ACT II
I wrote earlier this year about a project to turn the Richardson Olmsted Complex (ROC), a former asylum in Buffalo designed by the legendary nineteenth-century architect Henry Hobson Richardson, into a hotel and convention center. The project’s developers and designers are talented and inspired, and working hard to do what’s best for the city. But as I researched and wrote the piece I understood that the whole endeavor was, in one sense, a typical gentrification project. The ROC is taking a historic property, obscuring its original purpose, retaining what’s notable about its architecture (in this case: rough stone facades, super-wide hallways, high gable roofs), and increasing its value. And the transformation in program – from mental hospital to boutique hotel – invites satire.
But after visiting the ROC this summer, seeing the grounds, and walking through some of the buildings, I feel differently. The hospital complex was abandoned after the 1960’s, as more and more mental patients were treated as out-patients, and its wards fell into disuse. Since then its buildings have been weather-sealed and structurally stabilized, but they remain dramatically dishevelled: emptied of furnishings, with paint peeling in tendrils from the ceilings, rubble piled in corners, and, in some rooms, fire-scarred walls. The rooms carry incredible sadness. That’s not only in remembering the lives that passed sequestered inside, but in seeing how the facilities remain unused.
The ORC is an immense property, with nine individual structures and a property about the size of four city blocks. Its buildings have magnificent (i.e. Richardsonian) proportions, generous daylight, and stunning landscaping, and they’re literally turning to dust. It’s something of a miracle that they weren’t destroyed earlier, and that the property wasn’t redeveloped as a subdivision or a mall. Making these buildings habitable once again is a monstrous undertaking, not for the faint-hearted, or the cynical. It’s an act of gentrification, and an act of hope.