Reader Responses to Tuning Up

So impressed with your article on the new Lindemann Performing Arts Center, I flew up to Providence to see it for myself. Imagine my surprise, when I was told by the security guard that it was closed to the public, including alumni. Imagine my further surprise when I also discovered that the building stood on what had been a charming Victorian building at 242 Angell Street that had housed the history department, where I spent six years earning my doctorate. I understand that the history department has been physically picked up and moved to some remote corner of the campus, in keeping, I suppose, with the decline of scholarship and learning and the elevation of entertainment in our current culture, reflected by Brown’s multi-million investment in performing arts. I have two recommendations: One, provide guided tours for the public of the new star-chitecture. As your readers know, Brown doesn’t pay property taxes. Opening the campus is the least it could do. And, two, put a sign up that says something like, “We recognize that this building stands on what once upon a time was an exquisite Victorian home that housed the department of history, now no longer in fashion.”

Having to play the building like an instrument just to play one’s own instrument seems like it could qualify as a barrier to inclusion rather than a barrier-buster.

It might have been nice if the reporter had mentioned where the Lindemann Center is located for those of us who have not been in Providence for a while. The “where” of the who-what-where-when-and-why of basic reporting. A map would have been appreciated.

Ed. Note: The building is on Angell Street, where Sharpe House used to sit at 144, and across The Walk from the Granoff Center.

The Lindemann Center is a handsome, innovative building that will no doubt serve Brown and Rhode Island well. But it is not the architectural Messiah and what is pretentious now may prove cumbersome in decades. Not every artwork needs its performance space to be an “instigator,” “catalyst,” or agential nonhuman collaborator; there’s a thin line between empowering artists with tools and centering tech toys. While some glass walls are a fine metaphor for inclusion and the other values concretized in Apple Stores everywhere, and avant-garde architecture theory is a world of limitless imagination, there are real limits on the capacity of a building’s design to transform society. It is programming choices more than building choices that does so, and this does not require the musical spaceship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In fact, having to play the building like an instrument just to play one’s own instruments seems like it could qualify as a barrier to inclusion rather than a barrier-buster. The article’s title proclaimed: “This is Not a Building.” Is anyone going to tell the revolutionaries that it is, in fact, a building? We may yet learn it is over-built.