Two East Side Apartment Blocks –– Architecture Critic Morgan

Sunday, February 07, 2021

Will Morgan Architecture Critic

There is something sacred about brick, a material that commands respect. The many positive qualities include a sense of solidity, of protection against fire, an enduring character. Nowadays, so often builders add a thin veneer of masonry merely to create the illusion of that tradition.

 

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My wife's grandfather was a mason, an immigrant, who erected solid and beautiful brick buildings and houses across North Carolina. Harry Woollerton trained all three of his sons to be master masons as well. Throughout their careers the four men insisted that a brick wall be made of brick, no brick scrims for them.

 

 

The new apartment block under construction at the corner of South Angell Street and Butler Avenue is a paradigm of the transformation of brick from an age-old building material into a Potemkin village. Here, the putative brick wall is nothing more than tile-like "bricks" glued onto a balloon frame. Brick as used here is a bit of flimflammery to suggest a weight that isn't there.

 

 

Given that the existing structure on the site is a brick house erected in 1900, a case could be made for the new building to be in a matching material. Yet, the new apartments borrow nothing of the earlier house's gracefulness, scale, or history. The brick facade is nothing but a convenient cliché, cost cutting masquerading as quality construction.

Would anyone want to live on this heavily trafficked entrance to the East Side, especially behind a wall of two-by-fours just a few feet from South Angel Street? The ground floor is given over to parking for six cars. Is this the best use of space in a city with a housing shortage?

In contrast, a new apartment block on the other side of Wayland Square offers no on-site parking. Instead, the twenty-two one- and two-bedroom apartments at 225 Waterman Street occupy a notable new contribution to the area's townscape. Unlike so many other new apartments constructed on the East Side, however, this one is actually good architecture.

 

 

 

Much of this is due to the fact that the developer George Potsidis of Geo Properties did not try to wrap his building in contact-paper-thin brick or vinyl designed to look like wood. For reasons of economy, the charcoal-gray cement-panel walls look substantial and elegant. The contrasting natural hemlock for the main facade is equally handsome.    

Hemlock is used to articulate the windows, which are simple vertical openings–a relief from faux colonial fenestration with plastic moldings. The windows are set deep within the facade, a simple but powerful gesture that gives the wall gravitas and creates intriguing shadow lines.

But the one big difference between 225 Waterman and other multi-story apartments cropping up on the East Side is that it was designed by an architect. Potsidis is an engineer, but he understood that hiring an architect to oversee every element of the project would likely guarantee a better result. A more attractive building means more business and thus more profit.

Andrew Hausmann, a graduate of Roger Williams University, established his own Providence office, AHArchitecture (he is also a principal in the Chicago office of Perkins & Will, one of America's most respected firms). No surprise then, that the apartments in 225 Waterman feature, in Potsidis' words, "a sleek, thoughtful layout," not to mention energy efficiency.

Few of us will get to experience the sleek flats with their views over the heart of Wayland Square. But the envelope of this handsomely proportioned presence is a candidate for becoming a neighborhood landmark. We can be ever grateful that the initial plan to cover 225 Waterman in brick proved too costly.

 

William Morgan was trained at Dartmouth and Columbia; he has taught at Princeton, Louisville, and Brown. The author of more than a dozen books on architecture, his writing has twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

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