Waterplace Luxury Condominiums (left) and the GTECH Building (right).

Photo by David Brussat

EASILY THE BEST of three new building projects in downtown Providence is the second Westin tower. It looks quite nice, and merits applause. Yawn! The other two fall way short of the Westin in aesthetic quality. Let’s discuss!

The headquarters of GTECH Corp. was widely disliked before it was finished in October 2006. Waterplace Luxury Condominiums (the official name of the 17- and 19-story towers across Waterplace Park from GTECH) are close enough to completion for the public to judge them. It will come as no surprise that they, too, are widely disliked.

This much is indisputable. What fascinates and even surprises me — indeed, it baffles me — is that almost everyone I’ve spoken with or overheard dislikes the Waterplace towers more than GTECH.

Of course, I hate the GTECH Building, and it dismays me that others don’t hate it as much as I do. In vain have I explained in column after column that not only does GTECH have a tedious and sterile look, not only did its creators intentionally refuse to fit it into its architectural context, not only did they reject the great historical patrimony of Providence architecture: They also robbed the city of the opportunity to have a new downtown district that is unique in the annals of American urban planning. Because the GTECH Building halted the Capital Center District’s decade of progress toward a cohesive traditional appearance, it will never hit a home run for Providence. The best we can hope for is a single or a ground-rule double. In fact, it might already have popped out. Yes, people will shop, eat, work and live in Capital Center, but it won’t ever be loved and it will never add much to the city’s appeal as a tourist attraction. It could have been a great place; instead, it is pathetic. For this, GTECH is to blame.

Yet people don’t dislike GTECH as much as they dislike the Waterplace towers. Two different people told me on successive evenings last summer that the Waterplace towers reminded them of Co-op City, the late-’60s residential complex in the Bronx just off of Route 95. So I called them Co-op City. In retrospect, the name was not sufficiently insulting.

When Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci Jr. was released from prison, he said that the GTECH Building was “disappointing” but that the towers look like a “metropolitan detention center.” His derisive moniker galvanized their reputation as ugly. No such notoriety has attached itself to the much uglier GTECH Building — notwithstanding the efforts of this reporter. I tried to demonize it as the “ice cube in diapers,” a reference to its glassy tower rising from a garage of gauzy steel mesh. But it didn’t stick. Pols have had no comment, understandably hoping to protect their (actually, your) investment.

As for the Waterplace towers, they are likened to the repetitive, leaden apartment blocks of Russia and the Eastern bloc under communism. Others say they look like U.S. public housing. Some say they look as if they were constructed with materials stolen from the Providence Housing Authority.

People are much more likely to give derisive monikers to modernist buildings than traditional buildings. Because of its abstract form, modern architecture lends itself to ridicule. Architecture that fulfills our expectation of what a bank, a church or a house should look like does not tickle the universal tendency to poke fun at the unfamiliar. Yet, it seems to me that despite their cheesy novelty, the Waterplace towers look more traditional than GTECH. In fact, the worst thing about the towers is not their design but that having a condo there might mean having to look at GTECH from your living room.

To try to help me understand why the public still hates the Waterplace condo towers so much more than GTECH, my wife, Victoria, made an interesting observation. She says the ugliness of an office building does not betray our expectations the way the ugliness of a residence does: We’ve come to expect offices to be ugly, whereas we continue to expect residences, even sizeable residential complexes like the two towers, to look more “comfy, homey and fuzzy.” So even if we think GTECH is uglier, the ugliness of the towers upsets us more.

And in fact, a few people actually say they like the GTECH Building. Some of them are merely displaying their credentials as individuals who imagine themselves on “the cutting edge.” But others seem to enjoy how on a nice day you can see the sky, the mall and other buildings reflected in its façades. I myself have noted this charm. Having registered its existence, I must still insist upon the architectural weakness of any building whose allure can be found only in the reflection of its surroundings.

While I was seeking a good angle to shoot both GTECH and the Waterplace towers from the mall, a clerk told me he disliked both but had finally gotten used to GTECH. Nevertheless, my job is to warn the public about visual atrocities we should not want to see repeated in Providence. So I stand by my condemnation of the worst of buildings.

David Brussat is a member of The Journal’s editorial board ( dbrussat@projo.com).