An artist’s rendering of Dynamo Houseshows the smokestacks that will change color over the course of the night.

ILLUSTRATION COURTESY OF STUDIO AMD

PROVIDENCE — One of the first examples of a new hotel that currently exists only in cyberspace will be built in Dynamo House, a mixed-use project now under construction in the Jewelry District.

Struever Bros., Eccles and Rouse, developer of the $150-million Dynamo House, which would include a Rhode Island history museum, announced yesterday that the project also will feature an aloft brand hotel.

Starwood Hotels and Resorts, which owns the Westin, Sheraton and W hotel franchises, caused a splash in the lodging business with an unusual test-marketing campaign in which it has built a prototype aloft hotel in Second Life, a virtual world online.

In the development process, Starwood has been soliciting reaction and suggestions from the Second Life dwellers, whom it hopes will be future real-life customers, about the furnishings, paint colors and many other aspects of the prototype design.

Created and operated by San Francisco’s Linden Lab, Second Life is a 3D alternate universe with a population of about 400,000 software-rendered people, according to Business Week magazine. Real-world computer users invent alter egos who live variously mundane or fantasy lives, interacting with other characters. In order to transact business in Second Life, the players pay in U.S. currency exchangeable for so-called Linden dollars.

In a marriage of the 21st century with the 19th, the aloft hotel and its sleek contemporary interior design will be integrated into a former power plant that is being rehabilitated as Dynamo House.

“It’s going to be very cool,” said William Struever, president and CEO of Struever Bros.

The first aloft hotels — aloft is billed as catering to a hip urban clientele — have been under construction in Philadelphia and Lexington, Mass.

Dynamo House also would include Heritage Harbor, the long-planned $48.2-million Rhode Island history museum; commercial office space; and a locally owned restaurant.

Organizers of Heritage Harbor claim that their museum will be a hugely interactive experience with some virtual exhibits and holography that will rely heavily on computers — the kind of kinetic exercise that might appeal to Second Life dwellers.

Struever Bros. and Heritage Harbor organizers yesterday marked the start of construction of Dynamo House in a frigid, wind-swept ceremony in the parking lot of the former South Street Station, an electricity-generating plant donated to the museum by the former Narragansett Electric Co. that dominates the corner of Eddy and South streets.

Most of Dynamo House is scheduled to be completed in two years, with the museum tentatively set to open its doors a few months later.

Struever and Mayor David N. Cicilline rose up on a scissor-lift platform and removed a blue-painted wood panel that had been covering the lower part of one of the massive plant windows. From the interior, someone fired a kind of cannon. With a boom that startled and then delighted the audience, a shower of confetti shot out over the large speaker’s dais and the first few rows of visitor seats.

Dynamo House promises to be a landmark in an expanded Jewelry District that will emerge on the land opened by the relocation of Route 195 to a point south of the Fox Point Hurricane Barrier.

“The building has such amazing and wonderful character in itself, and [it] will be visible from everywhere,” Struever declared after the ceremony. “When we get the six stacks back up, they’re going to change colors at night. It will be the talk of the town in a very big way.”

In its heyday, South Street Station sported nine smokestacks, but lost three as a result of the 1938 hurricane. The rest were removed in the late 1980s, when the plant was decommissioned. Six faux 128-foot-tall smokestacks that will function as air intake and exhaust vents will be erected to restore an iconic feature of the structure.

Perforations in the metal stacks will allow powerful light fixtures to individually bathe the shafts in a soft glow that will change from one color to another automatically and catch the eye of motorists passing on the Iway. An oversized clock and oversized Dynamo House signs that required a city zoning variance also will be rooftop attention-getters.

As well as being a landmark, Dynamo House would be another building block in Providence’s economic-development ambitions for the Jewelry District. Cicilline said yesterday that hundreds of millions of dollars of development are slated for the district, including Brown University-related research facilities, and he reminded the crowd of another park planned for the banks of the Providence River.

Thanks to the altered Heritage Harbor plan, the power plant already has been restored to the municipal tax roll, and upon completion of Dynamo House, the city is expected to reap about $1 million a year in revenue, based on the current tax rate.

The nonprofit and tax-exempt Heritage Harbor originally was going to use the entire complex, but when it ran into financial trouble, it brought in Struever Bros. to develop the complex, with the museum reserving a quarter of the floor space. Heritage Harbor last week transferred title to the property to Struever Bros., which will divide the property as a condominium and eventually deed back the museum segment to Heritage Harbor.

Museum advocates estimate they will draw 150,000 to 250,000 visitors annually, ranking Heritage Harbor potentially the fourth most-popular Rhode Island destination for tourists and others, after the Newport mansions, Roger Williams Park Zoo, and WaterFire.

aloft would be the 12th hotel that exists, is credibly proposed or is under construction in Providence. While its lobby would be at ground level, the 168-room hotel would largely occupy the floors above the museum and would take full advantage of a planned rooftop garden, with some of its rooms having private garden patios, and expansive views of the Bay and the city skyline.

With the assistance of government grants, Struever Bros. plans a certified environment-friendly green roof largely covered by grass and other vegetation. Solar panels would provide electricity, according to Seth Handy, project development director, perhaps to power the illuminated signage and smokestacks.

aloft is a division of the luxury W Hotels chain but would be a moderately priced lodging with a nightly rate ranging from $150 to $170, according to Handy and published reports. It would have a pool and fitness center, a lounge with bar and pool table, and loft-like rooms with enhanced technology.

Occupying as it would the limited-service hotel category, aloft would have available a 24-hour on-the-go food station rather than room service, and it would not have a ballroom and meeting rooms.

gsmith@projo.com