Interview with Marisa Brown

Marisa Angell Brown is an architectural historian and educator who comes to PPS most recently from Rhode Island School of Design, where she served as Associate Director of the Center for Complexity. Prior to this, Marisa was Assistant Director at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University, where she taught courses on preservation and heritage practice and led the Center’s academic and community programs and partnerships.

Marisa holds a PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Yale University, an MA in History from the University of Chicago, and a BA from Princeton University. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Architectural Education, Places Journal, Perspecta, Buildings and Landscapes, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. She teaches courses in public writing and social change at the women’s prison in Rhode Island and lectures in the art history and interior architecture departments at RISD.

1. As the new Executive Director of PPS, what are your priorities in your first year?

Brent Runyon, the outgoing Executive Director of PPS, is a friend and colleague, and I am really lucky to come into the organization on his heels, as he and the PPS team have done a spectacular job over the last ten years.  My main priority is to continue to strengthen and develop our relationships with communities across the city, so we truly are an organization that serves all 25 neighborhoods equally.  I have a background in research, teaching, community collaboration, and design/the arts and I am excited to bring these approaches, relationships and commitments to this work.   

2. What do you predict will be the future for several high-profile preservation projects in Providence, including the Superman Buidling and the Cranston Street Armory? What do you see as PPS’ role in helping find solutions to move these projects forward?

Well, we are all hoping that the current plan to renovate the Superman Building will proceed without any hiccups – PPS has done a lot of advocacy work over the last eight years on this, and we are excited to imagine the apartments with period details that will emerge (and very happy that 20% of the units will be reserved for affordable housing).  So, the Cranston Street Armory is next, right? My prediction is…a dynamic mix of multiple uses, created in phases, possibly even with different partners. The design firm Utile did a fantastic study of the site in 2018 that came out of community input, and you can imagine the range of ideas people had for the space, suggesting everything from a circus school to a brewery. We are a small city and it’s a massive building – I predict it will become a little bit of everything, geared toward neighborhood use: mixed-income housing, office space, recreational space, and flexible event space for arts performances, exhibitions and installations.

In cases like these two where significant buildings or spaces that are valued by different communities are vacant or at risk of demolition, PPS plays an important civic role by building awareness of these places’ value, convening community members, policy makers and groups that care for them, and facilitating creative thinking about preservation and adaptive reuse.  We know that we are living during a time of decreasing and fragile civic engagement (locally and nationally – read Rhode Island Council for the Humanities’ 2022 Rhode Island Civic Health Index); within this landscape, PPS plays a really important role as a bridge between communities and policy or civic action.

3. PPS has made equity a priority in recent years.  What initiatives would you like to expand or begin to continue making progress on this issue?

I love this question, thanks for asking it! I’m half-Korean and I grew up in the Middle East, so I don’t always feel like the typical preservationist in this country.  When I used to teach courses on preservation and heritage practice at Brown, I always urged students who thought of themselves as public historians, cultural activists, or humanities-focused community organizers to consider the field of preservation as a place to make change, whether that means bringing decolonizing theories and practices into preservation, prioritizing long-term and rooted community collaboration in the work, or finding ways to work with knowledge-keepers outside of the field to interpret valued places.  About a month into the position, I don’t think I’m ready to share specific initiatives, but I can share that I am eager for PPS to support community heritage and preservation projects across the city in new and creative ways, to promote adaptive reuse as a key way for us to have a chance of achieving our sustainability goals as a city, and to continue to reckon with the uneven benefits and burdens that have been the result of preservation scholarship, policy, and advocacy, such as gentrification and displacement.  I see preservation work as deeply connected to issues of justice, equity and civic engagement, and that’s what motivates me to do it.

4. PPS has also invested in jobs training for preservation trades – can you tell us about these programs and whether there are plans to expand them?

These programs were launched in 2020 and have grown since then.  Created by Kelsey Mullen, Director of Education at PPS, they offer resources and training to DIY renovators and to those in the building trades who do the hands-on work of preservation.  A focus of many of these, as you can imagine, is historic window restoration, including a paid 6-week intensive that is run in partnership with Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island and Heritage Restoration.  We would dearly love to expand this program – Providence has about 35,000 historic structures, and anyone who lives or works in one of them knows how challenging it can be to keep them in working order.  The programs provide contractors and tradespeople with specialized skills that are in high demand in our local economy today and will become even more valuable if we are to begin to move toward a circular economy.  So yes, we would love to expand this – if you’d like to participate in or support these programs in any way, please get in touch!  

5. Is there a favorite spot in Providence you like to visit?

My favorite experience in Providence is discovering streets or parks that are new to me.  I’m a big walker and biker, and Providence is the perfect scale for both.  One weekend, as part of an organized urban hike, I walked 20 miles across the city over two days with a group of friends, covering everything from the North Burial Ground to Kettle Point to the historic mills and workers’ housing in Wanskuck. Providence is unusual that way.