Behind that, a glass door leads to an airy corridor populated on either side with independent offices, home to the humming industry that keeps higher education running.
While it isn’t one at the moment, all the infrastructure is there, and the feeling of easy conviviality, writ architectural, suffuses this section. More programmed areas splinter off the main room the registrar’s office, a large open space, was originally designed to be a café. From the entrance, orange stairs that flow gently into stepped seating lead up to the main gathering area, while the gap beneath the floating partitions draws the visitor’s eye to opposing walls and the cosmetically updated elevator bank. To harness that visual datum, WORKac cranked up the walls, which curve and vault in places as they weave their way throughout the center, making what could feel like an accident into a cohesive aesthetic statement. “The idea was to open it up to use this cool situation from the entrance.” That cool situation is a height slippage the front door on the building’s south side is halfway down a sloping street and so presented the architects with the opportunity to set up interesting sight lines. “It was a rabbit warren of offices,” Wood says of the older structure. (Danielle Simpkin, a RISD alum, designed the clothing used in this photo shoot.) Courtesy © Bruce Damonte/Courtesy WORKac According to the architects, the bathroom is the first of its kind in the U.S. More from Metropolis WORKac principals Dan Wood and Amale Andraos consulted with the queer research practice QSPACE on the design of the center’s gender-neutral bathroom, which sits centrally on the plan. A new addition that WORKac strongly pushed for, which occupies a former parking lot, holds a lecture hall/screening room and the mail room. Programmatically, the existing building, which dates to 1948 and was most recently used by an insurance company, was renovated to accommodate an increased number of administrative offices, in addition to a gathering space for design crits and get-togethers. It’s a hot day in Rhode Island, where he grew up (he tries to go for work in his home state whenever possible), and Wood is taking me through the airy, orange-detailed new facility. “We wanted to make a more RISD entrance for the campus,” cofounder (with Amale Andraos) and principal Dan Wood says, standing by the door most people walk through to get to that mail room, or career services, or the registrar’s office, or a lecture hall. The space is characterized by microzones for student interaction, some of which can be altered by the students themselves.
To someone else, a visiting parent perhaps, the presence of these instructions could feel like confirmation of everything people say about the youth of today-“THEY DON’T KNOW HOW TO ADDRESS AN ENVELOPE ANYMORE SOMETHING AVOCADO TOAST HOMEOWNERSHIP!” And to someone else, say, someone trying to figure out the New York architecture firm WORK Architecture Company (WORKac), which designed the center but had nothing to do with the envelope, it’s an ideal introduction: The project is surprising, it’s light, it reminds us of the constancy of change, and it nods to the vibrant culture of the contemporary art school. Leaning against the wall of the newly renovated student center at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), cheerily perched on a pale wooden table outside the mail room, is an oversize envelope-maybe three and a half feet wide and two and a half feet tall-inscribed with the phrase “HOW TO ADDRESS AN ENVELOPE.”Īt first glance, it’s hilarious and also sad, reminding a writer of both the loss of analog epistolary culture and its glorious and joyous replacement with a shift toward the digital. The New York architecture firm WORKac was tasked with renovating an existing building at the foot of the Rhode Island School of Design’s campus in Providence.