The Fogarty Building was designed by Castellucci, Galli, & Planka, an architecture firm that has been in Rhode Island for 54 years. The building’s first floor stands almost six feet above street level, and truly, it does look like a structure made out of elbows. The Providence Journal described Brutalism as “an architectural movement that emphasized simple architectural elements and building processes with no apparent concern for visual adornment.” Yet Brutalism’s striking repetitive angular geometries may qualify as visual adornment. Brutalism was also associated with a social utopian ideology.
The Fogarty was built during the 1960s, a period when our government sought to implement social reforms dedicated to the elimination of poverty and of racial injustice. Major spending programs were initiated to address education, medical care, urban problems, and transportation.
“When there were welfare rights demonstrations in the late ’60s, that building was a location of significant protests and human rights organizations demonstrating,” says Ken Payne, Director of the Rhode Island Senate Policy Office. “If you go back to the [period] of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and the Great Society, poverty was a horrendous problem in the United States. The Fogarty embodied an architectural expression of the services that alleviated conditions of poverty. It was expressly built to house the state’s Welfare offices.” Seemingly, the cultural aspirations of that period gave rise to the building, and became part of the urban landscape as a physical expression of those values.
