Portland Architecture

Cloepfil to speak Thursday at Portland Art Museum

2012-01-25T10:50:51-08:00

National Music Center, Calgary (rendering courtesy Allied Works)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

This Thursday at 6PM, Portland Art Museum director Brian Ferriso will host an interview and conversation with Allied Works founder and lead designer Brad Cloepfil.

The conversation comes at an interesting juncture for both Cloepfil and the museum. Today Allied Works is not only coming off the high-profile success of a well received Clifford Styll Museum in Denver, but is seeing other large scale projects beginning to come to fruition like the National Music Centre in Calgary, only adding to the firm's impressive portfolio of public arts institions in St. Louis, New York, Ann Arbor, and Seattle.

“We’re inventing an institution here,” Cloepfil told Fast Company last summer. “It’s an exciting thing but it’s a daunting thing. It’s a building type that doesn’t exist yet.”

National Music Center, Calgary (image courtesy Allied Works)

After beating out famous firms and architects like Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Jean Nouvel, among others, one of the first things Cloepfil did was to question whether such a building was really necessary. “Why build a national music center when everyone’s on their iPods?” he said. “Does a music institution need a venue anymore?”

In the end, both Cloepfil and his clients resolved Canada's music-loving public needed a place to congregate and call its own. “It’s about people coming together,” Cloepfil said in the Fast Company interview. “People always talked about how libraries would disappear. But they didn’t. People still go and bring their laptops. People like to be around people. So this space is about bringing people together for music.”

One could lead this notion into a similar conversation about the Portland Art Museum. Unlike the music center, PAM already has two buildings to call home. But there are increasing whispers that the museum may be gearing up to fundraise for development of the block it owns one block north of its existing Belluschi Building and Mark Building. Rather than an international design competition, as many cultural facilities use to bring top-shelf architects on board, PAM could easily simply sign on Allied Works. Portland as a city has a strong preference for all things local, and Allied is hands-down the local firm with the most international acclaim as well as the most experience with major art museums.

Vancouver Connector (images courtesy Allied Works)

Meanwhile, Allied's biggest local project for now seems to be the Vancouver Connector, which may be one of the few positive results from the Columbia River Crossing project. To buid the newI-5 Bridge between Vancouver and Portland, mitigation is required under federal law, requiring improved connections between downtown Vancouver and the Fort Vancouver historic site, including an expanded pedestrian overpass at Evergreen Boulevard.

In partnership with landscape firm Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, the 14-acre Connector will feature a promenade lined with flowing water, a native Camas prairie and a wetland meadow. The Connector is organized as a series of intersecting and overlapping plates that allow light to pass from upper to lower levels, and offer framed views of the city and sky.

Trolling the web for other Allied news and Cloepfil quotes, I came across a conversation at UCLA's Hammer Museum between Cloepfil and Portland-based director Gus Van Sant.

As Meara Daly recalled for the Los Angeles I'm Yours blog, the evening began with Van Sant asking Cloepfil about why he lives in Portland. "For both, it seemed to be a respite from the noise of places like NY and LA: it is a place where they are most productive) and how does one find inspiration," Daly writes. "Cloepfil meandered a bit on this topic, but essentially he believes architecture is a means of mining things – they do not have to be new things or even profound – to create a lens that brings insight into things. In a way he feels they both 'edit' experiences and the goal for him 'is not to expand but to limit the conversation.' Van Sant actually contradicted this notion though: he feels that in film 'scale is preferable, to make it personal AND include a vastness.”

In his Hammer talk, Cleopfil on more than one occasion "made a disparaging reference to 'corporate' architecture," Daly adds, and stated "that there are only two kinds of architecture: architecture as commodity, which is about replication and making money, and the 1% (very clever to hit that note!) who do it for the ideas and architecture that lives on its merits." This is a bit confusing to characterize the 1% as the good guys in this scenario, and Daly disagrees with this premise. "I do not believe architecture can be boiled down to these two extremes," she argues, "and in fact it does the profession a disservice to characterize it as such. Is his work for Pixar not a commodity? Is Frank Gehry’s work not considered a commodity AND in that 1%? I would love to hear other people’s thoughts on the subject, particularly folks who work in the industry." Indeed, Cloepfil seems to have a left-leaning sentiment and sympathy for the overwhelming majority earning less than a bundle, even as his clients are often very well-heeled.

Cloepfil's talk at the Portland Art Museum goes from 6-7PM on Thursday, and the museum is at 1219 SW Park Avenue.

OHSU unveils first look at riverfront Collaborative Life Sciences Building

2012-01-23T12:15:26-08:00

Collaborative Life Science Building (rendering courtesy OHSU)

BY FRED LEESON

There are few opportunities left in Portland to take a flat, vacant 12-acre site and erect a cutting-edge building that will establish a new use for many decades and set a template for related development nearby.

Such was the challenge for the Collaborative Life Sciences Building, the first of potentially several new buildings that will be known as the Schnitzer Campus of Oregon Health & Science University, located on the west bank of the Willamette River just south of the Marquam Bridge.

This first piece is a 650,000-square foot structure with a 12-story tower at the north end and a five-story element at the south end, sandwiching auditorium-sized classrooms and an atrium. All three components sit on a plinth that covers 470 parking spaces and seals polluted land below left behind by prior industrial uses.

If form says anything about function, this will be a busy building, indeed.

The complex structure is a collaboration between OHSU and the Oregon University System, which includes Portland State University and Oregon State University. PSU will use the structure for biology, chemistry and pre-med classes; OSU will expand its pharmacy program and research labs; and OHSU will use the Skourtes Tower for its dental school and a biomedicine program.

Collaborative Life Sciences Building (undersized renderings courtesy OHSU)

The final design, approved by the Portland Design Commission on Jan. 19 after several public hearings extending over eight months, is a joint effort between SERA Architects of Portland and CO Architects of Los Angeles. The LA firm, which led the large-scale design, has worked on dozens of projects around the nation involving health care, medical education and science and technology.

The overall size and shape of the building changed little during the public design process, but the Design Commission lobbied successfully for a more simplified palette of exterior materials and changes to the pedestrian and bicycle circulation.

“It has been quite a journey,” Brian Newman, OHSU’s planning director, told the commission at its final hearing. “We all feel the project has improved significantly because of your participation.”

Given its size and scope, there was little public testimony at the hearings. The AIA’s Urban Design Panel submitted written testimony that was more a criticism of the city’s master plan. “Instead of a composition of urban buildings in a connected field of urban blocks, the site master planning and building design offer our city a suburban-style university campus of buildings that fail to engage with the urban fabric,” the panel said.

Given the seeming isolation of the South Waterfront location, access the building should be excellent. The Portland Streetcar will have a stop on Moody Street, and the new Milwaukie light rail line will have a station at the south end of the project. Bicycles also are likely to be a popular transportation choice, and the design affords more than 400 bike parking spaces, some outside and many under cover.

Perforated stainless steel panels, punched with holes of three sizes, break up the glassy masses of the larger structures and provide sun protection where needed.

“The building has a lot of positive energy,” said David Keltner of THA Architecture, a Design Commission member. “It’s very forward thinking.” Ben Kaiser of PATH Architecture, another commissioner, added, “It is pretty dynamic, but extremely composed.”

The complex should spring upward at a fast pace. The city allowed for the start of construction on the foundation before the final design was approved. PSU officials hoped it would be ready for undergraduate classes in the fall of 2013, but a 2014 completion date may be more likely.

Pylons of pride: traversing the new Martin Luther King Viaduct

2012-01-18T12:28:16-08:00

MLK Viaduct (photos by Bradley Maule)

BY BRADLEY MAULE

Highway construction projects are never popular, never on budget, and never on time. Even in the utopian City That Works, this evidently holds true. The new Martin Luther King Jr Viaduct, which opened in October, is — at least from a cursory glance at the news stories about it — an unpopular boondoggle that opened a year and a half later than planned. And as a bonus, the road itself is bumpy, with slightly bowed segments that produce the badump . . . badump . . . badump sensation of, well, slightly bowed highways.

Be that as it may, the MLK Viaduct is, I think, pretty great — and necessary. The viaduct it was built to replace opened in 1936, when automobiles had circa-1936 horsepower and the land it crossed was still getting accustomed to the heavy load. Originally wetlands, the area the viaduct traverses was filled in with waste from the sawmills that lined the banks of the Willamette a few blocks to the west. Johan Poulsen, the proprietor of one of the largest of these, built a Queen Anne house in 1891 on the bluff overlooking where the south end of the viaduct and Ross Island Bridge would overlap but not directly intersect.

MLK Viaduct (photos by Bradley Maule)

The Union Avenue Viaduct — as it was known until Union Avenue was renamed for Martin Luther King in the 1980s — made aesthetics an integral part of this WPA project from the onset. Designed by Conde McCullough, the master Oregon bridgeman for whom the Coos Bay bridge is named, it featured gothic railings and artful pedestrian approaches and street lamps. (Check out the Library of Congress’ collection of historic photos of it HERE.) This attention to detail was not lost on the engineers charged with building the replacement.

Landscape architect Lloyd Lindley led a team that included Kittelson & Associates, David Evans & Associates, and ODOT (not to mention the many meetings between neighbors and local businesses) to craft the new viaduct that recalls the period its predecessor represented, but without feeling faux or trite. Along with modern common-sense amenities that include wide sidewalks and bike lanes (despite its highway designation, it’s still an important thoroughfare for locals), it has hexagonal support columns, sharp balustrades and street lamps, and most prominently, enormous pyramidal pylon towers.

“With this project, we had a chance to express the rhythm and texture of [McCullough's] classic architecture in a modern setting,” Lindley explains. A veteran of ZGF Architects, Lindley is familiar with modern (and modernist) projects. “We had concepts with Italianate, Mesoamerican, and Northwest styles, but ultimately we went with a minimalist approach that would meet the modern standards.”

MLK Viaduct (photos by Bradley Maule)

Modern standards, of course, pay close mind to sustainability, so most of the materials used were local, all of them American. There are two stormwater treatment facilities, one next to the Ross Island Bridge (merging with the east side tunnel project), and the other next to the streetcar bridge across the railroad tracks. After the Streetcar crosses the Willamette on the new Portland-Milwaukie Bridge, it will continue to the Eastside Loop at SE Harrison, where it will join its north-south course on Grand Ave and MLK Blvd.

The viaduct’s columns, haunched box-girders, railings, tubular guardrails, and skylights all employ this aimed simplicity too, but where the project thrives is in its lights and towers. “It sounds trite,” Lindley concedes, “but I wanted to somehow convey the Rose City.” Using the rose bush outside his office as an inspiration, Lindley studied the overlapping triangles of young rosebuds, “scanned them and played around with them,” and that eventually led to the lampposts he describes as “unfolding sheets of concrete.”

MLK Viaduct (photos by Bradley Maule)

It is the four pylon towers, though, which are the main attraction: simple and modern, as drawn up. They’re also perhaps the most obvious homage to Conde McCullough, whose Yaquina Bay and Siuslaw River Bridges along the Oregon Coast feature similar ornamental pylons. The 75′ concrete towers are topped with sleek, stainless steel pyramids that glow in the sunlight.

Serving as the gateway between the central city and points south, the MLK Viaduct’s towers stand as vertical points of reference in the otherwise low-rise industrial district. With pedestrian-bike ramps at SE Division Place, they mark a point of entry-exit for the viaduct’s bike lanes to connect to Division and the Springwater Corridor. The towers just to the north at SE Caruthers, though they don’t have similar ramps, create a landmark to the future eastern head of the Portland-Milwaukie Bridge, around which several attractions like OMSI, Portland Opera and Gamblin Arts already call home.

In addition to reference, the towers are also points of refuge: they’re at the approximate halfway point of the half-mile long viaduct, and if you’re going to stop here to catch your breath and take in the view, you might as well learn something. Placards explaining the history of the neighborhood, industry (lumber, railroad), Highway 99E, and the viaduct itself are installed under each of the four towers.

While it’s easy to say that the MLK Viaduct project ran over budget and took longer than it should have, it’s just as easy to demonstrate how the cost of materials became extremely inflated as the bubble burst and that unexpected delays from soil contamination (again, the land is a wetland filled in with century-old mill waste) added months to the buildout. In the end, though, Portland got a complex bridge spanning several streets and a very active railroad line, while never closing its predecessor. That is, though it was mitigated by cones and flags, traffic kept moving during construction. And, well, it looks great.

Coming north on Highway 99E, passing from Milwaukie into Portland by way of McLoughlin Blvd, the pylon towers clearly symbolize the transition into the urban center, and specifically Martin Luther King Jr Blvd. Following MLK north, one passes King’s statue at the Oregon Convention Center, through one of Portland’s only predominantly African-American parts of town, and on to the northern terminus of MLK Blvd at Interstate Bridge. It’s a fitting multicultural, multipurpose dissection of a city often dismissed for a perceived homogeny.

Back on the southern end of the boulevard, where over 60,000 cars pass each day, with still more passing under it alongside bicycles and people and trains, the MLK Viaduct is proof that, even in today’s roads, function and form can coexist.

Bradley Maule is the editor of Portland Urban Resource.

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Terwilliger Parkway at 100 and the Olmsted Brothers' vision

2012-01-17T07:25:55-08:00

Terwilliger Parkway (photo by Fred Leeson)

BY FRED LEESON

Aside from moving people from one place to another, how often does a strip of pavement add to civility of the city, provide emotional respite and inspiration, and even rank as a tourist attraction?

If it’s Terwilliger Parkway, think “all of the above.” The roadway that skirts Portland’s West Hills from SW Sheridan Street to Barbur Boulevard turns 100 later this year, and citizen activists and the Portland Parks Bureau hope to generate new attention for the Parkway and its interesting history.

In one sense, Terwilliger is more than 100 years old. Its genesis lies in the ground-breaking 1903 report to the Portland Park Board by the pioneering landscape architects John Charles Olmsted and Frederick Law Olmstad. Though Frederick is the better known of the brothers, it was John who did most of the legwork in the 1903 report that urged the creation of an extensive park system, a looping trail around the city and scenic roadways connecting major parks.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the Olmsteds came to Portland to plan grounds for the 1905 Lewis & Clark Centennial Exposition in Northwest Portland. But the amazing sweep of their vision included far, far more, and proved to have a long-lasting impact. Many of its recommendations have been adopted over the years, and many others still lie unfulfilled. Yet contemporary park planners remain aware of the 1903 plan and refer to it on occasion.

The Olmsteds are back in the news now because some devoted citizens who formed Friends of Terwilliger and the Portland Parks Bureau hope to install gateway markers at either end of the Parkway that will – eventually, perhaps – tells visitors and passersby about the Parkway’s fuller story.

“The sequence of views and natural setting is really spectacular,” Rouse said.

For now, however, there will be only one “gateway,” most likely a low-lying blade sign in Duniway Park saying “Terwilliger Parkway” and probably “1912.” “Unfortunately, we have a very limited budget,” said Allison Rouse, the Parks Bureau project manager. In some subsequent year, Rouse said, the city would like to see a similar gateway near the south end. It also would like to add interpretive information about the Olmsteds and other scenic attributes of the roadway.

The blade sign would be designed to catch the eyes of motorists, while the interpretive panels would be views by thousands who use the Parkway daily for walking, jogging and cycling. The preferred location for the market would require the relocation of a stone marker and bronze plate commemorating the life of Abigail Scott Duniway, who carved a reputation as the Oregon’s foremost activist for women’s suffrage, also finally approved – coincidentally – in 1912, the year the Parkway opened.

The original Parkway was a dirt road, which wasn’t paved until 1917 when water damage became apparent. The city government in the 1920s expanded parkway boundaries to include 100 feet on both sides of the road, to preserve the bucolic setting. The city government in the 1980s went further, approving a plan that would regulate development in the corridor and protect specified views.

Overall, “It’s a great piece of history that most Portlanders don’t know about,” said Brian Emerick, an architect and member of the Portland Historic Landmarks Commission. “Most Portlanders don’t know where Terwilliger is,” he added.

One challenge the Parks Bureau faces in creating the blade signs is the city’s own sign code. Rouse said the maximum sign size allowed without a variance is 10 square feet. She added that letters need to be five to seven inches tall to be seen by motorists. The formality of a sign code adjustment appears inevitable.

Rouse said the Parks Bureau hopes to complete the gateway design in March, start building it in April and install it in June. A parade and other events marking the Parkway centennial are scheduled for July 20 to 22.

“Overall, we think it’s a great idea,” said Carrie Richter, landmarks commission chair.

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Next moves for the "capital of conscience"

2012-01-13T10:46:14-08:00

Photo by Brian Libby

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In a Thursday Portland Tibune op-ed, PORT editor and artist/curator Jeff Jahn makes a compelling argument that Portland should sieze the day: keeping its creative talent by embarking on an ambitious future.

"Portland is the first U.S. city to grow out of the adolescent attitudes of America in the second half of the 20th century," Jahn writes. "The laundry list: non-car-reliant transportation, green thinking, proximity to nature, a very non-1 percent-centric civic attitude, high-tech savvy and a permissive attitude that was essentially humanistic rather than purely capitalistic."

"In other words," he adds, "the original Occupy Portland started around the mid-’90s by artists and has only gathered steam since...it is clear that Portland is receiving credit as the capital of
conscience for the United States. Portland became a 21st-century leader because it rejected both of the 20th century’s main models: Manhattan’s top-down corporate verticality and LA’s car-driven suburban sprawl. Instead, as a more 19th century-style city of shopkeepers and artists (defined by our citizens more than institutions), we should own the title and take care to not become complacent."

Jahn's op-ed responded to a previous Tribune article by Peter Korn exploring why there are no Portland-based winners of the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" fellows. He says our community of artists, designers and other creatives is more "MacGyver" than "MacArthur": smaller scaled as a result of the best work happening without institutional support, be it at alternative art galleries or in small architecture firms. "Some call it benign neglect, but it is simply an institutional lag," Yahn concludes.

Photo by Brian Libby

This notion of Portland having a hive of creative activity but too little leadership at the top enabling it to flourish also brings to mind a Wednesday article in Atlantic Cities about a "green revolution" happening in Chicago.

"Daniel Burnham went on to lay out much of the city's central lakefront area as part of his 1909 Plan of Chicago," David Lepeska writes. But the waterfront area often seemed under-appreciated during the latter half of the 20th century." But then came Millennium Park in 2004, controversial for its $450 million cost initially, yet quickly attracting droves. "It's only the beginning," Lepeska adds. "Several major projects remain on the city's lakefront docket, aiming to complete the makeover that began nearly a decade ago and create an unbroken, three-mile stretch of green jewels." Up first is a $225 million renovation of Navy Pier. By 2015, the city is expecting to redo North Island, a former landing strip that will become a new park and lagoon designed by the firm of Macarthur Fellow recipient Jean Gang and her firm, Studio Gang. There is also a $30 million redo of the northern portion of Grant Park, and a $50 million redo of the Navy Pier Flyover pedestrian crossing.

Obviously Portland doesn't have the wealth and resources of Chicago. But there's still a lesson to be learned. Top Chicago architects like Gang are leading the charge in re-imagining the city's most important infrastructure and public spaces. That's very different from what Portland is doing on projects like the Columbia Crossing, in which government highway engineers have forced design mediocrity and 20th Century thinking about roadways. It's an appalling missed opportunity. We're also building Portland's first new downtown bridge in more than a generation, TriMet's MAX/pedestrian crossing south of the Ross Island Bridge. It's going to be a handsome bridge, but the transit agency dismissed its best proposal, dumping acclaimed Boston bridge engineer Miguel Rosales just as his vision for the bridge began to attract excitement.

Besides these bridge projects, there is also the broader question of how Portland re-embraces its waterfront as Chicago is doing. Sooner or later, we've got to do something about the freeway taking up all our prime real estate along the east bank of the Willamette River. The Vera Katz Eastbank Esplanade was a good start, providing a walking path squeezed between the freeway and the water. But it's completely isolated from the east side itself by Interstate 5. The Esplanade needs to be a point of entry into the east side, not an outdoor hallway skirting it amongst the loudness of automobiles skirting by. It won't be cheap to bury Interstate 5 in a tunnel, and the alternative - having Interstate 405 on the west side become the new I-5, going from two freeways to one beside downtown - would create its own set of problems. Yet removing the freeway from the east side could increase property values and transform the central eastside, just as new streetcar and MAX lines are making the connections to downtown better than ever.

It's easy to feel cynical about the prospects of Portland taking on any major infrastructure projects given dwinding federal funds and given how badly city and state have failed with the Columbia Crossing. There's not money and even if it were, maybe we can't be trusted with it. Yet Jahn is right that Portland can't just assume its current popularity will last forever, and we must use the social capital being generated today to reinvest in the foundation of tomorrow. Maybe there's a wide chasm between a knitting, feminist-bookstore owning Portlandia urbanist and a Richard Daley-scale ambition for building. Maybe we can take pride in having a MacGuyver attitude rather than MacArthur heavyweights. Yet the "City That Works" (to borrow from the local city-government slogan) still has a lot of it to do, and our conscience should be pushing us to grow hungrier.

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Three new housing projects: sign of recovery?

2012-01-10T09:43:57-08:00

The Janey by GBD Architects (courtesy Neighborhood Notes)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

It's been a long dark winter since the sun set on the economic boom of the 2000s, when construction cranes dotted the central city landscape. For the past three years, modest renovations and public building projects have helped architecture and construction firms to get by, but in many cases just that.

But now there may be reason for at least some modest, guarded optimism. According to the American Institute of Architects' billing index, billings at US architecture firms in November, recorded their strongest monthly gain since the end of 2010. Inquiries for new projects also increased sharply.

Meanwhile locally, according to Portland State University's Center for Real Estate, sales from multifamily transactions "are on track this year to approach the pre-recessionary levels of approximately $800 million per year – a substantial uptick from the $525 million banked in 2010, and a huge increase from the $282 million recorded in 2009," reports the Daily Journal of Commerce's Lee Fehrenbacher.

Granted, the condo market that once provided the foundation for a robust economy is still yet to catch up. Freddie Mac reports that American households lost nearly $400 billion in property value during the first nine months of the 2011. But numerous apartment projects are underway, and even a few condos.

The Janey, for example, is currently under construction in the Pearl District. A six-story mixed-use project in the Pearl formerly known as the West Bearing Apartments, it is designed by GBD Architects and consists of 50 apartment units over 2,600 square feet of ground floor retail space.

Claybourne Commons (image courtesy Vallaster Corl Architects)

In the Sellwood/Moreland neighborhood, a 20-unit townhome project called Claybourne Commons is in the works, pending city approval. As reported by the Daily Journal of Commerce's Angela Webber reports, the plan calls for splitting the land into 20 lots, each with a 1,400-square-foot, two bedroom condo. Design is by Vallaster Corl Architects, the firm behind successful mixed use projects such as The Jefferson in downtown Portland and The Hawthorne in Southeast.

But the Claybourne Commons developers have also perhaps earned the ire of local music fans. They own the former funeral home next door to the Claybourne Commons site that was until recently home to The Woods, a popular indie music venue. But now The Woods has been forced to close its doors. A rent increase seemed to be the reason, but the owners told the DJC it was not such an increase that did the venue in but simply paying the existing rent. Yet the owners also have plans to renovate the buiding into office space, which would alter significantly the circa-1928 building.

Prescott Apartments (image courtesy Daily Journal of Commerce)

The DJC's Lindsey O'Brien also reports on construction of the $26 million, 155-unit mixed-use Prescott Apartments, which is set to begin in March, at North Interstate and Skidmore. Designed by Myhre Group, the C-shaped building will have 9,500 square feet of ground-floor retail space and underground parking for 111 vehicles. The Prescott will be six stories on its tallest side, facing Interstate Avenue.

Taken individually, none of these projects may represent a turnaround from the downturn. But like a dripping faucet that becomes a full-pressure stream, with a little luck these and other buidings on the boards or under construction may give us hope that the banks will start lending again, that the job market will give more people the resources to rent and buy homes. Make no mistake: no one is looking for the boom of the 2000s to return. Even if it could, we may not want it to, for rampant speculation is what helped ruin the economy. If a sustainable flow of demand and supply were to return, though, that would be cause for enough ribbon cuttings to make a bow.

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Portland's rise is not on a 15-minute cycle (nor is Pittsburgh's)

2012-01-05T10:26:38-08:00

A contrail over Southeast Portland (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In Wednesday's Washington Post, Maura Judkis argues that Portland's 15 minutes of fame are up.

"Portland, with its elaborate facial hair and abundance of strip clubs, represents irony. Pittsburgh, with its working-class pragmatism, is the opposite: earnest and straightforward," writes Judkis, a Pittsburgh native. "Hipsters take faux working-class attributes — brusque beards, Pabst Blue Ribbon and occupations such as butchery — and integrate them into their lives with an ironic wink and a superiority complex. In Pittsburgh, you can find all of the above, only without the derision and affectation. The natural life span of the hipster has come to an end. What was a lifestyle adopted to make fun of the mainstream has now become the mainstream. There are no more [expletive] hipsters to be looked at...and jokes about them — much like every skit on Portlandia — have started to feel a minute or a paragraph too long."

With due respect to the writer, I think this article, like many from national media outlets, fails to grasp the coalescence of long term trends leading to Portland's rise.

Instead of reading the tea leaves of decades-long socio-economic urban trends that have emboldened Portland and Pittsburgh, or any number of smaller cities around the world, this article and others before it - particularly those covering the Portlandia TV show - have instead confused them with trite, fickle pop cultural cache. The notion of 15 minutes of fame was of course coined by Pittsburgh-born Andy Warhol, but the mentality shown here is less that of a visionary art provocateur than of a TMZ or E! reporter genuflecting or scoffing at a Kardashian depending on the time of day.

It's not just the Washington Post doing it. A New Yorker writer, John Seabrook, described Portland as a city where people "pretend not to care about money and worldly ambition." Did I mention his review predated the Occupy Wall Street movement? We may not be the only ones who see how little of value being in the one percent really buys.

Carnival ride at Oaks Park, Portland (photo by Brian Libby)

The irony here - and yes, as a Portlander apparently I'm preturnaturally conditioned to recognize it, versus a Pittsburgian's quest for earnestness - is that Portlandia itself exemplifies a much better understanding of the city. The show may have a satirical tone (it being a satire and all) in its send ups of feminist bookstore owners and organic farmers, but it recognizes and embraces the city's broader identity of the progressive outsider, that which helped gave birth to Gus Van Sant films, Apple computers, Mark Rothko paintings and Simpsons episodes. The other irony is that Portland is overwhelmingly an earnest do-gooder populace, not cynical and ironic, compared to larger population centers on the East Coast or in Southern California.

In comparing the merits of Pittsburgh to Portland, Judkis can only seem to praise the Steel City by saying it has some supply of what Portland emblemizes. Pittsburgh, she writes, "has its own bike routes, microbreweries, organic food markets, art and lush scenery." If that doesn't work, there's always the cuisine that made unprecedented numbers of people in the Rust Belt and Midwest to which Pittsburgh belongs obese: "Don’t forget that it has one of the country’s weirdest and most delicious sandwiches."

This ought not to be about Pittsburgh versus Portland. As it happens, Pittsburgh does have a lot going for it. The city, more than any other former industrial Mecca flourishing in generations past, has found a way to reinvent itself as a flourishing small metropolis connecting the East Coast and the Midwest. And admittedly, Portland has its problems: we need jobs and greater diversity. But Pittsburgh and Portland, rather than rivals or as combatatants in some kind of cool-cache duel, both represent the rise of the small city at the expense of megalopolises like New York, DC and Los Angeles.

Gone are the days before the Internet and ease of travel when small cities' most talented artists and entrepreneurs felt they had to migrate across the country forever in order to find attention, investment and advancement. Today Mark Rothko wouldn't have to go to New York to become Mark Rothko.

The great diaspora of the 21st century will not be immigrants foreign and domestic heading to two or three American cultura capitols. It will be one that favors the Copenhagens, Kyotos, Portlands and Pittsburghs of the world - not to the same centers of smog, hubris and spit of the past. There is no Ellis Island today but an archipelago.

Go ahead, Washington Post. Try to marginalize this irrevocable broad transformation as mere fashion. After all, daily papers (once the gatekeepers of information, now stumbling to keep up) are part of the changing times theselves, and one that symbolizes something larger: an urban-cultural oligarchy becoming a democracy.

And now that I think about it, it's actually a good thing Portland's 15 minutes have been declared expired. Now that tastemakers might be moving on, we can focus on the truer substance and sustenance that remains.

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Vancouver's midcentury gem: visiting the Smith Tower

2012-01-03T13:35:14-08:00

Smith Tower (photos by Bradley Maule)

BY BRADLEY MAULE

Vancouver, Washington isn’t a whole lot of things to a whole lot of people — I’d guess most of Portland’s modern emigrant population hasn’t even set foot there (admittedly, it took me over two years to do so) — but one thing it is, is the home to one of the finest specimens of midcentury modern in the Pacific Northwest.

Recalling the famed Capitol Records tower in Los Angeles, Smith Tower is easily the most notable participant in Vancouver’s skyline, save for maybe the enormous industrial elevator next to the railroad bridge across the Columbia River. Technically, SW Washington Medical Center’s Firstenburg Tower is the tallest building in the Couv, a whole two feet (160′) taller than Smith Tower (158′), but it’s way out by I-205, well removed from the old downtown core.

Smith Tower (photos by Bradley Maule)

The 15 story tower opened in 1966 as a retirement home for seniors (over 62) and remains so to this day. Interestingly, its official name is Mid-Columbia Manor, but its nickname “Smith Tower” — allegedly begun by Bill Smith himself, the former president of Mid-Columbia Manor, Inc, who still manages the apartment building — stuck early on and is used today on the tower’s sign and letterhead.

Now 45 years old — five years shy of the nomination period for the National Register of Historic Places — Smith Tower looks like it was built in 1966, but it wears its age well. Perhaps a little too well, even, as its original mustard-yellow scheme was sadly scrapped over a decade ago at the behest of the City of Vancouver. The yellow ribbon panels were simply reversed, leaving the cylindrical building with a more boring beige. Not quite as boring, however, as the Harrison West Tower, Portland’s tallest building at the time, has been from the get-go. (For a better reference, the Lovejoy Fountain plaza also opened in 1966.)

Architects Keith Bradbury & Henry Greybrook practiced in both Oregon and Washington, but they operated primarily out of their Vancouver office opened in 1964 to oversee the construction of Smith Tower. While there, another senior living highrise, the 18-story Ya-Po-Ah Terrace (née Foothills Apartments), came off of their desk and still stands as the tallest building in Eugene. During Smith’s construction, it used a lift-slab technique based around its central core, akin to Chicago’s similarly-corncob-esque Marina City (which opened in 1964).

Smith Tower (photos by Bradley Maule)

At the time of its opening, Smith Tower stood diagonally across the street from Lucky Lager brewery, which wasted no time lending its identity to the building: the beer can. Alas, the brewery closed in 1985, and to no great chagrin to the elderly residents, that nickname has collected dust while the old brewhouse has been replaced with condos. Fortunately (or perhaps "luckily") for Vancouver, it hasn’t been overlooked in the ongoing Beervana revolution. There are currently two breweries — Salmon Creek and Mount Tabor — in production, and an artisan bottle shop with goods from across the region and country.

Otherwise, there isn’t a whole lot of info out there on Smith Tower, an effort compounded by the fact that Vancouver’s much larger neighbor to the north, Seattle, has a more famous, nearly century old landmark of the same name. Three years ago, a 74-year-old man got stuck in the Vancouver building’s garbage chute and had to be rescued by the local fire department. More recently, local citizens expressed concern that the controversial Columbia River Crossing’s Vancouver footprint would enter downtown at roughly the same height as the Smith Tower roofline, the reference point used by engineers at a public meeting. And, while I was there two weeks ago, an old man with long hair in a cowboy hat and boots urinated in the walkway toward the curving underground parking garage. Exciting times.

Whether it’s a first ballot hall of famer come 2016, its first year of eligibility for the National Register, remains to be seen, but it seems that Smith Tower’s tall, beer-can-shaped place as one of The Couv’s architectural icons is safe. The building is ideally situated in a burgeoning downtown Vancouver, and there are soon to be more senior citizens in this country than ever before, although this particular old folks' home still feels as modern as ever. What's more, Smith Tower typifies a generation of midcentury modern architecture that is only just now arriving on preservationists' radar. We can't just rely on being lucky to see these buildings endure.

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Thinking about the Willamette Valley landscape

2011-12-27T13:12:22-08:00

Willamette Valley near Gaston, Oregon (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Over the Christmas holiday, I did a lot of driving within Oregon for get-togethers with family. I drove to Eugene on the day of the 24th, to McMinnville the evening of the 24th, and to a farm outside Gaston on the 25th. At first my focus was the holidays and the relatives I'd see, or the caffeine I'd need to get through two marathon days. But as I made my way through the Willamette Valley, with its lush greenery, fertile farmland and gently rolling hills, the landscape itself gave me pause.

I'd already grown up in the Willamette Valley, born in Eugene and raised in McMinnville. But I rarely, if ever, thought about the natural beauty surrounding me. Oregon's natural wonders seemed to be more dramatic sites like Mt. Hood and the Cascades, the Columbia Gorge, high deserts to the east and the Oregon Coast to the west. But then, while in college in New York, the valley landscape upon my return seemed to look different, which was confimed by the awe my college friends would show when visiting.

The valley isn't comprised of soaring heights or crashing water, but it reminds us that the word "pastoral" has multiple definitions, all which fit the Willamette Valley. The word not only refers to the rural countryside, but also means idyllic, and "of or relating to spiritual care or guidance." If there is no singular postcard image of a peak or a body of water, there is the collective tapestry of land and sky.

Willamette Valley near McMinnville, Oregon (photos by Brian Libby)

What's more, the Willamette Valley is what our ancestors came to Oregon for. The Oregon Trail that carried thousands here during the Great Migration of the 19th Century eventually split two ways: to the southwest for those seeking fortune and fame, or to the northwest for those seeking fertile soil and quality of life. Today, it's not to say there isn't beauty or agriculture in California, nor is it impossible to get famous in Oregon. Yet these diverse landscapes - the brown scrubland with gold buried underneath, and the temperate greenery revealing the possibilities of the plow - still comprise much of our regional identities. I'd argue that the Willamette Valley is the essence of Oregon for this reason: it was the stage for the place that we made here.

In January, I'll be teaching a class called "Urban Discourses", which uses Portland as a template for learning about cities themselves. Although much of my preparation has centered on how our city resembles and differs from other cities - architecturally, artistically, economically - my mind often turns back to the landscape of Oregon and how it, along with the climate, defines us.

Airport Park near McMinnville, Oregon (photo by Brian Libby)

Just as rain makes the plants a particularly verdant green, for example, it also fosters a more mellow populace that favors reading books, making arts and crafts. It's cool enough here that we aren't sun worshipers bronzing to melanoma levels on our beaches. It's warm enough that we're not locked indoors all winter. Maybe some people complain about the rain, but the water seems to often wash away the most pretentious and extreme personalities back to points south or east. It reminds me of a Bill O'Reilly interview of David Letterman from a few years ago: O'Reilly was pestering Letterman to answer a question quickly. Reilly said, "Come on. Yes or no? It shouldn't take you more than a second." Letterman replied, "It takes longer for me because I'm thoughtful."

Oregon is thoughtful, and I reckon our mild climate and pastoral landscape, particularly the valley floor, fosters it. But perhaps we're also shaped by those who were here first: Native American tribes once flourished in the valley and throughout Oregon, instilling a value system of natural reverence that remains today. And Oregon was the last territory in the United States to be given up by Great Britain: is it a coincidence that we are unfailingly polite iconoclasts?

Even if one can't ever completely untangle why we are what we are, it's more than worth the time to set off from Portland to the south and west and simply get lost. Don't just drive on I-5 or even Highway 99W, but head off on those windy side roads as farmlands give way to forest, and as rivers like the Yamhill and the Santiam wind amongst the farms and small towns. To borrow from the state's former tourism slogan, things will look different here.

New life for a century-old warehouse

2011-12-21T16:39:34-08:00

2181 NW Nicolai Street (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Someday when we look back on this era, as much as any new construction the architectural legacy of the early 2000s may be the renovation and reimagination of old industrial buildings and warehouses. There are prominent internationally known examples like Tate Modern museum in London emerging from the former Bankside power station, and countless local examples from the past decade such as the Olympic Mills Commerce Center in the Central Eastside, the Ford Building on Southeast Division, and the Leftbank building on Northeast Broadway. We can now add to Portland's collection a warehouse conversion at 2181 NW Nicolai Street.

Originally constructed in 1910, the four-story, red brick warehouse has a mammoth presence with more than 100,000 square feet of space. The building stored steel being produced at a rolling mill next door; it's ideally situated for industry along the railroad tracks and only a few blocks from riverfront port area. But today, it lies just outside the edge of the Pearl District with its condos, parks and restaurants, so it may be or become "the beacon of a new chapter in the development of the industrial area", as Lindsey O'Brien wrote in last week's Daily Journal of Commerce. After purchasing the vacant building last year, developer Brian Faherty signed on Schoolhouse Electric & Supply as and Ristretto Roasters as ground-floor tenants with creative companies like Egg Press nesting upstairs.

2121 Nicolai and Schoolhouse Electric showrom (photos by Brian Libby)

It's clear as one walks into the adjoining Schoolhouse/Ristretto spaces that the building intends to be of the Pearl and no longer of the industrial waterfront. Chic furniture and light fixtures fill from the tall-ceilinged, wood-festooned space, and the smell of espresso wafts through the air. Yet outside the building, the setting is still one seemingly for longshoremen more than baristas. Big trucks are the majority of the traffic, and surrounding businesses are also as yet-ungentrified.

Even so, Faherty is making a smart investment, if not financially than at least architecturally - but in the long run probably both. Maybe the riverfront here is still cordoned off with barbed wire fence and the only Subaru Outbacks are ones being unloaded as cargo rather than being driven to McMenamins brewpubs. Yet, with the Fremont Bridge towering nearby over the railroad tracks, it's not hard to imagine the longshoremen moving upstream before long.

And even aside from speculations about the future of the Northwest Portland industrial area, the building itself is worth celebrating and preserving. This isn't our parents' or grandparents' warehouses of thin aluminum and without reason for a second glance. This building, whatever it's called (I can only assume somewhere a marketing person is working on this), feels incredibly solid, with not only the beauty of its patina and age but the blend of spatial grandness and material warmth engendered inside and out. This is a structure made of enduring and fundamental materials: red brick and natural wood.

2181 NW Nicolai (photos by Brian Libby)

It's not easy to at once be monumental and modest architecture, wide open and cozy. Or to be flexible enough to endure amidst not only changing eras but purposes. The newer Pearl District condos nearby, for example, will someday be harder to convert because they lack the same inherent flexibility. I can't help but wonder if a century from now the early-21st century condo and office buidings will be gone and this early 20th century Nicolai Street warehouse will still be going strong.

EcoFlats: bike-friendly and ultra efficient on Williams Avenue

2011-12-16T16:30:14-08:00

EcoFlats (photo by Ben C. Gray)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Recently I toured the EcoFlats mixed-use apartment building, along North Williams Avenue in Portland with its co-developer, Jean-Pierre Veillet of Siteworks Design Build.

Williams Avenue, once the heart of a thriving African American community, is today well known as a popular bike route as well as a burgeoning retail area of restaurants, cafes and shops. The building deliberately aspires to cater to the cycling community and demographic. On the ground floor of the building, for example, is Hopworks Bike Bar. “Some 3,000 riders a day pass by Mr. Ettinger’s new brewpub,” the New York Times’ Linda Baker writes of Hopworks in a recent feature about the neighborhood and catering to cyclists. “It has racks for 75 bicycles and free locks, to-go entrees that fit in bicycle water-bottle cages, and dozens of handmade bicycle frames suspended over the bar areas.”

There are no automobile parking spaces for tenants, but the 18-unit building has storage for 30 bikes. “Cyclists are a great potential market for businesses that want people traveling at human-scale speed and will stop and buy something,” Roger Geller, the city’s bicycle coordinator, also told Baker.

Hopworks Bike Bar on the EcoFlats ground floor (photo by Ben C. Gray)

Eco Flats is one of 15 building projects aiming toward net-zero operations through a pilot program launched in 2009 by Energy Trust of Oregon. Co developed by Doug Shapiro, it was designed to use approximately 60 percent less energy than a building constructed to code stipulations. Veillet says actual savings have been higher, approaching 80 percent. In the ground-floor entry to the apartments via elevator, a flat-screen TV affixed to the upper wall conveys in real time the amount of energy being used by each unit as well as how much energy is being generated by a rooftop array of solar panels.

“It took two years to convince the bank, but it was filled with tenants in 30 days,” Jean-Pierre Veillet says. “This isn’t a political statement. It’s something easy we can do now that saves 80 percent of the energy.”

The building’s architect is Works Partnership, the Portland firm that has won a slough of design awards and acclaim over the past decade for both new buildings like bSide6 and renovations like the Eastbank Commerce Center. (Rick Potestio, another of the city's top architects, also contributed early in the project.) Curiously, though, you won’t find the EcoFlats in Works Partnership’s website portfolio. This doesn’t seem to be because Works has washed its hands with its client or that there was friction. It’s a successful project economically, and I would argue aesthetically as well. But Veillet (whose work includes the expansion of Portland restaurant Genoa as well as a pop-up store in Manhattan for clothier Nau, also featured in the Times), is a blend of builder and designer, more so than just the contractor-led method the name Sitworks Design-Build would indicate.

Ecoflats (photos by Brian Libby)

“I respect Bill and Carrie as a architects. Bill is very dynamic with his design sensibility and capturing a building in the larger built environment. Carrie is brilliance in a bottle,” Veillet says of the relationship. “But EcoFlats is not a project that was fully under their control. I had the role of main contributor of funds, was heavily involved in design, ultimately responsible to the construction, and the promoter to the banks and PDC to gather their support. They are not a stamp-providing architecture firm and this one is a tweener. I provided the seed, they all helped it grow, then I trimmed the bush.”

From a visual, aesthetic point of view, EcoFlats looks just like what it is: a handsome although maybe not outright beautiful building that resembles Works projects like bSide 6 in the three dimensional quality of its façade, yet perhaps lacks the detail and rigor of a full-fledged Works Partnership piece of architecture. Yet this wasn’t something Veillet and Works fell into; at least from Veillet’s point of view, it was an intentional, pragmatic move that has resulted in exceptional efficiency yet reasonable rental rates.

EcoFlats (photos by Ben C. Gray)

What’s more, although the EcoFlats look is not a rigidly pristine one, it has a slightly rough-and-tumble quality that is not unsuccessful. The more I got to know the building, the more I came to like it. That’s in part because of materials such as reclaimed timber used in the upstairs walkway, or ceramic-coated siding, a Japanese import that modulates the building’s temperature swings by absorbing heat or cold and ventilating it before the building core absorbs it.

I also particularly enjoyed the metal-mesh screens on the front facade and how they appear almost like drapery only more industrial. The facade here seems reminiscent to my eyes not only of Works' bSide6 but also Holst Architecture's celebrated Belmont Lofts.

And you can’t talk about the building of the EcoFlats without considering the timing: a so-called Great Recession in which government and nonprofit incentives exist for green projects but banks have been extraordinarily reluctant to lend. That Veillet was able to line up support and collaboration from the Portland Development Commission, the Energy Trust of Oregon to make his project both pencil out and receive funding is no small feat.

EcoFlats interior and back courtyard (photos by Ben C. Gray)

In the end, there are buildings that win awards for their sculptural quality, and others which find their prestige being certified by LEED or other green building rating systems, but both are a small minority of what gets built. I think of the EcoFlats as an efficient building like those with green certifications, and more than hinting at the kind of design presence on the street that turns heads, be they of passers by or design juries. If it’s more of a DIY version that wears its pragmatism on its sleeve, the EcoFlats also delivers ample helpings of both function and form, all at a time when the wheels of the building machine have been grinding at their slowest time in a generation. It’s hard not to hoist a mug of beer or pipe a bike wheelie in response.

The Living Building Challenge is gaining ground

2011-12-13T15:30:14-08:00

June Key Delta Center (image courtesy greenposting.org)

BY JULIETTE BEALE

As soon as I entered the June Key Delta Center on an otherwise dark, stormy recent evening, the mood shifted. As part of an AIA/Committee on the Environment tour, I was greeted by two warm, friendly ladies responsible for the fruition of this newly completed community center in Northeast Portland, Chris and Leah, along with architect Mark Nye. They enthusiastically described the building’s systems, reclaimed materials, cargo containers, and community gardens. It was exciting to hear how this former gas station was converted into a simple community building and achieved such strict environmental goals (it is the first building in Portland attempting to meet Living Building Challenge strictures) on a piecemeal budget. It was even more exciting to see how this collection of retired women, have become experts on green building and some of its strongest advocates.

First established in 2006, the Living Building Challenge is gaining traction as a critical benchmark for sustainability. The LBC is the brainchild of Jason McLennan, CEO of the Cascadia Green Building Council, who describes the LBC as a “philosophy, advocacy platform, and certification program.” The LBC is composed of seven “petals” or performance areas including site, water, energy, health, materials, equity and beauty. These are further broken down into twenty imperatives that must be met in order to achieve certification. The standard includes areas most practitioners are well versed in, but is very stringent- net zero energy, net zero water, and a red-list of commonly used materials, among other criteria. It also includes areas, outside the scope of LEED, that are more intangible and harder to quantify like supporting a just and equitable world, democracy and social justice, rights to nature, and beauty and spirit.

To date, there are four Living Building Challenge-certified buildings, which is quite a feat considering that a project must go through design, construction, and then be occupied for one year while meeting the imperatives. Another 100 projects are beginning in nine countries and 27 states. The Portland design and construction community is quickly lining up to take on the Challenge: 13 projects have commenced in Oregon, most of which are single-family residences.

Given the emerging enthusiasm around the Challenge, the Portland AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE) has chosen this as its theme for 2012. To kick things off, the organization hosted a lecture on Peace Island Medical Center, a Mahlum-designed project striving to meet Living Building goals, as well as the aforementioned June Key Delta House tour.

For its annual Green Champions Summit, the committee hosted an evening on the Living Building Challenge with Eden Brukman, Vice President of the International Living Future Institute, which overseas the LBC. Capturing a different aspect of the Challenge, each event demonstrated that the LBC is at the cutting edge of sustainable building and demands new ways of thinking about the intersection of design, the environment, and the surrounding community. As one attendee at Brukman’s event described it, “The Living Building Challenge is LEED on steroids.”

In his presentation of Peace Island Medical Center, Mahlum’s Erik Goodfriend discussed the rewards and challenges of certifying a small-scale medical facility. Sited near Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, Washington, a Living Building seemed like an appropriate response to the remote location’s finite natural resources. It helped that PeaceHealth, the client, strongly valued the environmental stewardship inherent to the Challenge and made this a design priority.

The intangible petals, equity and beauty, which require a written narrative for certification, were easily achievable. Yet, other petals posed more difficulty, largely due to the programmatic needs of the medical facility. Daylighting the imaging spaces to meet the “Civilized Environments” imperative was not an option. Energy use and ventilation demands, in spite of rigorous sustainable design strategies, were still fell short of Challenge goals due to medical equipment loads. In many cases, sourcing materials and appropriate technologies to meet the client’s budget was impossible since many of these are brand new and very costly. Wastewater treatment technologies, designed to meet the “Water”, in the end, were not permitted. Ultimately, PeaceHealth used the LBC guidelines as a framework, but will only receive partial certification.

A recent Committee on the Environment lecture (photo by Juliette Beale)

In spite of this experience, Goodfriend remained optimistic about the LBC. He firmly believes that it should serve as the benchmark for sustainable building and that medical centers like Peace Island, will be able to meet the LBC in the future. Goodfriend remarked that we have the design principles to get us there so now it is a matter of placing emphasis on the innovation of new materials and developing precedents that open up avenues for revising the codes.

The Living Building Challenge not only demands innovation in sustainable design and technology, but it also forces designers to consider questions they may not regularly ponder as avidly as in school. Central to the Challenge is the question, “What if every single act of design and construction made the world a better place?” COTE’s Green Champion Summit focused on this question by presenting the “Equity” and “Beauty” Petals to a crowd of eighty architects, designers, and engineers. The audience was asked first to define the terms beauty, democracy, social justice, and natural rights. Then, they were asked to consider what metrics could be used to quantify them.

There was much crossover in the definitions participants developed for these different categories reflecting the interconnected nature of the petals. “Rights to Nature” touched on many site imperatives as well as the health imperative, “Biophilia.” Most people felt Rights to Nature should include day-lit views to the outside, healthy air, and basic access to resources. A possible metric that was offered involved creating an inventory of environmental assets at the project’s beginning and making sure these were preserved through post-occupancy.

When it came to democracy and social justice, definitions were expressed more in the form of questions. Does the project exploit people? Who is being served? Is there a disparity in cost per square foot between the user group and visitors? The metrics developed were less about design and more about increasing the number of voices and stakeholders. There were ideas about having a minimum number of community members included or a minimum number of hours that key stakeholders must spend listening to the larger community.

Brukman, who collected these comments and plans to draw from them when writing the next version of the LBC, was particularly interested in the architect’s perspective on beauty. In conversations she has had with other professionals, most touch on the idea that there should be some community involvement in deciding what is beautiful, especially within the user group. But several architects present brought up the need for craft and craftsmanship with a possible metric being the number of craftsmen on a project.

It was COTE’s hope that people would leave the evening with more questions than answers. “From a bigger picture standpoint it was interesting to focus the sustainable design conversation around somewhat intangible things,” co-Chair Erica Dunn said. “We have all heard the conversations on energy, water, and waste, but they are only a piece of being truly sustainable. And it is these intangible things such as beauty, democracy, and social justice that take the conversation beyond the four walls of the building to look at the building’s impact on the larger community.”

The Living Building Challenge forces people to consider these important questions. And it is these questions that compel us to think more deeply about the impact of our designs thereby opening new channels for discussion. To date, the predominant focus of sustainable building has largely been on the environmental impacts. By expanding this to include rights to nature, beauty and social justice, the LBC enlarges the design discourse to include underrepresented voices and elements. In so doing, as demonstrated by the June Key Delta Center and Peace Island Medical Center, all those involved become experts and proponents. The more advocates there are and the more that sustainable buildings connect to people’s spirit through their beauty and equity, the more likely it is that these buildings will be maintained for years to come. And that is sustainable design in the truest sense.

A model architect: Ben Waechter discusses design approach, upcoming projects

2011-12-12T13:23:33-08:00

Tower House (rendering courtesy Benjamin Waechter, Architect)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Two months ago while visiting the exhibit of AIA/Portland Design Awards submittals at Pioneer Place, there was one design that got me more excited than all the others: the Tower House by Portland architect Ben Waechter.

Initially it was the form of the unbuilt project that caught my attention: a cylindrical building on a steep hillside that seemed to resemble a miniature skyscraper or even a modernist castle more than a Pacific Northwest house. Instead of being nestled into the slope, like most houses one sees in the West Hills (where the project is scheduled to be built this spring), it sat at the bottom, untouched by the topograpy. Although there were no shades or other details that might deviate from the uniformity of the tower facade, a massive opening had been cut into one side, as if Godzilla had taken a bite.

Waechter, who has now been covered numerous times in major design publications like Dwell, has been on the Portland architectural radar ever since his Z-Haus project in 2009, which was soon followed up by the Cape Cod House in Portland, which expanded and transformed an existing home, and the J-Tea tea store in Eugene, which was an Honor Award winner at this year's AIA/Portland Design Awards. Waechter's Z-Haus was also part of the 11 x Design tour of 2009, which introduced a talented group of architects acting as their own developers.

Upon talking with Waechter last week, I came away even more impressed by how the interior relates to the exterior, and how it continues the architect's singular approach to space making.

Waechter has superlative pedigree. Not only did he work previously at Portland's most acclaimed firm of our time, Allied Works, but Waechter also spent seven years for top-level starchitect Renzo Piano. Perhaps these firms' greatest influence on Waechter is in his process: the Portland architect strongly favors using physical models to formulate his buildings rather than the much more common practice of sophisticated computer modeling.

"I prefer to do that over computer modeling because it’s more tactile and you can hold and touch it, and it’s easy to pick up and look at from different directions," Waechter says. "You can understand what’s working well and maybe more importantly what’s not working well quickly, because it’s right there. And I like working models in a sense that they can be taken apart and refashioned. It’s trying to define the issues and collecting all the criteria and being able to address that in as simple a way, or as distilled a way, as possible. Maybe more importantly, it’s about having a concept and sticking to the concept and having a clear idea about it."

Indeed, Waechter's projects are notable and compelling precisely for this reason: they have impeccable clarity, with nothing superflous, and the key idea of the design stands out. In the architect's Z-Haus, for example, the central stairway connects at half-level intervals a succession of six identically sized spaces that can be configured either as bedrooms or living rooms. Waechter often likes to provide a clear distinction between main rooms where people spend extended periods of time versus what he calls support spaces such as storage, kitchen and bathrooms. This distinction also is the organizing principal for the Tower House.

Interior rendering of the Tower House (courtesy Benjamin Waechter, Architect)

"The Tower House has a strong concept in a sense that it really can be thought of as three rooms and a building skin," he says. "the reason for doing that is to make this hierarchy between the main rooms and these support spaces. On the top there’s a living space. In the middle there’s the dining and kitchen, and below there’s the master bedroom. Those are the special rooms. The in-between space is more cellular in nature. It’s divided up just based on utility and pragmatics. The stairs need to be a certain form, then closets are inserted, then bathrooms."

"If you have a certain budget for your project, it makes sense to not spend the money equally across the project. It’s nice to concentrate your efforts on where you spend the most time," the architect continues. "But even if you have an unlimited budget, it’s nice to have hierarchy, whether it’s in your house or or office or any building. It’s nice to have big volumes of space and to feel compressed, with nice intimate spaces. It’s nice to have bright spaces and dimmer ones. You need one to emphasize the other."

These distinct rooms within the Tower House do not touch the exterior of the building. Instead, there is a buffer space - comprised of stairs and the other supporting storage, kitchen and bathroom spaces. So while you're in one of these main rooms, you're looking through a doorway through another space to the exterior wall, almost like a castle. Yet there are enough exterior windows to still bathe the interiors in natural light. The Tower House's exterior facade of ribbed, corrugted metal, the architect explains, "wraps the corner so it’s one surface. That also gives the appearance of something ribbed, like a sweater. It feels like a garment, almost. "

Both Z-Haus and the Tower House were built on spec and sold (with the help of Waechter's wife, realtor Daria Crymes) rather than for a particular client. "I think for me it’s really just a way to generate work," he says. "It’s fun in some ways because it’s a unique way of approaching a project. You’re your own client in some ways, but it also has to be marketable. Other projects take on a whole other level of interest because the owners have their own requirements. That’s a fun and interesting thing to add to the mix, to add to their needs."

I asked the architect if designing on spec causes him to incorporate market likes and wants or to design with them in mind. The answer? No and yes.

"The main driving force is not what the main market wants to see," Waechter answered. "It’s really what I think is appropriate for the site and the size of the program. But I do think a market driver is program: understanding what a lot of people are looking for as far as bedrooms and square footage. The Z-Haus is really big: 2800 square feet. That was done purposefully. The idea was to provide a lot of square footage on a small footprint and still provide outdoor space: something to accommodate a good sized family or one with a home office., proviing a higher density house with the square footage. I think we found in marketing it that actually a bigger group of people are looking for maybe the 2200 square foot house. So in that way it was too much. This one’s a ltitle smaller: 2200 square feet. This one is three bedrooms, two and ahalf bath. That kidn of model you see around a lot. That’s maybe the only criteria that’s taken from the market."

Model of the Flag House (image courtesy Benjamin Waechter, Architect)

Another Waechter project set to break ground next year, the Flag House, is for a client with a fairly large lot that sought to build a new house next to their old one. The name of the project comes from the fact that it is shaped like a flag - skinny and long on the bottom two-thirds, giving way to a wider rectangular shape at the top. Besides its shape, though, the house has a bold strategy. Although it has plenty of natural light coming deep into its interior, there are pretty much no windows on either of its long sides.

"There’s ambient light, and then there’s views," he explains. "If we put windows on the side, likely you’d be so close to your neighbor you’d feel intruded upon. This is saying, ‘Where are the views?’ Really they’re on the front or the back. It’s being aware of that and embracing that."

Back side of the Flag House (rendering coutesy Benjamin Waechter, Architect)

It all started with the site. "The existing house sits off-center of the site, enough that we were able to fashion a land division that worked. That was the first thing," Waechter explains. "We also wanted the house to engage the street, which made important to build in the pole part of the flag at the front of the lot. So the house starts out fairly slender, then it opens up to a bigger backyard. The challenge was it’s really close to the neighbors, so there’s the issue of privacy and sense of space. The solution was to not have any openings on the side walls – like, zero windows - but also treat them as exterior defining walls. Using them instead of fences. The existing house uses the new house as the defining edge to their outdoor space, almost like an urban courtyard where the backside of the neighbor’s building defines your courtyard, using the idea that a building has a stronger presence than a fence. But it still opens up to the street and the back."

In the middle, interior-most portion of the house, "There’s this double-high volume that’s top lit like a sawtooth light in a warehouse. That’s flooding the interior with natural light. It’s not dark, even though the windows are at the front and the back. It’s luminous. You end up with threes three points of light. Some houses have lots of natural light but the space is undefined. In this house, even though it’s a free flow of space, it’s directed and controlled. On the street side there’s this rec room or media room up above that looks out on the street. Your sense of space comes along and drops—sort of cascades down. It turns the corner and opens into this great room on the back. The main living space on the back is engaged with the landscape. Then as you move back into the building you move up and out and look out from the second story."

Someday perhaps Ben Waechter ought to be designing public buildings. He's that good of an architect, one you imagine bringing something fresh to art museums, courthouses and schools. Or maybe Waechter has a singular talent for single-family homes. Even if the 42-year-old were to quit at the end of next year, the handful of projects to which Tower House and Flag House would add comprises a stellar portfolio. Which is not to say that Waechter's work is flashy - just the reverse, in fact: a quiet iconoclasm that is well suited for Portland and Oregon.

Boom, bust and boxing: the saga of Tom Moyer and Park Avenue West

2011-12-08T09:08:52-08:00

Park Avenue West tower (rendering courtesy TVA Architects)

BY FRED LEESON

Here’s the scenario: Prominent, wealthy businessman plans to build a tall, impressive downtown building. Acquires a full block and clears it. Hires one of the most prominent architectural firms in the city to design it. Begins construction.

Then a huge economic downturn cripples the economy. Wealthy businessman hits the skids. Work is stopped on the foundation of the new building. The site sits untouched for several years, looking something like an archaic ruin. Eventually, new financing is arranged by other entrepreneurs and construction is completed.

Chances are you think I’m referring to Tom Moyer’s Park Avenue West, an artfully-designed 33-story mixed-use tower that now sits idle as a hole in the ground, immediately west of the Nordstrom store. Come next April, it will be three years since work stopped on the tower, which has since been scaled back to 26 stories. And there’s still no firm date for resuming construction.

Ah, but I deceive you. The opening vignette is NOT about Park Avenue West. Rather, it’s a surprisingly similar episode that unfolded a mere two blocks east of the Park Avenue West site in the 1880s. Is it possible that history suggests the outcome for Park Avenue West?

The wealthy entrepreneur of the early 1880s was railroad builder Henry Villard, who envisioned a wonderfully grand hotel for downtown Portland to sit on the block that is now Pioneer Courthouse Square. Villard hired Whidden & Lewis, Portland’s leading architecture firm of the era, to draw up plans for an eight-story, U-shaped chauteau-style building that would curl around an attractive central courtyard. Construction began in 1882.

The effects of a major recession that hit the East Coast in 1883 took several months to have its full impact on the far-flung West Coast. Financial setbacks forced Villard to halt construction on his hotel while it was still in its foundation stage. It sat untouched and was commonly known as “Villard’s ruins” for five years before other investors put up money to finish the hotel in 1890.

The good news was that the elegant new hotel lived up to Villard’s original plan. It hosted 11 U.S. presidents during its 61 years of operation. Its elegant lobby and fine dining put it in a class of its own. During the boom years of the 1920s, A.E. Doyle, who had succeeded Whidden & Lewis as that era’s most prominent architect, designed a never-built addition that would have filled the courtyard with a central tower.

Postcard of Hotel Portland (courtesy Mark Moore, PDXhistory.com)

Sadly, time wasn’t good to the Hotel Portland. In the 1940s problems were detected in the foundation. The belief at the time was that repairs would be too expensive. The hotel closed in 1951. The Meier & Frank department store bought the block, cleared it and built a modern two-level parking garage and gas station in its place. A deal negotiated in the 1970s by the now much-reviled former Mayor Neil Goldschmidt removed the parking structure and converted the old Hotel Portland block to today’s much-respected Pioneer Courthouse Square.

Meanwhile, back at Park Avenue West, the news isn’t good. Tom Moyer, the movie-theater mogul who plowed millions from his theater profits into the 1000 Broadway Building and Fox Tower downtown, now suffers from advanced dementia. His granddaughter, Vanessa Sturgeon, who has held the reins of TMT Development in recent years, said early in November that the firm hoped to land new leases for the unbuilt tower in 2013, and suggested a possible building completion date in 2015. (Original tenants were to include the Nike retail store and Stoel Rives, Oregon’s largest law firm. Both tenants backed out when construction stopped.)

Just a couple weeks after Sturgeon’s reference to leasing in 2013, Oregonian reporter Jeff Manning wrote about deep conflicts in the Moyer family arising from Sturgeon’s management of the family empire. The upshot is that the Moyer family could be headed for difficult and time-consuming litigation over the family fortune, perhaps comparable to the courtroom turmoil that arose in the Naito family after entrepreneur Bill Naito’s death in 1996. If so, it is probably safe to assume that even the 2013-15 time frame for resuming work on Park Avenue West is premature.

At its original height of 33 stories, the Park Avenue West was intended to fill a significant gap in Portland’s skyline. Given the low-scale buildings immediately around it, it seemed destined to enjoy visual prominence for decades to come. Its many years of planning included a deal negotiated by Tom Moyer to allow the surface of the adjacent southerly block to be developed into a public park in return for several levels of underground parking. The carefully designed result, Director Park, in time should become as much loved as Pioneer Courthouse Square as a jewel of Downtown Portland. It also was to have been the front yard, so to speak, for the graceful tower designed under the guidance of Robert Thompson and his firm, TVA Architects.

In 2009, when the affects of the Great Recession had become painfully clear, TVA scaled the design back from 33 stories to 26. Condos that once had been planned for the upper stories were scrapped. "We've tried to keep the verticality of the building," Thompson told the Portland Design Commission. "By any standards, it will still have a significant impact on the skyline."

Park Avenue West site (image courtesy skyscraperpage.com)

We shall see. For now, Portland can expect the hole in the ground to remain for at least a few more years. Perhaps it should be called “Moyer’s ruins,” with a nod to Henry Villard and the Portland Hotel. Which leads one to suggest that, like the example of the Hotel Portland, perhaps the Moyer family should negotiate a deal with new developers to come in and finish the project. At some point the hole becomes blight, although one doubts that the City of Portland is willing to force the owner to abate the nuisance the way it would with an ordinary homeowner.

It all adds up to a sad conclusion for the brilliant career to Tom Moyer. It is merciful if he no longer understands. Aside from being an excellent and mild-mannered business tycoon, this is the man who as an amateur boxer once traded blows with the legendary Sugar Ray Robinson.

Near the end of a long planning process and several public hearings leading to approval of the original 33-story plan, the elderly Moyer showed up at one of the final Design Commission meetings in 2007. He sat silently in the back of the room and listened to the final wrangling over bicycle parking and other tiny details. It was the kind of minutia that would drive most high-powered entrepreneurs crazy.

As part of my work reporting at The Oregonian, I approached Moyer and asked him what he thought about the planning process. Vanessa Sturgeon cut in and tried to prevent him from answering. I tried to tell her I only wanted a brief answer to one question, but it didn’t matter. Tom Moyer was already answering.

"It's something you go through," he said quietly. "When you get to the end, you know you've talked about everything."

16-acre Con-way site in Northwest being planned as major mixed-use development

2011-12-05T13:26:38-08:00

Proposed Con-way development (courtesy GBD Architects via DJC)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Nearly a decade ago, as some of the city's most prominent developers were making the case for a new South Waterfront district, I remember asking one, Homer Williams of Williams & Dame (who co-developed both South Waterfront and most of the former Hoyt Street Yards that became the northern Pearl District) what and where the next big opportunity would be.

His answer: the approximately 20 acres owned by the Con-way trucking company near Northwest 23rd Avenue and Vaughn Street. After all, Williams reckoned, the area was very centrally located and easily accessible. It's adjacent to Interstate 405 as well as the NW 23rd shopping district and historic neighborhood.

As Angela Webber reported in Friday's Daily Journal of Commerce, representatives from GBD Architects and Spencer Consultants presented their updated plans on behalf of Con-way to the city's Design Commission last week. The multiuse development, they say, will include housing, office and retail spaces. Con-way is not planning to develop buildings itself, Webber explains, but to forge agreements with individual developers for different projects on the site. The GBD/Spencer team estimated that the district will include up to 1,500 residential units as well as 368,000 square feet of office space and 144,000 square feet of retail space - totalling some 1.9 million square feet of new development.

The fact that GBD was presenting the plans leads back to the firm's designing Con-way's offices here in 2001. If GBD were to continue as architect of all or some of this new multi-block development, it would seem to indicate that developer Gerding Edlen, which developed the Con-way offices and hired GBD, might also become involved if they aren't already. That the Con-way representatives told the Design Commission that the project is exploring an ambitious district-wide shared energy program and plans to pursue LEED for New Development certification may also point to Gerding's presence.

Con-way headquarters (image courtesy Gerding Edlen)

Although the Con-way site is, as Williams noted all those years ago, ideally situated for high density, pedestrian oriented, mixed use development, there are some concerns about its impact on local infrastructure as well as the possibility building a low-density grocery store before any mixed-use development.

Webber reports that the first project on the Con-way site, "and the only one officially announced," will be renovation of an existing warehouse building into a 40,000-square-foot grocery store. "The project will need a special consideration in the master plan, because it will be a low-density, one-story project in an area projected to be denser," Webber writes. In the Design Commission hearings, she adds, GBD's Phil Beyl said the grocery store building would eventually be torn down and replaced with a higher-density project. "But Northwest District Association member John Bradley said, 'I doubt that the grocery store will ever be torn down.' Beyl in fact admitted that the grocery store would likely remain in the area for 20 years, after design commissioner David Wark asked what would motivate a grocer to leave a successful area."

Even without the erroneous claim that it would be a temporary grocery store, it's too bad that we have an admirable seeming high-density, mixed-use urban development beginning with a project that seems more typical of low-rise development outside the central city. It's nice to save and re-use a warehouse, but does that supercede the other values and goals for high-density development? Beyl, in Webber's story, is also quoted as saying the grocery store would be "catalytic" for the development. Maybe that's true, but I would have thought that the location itself and the type of high density urban environment being created - as well as the central heating and cooling plant being discussed by the architects - would have achieved the same goal of market attractiveness. In fact, one might argue that for all the convenience and attractiveness of a grocery store as anchor retail tenant for the emerging neighborhood, doing a low-rise building here undermines the integrity of the other high density plans.

Another issue here is parking. The local neighborhood group, the Northwest District Association, is reportedly concerned that the grocery store could be approved without requiring new underground parking. Webber reports that surface parking lots currently used by some 1,000 Con-way employees would provide the land for the mixed-use development.

There is also the attendant issue of traffic and what it will do to an already choked 23rd & Vaughn intersection that gives way to Highway 30, Interstate 405 and the Fremont Bridge.

And many of the acreage in question in this portion of heretofore industrial Northwest Portland is comprised of super-blocks rather than the 200x200-foot ones that are the norm in the rest of the city. At least in the rendering run by the DJC, the master plan does not seem to return any of these blocks, now that they'd no longer be industrial, back into regularly sized blocks. That said, the renderings at least seem to create pedestrian passageways and would have the buildings themselves designed accordingly.

Whatever quibbles there may be, honestly it's great to see that attention is being paid and even modest progress in developing this under-utilized group of blocks, because one wants it to be a sign of progress for a local development community that has been largely inactive for years now, dating to the housing bust of 2008. Even if all we have here is a single story grocery store, the master planning process indicates that Con-way and its development partners are looking to make a move when the market comes back. (And master planning itself is a good sign, rather than piecemeal development.)

A recent New York Times op-ed by the Brookings Institute's Christoper Leinberger recently noted that long term trends in the economic recovery favor such pedestrian friendly places.

"In the late 1990s, high-end outer suburbs contained most of the expensive housing in the United States," Leinberger writes. "Today, the most expensive housing is in the high-density, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods of the center city and inner suburbs... Simply put, there has been a profound structural shift — a reversal of what took place in the 1950s, when drivable suburbs boomed and flourished as center cities emptied and withered. The shift is durable and lasting because of a major demographic event: the convergence of the two largest generations in American history, the baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) and the millennials (born between 1979 and 1996), which today represent half of the total population. Many boomers are now empty nesters and approaching retirement. Generally this means that they will downsize their housing in the near future. Boomers want to live in a walkable urban downtown, a suburban town center or a small town, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Realtors. The millennials are just now beginning to emerge from the nest — at least those who can afford to live on their own. This coming-of-age cohort also favors urban downtowns and suburban town centers — for lifestyle reasons and the convenience of not having to own cars. Over all, only 12 percent of future homebuyers want the drivable suburban-fringe houses that are in such oversupply."

Maybe we're not out of the economic cold, but this would seem to indicate somebody is going to build a campfire.

It's only too bad that, given how clusters of empty blocks this centrally located come along rarely, that the master plan doesn't seem to include the possibility of public space, such as a school or a park. A new Lincoln High School has been suggested for this area, for example. A school, community center or other communal asset would help make this development an essential part of the city by having an essential sense of place. It would help put a there there, so to speak: a focal point where the iconic bridge meets a neighborhood of historic homes and retail strips to the south, and undustrial sanctuary to the north. At this point, though, even just a bunch of apartments and shops sounds like a nice start - a nice spark.

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