Perry, Shaw, Hepburn & Dean, the architectural firm that Brown had used since the 1930s, abandoned the long-used Georgian vocabulary for these two large reinforced-concrete-frame brick-clad boxes constructed to ease a housing shortage among Pembroke students as baby-boomers crowded the campus. The grid-like quality of these buildings was surely meant to evoke the modernist vision developed in this country’s college campuses by Mies van der Rohe at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology in the early 1940s. These isolated campuses are not, as there, part of a carefully developed campus and do not demonstrate that master architect’s control of proportion and detail.
– 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture
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