A4 Architecture Blog
A4 Spotlight: The History and Significance of the Charles Baldwin House
Charles H. Baldwin House (Newport, Rhode Island) In previous articles, we have discussed many buildings in Newport, Rhode Island that have been listed among the 2500 National Historic Landmarks (NHLs) in the United States. One level below that esteemed honor are...
A4 Spotlight: “Strategic Retreat” in Rhode Island
Rhode Island is called the "Ocean State," and is no stranger to the ebb and flow of the waters. But as climate change intensifies, coastal communities are having to confront a difficult choice: fight or retreat. The concept of "strategic retreat," which is the planned...
A4 Spotlight: Preserving Colonial Newport
52 Thames Street Exterior Before & After Newport, Rhode Island, is a city with a rich history dating back to its founding in 1639. It is home to some of the finest examples of Colonial Era architecture in the United States. However, many of historic houses have...
Newport Architect Spotlight: Richard Morris Hunt (Early Career)
JNA Griswold Design Sketch (Above) and the completed house (Below), 1864 Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895) was the first American citizen to be admitted to study at the École des Beaux Arts, the preeminent school of art and architecture in the world during the 19th...
Newport Spotlight: Ida Lewis Yacht Club (ILYC)
Aerial view of the Ida Lewis Yacht Club (Photo Credits: PJ Dougherty) When a city is as old as Newport, Rhode Island, which was founded in 1639, many of the buildings and structures of the city have had to function for many different purposes over time. This blog has...
Newport Architectural Spotlight: Harbour Court
New York Yacht Club - Newport, RI (Photo by Ross Cann A4 Architecture) Following the death of John Nicholas Brown I (1860-1906), his young widow Natalie (Dresser) Brown (1869-1950) commissioned Ralph Adams Cram of the Boston firm Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson to...
A4 Architectural Spotlight: Newport National Register of Historic Places
White Horse Tavern As any regular reader of the A4 Architecture blog well knows, Newport, Rhode Island is a city with a rich history dating back to its founding in 1639. At the date of the Declaration of Independence, it was the fifth-most populace city in the...
A4 Architectural Spotlight: Newport National Historic Landmarks
The Brick Market Newport, Rhode Island is a city with a rich history dating back to its founding in 1639. At the date of the Declaration of Independence, it was the fifth-most populace city in the American colonies and a major center of trade and commerce. As a...
A4 Spotlight: Fairbourne and Thomas Alexander Tefft
Fairbourne House, previously known as "Quatrel" Over its long history, from its founding in 1639 to the present day, Newport has been a destination for some of the most noteworthy architects in America. Some like Richard Morris Hunt and McKim, Mead, &...
A4 Guide: Vitruvian Ideals
What qualities make architecture successful? This is a debate that has no doubt been going on since mankind first moved out of caves and started creating rudimentary structures in which to live. Interestingly, even in a world of skyscrapers and modern technology one...
Newport Architecture Spotlight: Introduction to Touro Synagogue
Newport is famous for many things and for many “firsts” as it was the fifth largest city in colonial America and a major and prosperous settlement before the Revolutionary War. Among the things that Newport takes great pride in for is being a place of tremendous...
A4 Guide: Welcome to Newport
Newport has long had the reputation of being the pre-eminent “Summer Resort” in the North Eastern United States. It is famous in books and movies as being “the place to be” in the summer from the 1870’s through the present day. But how did Newport come to be known as...
A4 Spotlight: Accessory Dwelling Units in RI
Carriage House Render (Newport, RI) As part of our ongoing study of the Affordable Housing shortage in Rhode Island, we will examine the current status of Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) within the state. ADUs, also known as “granny flats” or in-law apartments, are...
A4 Spotlight: Affordable Housing in RI
Original Condition Axon (Newport, RI) For an ever-increasing percentage of Americans, the dream of safe, affordable housing remains elusive and the situation in Rhode Island is even more challenging than most places. To understand the current landscape, it is helpful...
A4 Guide: Financing your Project
Financing A Project Diagram Let me preface this article by stating I am an architect and not an accountant or a finance professional, but without a proper financial foundation for a project, it cannot happen. For this reason, we have come to understand the many...
A4 Guide: The Six Phases of the Architectural Design Process
Previous Project on Ocean Ave (Newport, Rhode Island) In previous Archi-TEXT articles it was discussed the value of an architect to help you navigate the various phases of the design of a new home or building or the renovation of an existing one, but what are the...
A4 Spotlight: Best of Newport
Each year since 1997 the readers of the Newport Life Magazine (and now the Newport Daily News, it’s sister publication under the same ownership), have been invited to vote on their favorite restaurants, stores, and professional service providers in Newport County. A4...
A4 Guide: Online Design Tools & Directories
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. In the world of interior and architectural design that is certainly true. In the past a well-prepared homeowner might have to comb through dozens if not hundreds of design magazines to find images that they liked and...
A4 Guide: Legacy Houses
Ⓒ Nick Mele When most architectural projects are designed, they are created to meet a specific purpose over a particular period of time. A store might be designed to be depreciated over the period of the lease; a hotel might be designed to capture the attention of the...
A4 Guide: Feasibility Analysis
When you want to do a construction or renovation project but you are not sure it is even possible what can a property owner do? This is a situation that many of our potential clients come to us with. We have developed an approach to help these people called the...
A4 Guide: Newport Architectural Forum
Newport, as many historians have noted over the years, is an architectural treasure chest. From the Colonial Era, to early Victorian, to the Gilded Age, and finally, to present times, Newport has an amazing breadth and depth of architectural gems for a community that...
A4 Guide: 13 Ways to Scare Away your Architect
There are things that a client can say that will scare a good architect and/or contractor away without you even realizing it. Here are 13 things I have heard said either directly or indirectly over the years that scared me or another professional away. They are a...
A4 Guide: The Why of Me
The Why of Me: “Why do each of us do what we do, and why do we do it where we do it?” are questions everyone can examine closely and find interesting discoveries about their past and realizations about who they are. A long time ago, I was just a boy from suburbia who...
A4 Guide: Salute to Architectural Clients
This is a salute to those people who choose to create special buildings and homes by serving as architectural clients. Undertaking the custom design and construction of a building is not easy, which is why so many people decide to just buy a “builder special,” – which...
A4 Project Spotlight: Osprey House Entry & Gates
The house at 80 Ocean Drive was built on the crest of the Ledges estate, one of the most prominent sites in Newport. After twenty years the owners of the estate were having to share their entry with another house and asked Ross Cann of A4 Architecture back to see if a...
A4 Project Spotlight: Pell Hotel
Newport Rhode Island and the surrounding communities of Jamestown, Middletown and Portsmouth have been popular areas for summer visitation since the Colonial period. Newport Harbor’s well protected, deep-water port so close to the Atlantic Ocean made it an ideal...
A4 Project Spotlight: Car Museum Project
Sometimes at the beginning of a project the client comes to the architect with a project goal that seems like it just might be too challenging or insolvable. When a husband and wife pair of car collectors had purchased an old plumbing warehouse and wanted to convert...
A4 Project Spotlight: Ocean Ave Craftsman
When houses were laid out in a small residential development called Chartier Circle back in the 1950s, little-to-no attention was paid to the spectacular views the area enjoyed. This now Ocean Ave Craftsman style cottage was one of the prime sites at the time, and all...
A4 Project Spotlight: Barrington Ranch House
Design magazines like to show aspirational projects that were built on empty sites with large budgets and lots of time to design and build. There is nothing wrong with such projects, but they are the exception rather than the rule. These projects are the architectural...
A4 Spotlight: Conanicut Yacht Club Awarded
After many years of using a converted farm shed as its "Tennis Hut," the membership of the Conanicut Yacht Club (CYC) decided to explore the possibility of upgrading its facilities. Under the leadership of the Commodore and a few key members, a group of architecture...
A4 Project Spotlight: Newport Home Featured Project – Seaverge Carriage House
A4 Architecture is pleased to announce that one of its projects completed during 2018 was selected for the cover of the annual Newport Home edition. Among the many hundreds of renovations and new construction projects completed each year in the Newport area during...
A4 Project Spotlight: King of Games or Game of Kings?
The players of this 45-minute match in Newport were Larry Phillips, Paul Weber, Prince Edward, and Marc Lewinstein. Last week, Newport played host to Prince Edward, Queen Elizabeth II’s youngest child. Edward is on a worldwide tour of Real Tennis courts as part of an...
A4 Project Spotlight: Newport’s Spring
A rendering by L + A Landscape Architecture shows the new public space that would be created from the Florence K. Murray Judicial Complex, at the left side of the image through to Spring Street. The preliminary design for the Newport Historic Spring Project was...
A4 Project Spotlight: Longwharf Renovation
Since the founding of Newport in 1637, Long Wharf has served as the major commercial axis of the city connecting Washington Square to the waterfront. In fact, when George Washington arrived in Newport to meet with General Rochambeau during the Revolutionary War, he...
Architect Spotlight: “My Architect” Louis Kahn
Newport is blessed with many beautiful and important structures which were built between the mid-seventeenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. There have even been some great additions to the architectural fabric of Newport in the last few decades but during...
Newport Architect Spotlight: Wharton/Codman – Newport Architectural Symposium
The fourth annual Newport Architectural Symposium, which was held here last Saturday, focused on the creative interaction between the noted American author Edith Wharton and architect and designer Ogden Codman. These two artistic giants began their careers in Newport,...
A4 Sustainability: Carbon Sequestration
The planet is far past the point of being able to avoid Climate Chaos by simply reducing the amount of carbon dioxide humans discard into the atmosphere. The fact that Category 5 hurricanes are now occurring very early in the season along with the warming of oceans...
A4 Architecture Tour: From The Gilded Age Into The Modern Era Along Newport’s Waterfront
The Newport Architecture Tour Map Newport, since its founding in 1639, has been a community wedded to its waterfront and became known as the “City by The Sea”. During its early days, the community grew up on The Point and Historic Hill, with the city depending upon...
A4 Architecture Tour: Late Gilded Age, Ochre Point & Lower Bellevue
The Newport Architecture Tour Map Following the arrival of Caroline Astor (Mrs. William Backhouse When Astor Jr.) to Newport in 1880 things started to change rapidly. What had been a quiet and gentile summer retreat for old money people from New York, Boston,...
A4 Architecture Tour: Early Gilded Age Newport
The Newport Architecture Tour Map During Newport's occupation by the British forces from 1776 to 1779, the population of the town decreased by fifty percent, and it would never return to its status as the fifth most populated city in North America. It was, however,...
A4 Architecture Tour: The Point & Washington Square
The Newport Architecture Tour Map Newport Rhode Island was founded in 1639 when a freshwater spring was discovered near a protected deep-water harbor just off the Atlantic Ocean. Unlike other colonies, such as nearby Massachusetts, the colony of "Rhode Island and...
A4 Spotlight: Newport Casino, The American Temple to Tennis
This coming week the eyes of the tennis world will be on Newport as many of the players from Wimbledon will be competing in the Infosys Hall of Fame Open. This is the only ATP men’s tournament played on grass in North America and extends the tradition of tennis, which...
A4 Spotlight: The Past, Present and Future of Reinforced Concrete
Pantheon In Rome, Italy 128 AD Steel-reinforced concrete is the means by which most tall buildings are constructed today. It pairs the compressive strength of concrete with the tensile strength of steel to make an incredibly structurally efficient hybrid composite and...
A4 Spotlight: Designing for Hope Funds 2024
Architects are not decorators they are professionals that solve challenging spatial problems. This means that sometime A4 Architecture goes above and beyond our normal task of designing buildings. Since 2007, our firm has had the honor and pleasure of designing all...
A4 Spotlight: Newport Spring Park
The settlement of the colony of Newport began in 1639 with the establishment of the Newport Charter. The location of the settlement was defined by the location of the freshwater spring that made the settlement and habitation of this location possible. It is this same...
A4 Architecture Tour: The Shingle Style
Seeing pictures of architecture can be useful, but there is no substitution for seeing the real buildings firsthand. Fortunately, in Newport Rhode Island there are so many notable works of architecture that you can experience many important examples of the craft’s...
The History and Importance of the LeRoy King House
The LeRoy King House in Newport Rhode Island stands as an enlightening representation of the evolution of the Shingle Style into a more classic, historically influenced design typology during the rapid construction of grand houses in Newport during the Gilded Age. The...
A4 Architecture’s Twentieth Anniversary
In Honor of Our 20 Year Anniversary I graduated from Architectural School in 1990 and received my professional license to practice architecture by passing all eight exams by 1993, which was the earliest I was allowed to sit for the exams following a three-year...