Designed and built during the early waves of Post-Modernism, when goofy proportions and wacky, ironic references abounded, this house, designed by Friedrich St Florian, is precise and reserved. Its overall proportions are based on formulas from antiquity filtered through the late 16th-century designs of north Italian architect Andrea Palladio, and its exterior is based on a 17-foot module, with the façade 51-feet wide (3 x 17) and the side walls 34-feet deep (2 x 17). It seems also to take its architectural cues from local examples, specifically the monitor-on-hip-roof houses by early 19th-century architect-builder John Holden Greene, whose often combined brick walls with light trim, 1-story columned entrance porches, roof balustrades, prominent symmetrical chimneys, and central pavilion atop a hip roof.
The interior, like many of Greene’s, features a center stair hall that penetrates the depth of the house only partially and is flanked by principal rooms on each side and at rear.
— 2006 Festival of Historic Houses Guidebook
A house more polemical than aesthetic. Designed and built during the early waves of Post-Modernism, when goofy proportions and wacky, ironic references abounded, this house, designed by Friedrich St Florian, is precise and reserved. Its overall proportions are based on formulas from antiquity filtered through the late sixteenth-century designs of north Italian architect Andrea Palladio, and its exterior is based on seventeen-foot module, with the façade fifty-one-feet wide (3 x 17), and the side walls thirty-four-feet deep (2 x 17). But the excruciatingly reductivist detail and awkward and overly large belvedere atop the house erode the effect. Ultimately, the house lacks the grace of Palladio. And for a house so seriously attempting to emerge from an architectural continuum, it does not relate well to the neighboring large houses built in that tradition almost a century before this.
— 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture
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.