The $12 million renovation project of the 1840-built Rhode Island Hall has been led by Massachusetts-based Anmahian Winton Architects. The construction and renovation scheme helped the building to receive an overall 42 points out of a possible 69. The building has been awarded the maximum amount of points in the category for innovation and design. Rhode Island Hall’s ‘green’ recognition marks Brown’s first LEED-Gold certification.
According to the architects, the newly renovated hall displays architecture and sustainability alongside. The 170-year-old building has been emptied and completely renovated to include classroom, laboratory, studio, and communal spaces, and designed to provide a welcoming and stimulating environment for scholarship and community.
Various features of the building combine past and present. Several pieces of furniture in the building were crafted by Bilt Furniture of Providence, a company recently founded by four Brown graduates, using salvaged pieces of the hall’s original 19th-century timbers. In addition to several artefact display cases scattered throughout the building, the design also features a view into the building’s history, a glass-covered interior wall revealing Rhode Island Hall’s original fieldstone rubble. An elephant-headed column capital, a gift from Michael W. Joukowsky, Class of 1987, currently stands outside the building. The piece, sculpted by Dakhilallah Qublan, is a three-quarters replica of one of the original 142 column capitals discovered at the Great Temple Excavation in Petra.
The building was rededicated as the new home of the Artemis A.W. and Martha Sharp Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World on 16 August 2009.
