Paul Rudolph’s Beneficent House represents the best of the boldly articulated Brutalist buildings erected in Providence and one of a handful of recent Downtown buildings by a major twentieth-century American architect. The nine-story, brick-and-concrete sheathed, steel-frame residential building is composed of interlocking, staggered “building-block” units creating richly textural elevations. Beneficent House demonstrates a departure from the pseudo-formal, monolithic structures of the 1950s and early 1960s, and, through use of string courses, suggests a more human scale. It was built by nearby Beneficent Church at 300 Weybosset Street as housing for the elderly.
Rudolph compared the clustering of rooms present in this design to the Ponte Vecchio or medieval hill towns. He expressed opposition to ordering his elements to fit a square or rectangular container or package, arguing that “you can’t make cities out of packages.”
Bibliography:
“Paul Rudolph and His Architecture.” UMass, Dartmouth
“Paul Rudolph’s Elaborated Spaces: Six New Projects.” Architectural Record 139 (June 1966): 144
Providence: A Citywide Survey, p. 163
–Providence’s Recent Past (2010), a PPS map by Ned Connors.
Paul Rudolph’s apartment building for the elderly is by far the best of the buildings created within the Weybosset Hill redevelopment project, even though it’s not so good as it should have been. Its animated massing and juxtaposition of cast-concrete and brick make it much livelier and inviting than the sterile monoliths that otherwise fill this area, but balconies for each unit that disappeared during construction because of the budget constraints would have made this one of Rudolph’s best buildings. Rudolph was, of course the country’s leading exponent of the use of concrete both structurally and decoratively, following in the footsteps of Le Corbusier. In contrast to his recently completed and much vilified Art and Architecture Building at Yale University, this building has long enjoyed approval by its residents and desirability among those who wait to be admitted.
– 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture
Last edited March 19, 2025, by Elisabeth Brown
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