The original purpose of the Hospital Trust Tower, also called the Sovereign Bank Tower, was to house the organization behind the funding for Rhode Island Hospital. The building has twenty-eight floors and over three hundred thousand square feet of high-quality office space. The sizes of office spaces range from a modest five hundred square feet to a massive area of almost thirteen thousand square feet. The building’s exterior features a taut-skin cladding of pre-cast concrete and travertine.
Travertine is the same material used in the Colosseum of Rome, in the Sacre-Coeur Basilica in Paris, and in the Los Angeles Getty Center in California. It remains a widely-used building material in modern architecture. At the topmost portion of the building is a masonry cap that emits light during the dark hours of the evening until midnight. It usually glows orange, but the lights are replaced with different colored bulbs to suit various occasions. The top of the masonry cap features a helicopter pad.
Standing at one hundred and five meters, the international-style skyscraper is one of the most dominant structures in the Providence skyline. The tower was built as an addition to the Hospital Trust Building of 1919 by the John Carl Warnecke & Associates architectural and design firm. The project was completed in 1973 .
The building is certainly an imposing structure, but William McKenzie Woodward, a prominent architectural historian and a member of the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission, is not impressed by the aesthetics of structure. Nonetheless, the One Financial Plaza gives the financial district of Providence a unique sense of place, and it has established the genius loci of the area for future architects and urban designers.
Bibliography:
Statewide Preservation Report P-P-5, Downtown Providence, p. 61
–Providence’s Recent Past (2010), a PPS map by Ned Connors.
John Carl Warnecke & Associates’ (Los Angeles) twenty-eight-story tower is a lackluster addition to both the street and the skyline. Its setback emulates the New York mid-century modernist posture of tall building behind public plaza that was first seen in Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Lever House (1951-52); the plaza’s current design by sculptor Howard Ben Tre bravely attempts to soften the rigid geometry of the space. The tower’s blunt mass, made all the more graceless by the travertine curtain wall, culminates in a broad masonry cap embellished by an oddly delicate necklace of lights, whose golden glow cutely changes to red and green in the weeks before Christmas. Before the construction of the tower, this staid institution flirted with the idea of a dramatic helical shaft by Paul Rudolph, a project that would have built on the avant-garde precedent set by the Industrial Trust Co. forty years earlier. The curiously named bank lost its identity through corporate acquisition in the late twentieth century.
– 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture
Last edited March 27, 2025 by Elisabeth Brown
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