PANEL 8
A perspective of the corner of Wickenden and Brook Streets. Brook Street terminates in a pedestrian plaza in the right of the image, and new infill buildings are seen. Prominent signage, including a large “Park” sign, is visible in the foreground.
CLAIRE ANDRADE-WATKINS
"The selection of panels #4, #6 and #8 for review is based on a conundrum of being both a witness and participant in the ‘lived’ moment of those spaces as the center of the Cape Verdean community, yet invisible in the vision and execution of the College Hill Plan. I see the ‘footprint’ in panel #4 of the house on 26 Planet Street where I was born and raised; the house at 28 Planet next door where I often babysat, the Goff house on the corner of Benefit and Planet where we often visited, and the Burnside Apartments with the wonderful curved iron rail that was the delight of children in the neighborhood.
Reconciling those memories to ‘footprints’ and what the implementation of the plan created in terms of the human consequences to the denizens of those spaces is another perspective: one of existing, but not visible, and voiceless in the determination of ‘significant or insignificant to the historic fabric ’, worthy of preserving or relegated to ‘infill.” The conundrum is not a resolution but a question. What do we remember? Or more importantly, who decides what and how we remember? The challenge is not the regret of the past, but the hope for the future to reconstitute those lost memories and absent voices and integrate them into the new ‘vision’ of significant historic fabric."
COLLETTE CREPPELL
"Much has been written about the International Style as it swept Europe and then was brought to the United States in the post-war and mid-century period. More often than not, mid-century modernist architectural renderings appear to rise out of a tabula rasa.
What is striking still today about William Warner’s urban architectural vision and Margie Olson’s arresting renderings for College Hill is the careful relationship they suggest between the architecture and the context: soaring modernist towers rise from, and modernist housing blocks are embedded in, a clearly depicted historic neighborhood context.
In these renderings, the historical and the visionary are admiring neighbors. Students of architecture and urbanism must admire and, in our turn, now nearly sixty years later, draw upon the inviting lessons of these optimistic and energetic images. The kites in Panel 10 symbolize this soaring optimism.
Warner and Olson’s streetscapes challenge us to reconsider certain tenets of urbanism. Where we might today declare the primacy of the street edge—with the domain of the car, the pedestrian and the building edge as layers from public to private.
In Warner’s vision and Olsen’s renderings, one sees instead the primacy of shared public space, even on residential blocks. In Panel 2, this shared space is created by an urban plaza at the scale of a housing block set back from the street. In Panel 5, this communal zone is defined on the very interior of the block—letting go of the concern for property line demarcations and even drawing in a parking zone. In Panel 8, the PARK sign on the property side of the sidewalk invites the public into the private zone—while the street, interestingly, is rendered devoid of vehicles. (Note in Panel 8 the animation of the pedestrian plaza against the layered backdrop of both historic and modern housing.)
In the post-war period architects and planners had the problem of the automobile to solve. How refreshing—for a moment at least—to consider the vehicle as a benign presence on the interior of the block (Panel 5)."
DAVID BRUSSAT
"Panel 8 represents a perspective view up Wickenden Street as it passes by Brook. The infill housing above shops that faces a plaza at the intersection resembles a 1960 house by I.M. Pei that I grew up near in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Cleveland Park, a district of eclectic houses almost entirely tradiitonal. The style is no more appropriate here on Wickenden than it was at 3411 Ordway St., N.W.
At this point in the selection of panels, this one speaks for itself. Most of the sketches in the survey are of very high quality, but they also betray, as do the plans and maps, a disinclination to label streets. This must have created some confusion among the public about what they were being shown, since so much of it no longer resembled what they knew. Might this have been purposeful? I have long believed that the increasingly abstract quality of architectural renderings since 1950 was intended not to reveal but to disguise the nature of the planning and design intentions of project managers."
MARISA ANGELL BROWN
"Like Panel 7, Panel 8 is filled with high drama. The panel presents a perspective of the corner of Wickenden and Brook Streets showing a modern shopping plaza where Hairspray and Gregory’s Optical are now, cater corner from the defunct Z Bar. The elaborately rendered shadows, sparsely populated sidewalks, empty windows and inky figures create a sense of unease. In 1959, the forced relocation of Fox Point’s historic immigrant communities – mainly Portuguese and Cape Verdean – had begun so that their homes and stores could be razed to make way for I-195, which was constructed in phases between 1956 and 1964. The large parking sign at left in this panel testifies to the highway’s newfound proximity, while the elderly lady’s shawl, bun and long skirt mark her as one of the thousands of Portuguese/Cape Verdean residents of Fox Point.
Unlike many of the other panels, which present the city’s historic homes in a positive light, emphasizing their individuality and detailing, Panel 8 illustrates the College Hill Study’s claim that Fox Point was a slum, filled with “neglected and worn out buildings.” Warner’s modern shopping plaza – unlike the housing in Panel 9, which is designed to fit into its context – rebuffs the existing streetscape. The whiteness of the new building’s upper panels, the openness of the plaza and the way in which it lets in light from the Seekonk River, which floods across Wickenden Street onto Brook in the drawing, dispelling the dark shadows that haunt the rest of the street, suggest that this modernist intervention will “renew” Fox Point."