by Michael J. Crosbie
Honoring your elders is not today's most popular theme in architectural design. But a new classroom building on the Brown University campus, designed by the Providence, Rhode Island firm of William Kite Architects, shows that it is possible to work within the fabric of an old building with originality while paying homage to what has come before. The result is a "new" building striking in its inventiveness.
The American Institute of Architects' national honor awards jury acknowledged this when they recognized the project with an Honor Award for Outstanding Interiors for 2002.
Smith-Buonanno Hall started its life in 1906 as a two-story gymnasium for Pembroke College, which later merged with Brown. The building — a stripped-down version of academic Elizabethan Revival — is load-bearing brick, exposed on the interior, with wood-framed floors and roofs.
The one exuberant feature of the old gym was its heavy-timber wood truss roof structure, complete with carved details. Except for the removal in the 1970s of an elevated running track in the two-story space, the building was virtually intact when Kite was asked to transform it into a classroom facility.
An obvious response to the new program would have been to slice the two-story gym space horizontally with a wall-to-wall floor. This would have provided the maximum amount of new floor area but at the cost of the building's volumetric appeal.
