meeting_street_final

providence, rhode island

status : complete

Project Overview
The Meeting Street Center is a 76,000-square-foot, multi-use educational and clinical facility designed to serve over 3,000 children and families annually. The building is sited on a nine-acre campus and supports a range of integrated services, academic, therapeutic, diagnostic, within a spatial framework that prioritizes accessibility, sensory awareness, and spatial diversity.

Design Strategy
The design emphasizes a spatial dialogue between structure and site, negotiating an emerging urban edge and the open landscape it inhabits. This dual condition informs both the massing and the orientation of the building: portions of the structure reach outward into the landscape, while others curve inward to frame intimate, sheltered outdoor spaces. Public zones, galleries, gardens, and shared lobbies, are positioned to blur the boundary between interior and exterior, creating spaces that are porous, visible, and socially engaging.

A key organizational strategy was the modulation of spatial scale. Narrow corridors give way to expanded atria; framed thresholds open into shared gardens; circulation paths fold into meeting spaces. These shifts in scale reflect the varying sensory needs of the occupants while creating moments of surprise and pause within an otherwise efficient layout.

Circulation and Program
Movement through the building blends two types of spatial logic: linear mechanical corridors and more organic, path-like connectors. This hybrid circulation strategy allows the building to serve multiple programs simultaneously while avoiding institutional monotony. Hallways are widened into informal gathering nodes, waiting areas open into daylit garden bays, and access ramps are integrated into continuous, landscaped interior zones. This allows the building to serve as a framework for social interaction, rather than simply a means of navigation.

Visual access and daylight play a central role in the spatial composition. The building is organized around a series of interconnected volumes, articulated through shifts in height, cladding, and transparency. Generous glazing along circulation spines and entry points brings natural light deep into the plan, while creating lines of sight between classrooms, therapy zones, and outdoor learning environments.

Material Palette
The project uses a restrained material palette to unify the diverse programs within. Exterior panels in muted tones are broken up by brighter, warm-colored modules that signify entry and public gathering areas. Inside, exposed structural systems and bright floor finishes establish orientation and character while supporting legibility for diverse users, including those with sensory processing needs.

Color is used not just decoratively, but as a spatial signal, grounding wayfinding and zone identity. Textures are soft, cleanable, and acoustically tuned. Landscape integration includes native plantings, snow- and shade-appropriate paths, and protected play zones, reinforcing the building’s relationship with its environment.

Conclusion
Meeting Street Center is designed not as a single-purpose facility but as a network of interrelated spaces, academic, therapeutic, administrative, and social, united through a commitment to accessibility and community engagement. It prioritizes clarity without rigidity, flexibility without anonymity, and care without compromise. The building serves as a framework for care, learning, and gathering, designed to grow with its community.

Awards

Starnet Design Award
Inspirations Award, Contract Magazine
Silver Design Award, RI Monthly
Outstanding Design, American School & University Magazine
LEED Certified

Architecture

Design + Fabrication

Art + Code

© [wpsos_year] Ken Marold USA, Inc. All rights reserved.

Cranston, RI
Construction Completed: 2004

This project repurposes a vacant concrete block furniture warehouse as the new studio and office space for SA Architects. The design operates through a strategy of measured intervention, retaining the pragmatic simplicity of the original structure while marking new insertions through material and spatial contrast.

Key modifications to the building envelope occur along the north and west facades. A sculptural extrusion marks the main point of entry, while a linear strip of new operable windows introduces rhythm, daylight, and ventilation into the deep-plan interior. These interventions are clad in Rheinzink, selected for its material contrast, environmental durability, and ability to register time and weathering across its surface. The rainscreen cladding wraps the additions as a continuous skin, visually separating the new elements from the retained concrete shell.

Pawtucket, RI
Construction Completed: 2001

The Pawtucket Day Nursery addition redefines educational space through the architecture of movement, perception, and curiosity. Conceived as a kinetic counterpoint to the existing school, the new volume translates the spirit of play into spatial form. Skewed geometries, tilted walls, and oblique intersections create an animated composition that responds to the dynamic energy of childhood. The design transforms the rectilinear restraint of the original structure into an expressive environment that invites exploration.

Rather than replicate childlike imagery, the project interprets the qualities of improvisation, balance, and discovery as formal operations. Walls shift off-axis, windows tilt toward the sky, and the roof folds to capture daylight from multiple angles. These gestures situate the building within a language of movement—one that reflects how children perceive and navigate space, not through static order, but through fluid, evolving experiences.

At its core, the project frames play as a cognitive and spatial process. Architectural form becomes a teaching tool—one that encourages awareness, observation, and imagination. Each skewed wall and canted aperture transforms light, sound, and view into a series of sensory events. The result is a building that is both structured and improvisational, a framework that mediates between the discipline of learning and the spontaneity of play.

The design’s compositional strategy also reflects a pedagogical philosophy: that environments can shape how children engage with the world. By layering proportion, rhythm, and distortion, the architecture produces conditions of both familiarity and surprise. These calibrated instabilities serve as metaphors for learning itself—an act of continual adjustment, experimentation, and adaptation.

The addition is articulated through a minimal yet vivid material palette that merges industrial resilience with child-centered warmth. Corrugated metal siding and bright stucco planes define a tactile contrast between texture and color. The junction of these two materials becomes a point of tension and continuity, visually tying the new construction to the existing nursery while marking its independence.

Daylight is a primary design material. Angled skylights and canted windows bring changing light into the interior, projecting animated shadows across walls and floors. This interplay of light and surface transforms the interior into a living environment—responsive, temporal, and atmospheric. Each moment of the day reveals a different spatial reading, encouraging occupants to continually rediscover their surroundings.

Inside, the environment functions as both classroom and laboratory. Bright planes of color—reds, yellows, and ochres—activate surfaces and delineate zones of activity. The spatial sequence is intuitive, alternating between open gathering areas and smaller, framed nooks that support reflection and focused learning.

Mechanical and structural systems are intentionally exposed, extending the project’s pedagogical dimension. Trusses, ducts, and conduits are not hidden but celebrated, demonstrating the mechanics of how a building stands, breathes, and performs. In this way, the building becomes a transparent diagram of its own making—an environment where curiosity extends from the curriculum into the architecture itself.

The Pawtucket Day Nursery expansion serves as both a learning space and a civic statement. Its sculptural form asserts the value of creativity in public education, while its material honesty grounds it within the city’s working landscape. The addition accommodates flexible programming—classroom activities, art, play, and community events—reinforcing the school’s role as a social anchor within its neighborhood.

By merging play with structure, imagination with discipline, the project creates an architecture that speaks to both the freedom of childhood and the precision of design. The Pawtucket Day Nursery demonstrates how educational architecture can transcend utility to become formative—shaping not only the experience of space, but the way young minds learn to see, move, and build meaning through their environment.

© Ken Marold USA, Inc. All rights reserved.

Untitled-3

providence, rhode island

type : built
status : completed in 1997

Project Overview
Set within the vast and endangered volume of the Cranston Street Armory’s drill hall, this exhibition transformed a 38,000-square-foot void into a charged space of public encounter and creative expression. A rapid, site-responsive scaffolding system was used to construct temporary gallery spaces for a group art show, redefining a structure known for its historic grandeur as a platform for contemporary artistic experimentation.

Spatial Strategy
The primary challenge was scale. The armory’s soaring web trusses and cavernous enclosure dwarf human-scaled activities, creating a spatial dissonance between the architecture and the artwork. Rather than resist this monumental scale, the installation leverages it, diagonally slicing through the drill hall with a dense, angular scaffolding array that acts as both infrastructure and spatial frame.

Vertical scaffold elements pierce upward into the lofted volume, creating a sense of vertical continuity that connects the human scale of the artworks to the massive structural language above. This scaffold latticework locks into the existing armature of the armory itself, not by dominating it, but by anchoring moments of inhabitation within it. The resulting geometry operates at multiple scales simultaneously, housing artworks, forming circulation paths, and framing elevated perspectives.

Material Tactics and Construction Approach
The material palette was entirely drawn from donated, salvaged, and scavenged elements, industrial scaffolding, used barrels, construction fencing, traffic mitigation equipment, and projection materials. These components were recontextualized to form display surfaces, lighting supports, and circulation enclosures. The use of modular and mobile components allowed for rapid deployment and post-exhibition removal, highlighting the temporary nature of the intervention while respecting the armory’s fragile condition.

Installation was achieved with minimal tooling and volunteer labor, foregrounding the collaborative spirit of the event and the resourcefulness required for occupation of a space without conventional exhibition infrastructure.

Program and Collaboration
This project was developed in partnership with the Vanguard Group of Artists, Convergence International Art Festival, and the Providence Preservation Society. The installation provided a spatial framework for a multidisciplinary arts exhibition, including painting, photography, sculpture, video, and performance. The modularity of the scaffold system allowed curators to adapt the space as programming evolved, enabling fluid transitions between static exhibition and live activation.

Projection screens, suspended artworks, and layered soundscapes capitalized on the scaffold’s skeletal openness, turning it into both armature and amplifier. The exhibition not only filled the armory, but reactivated it, momentarily transforming an endangered civic relic into a spatial commons for cultural production.

Conclusion
The Construction of Art is an architectural improvisation, a light-footprint framework for creative occupation that resists permanence while asserting presence. By working with found materials and inserting a flexible scaffold logic into a historically rigid envelope, the project reveals how spatial precision and tactical reuse can reengage overlooked civic infrastructure. The installation was less a solution and more a proposal: a reminder of the power latent in big, empty buildings and the communities that are willing to reinhabit them.

Architecture

Design + Fabrication

Art + Code

© [wpsos_year] Ken Marold USA, Inc. All rights reserved.