Exhibited at the Lisbon
Architecture Triennale
“How Heavy is a City?”
Lisbon, Portugal, 2025
Date
Spring 2025
Site
TOPS Electrical Supply
Providence, RI
Category
Architecture
Yukitsuri - The Japanese practice of supporting trees with braces, allowing them to remain upright and continue growing.
This project begins at 120 Point Street, Providence, RI, a cluster of warehouses once home to the Barstow Stove Company and later TOPS Electrical Supply. Empty since 2012, the newest warehouse now reveals a bare concrete frame, a resilient skeleton.
This project serves families and loved ones of children in nearby hospitals, people waiting on the margins of institutional space, seeking quiet, community, and restoration. Suspended between worry and hope, they need comfort without retreat, connection without intrusion. This place offers them pause, gathering, and care.
Within the cleared frame, a reimagined red New England barn is stretched and split, its familiar form reshaped through grids and arcs into gestures of enfolding softness. Once a vessel of labor, it becomes a symbol of quiet care.
The warehouse is wrapped in glass, transforming into a greenhouse of layered microclimates. Each zone responds to human need: a warm alcove for company, a cool corner for solitude, a space to share meals, focus, or play. These are not rooms but environments, suggestions for use, flexible and open.
Like a garden, the project grows with its caretakers. It refuses a single solution, instead cultivating an ecology of support. Architecture here becomes caretaker itself, offering warmth, light, and shelter without demand. The greenhouse is both mechanism and metaphor, a porous skin that protects and nurtures.