A4 Architecture Blog
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...
Newport Architecture Spotlight: Tennis at the Newport Casino
When the Newport Casino was first built in 1880, the game of lawn tennis was a new but quickly growing sport. The game had been derived from the more complicated and architecturally involved game now known as Real Tennis, which had been invented in the 13th century in...
Newport Architecture Spotlight: Old Colony House
Reading of the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July Newport is a place of authentic architectural monuments and living history. The houses of the Point and Historic Hill neighborhoods have been in many cases occupied for as long as 250-300 years. That...
Newport Architecture Spotlight: Rough Point
Newport is filled with great buildings that have been modified over time, either by other great architects or which were replaced by buildings that today the Historic District Commission would no longer allow to be replaced. This means we might have had the old...
A4 Guide: Preservation Society of Newport County
Before the founding of the Preservation Society, Newport was both very different than it once was as well as different from what it has now become. In 1945, the glories of the Gilded Age were long past, broken by the 4 sequential catastrophes of World War I, 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: Architectural Quotes
52 Great Architectural Quotes 26 Best Quotes About Design by Non-Architects “Architecture must honor three things: Strength. Function. Beauty.” --Vitruvius “Beauty perishes in life, but is immortal in art.” --Leonardo da Vinci “Architecture is frozen music.”...
A4 Guide: Preserving Newport
As the Archi-TEXT column has pointed out many times, Newport is an extraordinary treasure trove of historic architecture, spanning from the early days of the Colonial settlement of New England and continuing right up until the present day. Newport is fortunate to be a...
Architectural Firm Spotlight: Peabody and Stearns
The Shingle Style, which was described in a previous Archi-TEXT, was an architectural form that developed in the late 19th century in Newport, RI and other New England seaside resort communities. It is often associated with the preeminent firm of the era, McKim Mead...
A4 Project Spotlight: Vinland Estate
A4 Architecture is in the midst of helping fix McAuley Hall, which was originally designed by the noted Boston architectural firm of Peabody & Stearns in 1882 for Catherine Lorillard Wolfe as "The Vinland Estate." This is one of the "Crown Jewels" in Salve Regina...
A4 Guide: The Enduring Power of New England’s Shingle Style
The Shingle Style, as it has come to be known, was originally a relatively short-lived offshoot of the Victorian Queen Anne Revival style during the late 19th century in the United States. This style has, over the last century, come to epitomize the leisure and...
A4 Guide: Climate Change Impacts in Newport
Nowhere is the adage “Think Globally, Act Locally” more pertinent than in the area of global climate change. Since the recent election of Joseph Biden as President of the United States on January 20th, there have been a series of events in Newport that have reinforced...
A4 Guide: Finding the Right Builder
In previous Archi-TEXTs, there have been discussions on how to choose the right architect for your project and how to work with them to choose the right design for your new building or renovation. This article will address the different factors you should consider in...
A4 Guide: Construction Documents
In past Archi-TEXT articles, it has been discussed that one of the prime contributions an architect can make to a project and the key determinate of how successfully the construction project will go is the quality and completeness of the construction documentation....
A4 Guide: Phases of the Architectural Design Process
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 various phases of the architectural design process? The...
A4 Guide: How to Choose a Design
In a previous Archi-TEXT, it was discussed how to find the right architect for your project. But that is just the first step in your design journey. Now the fun part begins: how to choose a design and guide it. Your architect will be tasked with managing space and...
A4 Guide: How to Choose an Architect
Ross Cann, RA, AIA (A4 Architecture) Choosing an Architect In previous blogs, we have addressed the issues of whether you need an architect and what value an architect can bring to your project. This article will address how to evaluate and select an architect. There...
A4 Guide: Becoming an Architect
Until the late nineteenth century, the process of becoming an architect was through apprenticeships and practice, and nearly exclusively for men. Like most crafts, one began as an “Apprentice,” graduated to “Journeyman,” and then late in life, if one worked hard and...
A4 Guide: Things A Contractor Will Not Tell You
Everyone lives in a house or an apartment, so it is easy to ask, “How tricky can it be to build or renovate one?” The answer is “A lot harder than people think!” As an architect for more than 30 years, I have had a front row seat to hundreds of projects we have been...
A4 Guide: Image of an Architect
If architecture is the materialization of finance, technology, and zeitgeist into the structures that first serve then later represent each era, then what is the proper image of an architect, through whom all these complexities must be filtered? When one does a Google...
Newport Spotlight: A History of Public Schools in Newport
Although we have come to take for granted in the United States that all children will receive a public education, this was not always the case. Education during the Colonial era was a prized and valuable asset that was generally only available to the wealthy. Most...
Newport Architecture Spotlight: Newport School Buildings
Of the school buildings in Newport, the current Rogers High School is the most recognizable, and also the third building to carry this name. The first was built on Church Street in 1873. The second was built on Broadway in 1905 and is now part of the Thompson Middle...
A4 Guide: A Short History of Newport Zoning
Architecture has been with us since the dawn of mankind. Zoning, which is the societal prescription of what can and cannot be built in a particular location, is barely 100 years old in the United States. The earliest zoning laws were the Los Angeles Ordinances of...
Newport Spotlight: The Artful City
In a world dominated by thirty-second sound bites, YouTube videos, and dueling town halls on T.V., what good are books? And what good then are book reviews? Well books have a gravitas and permanence that fleeting video clips can never have. The Redwood Library has...
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A4 Spotlight: The Return of the Newport Symposium
After a five-year hiatus, a longstanding scholarly tradition has returned to Newport. On Thursday, April 3, 2025, The Newport Symposium was revived by the Preservation Society of Newport County (PSNC), following its absence from the annual event calendar during the...
A4 Spotlight: The Why and How of Recycling
The global climate crisis is no longer a distant threat; it is a present reality, marked by extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and disrupted ecosystems. In this context, seemingly mundane practices like recycling and composting become crucial tools in our...
A4 Spotlight: Heat Pumps for Historic Houses
Chateau-sur-Mer (Newport, RI) Photo Credits: PSNC The Preservation Society of Newport County has embarked on a significant initiative to modernize the climate control systems within its historic properties, with a focus on achieving both sustainability and material...
A4 Spotlight: AC Retrofit
Diagram of AC System in Historic Home, Credit: Pinterest They don’t call climate change “Global warming” for nothing. As the average temperature of the planet increases each year, the need for air-conditioning becomes greater each year. The fact that creating...
A4 Spotlight: Electrical Infastructure
Recently, one of our clients requested an upgrade to their power supply from the local electrical utility in order to install more sustainable heating and cooling for a building on their property. Because the grid lacked the capacity, they were denied the installation...
A4 Spotlight: Home Insurance
Climate change is significantly reshaping the landscape of home insurance across the United States, with Rhode Island feeling the effects particularly acutely. Rising sea levels, increased frequency of severe storms, and heightened fire and flood risks are forcing...
A4 Spotlight: Water Sustainability
This past year, the price of municipal water in Newport increased by 17.5%. Newport is not alone in seeing the price of water increase even faster than the rate of general inflation. This trend is happening both around the United States and globally. As 2025 unfolds,...
A4 Spotlight: Modern Adaptive Reuse
Newport, Rhode Island, has long benefited from "Adaptive Reuse," which is the practice of repurposing old buildings for purposes they were not originally intended for. Founded in 1639, Newport grew to be the fifth-largest city in the American colonies at the time of...
A4 Spotlight: Aging In Place
Like many cultures worldwide, American society is getting older on average. As people live longer and have fewer children, the demographics of the population are changing rapidly. In the United States, where multi-generational households are less common, the...
A4 Spotlight: Goldman Sachs 10KSB program
When architects, lawyers, doctors and many other professionals graduate from university, they are often well prepared in their area of expertise but exceedingly unprepared to manage a professional practice or business. For generations, these small business leaders...
A4 Spotlight: Newport Buildings in HBO’s The Gilded Age
The Ballroom at The Breakers in HBO's The Gilded Age, Credit to Alison Cohen Rosa Sir Julian Fellowes became famous for his wildly successful television series Downton Abbey, about the Grantham Family and their ancestral home. To follow up on that success,...
A4 Spotlight: Galvanic Action
A Building Suffering From Galvanic Action Architecture is not just the artistic composition of forms for aesthetic purposes but also the assembly of tens of thousands of individual components for specific practical purposes. Without understanding the complicated...