Portland Architecture

Halprin book release party this Saturday

2009-12-02T12:06:43-08:00

This Saturday brings a celebration for the publication of the book Where The Revolution Began: Lawrence and Anna Halprin and the Reinvention of Public Space, published by Spacemaker Press.

In the Ziba World Headquarters atrium (1044 NW Ninth Ave.) at 2PM, there will be a host of people and artists articulating the Halprin legacy as seen in this book: Portland Commissioner Nick Fish will emcee, followed by a performance from violinist Ron Blessinger of Third Angle Ensemble, with dancers Linda K. Johnson, Tere Mathern, Cydney Wilkes, and Linda Austin. There will also be a screening of The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin, a documentary about the September 2008 performance in Halprin’s Portland plazas. Admission is free.

Between 1963 and 1970, Lawrence Halprin and Associates realized the Portland Open Space Sequence—a quartet of public plazas in Portland, Oregon, that redefined the city and set a bold new precedent for urban landscape architecture. Composed of the Lovejoy Fountain, Pettygrove Park, and Forecourt Fountain (latter renamed Ira Keller Fountain), plus the lesser known Source Fountain, the plazas were a dynamic collage of striking concrete forms, gushing water, and alpine flora that, in their seamless mix of nature and theater, created a playful metaphorical watershed coursing through the central city.

Where the Revolution Began is the story of how these plazas came to be. Born of the creative experimentation and collaboration between Halprin and his wife, pioneering choreographer/dancer Anna Halprin, the Portland Open Space Sequence came to life in the unlikely setting of the city’s first scrape-and-rebuild urban renewal project. But Halprin defied the conventions of both American urban renewal and midcentury modernism, designing the kind of inviting, exuberant public space that hadn’t been seen since Renaissance Rome’s Trevi Fountain and Piazza Navonna.

For Halprin, who died in October at age 93, the plazas became the first step in a career-long exploration of sequential works of landscape design, from the Haas Promenade in Jerusalem to the Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C. For Portland, Halprin’s work marked the beginning of a tradition of remaking the city around interactive public spaces such as the famed Pioneer Courthouse Square. And for landscape architecture, the plazas laid the earliest foundations for the ecologically and socially responsive urbanism on the rise today.

Replete with historic photographs and Halprin’s own notebook drawings (two of which are shown in this post - of the Keller and Lovejoy Fountains), Where the Revolution Began is the historically complete document of how this pivotal moment in urban landscape history came to be, from concept to fruition.

The book includes essays by three experts on the Halprins: John Beardsley, author of Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape and Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists; Janice Ross, director of the Dance Division at Stanford University and author of Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance ; and Randy Gragg, editor in chief of Portland Spaces and Portland Monthly magazines.

Photographs in Where the Revolution Began are by Susan Seubert, who has photographed for publications like National Geographic Traveler and the New York Times.

In Beardsley's essay, he writes:

"The 'transitional figure' in history is a well worn cliche, but in Lawrence Halprin's case, the term emphatically and revealingly applies. Halprin is widely recognized as one of the preeminent designers of the postwar era, when landscape architecture finally reckoned with the formal, social, and technological implications of modernism."

"Halprin used a language of streamlines forms, asymmetrical geometries, and spatial ambiguity characteristic of much high modernist art. He likewise shared the faith they displayed in the socially transformative power of functionalist design...But Halprin [also] articulated some of the earliest and most forceful environmentalist challenges to modernism."

"Halprin...recognized ecology as a social as well as a biological construct; ecological health, in his mind, encompassed humans in addition to the rest of the biotic community. Halprin's engagement with urban renewal, a feature of his work both in Portland and Seattle, was at once the legacy of modernist aspirations for social improvement and a critique of the way modernism was rending the physical fabric of American cities."

I'm just hoping that I'm feeling happy enough from a Ducks win in the Civil War to go to the book event on Saturday, and not too depressed by a Beaver win to engage in human contact. Either way, though, I heartily recommend purchasing a copy of the book.

Another look at Burnside Bridgehead

2009-11-25T13:31:07-08:00

The Portland Development Commission will host a public workshop this evening (Wednesday, November 25) to engage community members about potential uses of the four-acre Burnside Bridgehead site.

The workshop will be held from 5:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. in the atrium of the Olympic Mills Commerce Center, 107 SE Washington Street. A second workshop, slated for winter 2010, will offer attendees a chance to comment and provide input on the draft Framework Plan.

“Fresh perspectives make the ordinary extraordinary,” said project consultant Will Bruder. “The team is very eager to have a two-way conversation with community members about what they want for this site.” That Bruder (a very talented Phoenix architect now teaching at PSU) is involved bodes well for this development, especially given what a cluster-@$*& Burnside Bridgehead was originally, when PDC's board awarded the development contract to national developer Opus, against the wishes of the advisory committee that selected local developer Beam.

And speaking of which, an additional element of the Framework process is PDC’s partnership with Beam Development on Burnside Bridgehead going forward. In February, Beam agreed to serve as PDC’s strategic advisor for the Framework Plan, providing development advice in exchange for the opportunity to develop a minimum of 20 percent of the site. The Burnside Bridgehead Citizen Advisory Committee, which meets monthly, will provide significant input and comment to the project team.

Expected to occur over the next six months, the planning process will culminate in the release of a Burnside Bridgehead Framework Plan in March 2010. This high-level guidebook to redevelopment will include the refinement and clarification of public goals and objectives for the property and identify key opportunities and constraints on the site.

The Burnside Bridgehead site is identified in the City of Portland’s recently adopted “Economic Development Strategy, a Five-Year Plan for Promoting Job Creation and Economic Growth” as a key catalytic site within the Central City for the creation of a significant mixed-use gateway development. The Burnside Bridgehead Framework Plan project is a six-month process that will culminate in the release of the Framework Plan, a high-level guidebook to redevelopment that will direct and guide the creation of this mixed-use gateway.

This Plan includes the refinement and clarification of public goals and objectives for the property and the identification of key opportunities and constraints on the site. The process is also intended to answer remaining questions about the site including the reuse potential of the Convention Plaza building, changes in capacity of the site given upcoming transportation infrastructure improvements such as the Burnside-Couch couplet and the Eastside Streetcar, and the appropriateness, and direction, of phasing development within the project area.

The second workshop, slated for early 2010, will offer attendees a chance to comment and provide input to a draft Framework Plan.

A new home for ZGF, a new era for the West End: visiting 12 West

2009-11-23T12:33:37-08:00

For much of the last decade, the Pearl District has seen a succession of mixed-use condos built within the neighborhood while just across Burnside, the West End has, aside from a small project here or there, remained relatively stagnant. That changed, however, with the construction of the 12 West tower at SW 12th and Washington.

The economy has changed the dynamics of a continuing march of new towers. There may not be a building boom west of Burnside in the coming years to match what happened in the Pearl during the last 10 years. Perhaps that's all the more reason, though, that 12 West will help to anchor this relatively sleepy portion of downtown. With the arrival of the Ace Hotel nearby, as well as retail and restaurants such as the Living Room Theaters and Kenny & Zuke's Delicatessen, the West End is starting to feel more alive.

The 22-story building has ground-floor retail, 17 floors of apartments and a few floors of underground parking. But my focus on the three visits I've made to the building since it opened earlier this fall has been the anchor tenant, ZGF Architects, which occupies the first few floors.

From the street one enters the massive 85,000 square foot ZGF headquarters through a multi-story foyer, in which the stairway leading to the firm's upstairs offices is suspended from the ceiling on steel cables. The stairway appears to almost float within the massive volumed and naturally lit space.

Inside, the lobby is equally striking. Sitting at a sofa near the front desk, one looks through a variety of spaces that can change, expand and contract. To the left is an outdoor deck carved into the interior building. Looking forward through the lobby, there is a glass walled conference room in which the walls have been festooned with thousands of ZGF's old project slides (pictured below) as well as a series of sliding wood doors that can create both large and intimate settings. The front desk is separated from a work area by a long metal-mesh curtain, the kind used for fireplaces only about 20 times bigger.

Because the language of concrete, glass and wood is nice and simple, the designers embraced their opportunities to put their work forward. Besides the project slides occupying one wall, throughout the rest of the office there was also renderings and drawings of in-progress work pinned to the wall. Like the Holst Architecture-designed Ziba headquarters, or BOORA's recent redesign of its offices, the interior of these offices becomes a blank canvass that gives way to a kind of continually changing mass-media scrapbook.

On top of the building there is a spectacular view (pictured below) from a rooftop deck and party area. But the biggest attraction up here may be 12 West's array of wind turbines. These are historic, by the way: the first wind turbines anywhere in America (if not the world) to be used on top of a building in a high-density urban setting. It sounds inherently wrong to say, because so many projects around the world involving building-integrated turbines have been announced. how could this be the first? But ZGF's rooftop turbine array is a pioneer in actually getting mounted on a building. The turbines will ultimately provide only about one percent of the building's power. But one percent of a 22-story building's energy use is not a small amount. What's more, other aspects of the building's integrated design include thermal solar hot water and an ultra efficient building envelope.

The turbines are part of an overall sustainable design and construction effort that will earn 12 West a top-level Platinum LEED designation from the US Green Building Council.

The $137 million building was developed by Gerding Edlen, the company behind all five of the Brewery Blocks, the Gerding Theater and The Wieden + Kennedy building in the Pearl, not to mention numerous towers in the South Waterfront district as well as projects Los Angeles and Bellevue. The land for 12 West, however, belonged to the Goodman family, owners of the City Center Parking garages and numerous surface parking lots throughout the urban core. Thus, the 12 West project represents not only Gerding Edlen taking their Brewery Blocks model west across Burnside, but also - and perhaps more importantly - the Goodmans beginning to develop their surface lots. In a city like Portland aspiring to high density, there is little excuse for surface parking lots scattered throughout the city center. Luckily that is starting to change.

Given how the economy has tumbled, I might worry a little about ZGF living up to this Grand Palais of an architectural office. Can they design enough hospitals, airports and academic buildings to pay the mortgage? I say this not out of any inside knowledge of ZGF. Or if I do have inside knowledge of the firm, it's that ZGF seems to be at a high level when it comes to producing quality design.

The firm has been a very big one in Portland (the biggest, actually) for many years. But in recent times the caliber of design has taken a step forward. There are talented younger-generation architects like Gene Sandoval at ZGF, but also the influence of old-guard architects like Robert Frasca. I just hope that the economic climate and this huge office allow ZGF to continue prospering. With work happening around the world, though, and a track record of several decades, the future seems bright for ZGF. They seem to occupy a rarified air of large firms with international scope and attention, firms like KPF (Kohn Pedersen Fox) , SOM (Skidmore Owings Merrill) and HOK (Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum). Apparently you need a three-name acronym to qualify.

Last Friday I happened to visit the 12 West building on a cloudy, rainy day at dusk. Any photographer would tell you it was time to put the camera away and wait for bright afternoon or morning sunshine. But I kept snapping pictures of 12 West as I stood outside, and I think that was because the building had a noticeable glow even in this low light. The ultra high-efficiency glass used on the facade not only brings lots of natural light into the building, but it also gives 12 West a sense of transparency that helps humanize its somewhat monolithic form. It doesn't just reflect light like a mirror, but actually seems to hold that illumination like a jewel box.

At first the facade seemed to me like a lesser version of ZGF's other recent local tower, The Eliot (located at SW 10th and Jefferson behind the Portland Art Museum). The randomness of the facade patterns in the Eliot initially seemed more striking. But ultimately I've come to appreciate 12 West's balance between randomness and clarity. The Eliot, it turns out, has come to feel like a first draft of 12 West's facade. It's true the Elliot has more human-scaled spaces at ground level (such as brownstones and a glass-walled cafe), but that project also benefits in that regard from bordering a pedestrian street. There are also a series of indentations in the 12 West facade where balconies or windows break up the mass of this behemoth, creating the sense that the glass curtain wall is just that - a gentle curtain over the building. Even though 12 West is bigger than the Eliot, to me it feels lighter.

I am not quite ready to say 12 West is a gorgeous composition up there with the best recent local towers, such as 937 or The Metropolitan. Honestly, I need more time to contemplate a building fully. Part of me feels at first glance that it could somehow be a bit more elegant, yet there is an honesty and clarity of expression that I also admire. Besides, there have been times I've written about a building a few weeks or months after it was completed only to see my opinion change over time. I want to keep my mind open about it a little longer.

I can tell you, though, that 12 West makes a very nice addition to the downtown skyline. It represents the continuing tradition of quality that marks both the architect and developer. If 12 West is part of the end of a booming era, it's a nice way for Gerding Edlen, ZGF and Portland itself to go out. Increasingly our city is going to have people living vertically in condos and apartments, and if I were to do so, I can scarcely think of a better location or glass-ensconced setting in which to live.

We'll leave the light off for ya': Melvin Mark, Russell lead BOMA Office Energy Showdown winners

2009-11-20T12:56:29-08:00

The Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) has announced the winners of Portland’s 2009 Office Energy Showdown. Now in its third year, the Showdown recognizes Portland-area office buildings that have made significant achievements in energy efficiency.

Participation saw a nearly 30 percent increase in the number of participants from the previous year and added nearly four million square-feet of office space to the friendly competition.

Winners were chosen from among 32 properties, representing over 11 million square-feet of office real estate. Challenged to assess their buildings’ energy performance, all participants demonstrated market leadership in quantifying their energy use and establishing baseline data that can be used to track future gains in operating efficiency.

The Grand Prize winner, which receives the “Power Broker” trophy for a property, team, or company achieving an outstanding accomplishment in all-around energy performance was the Melvin Mark Companies, a commercial real estate broker. Melvin Mark's portfolio includes the Sunset Center at Tanasbourne as well as the Columbia Square (pictured above) and Crown Plaza buildings downtown.

Three projects were also singled out for demonstrating the highest energy performance ratings. 1st Place went to the 200 Market Building, managed by the Russell Development Company. 2nd Place was the Gus Solomon Courthouse, managed by the General Services Administration (which probably uses little energy by virtue of being largely empty), and 3rd Place went to the Kruse Woods V project, managed by Shorenstein.

Then there were awards for 'Greatest Improvement', for the properties demonstrating the most significant gains in energy performance rating over the year. 1st place went to the ODS Tower in downtown Portland managed by Ashforth Pacific (now if they could only do something about the hideous sculpture in the front of the building) and designed by ZGF. 2nd Place was Montgomery Park, the Northwest Portland landmark managed by Bill Naito Company. 3rd Place was a tie between the Liberty Centre (Ashforth Pacific) and 1915 Amberglen, managed by KG Investments Management.

If they'd needed to break the tie, I'd have disqualified Liberty Centre for spelling "Centre" like Canadians. That said, Liberty Centre is also noteworthy in that it was originally to be a design by internationally renowned architect Cesar Pelli, before ultimately being designed by Portland's GBD Architects.

Design afficionados (or "designistas", as developer Dennis Wilde has called them) may snicker that many of these buildings are visually unattractive or, in some cases, located in some far-off suburban office park surrounded by surface parking lots. I mean, you never hear someone say, "Have you seen that Kruse Woods V office building in Lake Oswego? What a gorgeous work of architecture! What is that, Koolhaas? Piano, Meier?" But energy efficiency is one of the biggest movements of our time, and part of a regional effort to reduce the need for coal-fired power plants by cutting our power addiction. What some of these projects lack in looks or location, they admirably atone for by being as efficient as they can be.

Latest Designs on Portland talk: working in China

2009-11-18T12:04:09-08:00

This fall China has been on the brain of Portland's art and design community. Taking a cue from the Portland Art Museum's "China Design Now" exhibit, which surveys the latest in design, fashion and graphic design from China, the next installment in our Designs On Portland discussion series will feature three local architects with experience across the Pacific in the land of Mao and Ming.

Scheduled for Thursday at 6:30pm at Design Within Reach (1200 NW Everett), the talk will feature Robert Packard of ZGF Architects, Gary Reddick of V3 Studio, and Rick Potestio.

ZFG has quietly designed numerous projects in China, such as the Silo City Residential District in Beijing, an 8.6 million square foot LEED-rated residential district ; the 900,000 square foot FuWai Cardiovascular Hospital in Beijing; and a 600,000 square foot expansion of the Beijing Children's Hospital.

V3 Studio and Reddick's previous firm, Sienna Architecture, have been hired to design a number of buildings and master plans such as the five-building Jinan Olympic Park complex in Jinan, China (shown in rendering form at the top of this post and directly above).

Potestio hasn't designed a building in China, but the architect, professor and urban planner has traveled extensively in China and conducted charrettes there to generate designs for housing projects in three Chinese cities.

More than simply looking at the work these architects have done, the hope is that our conversation will delve into the challenges and opportunities facing Portland architects as they seek out and procure work in China.

The speed of development there can be staggeringly quick, for example. That's appealing to an architect used to seeing projects languish on the drawing board, but not so appealing when you're asked, for example, to only design a project through the design-development stage and then hand over the blueprints to a different architect who will see your baby through to construction. At the same time, the government itself can help or hinder a project.

Two years ago I interviewed an engineer, Steve Burrows, from the renowned engineering firm Arup, about working in China; his firm worked on the Bird's Nest national stadium and the Rem Koolhaas-designed CCTV Tower (the latter of which is pictured above in a shot I took in 2007 when the building was under construction). When I asked him about the Chinese government's attitude about the stadium being constructed, Burrows had this to say:

"From the top of Chinese political leadership down they were going to do this. They could have found us not compliant with Chinese code and made us go through the infinite loop of proving the unprovable. But they always found a way to keep it moving forward. There was always an attitude of, 'There must be a way.'"

But what happens when it's not a national landmark like the Bird's Nest? Notice Burrows indicated that Chinese code can be problematic a lot of the time, bogging down a project indefinitely.

We also hope to talk about the challenge of China discovering - or rediscovering, to put it more accurately - its own architectural vernacular. As wonderful as much of the new Chinese architecture from recent years has been, most of it seems to have been designed by western architects. Or even when it is designed by Chinese architects, it looks western. How does China preserve the history and tradition of its architectural past even as its ultra dense population goes from courtyard-like hutong villages to highrise residential towers?

As always, the discussion is hosted and sponsored by Design Within Reach.

Hillsdale Terrace: debating the "inescapable stigma" of public housing [updated]

2009-11-16T12:01:25-08:00

In the opinion section of today's Oregonian, architect Michael Willis takes a heartfelt stand against the ongoing stigma of public housing.

The Willis essay is actually a response to a previous op-ed piece written by Ray Hallberg, who criticized the Housing Authority of Portland for applying for $40 million in federal money to tear down the 39-year-old, 60-unit Hillsdale Terrace in Southwest Portland (pictured above and below) and build 100 units of new public housing.

"Families in public housing projects blend poorly or not at all with the larger community," Hallberg wrote. "Project schoolchildren are marked by their peers as 'from the project' and tend to self-segregate. Rightly or wrongly, there is an inescapable stigma attached to the tenants of public housing projects."

"Such projects have been identified nationally as social failures since the 1960s," Hallberg added. "The larger the project, the larger the failure."

To Michael Willis, this isn't just an attack against the Hillsdale Terrace project that his firm, Michael Willis Architects, is designing. Or the numerous public housing projects the firm has designed in the past, in Portland as well as San Francisco, New Orleans, Oakland and several other cities. It's also a personal affront, because Willis grew up in a public housing project in St. Louis.

"We are most proud of the work we've done for HAP in Portland, reconnecting former public housing communities into the surrounding neighborhood fabric in ways that value both the residents of the newly built housing and their neighbors," Willis writes. "Please go to North Alberta Street and Vancouver Avenue to see Humboldt Gardens or to North Portland's Portsmouth neighborhood to see New Columbia. And if there are still issues to be resolved between neighbors, that's called real life. At least it will be in the context of neighbor-to-neighbor, not as neighbor-to-stigmatized people from the projects."

I find this an interesting debate, and one that is perhaps settled by design.

For starters, Hallberg is not merely some crackpot. He is a retired builder and developer as well as a member of the Homebuilders Association of Metropolitan Portland's Oregon Housing Hall of Fame, and previously served on the board of the Housing Authority of Portland.

And Hallberg has a strong point when it comes to evaluating the success of public housing projects of the past. You don't have to live in New York or Chicago to remember the common phenomenon in the 1960s and 70s of affordable housing towers that were meant to lift people out of poverty but often, as Hallberg noted, resulted in crime-ridden places and the notion that the struggling poor population was being segregated away from the rest of society.

He remembers when Hillsdale Terrace once engendered such controversy upon its original construction. "In the late 1960s, HAP proposed the Hillsdale Terrace apartments at 100 units. The plan triggered immediate, intense neighborhood resistance because no one wants a public housing project next door," Hallberg (pictured at left) writes. "There were many neighborhood meetings, including a full house in the Wilson High School auditorium. There were two hearings before then-Mayor Terry Schrunk's City Council. Finally, the plans was approved -- at 60 units -- and built in 1970."

Even so, times have changed. I don't think investing in a contemporary re-design for Hillsdale Terrace will elicit feelings of class-based discrimination, and today's public housing projects are designed to better integrate with an existing urban fabric. In other words, Hallberg is at least partially correct that no segment of the population should be isolated from the rest of a community. But I think Willis is correct that the time is past for public housing projects to be viewed merely as highrise slums that will mark residents ad doomed black sheep.

Of course, there is also a racial and class element to this particular debate. Hallberg is Caucasian and Willis is African American. Hallberg was a successful developer, while Willis was raised in just the kind of "projects" that are supposed to earn the "inescapable stigma" Hallberg writes about.

Ultimately I side with Willis in arguing we can re-make public housing so that it's beneficial to lifting people out of poverty. But Hallberg's reminder that such public investment to help the poor doesn't always run smoothly or without societal downsides.

UPDATE, 11/18/09: In an additional Oregonian op-ed the paper published online, Rick Nitti, director of the Hillsdale nonprofit social service agency Neighborhood House, has this to say:

"Hallberg argues that 'building a segregated, dense community of low-income families is exactly what HAP should not do. I agree with his premise but disagree with his conclusion. A newly developed Hillsdale Terrace will create a geography of opportunity for disadvantaged families with access to jobs, health care, services and resources, and good schools for their children."

"As someone who lived in the shadows of Chicago's Cabrini Green, I know first-hand what bad policy it is to isolate our poor in communities of poverty. The evidence is clear. Integrating low-income families in middle-class neighborhoods where they gain access to higher-performing schools and more job opportunities and are exposed to less crime and social distress has demonstrated increases in opportunity and reduced the effects of poverty."

"Building a new Hillsdale Terrace that is a model for sustainable development and is designed to reflect the surrounding neighborhood's character will help transform what is now a distressed pocket into a mixed-income community that instills pride and dignity among its residents."

Opportunity abounds with abatement: A conversation with PDC's John Warner about workforce housing

2009-11-13T10:30:28-08:00

Imagine if there was a way to put the Portland area's countless unemployed architects and construction workers back to work. And while you're imagining, suppose this plan stemmed from an already-existing city program that has simply been shelved for the last four years. And finally, imagine that this endeavor would not cost the city money but in fact do the opposite: create a long-term revenue stream.

This isn't mere architectural pixie dust or pie-in-the-sky optimism. It comes from a conversation I had recently with John Warner, who manages housing development and workforce housing policy for the Portland Development Commission. Warner met me at a coffee house near PDC with a binder full of stats and graphics, but the message was more emotionally resonant: that we can do more to stimulate housing and jobs as well as great architecture without exhausting city coffers.

For thirty years until a 2005 moratorium was put in place, the city utilized the New Multiple Unit Housing Property Tax Exemption program to stimulate multifamily housing in the central city. It was geared towards residents too well off to qualify for low-income housing but not affluent enough to be able to afford to live here. Exemplified by projects such as the Sitka Apartments in the Pearl District (pictured at right) or Shaver Green in North Portland (apologies - these turned out to be affordable housing projects) these programs help create close-in housing for working people like cops, teachers, social workers and firefighters.

Prior to the 2005 moratorium, both the New Multiple-Unit Housing program and the Transit Supportive and Residential Development programs provided a 10-year tax exemption on the improvement value of a new multifamily or mixed-use project in the central city and in PDC-designated urban renewal areas as well as light rail station areas outside the central city. They were intended to provide an incentive for high-density residential and mixed-use development in Portland’s centers and other transit-oriented areas so that the city can accommodate new population growth, improve the housing-jobs balance, and support public transit, particularly the regional light rail system.

Tax abatement programs such as these not only help make the central city a viable destination for more than just the richest and poorest populations, but also lead to increased tax revenue by growing the overall tax base. It's worth it to offer discounts to projects that bring more middle income people into the heart of the city.

But because these workforce housing programs have in the past been used in relatively tony areas like the Pearl District, there is also a stigma: that people already well off are getting tax breaks they don't deserve, while some granny in Lents or a minimum-wage worker in Parkrose is having to pay their property taxes in full.

This misleading appearance of unfairness seems to be why the moratorium was placed on the New Multiple Unit Housing and Transit Supportive development programs in 2005. The tax exemption, heretofore intended for middle class/workforce housing, was re-directed to low-income housing projects.

It may sound fairer for the city to devote its limited housing funds to the neediest people, and build all low-income housing. Why give tax breaks for fancy condo towers?

But it's not that simple; in fact, such a notion is misleading. Nationwide, low-income housing already receives vastly more funds than workforce housing. Certainly I'm not arguing that there shouldn't be strict attention to providing low-income housing. It's just that if low-income housing is already relatively stable in its funding mechanisms, why cut off workforce housing when it's the neediest and most neglected in terms of city financial support?

It's also middle-income housing that can have the most impact on the places where it is built. Healthy urban areas are places where people from a variety of income levels live and work in a manner that promotes the overall economic growth. I mean, it's great to help a homeless person get off the streets into a single-room-occupancy residence. That's our responsibility as a caring society. However, it's workforce housing projects that will bring people into the central city to patronize restaurants and shops, reduce crime and traffic, contribute to the tax base and make the whole economy prosper.

Now, Warner says, the city is preparing to re-evaluate these tax-abatement programs. Over the next year, we could see them made active again. And that's a good thing.

“The tool is sitting in the tool shed," Warner explains. "All we have to do is pick it up. We could have the design and construction communities back to work. It’s a catalyst.”

Warner and PDC are proposing a 15-year fund that is contributed to by employers, foundations, and the city. The goal is 20 projects (with 3,400 households) built during that time. All of the money would be paid back but in the meantime it would induce $1.1 billion in total development.

Portland has enjoyed a relatively low cost of living compared to other West Coast cities, which have experienced greater crisis of affordability in their centers. In places like San Francisco, for example, you have to be J.R. Ewing to live within five miles of the Transamerica building or the COIT tower. That's not quite the case in Portland, but things are changing here. Simply in order to stay even with the current standard of living, you'd need annual income growth of 4.7 percent. Most people I know get a 3 percent annual cost-of-living raise at most.

“A rational consumer will not choose to live here," Warner says. "So you have to trade on people’s irrational exuberance.” It's a good thing we have all that beautiful scenery and all those yummy food carts. Otherwise Portland could become a lot more like Cleveland than we're prepared to admit.

Recently I wrote a blog post about the proposed workforce housing project envisioned by Works Partnership and developer Randy Rapaport. The project, which won an unbuilt-design award from the American Institute of Architects last month, would require the kind of workforce-housing funds the city previously provided (before the 2005 moratorium) in order to get built. And this is true with countless projects across the city that haven't even been conceived of yet. Tax abatement could be putting architects and building-industry workers back on the job.

PDC owns many land parcels around Portland that could be turned into workforce housing projects if the abatement moratorium were to end. And again, this wouldn't be a strain to the city's tax coffers, but would actually increase them over time by growing the tax base to include more taxpayers. Wouldn't it be nice to see more construction cranes in the air next year? It could happen if we bring the abatement program (which was on the books for 30 years) back.

If the city's tax abatement programs for workforce housing are re-instated, there's only one more thing I'd like to see done: the instigation of a design excellence program at PDC that helps assure commissions are given to the city's most talented architects, and not simply those who have the most experience or have an inside track with the agency. Part of what was exciting about seeing the Works-Rapaport project was that it combined affordability and location with superlative architecture. That hasn't always been the case with PDC-oriented projects. Some of them are outright ugly. So while the economic and social factors are more than enough to make workforce housing programs worthwhile, we also needn't give up the opportunity to direct such projects to the best designers.

Even so, in such a devastating economy for the design and building community, there may be a growing sense of urgency about putting workforce housing programs back on city books. Of course we have to be protective of the city budget, but I'd do this in a heartbeat.

Envisioning a new Muslim Community Center in North Portland

2009-11-09T11:51:19-08:00

Recently I got together with the architects from local firm Architecture Office to hear about a proposed design for the Muslim Community Center of Portland.

The mosque would be home to the city's oldest Islamic congregation, formed in 1969, and is to be located on North Vancouver Avenue just south of Killingsworth. Although North and Northeast Portland have burgeoned with gentrification and added economic investment over the last decade, and the area is home to many churches, the Muslim Community Center could become something more: not just a place of worship, but a gathering place for people of all cultures and religions.

The design has a contemporary look that recalls (its minaret notwithstanding) Pietro Belluschi's mid-century Portland churches. There's also an aspect of the inward-focused courtyard style of traditional Islamic architecture that is being turned on its head here with a public garden facing Killingsworth and a garden on the roof.

“While their growing numbers are being increasingly augmented by immigrants, this is a historically home-grown community with deep roots in the African and African American populations of north and northeast Portland--devoted to a mission of outreach and education for Muslims and non-Muslims alike,” says Garrett Martin, one of partner with Architecture Office along with David Suttle and Dave Hurley, all pictured below. Martin also teaches architecture at Portland State University. “This sense of openness and homegrown Islam has led them to seek from us a modern mosque for a new, progressive expression of American Islam.”

The 12,000 square foot design includes men’s and women’s prayer halls (separated visually at the request of the women, but still sharing the same space) with the requisite mihrab (niche facing Mecca), minbar (imam's platform), a large informal community hall, classrooms, ritual wudu (washing) spaces, and a series of courtyards which open the facility to the street, providing space for the community's Saturday bazaars and overflow space for the three main eid holidays each year. Along with the minaret, Martin says, “these are traditional elements found in most mosques around the world, just reinterpreted in a slightly new idiom.”

“In our research and conversations with Koran scholars and members of the community,” Martin adds, “we discovered that simplicity and humility are extremely important qualities sought for mosques, yet often historically overlooked for the sake of the individual glorification of a rich patron.”

The architects’ design is a series of continuously unfolding masonry layers, at times protecting and at other times opening up to embrace the surroundings or provide focused passages of daylight. There are also places where these layers are perforated in an updated interpretation of the ornate stonework screens of Islamic architecture. These serve a practical function, providing sunshades on the more exposed faces, while tying the building to its traditions and providing a diffuse counterpart to some of the more focused apertures and light-shafts.

The building is also situated at an angle to the street grid and instead is placed onto a q'ibla, or Mecca-facing axis, allowing frequent prayer to occur anywhere in the facility, by merely facing a room's end wall. A portion of the minaret folds off this axis and back onto the street grid, symbolically calling the greater city to prayer, while pulling daylight onto the minbar inside.

“The masonry layers also serve an environmental function,” Martin says, “providing thermal mass for more passive heating and cooling strategies, while an operably skylit internal courtyard is conceived as a potential heat-chimney.”

The Muslim Community Center is currently in a fundraising campaign, and word is that the campaign is running short of its targeted goals. But, the architect says, “This community is actually trying to make a social difference, to emphasize connections and understanding across religions and cultures, through the very architecture of the building proposed.”

Three finalists announced in PSU-run design competition for firefighters memorial

2009-11-05T15:06:01-08:00

Three finalists have been announced in a Portland State University-administered design competition on behalf of the Portland Fire Bureau, the Portland Firefighters Association David Campbell Memorial Committee for the creation of a new memorial. It will be built on the Eastbank Esplanade beside the northeast corner of the Hawthorne Bridge.

The competition came about when Jeff Schnabel, a member of PSU architecture department faculty was contacted by the firefighters group to assist with a new memorial that would replace the existing one on West Burnside. He suggested (and they accepted) a small competition using the pool of architects that are currently serving or have in the past served as adjunct faculty for PSU.

Finalists, announced in October, are Whelton Architecture, SUM Design Studio and William Tripp. Other participants were Works Partnership, Matt Janssen, Architecture Office, and Nikola Boscanin. Schnabel says the next steps will be review by various city agencies and cost estimates followed by the resubmission of the schemes based on the review comments.

The SUM Design scheme finalist (pictured above) is called “Senses”. It includes a reflecting pool not unlike that planned for the World Trade Center memorial. I say this not to imply it’s a copy, but to emphasize that still water has long made places of sober reflection—pun intended.

William Tripp Architects has offered a scheme (pictured below) in which a series of steps guide visitors down to the river, with individual stone steps marked to commemorate fallen firefighters. This may be the plan that creates the best interface with the Willamette, kind of like the Spanish Steps in Rome.

Whelton Architecture created a cluster of tall light poles (pictured below and at the top of this post), each one representing a fallen Portland firefighter and each of a varying height depending on his or her length of service. This seems like the memorial that would be most striking from a distance. I think a cluster of artful light poles would carve out a sense of place that could in turn help define this portion of the Esplanade.

A final scheme will be selected in November. The selection committee includes Commissioner Randy Leonard, Fire Bureau chief John Klum, Portland Spaces and Portland Monthly editor Randy Gragg, travel agency owner and former mayoral candidate Sho Dozono.Construction of the memorial will be completed by June 2011 in time for the 100th anniversary of the death of Chief David Campbell in a tragic fire just two blocks from the site of the new memorial.

Memorial Coliseum & Rose Quarter: City now accepting proposals, Blazers first in line

2009-11-04T11:02:31-08:00

This month the Rose Quarter Citizens Advisory Committee will begin accepting proposals for how to re-invigorate Memorial Coliseum (the latter of which is pictured above in an early rendering by architect Skidmore, Owings and Merrill).

"We expect to have a range of different proposers," the Portland Development Commission's Kia Selley told Architectural Daily, Sam Bennett's blog. She added that this stage of the proposal process is “intended to be welcoming to people who don’t have a lot of development experience to get their concept out there.” Proposals are due by December 1, after which PDC will issue a request for proposals from a short list of favored ideas.

Meanwhile, timed perfectly with the opening of the proposal stage is the Portland Trail Blazers entry, dubbed "Jumptown".

The name is borrowed from the nickname this area of town had in the early to mid-20th Century when, instead of two arenas, it was home to a largely African American neighborhood and several jazz clubs like The Dude Ranch and The Chicken Coop.

The plan for Jumptown, according to its website, is "a vibrant community gathering place at the intersection of sports, music and entertainment, one that pays homage to the rich musical heritage of Portland’s eastside. Representing world-class design and best practices in green construction and operations, the project will also appropriately honor the State’s veterans."

In reality, that appears to mean preserving Memorial Coliseum but shrinking the size of its seating bowl. The Blazers want a roughly 7,000-seat arena rather than the 11,000-seat one that was originally built. In that scenario, I'd just hope they do it in a manner that changes the appearance of the bowl as little as possible. One way might be to remove seats from the bottom rather than the top, which would be less invasive to the bowl form. Another way might be to re-do the seating, giving each seat more size and leg room.

The team also envisions "music events, a variety of residential, hotel and office space, diverse retail and restaurant amenities and, potentially, a one-of-a-kind Nike interactive experience." These amenities would take up existing empty space in the Rose Quarter.

As an editorial in today's Oregonian noted, the Jumptown proposal has not articulated how much public investment would be required, and there are still questions about how the district would stay vital when there isn't an event at either arena. (The editorial was incorrect, however, in calling Memorial Coliseum "often empty". It hosted as many events as the Rose Garden last year, despite not getting the maintenance and upkeep that its bigger sister receives regularly.)

There is a lot to like - or at least some good potential to be found - in the Jumptown proposal.

For starters, the Blazers seem to have moved away from their original discussions about removing all of Memorial Coliseum's seating bowl for bars and restaurants. Instead, they see the MC being what it is: a simple, sculptural bowl in a box that represents the best of American 20th century contemporary architecture. That's very encouraging.

What's more, the idea of a hotel on the Rose Quarter site seems inspired. It would help bring activity to the district during the crucial there's-no-game-or-concert-happening periods. It seems unlikely that Portland will build a massive headquarters hotel in this area like Mayor Adams wants, but adding a regular sized hotel here would be a step in that direction without such massive subsidies.

A Nike interactive museum could act as a very successful magnet for the district. The Oregon Sports Hall of Fame was a dismal failure and a tremendous disappointment when it was located downtown near the Multnomah County Courthouse. If Nike could give Oregon a higher quality sports museum, it would be a huge cultural boom for the city and would finally, finally give the athletics giant a more substantial connection with Portland after sequestering itself in a bermed-in Beaverton campus for the last few decades. (The Oregon Ducks' last two football uniform designs could be part of an exhibit called "What not to do: adventures in faux diamond plating and gladiatorial wings." But in fairness, another exhibit could profile the perfect genius of their 'O' logo design.)

It's not to say that the Blazers should be given a free pass on Jumptown without further articulation of their plans. The team could still wind up altering the Coliseum's seating bowl far too much, or their development partner in Baltimore, the Cordish Company, could wind up suggesting some sort of ill-advised addition to the Coliseum's exterior that looks as hideous as the One Center Court building that the team built next door to the Rose Quarter.

Even so, in talking with the Blazers from time to time, I've been pleasantly surprised and undeniably impressed with team leaders like team president Larry Miller and vice president J.E. Isaac. These are not yes men taking orders from Paul Allen and Vulcan, or pushovers acquiescing to their developer's crass, heavy handed design sensibilities. They've been working with a talented local architect, Rick Potestio, as a design advisor (as well as Nike's Tinker Hatfield), and hopefully that will yield fruit.

Meanwhile, though, I'm skeptical about the mayor's Citizens Advisory Committee receiving any other serious proposals. Sure, there have been ideas for a velodrome or an arts center, but I'm yet to see any evidence of full-on submissions being made for these or other ideas with funding mechanisms in place. Anyone can suggest an idea, but ultimately the Committee will only go forward with ideas that have backing. Even the most high-profile alternative idea to the Blazers', developer Douglas Obletz's proposal for a Memorial Amateur Recreation Complex, may not go forward in this city-sanctioned process. And even if there are some ideas proposed, ones with funding in place, the process going forward is PDC's standard developer-driven one. Might something else like a design competition have been better?

Still, we've come a long way from the days earlier this spring when Timbers/Beavers owner Merritt Paulson (son of George W. Bush cabinet member Henry Paulson), Mayor Adams and City Commissioner Randy Leonard were trying to build a minor league baseball stadium on the Coliseum site. This would not only have destroyed one of the city's most important architectural landmarks, but it also would have been bad for the Rose Quarter, hosting vastly fewer events than the Coliseum does today and detracting from Portland's rise to become a major-league sports city.

I shouldn't even dignify his childish antics with a response, but it's also disappointing to see Leonard even as recently as this Monday in a Mark Larabee-reported Oregonian story still trying to float the baseball-in-the-Rose-Quarter idea and calling the Coliseum a "Costco". Leonard is in many ways a smart, tough, principled man, but his design sensibility is a laughable embarrassment that represents the worst in an elected official: cynicism, ignorance and arrogance disguised as trite populism. I know Randy Leonard is capable of being a much better City Councilor, and a bigger man, than this.

And in case you think I'm merely vilifying someone who disagrees with yours truly about design, it's not about that. It's not about Leonard's aesthetic opinion versus mine. An overwhelming array of preservation and design organizations, such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the US Green Building Council and the American Institute of Architects have all weighed in on this, calling for Memorial Coliseum's preservation.

It's also disappointing that the one group of people other than Leonard who seem to vehemently want to "grenade" Memorial Coliseum, as one commenter put it on the Blazers' Jumptown website, are Timbers soccer team supporters. Perhaps they worry that the Timbers' jump to Major League Soccer will fall apart if the Timbers' reconfiguration of PGE Park as a soccer-only facility is hampered by the Beavers (Paulson owns both teams) not finding a home. I personally would argue against cutting off your nose to spite your face. The best scenario remains for the MC to be preserved, and the Beavers and Timbers each to have a proper home of their own that's not on the Rose Quarter site.

Thankfully, though, despite the questionable effect of the Advisory Committee, the potential lack of properly funded ideas, the challenge of getting the Blazers to listen more to talented local designers than corporate developers, and the smear campaign against a modernist local landmark by one city leader, Memorial Coliseum and the Rose Quarter just might turn out to be a success.

Learning From Columbus: Friedman's case for capping I-405

2009-11-03T11:17:04-08:00

Note: This is a guest post from Daniel Friedman, a member of the Portland Downtown Neighborhood Association board. Friedman is an emeritus psychology professor at Antioch College where he taught for 21 years before retiring and moving to the South Park Blocks in 2001.

Friedman grew up in Columbus, Ohio and sees in its new capped freeway a reminder that Portland should revisit its own I-405 capping plan first forwarded in the 1990s by then-mayor Vera Katz. His proposal here also comes just days after the city of Vancouver, Washington announced the results of a design competition (won by Portland firm Allied Works) to cap I-5 to re-connect the east and west halves of the city.

Columbus, Ohio, like any number of American cities, has sent planners and public officials to Portland to ride the streetcar and to study up on transit-oriented development and other urban-planning innovations. Now it may be time for Portland to send a delegation to Columbus.

What Portlanders would see in Columbus is a potential solution to the drastic rupture created in the downtown streetscape when Interstate-405 was built in the late sixties.

I-405 divides Goose Hollow from Downtown Portland, forcing pedestrians to cross the freeway on bleak, noisy, often-deserted overpasses whose narrow sidewalks leave them precariously close to fast-moving traffic. Crossing the canyon-like I-405 is dull and unpleasant and discourages pedestrian travel between two dynamic and rapidly developing neighborhoods. The I-405 freeway creates a dead zone in the middle of what is otherwise one of the nation's most walkable central city districts.

Columbus faced a similar problem: a desolate freeway overpass that separated the downtown area from Short North, a densely-populated, mixed-use neighborhood, not unlike NW 23rd. Pedestrians were forced to trudge across a forbidding, windswept highway overpass in order to travel from Short North to the city's Convention Center, Public Market, Arena District, and on to downtown.

Inspired by the Ponte Vecchio (pictured above), the Arno River bridge that has housed shops and artisan workspaces since at least 1345, Columbus developer Jack Lucks proposed construction of retail storerooms on both sides of the street, on platforms extending out over the interstate.

Lucks' innovative solution—which came to be known as the 'I-675 Cap'—has won a number of design and planning awards, including a Charter Award from the Congress for New Urbanism.

This aerial view shows the basic design: Three parallel "bridges" across the freeway. The center bridge carries North High Street. Shops and restaurants are located on top of additional bridges which extend out along either side of the original freeway overpass.

The retail platforms are 38-feet wide on one side and 57-feet wide on the other. Completed in 2004, the Cap contains 26,000 square feet of retail.

By constructing platforms for shops and restaurants along the sides of what was once a derelict interstate-highway overpass, this retail-focused freeway cap has reconnected Downtown Columbus with the adjacent Short North arts and entertainment district. As they stroll along the Cap, many pedestrians aren't even aware that they're crossing an eight-lane interstate highway.

The I-670 Cap is one of the few freeway caps in the US that consists of retail and restaurant space rather than parkland. The advantages of the retail approach are two-fold: (1) Revenue from retail users fully or partially pays for development; (2) Continuous retail pulls pedestrians across the freeway, seamlessly linking formerly divided neighborhoods.

Imagine several freeway caps, each containing small retail spaces, spanning I-405, reconnecting downtown Portland with Goose Hollow. Perhaps the strongest candidate for a cap would be SW Morrison Street, since there are already proposals on the table to designate it as downtown's signature East-West shopping street. [See: Portland Downtown Retail Strategy-2009 , Downtown Portland Retail: A New Renaissance ]

With a retail-focused cap to entice pedestrians across I-405, Morrison has the potential to evolve into a continuous retail and entertainment corridor extending all the way from the Willamette to PGE Park (0.9 mi).

Gragg on Halprin: "My eyes are all teary"

2009-10-29T11:59:51-07:00

As many in the design and architecture community have already learned, the legendary landscape architect Lawrence Halprin passed away on Sunday, October 25.

The Harvard-educated Halprin helped revolutionize public and open space design in the 1970s, with his attention to works that functioned well on a human scale and encouraged interaction, very much in the egalitarian tradition of parks and public realms created by Frederick Law Olmsted and his sons. Portland, where the Olmsted brothers designed the North and South Park Blocks, and where Halprin designed two fountains (the Keller Fountain and Lovejoy Fountain), was the common thread. Halprin also worked on the transit mall in downtown Portland, the landmark Sea Ranch project in Northern California, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial in Washington, DC, and much more.

Randy Gragg (pictured at left), the longtime Oregonian architecture critic who now is editor of Portland Monthly and Portland Spaces magazines, is an authority on Halprin and a big fan. Last year he helped bring to fruition "The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin" with choreographer Linda K. Johnson, and currently Gragg is working on a book about the designer, due in December. Recently I interviewed Gragg by email about his thoughts on Halprin and his passing.

Me: Did you ever get to meet Halprin personally? If so, what was that (or what was he) like?

Randy: I met with Larry on four different occasions over the last few years. The first three times, he was very weak and a bit spacey. During a hospital stay for minor surgery a couple of years before, he had contracted a virus that nearly killed him. Nevertheless he was still working finishing up projects in Yosemite and San Francisco. He was very gracious but his memory of the specifics of he work in Portland was not strong.

The last time I interviewed him, I had done a lot of archive research both at the PDC and at larry’s archive at Penn and I came armed with lots of letters and pictures. As well, I understand he had changed his meds. He was an entirely different person. Still gracious, but full of memories prompted by the artifacts and pleasantly combative about anything he thought I was misinterpreting. It was really fun and I saw the fiber of the man he once was: The very typical successful visionary – part seducer, part iron will, and no doubt.

You seem to have developed a particular interest in the Halprins even amongst the broad array of people you've covered. What is it about Halprin that looms so large for you?

Boy, I sure did: years of my life and, now a book: "Where the Revolution Began: Lawrence and Anna Halprin and the Reinvention of Public Space". We’re having a big release party December 5.

So I knew the fountains from history and visiting my first few weeks in Portland back in 1990. But it was landscape architect Peter Walker who really alerted me to the profundity of their influence—particularly Lovejoy – on the history of landscape architecture: Nature meets theater in the city. My first major piece on Larry was back in 2003, inspired by developer John Russell’s efforts to prune the trees around Keller Fountain and Pettygrove Park.

My friend, the choreographer Linda K. Johnson, sent me a book on the work of Larry’s wife, Anna Halprin, who is often credited as the inventor of Postmodernism in dance, was developing her most influential work at the time Portland’s plazas were being designed. And suddenly I was hooked on these two characters and what the Portland work really meant: to landscape history, urbanism, and dance.

On my Loeb Fellowship, I spent a lot more time researching and when I returned I burrowed into the PDC’s archives. And, whoa, there was this incredible story of the reemergence – and battle over – public space in Portland. You don’t get to Waterfront Park or Pioneer Square or Jamison Square or Tanner Creek Park or South Waterfront’s ambition’s to knit habitat to high-density urbanism. Mike Houck will probably disagree, but I really believe the whole idea of “nature in the city” – in a true urban sense -- begins with Halprin. To put it how Houck might: Halprin put a fucking watershed in fucking downtown; sure, it was a fucking metaphor, but it still fucking matters because it planted a seed in people’s fucking brains.

Any memories of being in Halprin-designed space in Portland like the fountain that particularly stand out for you?

Well, last year’s performance, The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin, is the mother of all memories: about 1000 people watching incredible dances choreographed by Tere Mathern, Cydney Wilkes, Linda Austin and Linda K Johnson all to music by Third Angle Ensemble. I still get chills and tears watching the video – which we’ll screen at the December book event. Linda K, Ron and I – and Third Angle’s board – worked for a solid year on that project and I’ve never had a more fulfilling group experience in my life. It still blows me away that most of those people who came that sunny Sunday afternoon lined up – for like 20 minutes – at the end for the final piece to join hands and circle the little Source Fountain. My eyes are all teary writing this.

The South Auditorium district overall seems to have a controversial history and mixed success given what was torn down to build this area, etc. How might this area of town be re-imagined in the future in a way that really makes the Halprin fountain an oft-visited centerpiece again?

Well, I don’t get all misty over the neighborhood that was lost. There were a few OK buildings that got torn down and, yes, some people were displaced. But the record shows the PDC did a pretty good job in finding them homes, mostly better homes, according to interviews I read. Keep in mind, Portland’s neighborhood movement was spawned in Lair Hill as activists banded together to fight further expansion of the urban renewal area southward. Healthy cities are self-correcting.

As for the South Auditorium’s mixed successes urbanistically, it really is one of the MOST successful urban renewal districts in the country from that period. For one, it got finished. Two, the apartments always fetched top dollar and eventually sold for a record amount when they were converted to condos. The area is much loved by those who live there. You can’t say that about many mid-century American urban renewal areas.

The offices directly adjacent to the plazas have had a more mixed history, but that’s because the owners have done a shitty job of marketing them. Could the area be improved? Sure. The retail never flourished because the original developers and the architects, Skidmore Owings Merrill, didn’t understand what we know about urban retail today: It needs to be in a retail district. They thought the apartments and the cars going down First Avene would be enough, but the parking and signage is too hidden, the cars going too fast, and there’s not enough residents to support the retail alone. Had the orginal design put the retail over on fourth, it’d be a different story.

Looking ahead, I actually LIKE that these are somewhat hidden spaces. They’re special and don’t need Project for Public Spaces kiosks and flower ladies and crap hanging from the light poles. Would changing some adjacent uses help? Sure. While I personally would love to have an office or even live in the office spaces adjacent to Lovejoy Fountain – they’re the most Miesian spaces in town, absolutely beautiful, particularly on the east side of Lovejoy—they probably could be replaced with more intensive development to put some more eyes on the plaza (as long as the great Hot Pot place is saved!) . And the retail around the little Source Fountain totally needs to be rethought.

But the real jeopardy ahead, to me, is the upcoming Lincoln Street redo for MAX and the Montgomery “green street.” So remember, people, Larry Halprin’s fountain plaza sequence is the FIRST green street, and to go into Houck speak again, DON’T FUCK WITH IT. The designers on these projects need to act respectfully and keep their faddish bioswales and grass clumps well away. It’s OK for a little rainwater to trickle into the pipes through the wonderful drainage system Larry integrated into the concrete scoring (even if most of the time, it’s plugged up, due to poor maintenance). It’s history. It’s metaphor. It changed the city for good and great ways.

Mockbee, Rummer and more

2009-10-28T12:16:09-07:00

Tonight as part of the AIA Architecture and Design Festival, the Center For Architecture will be screening a documentary about the late, great architect Samuel Mockbee.

Entitled The Rural Studio after Mockbee's project, the film chronicles how, starting in 1993, the Auburn University Professor Samuel Mockbee guided his students in designing and building homes and community spaces in economically depressed Hale County, Alabama. Mockbee's contextual-based learning philosophy transcended race and class and in the process has changed the lives of both students and clients. With tongue firmly placed in cheek, Mockbee often called his Rural Studio "Redneck Taliesin South".

The film screens at 5:30pm at the Center For Architecture, at 403 NW 11th Avenue, and admission is free.

I had the opportunity to interview Mockbee for Salon in 2001, just a few months before his untimely death from cancer. Here is a portion of that Q&A:

Me: How does it feel knowing your profession has been marginalized by the American home building industry?

Mockbee: It's a shame, because houses are the great paramour for architects, from the most successful all the way down to the most struggling. We draw them on the backs of napkins. But too often when I look at what builders and developers are doing, we're not talking about architecture any longer. We're talking about capitalism at its most obscene. The public has bought into the mediocrity and insipid attitude of manufactured and spec houses, and has given up any hope of creating homes with spirit. Real architecture does cost somewhat more. But most homes in America are built with false façades that try to pass themselves as architecture.

You've often said that all great architecture is honest.

It always has been. Architecture addresses truth and beauty and has a moral sense to it. All great art has that, too.

You cite painters like Klee, Goya and Picasso as your primary architectural influences, emphasizing the art of architecture. Yet the Rural Studio is known for advancing the profession's social and practical side.

For me art is a very personal endeavor, a way to reflect on what I'm trying to do as an architect. An architect, on the other hand, has to be an extrovert. You can't get anything built by yourself. You've got to have consultants, suppliers and a client who understands what you're trying to do. The connection is that art is a reflection of the best of who we are. One informs the other, and vice versa.

Which Rural Studio clients have been the most satisfying to design and build for?

What immediately comes to mind is the Hay Bale House we did for Shepherd and Alberta Bryant. Shepherd is about 80 years old, and unable to fish or hunt or do many of his favorite outdoor activities anymore. His wife, Alberta, who had lived with him in an old shack for 40 years, wasn't in the new house six weeks before she had a leg amputated and the other soon after. She says she doesn't know what would have happened to her had we not built that house.

But the most profound result of our efforts has been on their grandson Richard Bryant. This was a kid who didn't have anything, but because of his relations with the students -- we've watched him grow up over the eight years we've been building down there -- he's blossomed into a mature young man who's just graduated from high school, and is going to go to college. He wanted to be like them, and now he's going to be.

Have any clients chafed at the vibrant designs and unconventional materials being used for their homes?

That has happened to us, but not to the extent that it can't be fixed. The students have to learn to listen to the clients, and find out what their needs are. But on another level, as hard as we try to get the clients to be honest and relaxed with us, there is some apprehension that if they don't agree with us somehow we won't build it for them. I'm always trying to explain to the clients that we're going to build the house for them no matter what, and that they need to tell us what they need and want. We don't push our aesthetics onto anybody, nor do we push any values. The students work very hard to win the respect of these clients. They want to make these houses wonderful for them.

A lot of architects talk about trust being the key to a relationship with a client.

Well, sometimes that word means the architect wants the client to indulge his ego. Architects like to have their way; they micromanage too much and they think they have the answer to everything. But we are good problem solvers, and our education serves us well in attacking projects and looking at them creatively. The problem is, we often believe our own propaganda. But there are also two sides to that coin. You don't want a client who misunderstands what design and architecture are really about. Many want this faux architecture, and that drives us nuts.

Do Rural Studio houses reflect your own architectural style?

I don't lift a pen or put one stroke down on those designs. But I have a high bar I expect students to reach. I make them draw and redraw, so in that sense maybe it does reflect my style a bit. At any firm the work takes on the personality of the principals, and I think that's true of the Rural Studio. But really the students do it themselves.

Do you think we should give more large-scale commissions to young architects?

I'll have to be honest about this: I feel just the opposite. Back in the '60s, we said don't trust anybody over 30. Now I say don't trust anyone under 50. If you take a look at the primo architects of the Renaissance, and the ones practicing today, you'll see that they're all over 45 and older when they do their major buildings. Frank Gehry is over 70. It takes years to accumulate the necessary abilities to produce a piece of architecture. You can do small work at a young age, but the technical aspects, the business aspects, the aesthetic aspects -- all of this you're juggling throughout your career, and trying to improve and mature. I tell my students: You may be able to start practicing two or three years after you graduate, but you're not really going to be an architect until you're 45. It's just the nature of the beast. That's probably true in medicine, law and all the professions -- except the oldest one, of course. You've got to invest in the long haul.

Meanwhile, if the Mockbee film doesn't interest you, there are two more events coming up worth noting:

Tonight (October 28) there is a panel discussion at Froelick Gallery at 7:15pm hosted by OFFICE, the creative office products store formerly located on Alberta Street and now doing a series of special appearances. The talk includes Greg Stobbs, retail director for Nike; Doug Cooke, co-founder of Tinder Design Research; and Greg Mitchell, a project manager at LRS Architects. Froelick Gallery is located at 714 NW Davis and admission is free, as are the cocktails provided by New Deal Vodka.

Next Wednesday (November 4) at 6PM, Rejuvenation (1100 SE Grand Avenue) is hosting a conversation with legendary local midcentury modern home builder Robert Rummer.

The evening is a benefit for Street Of Eames (or more specifically the homeless youth programs the Eames tour benefits) and admission is a $20 suggested donation. You must RSVP by November 1

Builder of 1960s-'70s residences in neighborhoods mostly west of downtown, Rummer's homes have acquired iconic status for their focus on bringing the outdoors inside as well as their dramatic yet elegant mixture of high ceilings, warm wood paneling, and full-length glass walls.

Rummer homes were also directly inspired by the better known Eichler homes of Southern California.

Rummer will be interviewed by Becca Cavell of THA Architecture and will show slides from his personal collection. RSVP is required - you can sign up here.

Works Partnership and Randy Rapaport reinvent workforce housing

2009-10-26T13:31:43-07:00

Last week, after Works Partnership’s design for a new workforce housing project won an AIA Design Award (in the Unbuilt category), I sat down with firm principals Bill Neburka and Carrie Schilling and the project’s developer, Randy Rapaport, to talk about the project.

The building, which is officially still unnamed but may (if Rapaport has his way) be called the Mark Rothko Apartments (after the legendary painter who grew up here), has a dynamic program. Situated at Northeast 2nd and Multnomah, between the Rose Quarter and Martin Luther King Boulevard, it’s actually designed like two buildings, with one half cantilevered over the other. In between, on what is called the transfer floor, is a greenspace and community room.

“It’s interesting as a conceptual idea, a new direction for urban housing,” Neburka says.

“Three nuts got cracked, I think,” Schilling adds. “It’s the idea of doing a core study to find the most efficient plan possible on a quarter block site. Portland has a lot of quarter blocks. Then there is the mandate of [last year’s city-sponsored] courtyard housing competition to draw families back to the urban core. But courtyard housing is actually a fairly low-density solution. We wanted to take that mandate and apply it to higher density development. Then it was the idea of creating two project mixes versus saying we’re going to do one thing. It allows two objectives to be met on the same site.”

The reason for having the equivalent of two different buildings in one was efficiency: It’s a kind of puzzle being able to build affordable housing units cheaply enough to meet budget strictures. Also, the architects and developer were trying to work creatively within a system where affordable housing subsidies are given out in a per-door basis. The two portions of the building allow a layout of the units that better maximizes space and, therefore, allows more of them to fit into the 10,000 square foot floorplate. The plan also seeks to mandate floor area ratio in order to maximize density.

“We didn’t want to say, ‘This is the way everybody does affordable housing.’ You put in the same elevator core and dumb down the finishes with cheap windows,” Neburka explains. “We thought there’s got to be an intrinsic way to get a more efficient solution. We had all these different configurations and took the one most efficient for big units and the most efficient for small units. It’s not re-inventing the wheel. All of the tools I’ve think we’ve all applied are all out there. Nobody looks at what resources are available. Transfer floors have been done all over the world. Then once you have that transfer floor, why not make it an open space?”

“Think of it as the lower neighborhood and the upper neighborhood divided by a park,” Rapaport adds.

Besides the striking form of two differently sized rectangular shapes stacked one onto the other, the design is notable for its façade, a series of concrete panels that resemble mid-century modern Brutalist design but divert from that rigid geometry as the panels gently bend and curve like reeds. This is not just an aesthetic move, but one rooted in the building’s program.

“The typical problem is you’ve got a big box of repetitive windows. In ours, it’s not an office building. It’s a living space,” Neburka explains. “You’ve got regular spaces, quiet spaces, active spaces. Let’s just allow that grid to inflect a little to replicate what’s going on inside. You’ve got bigger windows where there are more public spaces. It’s an idea of where the building quiets down and where it activates.”

The reed-like pattern of the concrete panels also helps activate the building’s façade, acting as a connecting thread between the top and bottom portions to create the visual sense of stretching, almost like a piece of chewing gum or toffee being pulled. “We thought, ‘Why don’t you take this traditional building and pull it apart?’” Neburka says. “What are the qualities that can be gained from that?”

If built, the project is poised to earn participation (and funds) from both Metro and the Portland Development Commission. Their interest comes from the fact that this is a high-density affordable and/or workforce housing development that’s family friendly with lots of three-bedroom units and ideally situated for accessing mass transit (there are 39 transit connections within 1,500 feet). In fact, the building team actually discovered that the site is a PDC-owned vacant lot and approached the agency with a plan to develop it.

Besides this meeting city-desired high-density and affordable housing goals, or bringing desperately needed housing to the Rose Quarter and Lloyd District, the building would also mark a new beginning for the city when it comes to sponsoring high-quality architecture by talented local firms. Too often in the past the Portland Development Commission has produced buildings of disappointing design quality, the result of a process favoring public process for its own sake over one geared to generate design excellence. I mean, have you seen the PDC developed project at Martin Luther King and Fremont, for example? It looks like a fusion of a lighthouse and a prison.

The Mark Rothko Apartments, on the other hand, would be a superlative project for both public and private leaders to get behind.

Chinese architect Yung Ho Chang visits PAM, The Back Room

2009-10-25T18:11:44-07:00

When I first visited the exceptional China Design Now exhibit that opened this month at the Portland Art Museum, it caused a small epiphany: that for all the nation's hugeness both in terms of population and cultural influence, I could not name a single contemporary Chinese architect of huge international renown - not a single "starchitect".

China's neighbor and rival, Japan, has had a host of them: Tadao Ando, Arata Isozaki, Yoshio Taniguchi. The only exception I could think of with China is I.M. Pei, but he was educated and has lived in the United States since the 1930s.

In the China Design Now exhibit, there is an architectural focus that includes buildings like the National Stadium (a.k.a. "The Bird's Nest") and the CCTV tower. But those buildings were both designed by Europeans: Herzog & DeMeuron and Rem Koolhaas, respectively.

But the answer to this question about renowned modern Chinese architects or starchitects may best be focused on Yung Ho Chang. Who, like Pei, seems to favor circular eyeglass frames.

With design offices in Beijing and a position as head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Architecture (a position the great Portland architect Pietro Belluschi also once occupied), Yung is one of China's contemporary design giants. He designed the China Design Now exhibit when it originated at London's Victoria & Albert Museum, and recent projects include an ambitious urban plan for a "sustainable town" in the Jiading district of Shanghai and the ambitious Shanghai Pavilion at next year's 2010 World Expo (pictured below).

Born in Beijing, Yung studied environmental design and architecture at UC Berkeley and then returned to China to co-found the country’s first independent architecture firm in 1993: Atelier FCJZ (short for Feichang Jianzhu). The name translates to “unusual architecture”. AFCJZ has designed private homes, factories, museums and government buildings, as well as installations, experimental furniture and graphic design.

Yung & company's work is known for combining traditional Chinese forms and materials with contemporary global practice. Besides his current chair position of MIT's architecture department, from 2002-03, Yung held the Kenzo Tange Chair at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He is also at work on a new MIT campus master plan.

Yung will be in Portland for two events this week.

On Thursday (October 29), the architect will speak at the Art Museum as part of China Design Now, for a discussion called "China Architecture Now" and focusing on how the rapid changes in contemporary China’s economy, mobility and consumerism are profoundly affecting architectural practice in the country. The lecture is from 7-8pm in the Fields Ballroom at the Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Avenue. (Tickets, available through the museum box office, are $5 for members and $12 for non-members, not including entry to the exhibition.)

Friday (October 30) finds Yung at a cozier gathering: The Back Room, the ongoing dinner-and-discussion series overseen by writer/editor Matthew Stadler. The architect will be interviewed by Randy Gragg, editor of Portland Spaces and Portland Monthly (and previously, of course, The Oregonian's architecture critic). The Back Room evening will be held at Saucebox, which is perhaps appropriate given that the downtown Asian-fusion restaurant was designed by Brad Cloepfil. There will also be dinner and drinks by Gregory Gourdet and live music by Lisa Schoenberg (of Explode Into Colors) and Jonathan Sielaff. Seats are $65 each with dinner, drinks and everything included. The evening begins at 6:30pm. You can reserve a seat here. For more information email Matthew Stadler at thebackroompdx@gmail.com.