During a public hearing of the Downcity Design Review Committee, Prof. Wilbur Yoder objects to plans to demolish the Fogarty Building on Fountain Street. At left is Michael Voccola, vice president of the Procaccianti Group, which owns the building.

The Providence Journal / Andrew Dickerman

Architect L. Glenn Allen holds an artist’s rendering of a parking garage that is proposed to replace the Fogarty Building.

The Providence Journal / Andrew Dickerman

PROVIDENCE — Rather than rehabilitate the Fogarty Building across the street from the Rhode Island Convention Center, a development company now wants to knock it down and build up.

The Procaccianti Group, of Cranston, yesterday proposed to construct a building that offers ground-floor retail topped by a six-level parking garage.

And it wants to raze the former police and fire headquarters at LaSalle Square and eventually replace it with a bluish-glass 22-story office tower with ground-floor retail.

While it wrestles with the final program for the police and fire headquarters, the Procaccianti Group wants permission to use the site as a parking lot.

Both plans were unveiled at a public hearing held by the Downcity District Design Review Committee, a city agency that governs land use and the design of structures in the old part of downtown.

The committee postponed definitive action on Procaccianti Group’s request for permission to demolish both buildings and asked for more fully developed designs for the proposed replacements.

Hailed and reviled as an exemplar of the brutalist school of architecture, the 38-year-old three-story Fogarty Building at 111 Fountain St. served for most of its life as a state welfare office and briefly in this decade as a public school annex. It has been left vacant for a few years in anticipation of its reuse or demolition.

While Procaccianti Group initially preferred rehabilitation, spokesman Thomas Niles told the committee the fact that the ground floor is 5 feet, 5 inches above the sidewalk is a “physical and psychological impediment” to pedestrians and would not appeal to good retail tenants.

Describing the building as a “cavelike structure with a porch,” Niles said it has become “an attractive nuisance” that is difficult to secure from vandals as long as it stays vacant. If the committee approves demolition, he promised that his employer would move swiftly on a new structure.

In a counterpoint, Kari Lang, executive director of the West Broadway Neighborhood Association, contended that the distinctive brutalist concrete architecture should be preserved and rehabilitated.

Addressing the committee, Lang quoted renowned urbanist Andres Duany, who counsels that no building should be torn down unless its replacement is demonstrably better. She questioned whether Procaccianti Group’s project design is sufficiently developed to warrant a demolition decision right away.

Brutalism is an architectural movement of the early 20th century that emphasized simple architectural elements and building processes with no apparent concern for visual adornment.

Procaccianti Group’s architect, L. Glenn Allen, presented a building with large insulated vertical windows tinted bluish-green and framed by anodized aluminum for the ground-floor retail, anodized metal awnings and a band of green spandrel glass girdling the building above.

The garage façade would be precast concrete in a very light coffee color flecked with black, which Allen likened to the concrete being used on the addition to the nearby Westin hotel. To minimize the bluntness of the parking decks, they would be covered with a galvanized stainless-steel screen.

Allen said the structure could accommodate a second-floor link with the Convention Center via a pedestrian bridge.

Others who spoke at the public hearing were Karen L. Jessup, a representative of the National Trust for Historic Preservation; Jack Gold, executive director of the Providence Preservation Society; Luci Searle, a 20-year city resident; Kyna Leski, a professor of architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design and new architectural consultant to the mayor; and Wilbur Yoder, a RISD architecture professor.

“My concern is that we’re beginning to look like a piece of Swiss cheese” in Downcity, with buildings torn down and not replaced, Searle said. She and Jessup urged that no demolition permit be issued until the development company proves it is ready to build anew.

“Overall the [proposed] building looks too box-like to me,” Gold said. He and Jessup called for a new building with more exterior articulation.

Yoder, and committee member Richard P. Baccari Jr., who spoke after the hearing, said something more needs to be done to soften the blocky appearance of the parking levels. Baccari suggested adding a floor or two of office space or retail.

Rather than the unified design presented, Leski suggested that the Fountain Street side of the building be made to look different from the Sabin Street side in order to address the differing architectural contexts of the surroundings on either side.

A critique by the staff of the city Department of Planning and Development called the proposal “banal” and recommended changes, including an improved visual relationship with nearby buildings and a “less generic” storefront plan.

As for the former police and fire headquarters, architect Mark A. Spaulding displayed a building that would have a five-story horizontal podium with 17 floors above, clad in a curtain wall, that would contain offices and mechanicals. At street level, there would be one floor of retail.

There would be a below-ground parking level and the other four stories of the podium would be a parking garage.

Some of the same speakers said the impressive Fountain Street façade should be saved and worked into the new structure. The planning staff said the design is “going in the right direction.”