New Pembroke is a four-building complex on the corner of Bowen and Thayer Streets designed by Donlyn Lyndon, Professor and Chairman of the architecture department at M.I.T., an architect with the firm Moore, Lyndon and Turnbull of Boston and New Haven, and Chairman of the Board of Lyndon Associates, Inc.
The buildings were designed to blend well into an area occupied by small stores and large nineteenth century homes. On the commercial Thayer Street side of the complex, a band of green bricks sets apart the rented shops on the ground floor of the four-story building and maintains the “one-story commercial continuity” of the street. The Bowen Street side relates to the residential neighborhood with two smaller structures within one building and walls which reflect the hedges across the street. In addition to the green brick of the stores, there are areas of buff brick at stairways and doorways, red brick in public areas in the rear courtyard, a dark blue strip of bricks above the store fronts where signs appear, and more blue brick designed to soften the top edge of the building. Inside, the complex of four buildings is subdivided into smaller living units with separate doorways, a departure from institutional living designed to provide smaller living relationships for the 200 resident students. The design was awarded first place from among 670 entries in a competition sponsored by the magazine Progressive Architecture in 1970, but construction was postponed when the city refused to grant a zoning exception. In awarding the prize, the judges praised this “anthropocentric” design in which “human need seems to be the principal form-generator,” proclaimed the dormitory “on the one hand, dumb and ordinary, and on the other hand, very sophisticated, sensitively and unusually done.”
Bibliography:
Brown University Residential Life website
Mitchell, Martha, Encyclopedia Brunoniana, copyright ©1993 by the Brown University Library
–Providence’s Recent Past (2010), a PPS map by Ned Connors.
Contextualism was nothing new to Providence (although heretofore it had probably never been called that) when MLTW/Moore, Lyndon, Turnbull designed this combination commercial-dormitory building. The Thayer Street elevation maintains the commercial street line of the block immediately south, while the Bowen Street side sits back from the street line, like the houses across the street and adjacent, and follows architectural cues developed in those same houses. Interior courtyards are intimate and appealing, featuring on its upper elevations abstract sculpture by the wife, Alice Lyndon, of one of the architects. It took first place in Progressive Architecture’s 1970 Design Awards, and the design was published on that prestigious magazine’s January cover. Jury member Robert Venturi characterized it as “anti-symbolic – a kind of neutral recessive building.” He went on to say that the design was “on the one hand dumb and ordinary, and on the other hand very sophisticated; sensitively and unusually done.” The only off note (and a detail not yet worked out when PA gave its award) is the abundance of multiple-color bright glazed tile, which links this building with the psychedelic late 1960s.
– 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture
Last edited March 27, 2025 by Elisabeth Brown
Share your Story
Something to add? An edit or correction to suggest? Community input about the history of these important places is welcome. All submissions are reviewed before posting.