PPS Award Adaptive Reuse/Neighborhood Revitalization 2004
This is one of the most forthright, powerful industrial buildings in the city, if not the whole state. Architect Bucklin is perhaps best know for his work in the Greek Revival style, notably Providence’s Arcade and Manning and Rhode Island Halls on the front row of the Brown University campus. That style, still influential here, emphasized broad, bold massing; here, however, in a more utilitarian application, it appears without the minimal yet subtle detailing typically used to inform and to modulate monumentality. Built originally to house a wool-manufacturing company, it housed a steam-engine-manufacturing company during the last two decades of the 19th century, then a worsted-wool company in the early 20th century, followed by mixed-industrial uses for much of the second half of the 20th century.
In the early 21st century, a group of artists inhabiting the space acquired the mill to convert it to live-work space, one of the first successful attempts in Providence to make legitimate a long-standing practice and thus a pioneering effort toward the re-use of Providence’s many underutilized industrial spaces.
— Festival of Historic Houses Guidebook, 2013
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