urban & beyond

an insight

There’s a certain atmosphere in former factory towns. Maybe you’ve felt it walking through cities like Providence, Worcester, or Pittsburgh. Maybe you’ve felt it through a painting.

Light might have something to do with it.

In City: Rediscovering the Center, William H. Whyte writes:

Porous surfaces such as brick or limestone act differently. They reflect far more light… But the light is benign. It does not glare. Instead of reflecting the sun back in parallel ways, porous surfaces break up the rays and diffuse them… Some of them fairly glow.

It’s the glow you feel in Charles Sheeler’s Amoskeag Canal:

Geometric mill buildings in red and beige reflect in a still canal under a pale blue sky, creating a quiet, balanced industrial landscape. — source — currier.org

Or in Edward Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning:

Empty two-story commercial buildings along an unoccupied street cast in soft sunlight. — source — whitney.org

Or in Morning Sun, also by Hopper:

A woman in a pink slip sits on a bed in a sunlit room, gazing out of a window toward a brick building across the street. — source — edwardhopper.net

And lastly, in Charles E. Burchfield’s Factories:

A moody industrial scene with smokestacks and factory buildings, painted in expressive, almost surreal brushstrokes. — source — burchfieldpenney.org

snapshots

Carrying the thread forward, here are a few glimpses of that same glow, captured in Providence’s Jewelry District:

A brick building with fire escapes and arched windows, with factory smokestacks in the distance.

A brick building with green-trimmed windows and doorways, lit by soft afternoon sun.

View through a multi-pane window into a quiet brick alleyway with green awnings, potted plants, and warm sunlight filtering in.

A corner view of a tall brick building under a deep blue sky, with bare trees and cars lining the street.

new resources

Max Podemski’s A Paradise of Small Houses traces the evolution of America’s iconic urban housing — from tenements to dingbats — uncovering the social, cultural, and planning decisions behind them, while questioning how past models can inform a more equitable housing future.
In Bourgeois Utopias, Robert Fishman explores the origins and evolution of suburban life, showing how 19th-century middle-class ideals shaped the suburban dream and reshaped urban development around values of domesticity, privacy, and separation from the city. Case studies include London, Manchester, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Paris.

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something in the light

an insight

snapshots

new resources