Dreaming With Place: Bookstore as Experience Design

Curiosity & Co. is the next stage of public and community experimentation by Epic Decade. It reinvents a building that was once the one-room schoolhouse of the island of Jamestown and an anchor hospitality offering on main street into a literary and culinary experience center. As a storefront, it is a curated bookstore and wine bar.

Epic Decade partnered with the Providence-based design build studio HB for an end-to-end creative process to imagine, design, and fabricate a unique installation that heightens the visitor experience of this multi-purpose site. HB Design & Build Co-founder Andrew Tower will deliver an artist’s talk and walk-through to bring this case study to life.

Guests will gain a real-life behind the scenes view of the creative process to better understand how research, experience design, rapid prototyping, and brand storytelling contribute to creating competitive value for clients and projects across any sector.

Andrew Tower

Andrew Tower is a design-build architect based in Providence. With experience working in traditional architecture offices and time spent working in the construction fields, Andrew has created a path that seeks to join these two often separate worlds.

After completing a BArch from Rhode Island School of Design, Andrew co-founded HB LLC in 2006 as a design and fabrication workshop to explore and understand the fluidity ideal in the process of making architecture. Through careful design, fabrication, and construction HB’s work focuses on explorations in tectonics, materiality, and processes of construction to create a meaningful place.

The HB team practices its craft in a wide variety of scales, locations, and programs. Recently completed projects include the Bayberry restaurants, Long Live Brewery, and Chez Pascal, to name a few. In addition, HB is currently working on residential projects between coastal Rhode Island, Brooklyn, Upstate New York, and beyond.

The project closest to home is the renovation of a 17,000 square ft building on the west side of Providence. HB has built out their workshop and office in part of the building while creating a series of office suites to attract other design professionals to set up shop, creating a community that has been named Accordion Studios.