Saturday March 27, 2021
The new hotel in the ironic “Innovation & Design District” of Providence is a real idiot. While we are excited to welcome a new hostel as well as another completed piece of the I-195 development plan, the upcoming Aloft Hotel on Dyer Street is a major architectural disappointment.
“Innovation & Design” Really? PHOTO: Will Morgan
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Granted, the Aloft will add 175 hotel rooms to the city. It can also add amenities like restaurants and bars. What this hotel won’t add, however, is something that approaches architectural excellence, let alone the vision of a “vibrant, forward-looking center” as promised by Kevin Sullivan of Shawmut, the hotel’s builders. Dubbed “High End”, Aloft doesn’t offer anything special in terms of design. Unfortunately, it’s little more than any other airport hotel in any other city, but here it’s in an urban core.
Does anyone remember our daring city’s great promise to dismantle and relocate an intrusive elevated road through downtown Providence? That way of thinking from the wall was one of the main reasons my wife and I decided to move here. The development of I-195 can have some positive aspects, such as Wexford and the footbridge. But the aggressive mildness of the hotel suggests that the city is again settling for less than it deserves.
Aloft Hotel and the downtown Providence skyline. PHOTO: Will Morgan
One looks in vain in the new hotel for visual interest such as shadow lines or a fascinating skyline. The only thing that reduces the unfavorable mass of the hotel is turning around the corner; Instead of grace or subtlety, there is just the plumb line. And what will the mundane brick cladding do?
How did it happen? There were many meetings, hearings, studies, proposals and promises, but was there a design review? Did the I-195 Commission knowingly say, let’s spend a whole lot of money and build a hotel that looks like any other chain offering from Omaha to Orlando? Was it the promise of construction contracts and the eternally skewed math of jobs-jobs-jobs that made such a visual insult to the city possible?
If the new Aloft Hotel is the answer, what was the question?
Aloft Hotels facade of relentless boredom. Still, it’s far more interesting now than when the brick veneer was applied. PHOTO: Will Morgan
Aloft claims that “the brand is most notable for its modern architectural design style.” That may be true when the chain was part of Starwood Hotels. Aloft encouraged design connoisseurs by choosing set designer and architectural prodigy David Rockwell as their design guru. Rockwell’s “energetic hotel experience” set out to reinvent the romance of the Route 66 roadside motels, where “chance encounters and mid-century modern design were once hallmarks of highway traffic culture”.
That hip slackened a bit in the possession of Marriott. Among Aloft’s nearly 200 hotels around the world, some locations still offer excitement, such as the Aloft Boston Seaport. This is strange because its developer, Richard Galvin of Commonwealth Ventures, is the man behind Providence Aloft. It’s hard to imagine anyone describing the Dyer Avenue Aloft as “smart, modern design,” as Galvin said of his Boston hotel.
SEE WHAT MORGAN WRITES ABOUT OTHER NEW HOTELS BELOW – HE LOVES ONE OF THEM
Wexford is actually smart, modern design. PHOTO: Will Morgan
Aloft in Providence is the work of Elkus Manfredi Architects, a large Boston-based company that has some spectacular contributions to its name. The company has operated skyscrapers, commercial blocks and university structures for over 30 years. Perhaps the best-known Elkus Manfredi project is New Balance’s headquarters, the huge ship-like presence (some say it looks like a shoe) along the Mass Pike in Allston. In Rhode Island, Elkus Manfredi designed the little-known but respected campus for the Citizens Bank in Johnston.
The Garrahy Courthouse parking garage near the new Aloft has made an effort to be appealing. PHOTO: Will Morgan
However, for a Primo location in downtown Providence, we got a large, unsightly block of brick-built property. The patron saint of modern architectural criticism, Ada Louis Huxtable, would have described this as “unforgivable, consummate mediocrity”. As is often the case with great architects out of town, Providence gets the company’s B-Team. Or worse, we don’t seem to be able to demand what we really need or what we should strive for.
Governor Raimondo said in October, “The Aloft Hotel will help us attract visitors as our economy recovers.” Maybe. But the chunky, chunky appearance of the new Aloft Hotel with the lowest common denominator isn’t going to earn us any awards for inspiring city design. What it will become, however, is a symbol of Providence’s failure to embrace an overall noble vision for the land of I-195. Good design costs no more than mediocre design, but the real cost of bad design is cumulatively corrosive.
Rear view of the Aloft Hotel. PHOTO: Will Morgan
GoLocal architecture critic William Morgan has been written for a variety of design and urban newspapers, including the New York Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the Christian Science Monitor.
