Because who better to call to transform an old loading dock into an outdoor theater?
RISD students up to the challenge of making Millrace Theater a reality
WOONSOCKET — They peered into shadowy corners of the maze-like mill campus, wandered the banks of the nearby Blackstone River, snapped photos with cell phones, and jabbed pencils at sketchpads.
Over a hundred students from the Rhode Island School of Design took a studious look at one of the city’s oldest mill sites Thursday, but it was more than a field trip. It was a race. Grouped into a dozen teams, the students from RISD’s department of interior architecture are competing against each other to come up with the best design for reinventing an old loading dock as an outdoor theater at the former U.S. Rubber Company and Falls Yarn complex. They have just a few days to finish the job, a joint venture of RISD and the owner of the mill, NeighborWorks Blackstone River Valley, which envisions the complex as part of the future “Millrace District,” a $20 million housing and workplace village for young artists.
“The winning design will be used to inform a grant application to ultimately build the Millrace Theater,” said Meghan Rego, a spokeswoman for NeighborWorks.
“The soon-to-be revitalized area is envisioned as a cultural magnet with housing, commercial, community and arts spaces.”
The student flock, including many graduate students from foreign countries, got a crash course in the Industrial Revolution and the city’s role in it during their visit to the onetime factory hub, located at 68 South Main St. They took turns doing walking tours of the city and got some oral briefings from local architects, artists, city planners and artists, including Daryl Black Eagle Jamieson, a Narragansett Indian who specializes in traditional drumming.
Jamieson thumped a drum and sang Native American folksongs from a seat perched atop the long-abandoned, elevated loading dock, which connects the two main mill buildings that comprise the architectural study site.
“It’s a sound test,” observed NeighborWorks Director Joseph Garlick.
“The acoustics are great in here!” Jamieson proclaimed with unfettered glee.
But this was serious business for Elizabeth Debs, a RISD faculty member who proposed the mill complex for a realworld exercise in “adaptive reuse” – design jargon for upcycling an old structure for some new purpose.
Many of the international students know little about the Industrial Revolution or the kind of architecture associated with it, said Debs. The challenge of converting an old textile factory for another use is an effective way to build the brain muscles they’ll need to solve the unique architectural puzzles they’ll face in the future, wherever they land.
“It’s a fabulous exercise for them,” said Debs. “Right now, Woonsocket is one of the best places in the world if you want to understand the Industrial Revolution.”
Debs calls the design exercise a “charette,” a kind of intense, fast-paced brain-teaser focused on a specific problem that involves competition among students. The format is a tradition for the interior architecture department, which has completed designs for an autism classroom in Providence and a “makerlab” for the Providence Historical Society in the recent past.
Mariah Bennett, a second-year graduate student from Texas, seemed to find the industrial landscape of Market Square an intriguing and otherworldly setting com- pared to what she’s used to.
“This is a really interesting project,” Bennett said as she surveyed a stretch of the Blackstone River that runs behind the complex. “It has a lot of components you can play with.”
The Millrace District is NeighborWorks’ latest name for what is a multi-mill makeover, including not just 68 South Main St., but an adjacent wooden mill known as 15 Island Place, next door to River Island Park, and 40 South Main St. – the former Mulvey’s Hardware. The project used to be called ArTech Hub, but NeighborWorks opted for a name change inspired by a well-preserved feature of the site – the millrace – that was built to harness the power of the Blackstone to run factory machines.
Mulvey’s is the only component of the Millrace District that’s complete, including a half-dozen affordable apartments, an incubator kitchen for culinary startup businesses and indoor gallery hall.
Consisting of some 70,000 square feet of space, 68 South Main St. was previously known as Le Moulin, which had served as a sort of funky mall for a hodgepodge of boutique gift and craft shops. They were eventually forced to relocate after the building was condemned for safety reasons, but NeighborWorks later bought the site for $1 million and has since taken care of the most urgent structural deficiencies.
The RISD students have until Tuesday to complete their design entries for the loading dock theater, at which point they’ll be displayed for judging at the school’s Center for Integrative Technologies on Weybosset Street in Providence. RISD faculty member Michael Grugl, adjunct professor of interior architecture, said the facility is not open to the public, but the winners’ work will be displayed at 40 South Main St. during the first week of November.
Grugl admits the pressure to perform is on for the charette combatants, but he says they’re likely to encounter similar demands in the real world of applied architecture, so it’s good practice.
“I’m happy they are getting this opportunity,” said Grugl. “We oscillate between theory and practice. This is a really good opportunity to get close to a practical development project with a real client with a real aim.”
The student projects will be judged by a panel of RISD faculty members and personnel from NeighborWorks.
Grugl says students “are pumped” about the project.
And if it means they have to pull an all-nighter or two to get the work in on time, well, that’s college life.
“These students are used to working through the night,” he says.