Dr. Downtown, David Brussat: Thinkfesting the RhodeMap

Monday, December 08, 2014

David Brussat, GoLocalProv Dr. Downtown

 

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How many contrarians will be among the 80 or so “Rhode Island thought leaders” invited to Gov.-elect Gina Raimondo’s economic thinkfest on Dec. 16? That’s Beethoven’s birthday, so let’s not forget about beauty, the Ocean State’s chief economic asset.

But Raimondo already has her free advice to strengthen the state’s beauty by promoting new traditional architecture. She can help herself and the state economy also by making sure her staff invites to her summit not just the usual suspects who will praise RhodeMap RI but some who want to bury it.

The new governor deserves to hear about a strategy that has not been tried. For decades the state has paid outside business to relocate here and new industries to grow here. It has not worked. The subsidies designed to offset our cellar-dwelling business climate are not enough. They are high but the obstacles to job creation are higher, and taxpayers cannot afford to fatten the envelope any more.  

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Taxes and the Economy

Anyway, such corporate socialism is bad policy. The state should cut taxes and regs. That has not been tried here. Ever. As political sops, yes, but not as an economic plan. The tweaks made last year by the General Assembly were mere chicken feed.

Big cuts at state agencies are not the answer. The answer is ending state agencies that keep giving us programs that don’t work. The obvious examples are the State Planning Council that developed the RhodeMap, and the CommerceRI bureaucracy in charge of setting up the bureaucracies that hire the same old experts who design the Rube Goldberg devices designed to do the same thing over and over again since at least 1984.

But whether the state continues its subsidies, decides to fix the business climate or uses the RhodeMap to try something else, it should avoid adding social equity and climate change as part of any plan to expand the economy. Fairness and sustainability are goals of economic policy, not tools to achieve growth. Putting the cart before the horse is sure to  complicate and undermine whatever plan is adopted to expand the economy. Whoa, boy! Whoa!

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Huygens & Tappe designed house on Congden St., liladelman.com

End the War on Architecture

Dr. Downtown was amused by last Friday’s Journal op-ed “Could we be seeing an end to the architecture wars?” by Marisa Angell Brown (a real humdinger of a Rhode Island handle!). She seeks a compromise between “cutting-edge modernism” and “wannabe historic buildings.” She thinks she’s found the key to such a cease-fire in architecture that “uses traditional materials in modern ways.”

But the doctor’s eyeballs started rolling out of control when she admitted that she is “an architectural historian whose love is modernist architecture … but who chooses to live in a circa-1800 home off Benefit Street, which I love madly.”

What a hypocrite! Steak for me but burger for thee! Never mind that most modernism in Rhode Island already uses traditional materials to gull a skeptical public into accepting modernist buildings. Her idea has already been tried and found wanting by most people, who think, oddly enough, that houses should look like houses, museums like museums and churches like churches. Imagine that!

The doctor predicts that the style wars around here won’t end until the architecture Marisa Angell Brown wants for the rest of us looks something like what Marisa Angell Brown chooses to live in herself.

As Applied to Applied Math

Brown (the school) broke ground recently on its new applied math building, a home for faculty and grad students to be displaced by Brown’s proposed new engineering building. Both will be near Hope Street. A source told me that a “mockup” of materials to be used was already up at the construction site, at the corner of George and Hope streets in the parking lot of the Barus and Holley Building, which is, regrettably, not at risk.

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Mockup of Applied Math Building at Brown, photo by David Brussat

The mockup, which displays a small wall of dark-brown shakes, or shingles, to be used in the building, suggests that the materials will be traditional, but a story in the Brown Daily Herald by Ashwinni Natarajan reveals that the look will be modern. How convenient for Marisa Angell Brown – Brown’s already following her advice!

“Though the new applied math facility will have a modern aesthetic,” the BDH was told by a Brown official, “its design will contrast with that of the engineering building.” Ah, good! At least that will be traditional, yes? Alas, no. “While they both may end up looking like modern buildings,” says the official, the math building, which is nearer to Hope, must do a better job of fooling the neighbors into thinking Brown wants to fit in. (That’s probably not how the university would phrase it!) Hence the shakes.

Though construction has begun, the design has not been made public, allegedly because it isn’t done. So the writing is not on the wall - or the mockup. It certainly is not on the site’s construction fencing, which, like a Freudian slip, displays only traditional buildings among Brown’s recent projects.

 

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