Clashing with late 19th century and early 20th century colonial revival houses and abutting street-level shopping on Thayer Street, the Sciences Library is often seen as an imposing and obtrusive addition to College Hill by critics who supported the 2016 demolition of the Fogarty Building, one of Rhode Island's few examples of brutalist architecture. Architectural historian McKenzie Woodward condemns the building as "overwhelm everything around it", even comparing it to a Soviet-era Panelák when viewed from its "all-too-many distant viewing perspectives". Proponents of brutalism assert that it is the world's most endangered architectural style and, given the loss of dozens of significant brutalist buildings in the US in the twenty-first century, the Sciences Library is a rare surviving example.