BUILDING STUDY

100 WASHINGTON STREET, PROVIDENCE, RI

In 1926 Providence’s real estate tycoon, George C. Arnold built Providence’s thinnest building when he saw the neighbor's building walls were on his territory. The land would only allow the building’s width to be 12 ½ feet above ground but below ground it extended a bit further with the sidewalk that was punctured with glass bricks to allow for light to filter into the basement. The building was bought by Cortellessa Properties in the early 1990s and has since been left it to deteriorate.

HOTEL TERRITORIAL

Territorial is a single occupancy hotel partnered with its neighbor Hotel Providence. Territorial is designed to be a boutique alternative  to the more traditional Hotel Providence. It is a Single Occupancy Hotel, where one guest (and their invited) can have complete or partial reign over the hotel’s bar, spa, and pool.  Unless reserved, the pool/spa and bar would remain open to the public.  If the guest wants total privacy they would need to reserve the entire building.  

PROGRAM

Basement: A Cocktail Bar
Second Floor: Lap Pool/ Small Spa
Third Floor: Grand Suite/ Catwalk
Ground Floor: Tree Garden/ Smoking Lounge

DESIGN

The rear of the building extends its boundaries with an angled sweep towards Hotel Providence and opening up to the Arnold building across the street.  This expands its square footage and creates a dialog with its partner, Hotel Providence. On top of the building is a larger skylight angled upward with retractable glass panes exposing the pool and the bedroom to air, light, and the skies above.  The exterior wall has a grass moat in the rear and benches to be the smoking area.  The floor levels have all been altered, opening up the ceiling height, creating greater spatial illusions. The interior plays with changing boundaries all intruding upon the space of another. The lap pool is made entirely of clear plexiglass and invades the private space of the suite and offers views all the way to the basement hotel bar. Each floor is visible to the other.

CLUB SKIN: A GAY NIGHTCLUB

PROGRAM

Basement Bar
Dance Floor/ Catwalk
Office Space/ Storage
Outdoor WC
Hot Dog Stand

DESIGN

My colleague's design was for a theatre and her driving concept was skin. In keeping with her concept I found inspiration from both the outer layer of skin as her's before me as well as circulation. Adapting from her design with the second and third floors I have created multiple levels offering multiple views from which one can see or be seen. The space becomes an “urban theatre”  with multi layered platforms, balconies, catwalks, “runway space”, and voids.  “Sitting on bleachers, watching the action. Watching becomes everything,  ” and “queer men put on a show…validating their existence.” Kate’s rise and fall of the upper floors becomes “the half seen forms of body that match each other in curve and bulge.”   The entire building opens up, thus becoming a a celebration of the gay man.

FEATURES

WC:  The exterior bathroom of the nightclub is one of the special features of the space.  It is enclosed entirely of glass wall with a long track that collects the septic flow beneath the floors and into the septic system.  The entire bathroom is a series of these urinals that celebrate one of man’s greatest pleasures. These bathrooms are surreal in their floating nature, in the shape that they take and also very real, “the place where you return to your body- especially in the water-closet.”

Quotations from Queer Space
Bexty, Aaron. Architecture and Same Sex Desire.
New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc, 1997