A backhoe sits before Brown’s Urban Environmental Lab, on Angell Street in Providence

Journal photo by David Brussat

THE BACKHOE in the photo has a lean and hungry look. The old stable, home of Brown University’s Urban Environmental Laboratory, has already seen the backhoe rip up its community garden. The stable has every reason to tremble.

The stable’s entry in the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission’s 1986 survey of Providence buildings reads: “Lucien Sharpe Carriage House (1885): Alpheus Morse, architect. A 2 1/2-story Modern Gothic stable with a cross-gable roof. The building originally provided for a cow barn facing Fones Alley, a stable facing Angell Street, a coachman’s apartment on the first floor of the west side, and a billiard room upstairs.”

Sharpe, whose family managed Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Co., maker of machine tools, lived across the street in a house built a decade earlier by Morse. Scholars may wonder why Sharpe put his billiard table in his stable, but the room retains its elegance (if only half its size) after several phases of renovation by Brown, which kept many old details. The original lab used efficient energy technologies. Even its greenhouse was recycled. The lab remains the greenest building on the Brown campus.

It is easy to praise Brown’s record of preserving historic buildings. The old stable was not its first act of preservation nor its last. Brown just spent $5 million to preserve the Peter Green House by moving it half a block. In protecting its historic quadrangles, Brown has saved not only the best architecture on campus but also the idea that young scholars should feel that Brown has a noble purpose.

And yet almost everything that Brown has built since, let us say, 1968 seems to have been designed to undermine the school’s nobility. Beyond the old quads, places like the stable have witnessed a battle between the forces that preserve the school’s nobility, so strong at Brown, and those that undermine it, which keep growing even stronger.

That battle eventually played out inside the stable long after its 1981-83 renovation as an environmental laboratory. In later years, renovations cut its communal spaces into offices, snuffing out the lab’s enviable tradition of amiable social and scholastic exchange. Institutional impersonality seemed to grow more oppressive with each renovation.

The tenor of this sad evolution mirrors what has happened out of doors, visible to anyone who has commuted downtown on Angell. Small but lovable old buildings have slowly been replaced by large, sterile buildings, until Angell from Thayer to Brown has become the sort of urban environment you’d think that a community of urban environmentalists might be eager to flee — except that it is home.

News that Brown has decided to demolish the lab and two other houses on Angell Street to make way for a Mind Brain Behavior Building has cast a pall on student life at the lab. Its community garden has already been plowed under for The Walk, a grandiose pedestrian boulevard that would link historic Lincoln Field to the Pembroke campus. Beautiful old buildings are being shouldered aside to make way for this dubious swath, but to reach Pembroke the swath would have to squeeze between the Bio-Med Building with its sinister hypodermic spire and the sterile new Life Sciences Building. Why not shove them aside? But of course such alien behemoths are sacrosanct. The best case for razing the old stable-turned-laboratory is that the historical character of this block of Angell is already history. The university is no longer a hallowed institution but the occupant of an “institutional zone,” and of course the institutional zone must follow its zen and embrace its inner heart of darkness. Thus spake Brunonia.

Of course, it needn’t be so. But Brown must think about how its appearance embodies its purpose. Like most civic, cultural, religious, corporate and academic institutions, the school has had its appearance hijacked by design elites ruled by fashion and unsympathetic to the rootedness of local institutional value. Brown will expand, as it should, but its evolution need not continue to alienate both its academic culture and its neighboring host communities.

Because Brown has preserved much of its historic campus, it still is possible to reconceptualize its institutional growth to be more sensitive to its own mission. It should preserve the lab, cancel or rethink The Walk, save the Dexter Wall discussed here last week, shift the Brain building to the planned medical complex in the Jewelry District, and redesign future campus buildings to reflect a spirit more congenial to all of its communities, as it recently did for the proposed Nelson Fitness Center.

For this to occur, Brown must recognize the need for change, and then assert institutional leadership to preserve its own beloved academic mission.

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Correction: My column last week, “Don’t tear down that old wall,” incorrectly stated that Brown purchased the Dexter Asylum from Providence in 1963. The sale actually took place in 1957.

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