Fire Stations from Emmons Architects and Hennebery Eddy

Last year a partnership between Emmons Architects and Hennebery Eddy garnered a finalist slot in the design competition for Fire Station 1. It was a very nice looking proposal, rather influenced by contemporary Dutch design, but they ultimately lost out to Thomas Hacker Architects. And the project has since been scrapped by the city -- a major, major mistake in my opinion -- due to budget problems.

However, both firms have designed new fire stations before and after the competition.

  Emmons Architects recently unveiled its completed Fire Station 27 in Southwest Portland. The wood, concrete and glass structure is nestled into a hillside site that mimics the contours of the terrain in a host of compelling, angular forms. Even so, this is not a jagged set of corners, but a nicely flowing composition. Emmons has designed numerous fire stations before, so #27 also comes with top notch facilities for the firefighters.

  Meanwhile, Hennebery Eddy also has unveiled Fire Station 28 on Sandy Boulevard in Northweat Portland. Here an entirely new structure has been fused with the existing early 20th Century firehouse. Looking at the new station with its marriage of old and new, each with its own style but in a harmonius whole, is an impressive site.

Regarding Fire 1 for one more moment, I don't want to take anything away from competition winner Thomas Hacker Architects, but if they and the city can't reach a proper agreement on costs, why can't the city offer the chance to the Emmons/Hennebery Eddy team or to Allied Works, the other finalist, to build the fire station and museum on the new site under the new budget strictures? This of course relates strongly to Ankeny Plaza, with the fire station there being vacated and the area being transformed into one with housing and more vibrant street life there beyond Saturdays when the market comes. I doubt this will ever happen, and I fear the city doesn't have the courage to take a risk on something like Fire 1 for fear of more budget problems. It's too bad, because all three of the original Fire Station 1 finalists are more than capable of doing good work.

As these new designs for Fire stations 27 and 28 definitely seem to show.

Comments

[m. conroy]

Hennebery Eddy should team up with the folks building the Ladd tower. Maybe they could show them how to incorporate the Rosefriend apartment building into that glass behemoth.

[torridjoe]

Only the Hacker design really took the functional needs of the fire station into account; the other two finalists seemed more interested in the way the station fit into the new ideas for the area.

In any case, the budget shortfall was in the millions and rising with each day, but Fire's promised portion was never going to change--about $11mil that was coming from the GO bond to do renovations and remediations. PDC would have had to carry the freight for the rest of the overages, and they weren't willing to do so.

[keith]

The Emmons/Hennebery Eddy design for Fire Station 1 is gorgeous - I'm sure any functional adjustments could have been worked out (especially given they have designed many other stations) if only the city had an interest in taking such risks with supporting good design.

It's interesting that Portland has such an openminded drive to be a place for the 'creative class' yet so often blocks the truly creative.

[Stuart Emmons]

To set the record straight, our scheme certainly incorporated all functional requirements for the fire stationand and then some - we know functional needs well, coming from our combined team designing or reconditioning 12 previous fire stations for the City. The Fire Bureau brass also confirmed that our scheme met their requirements well. It was our goal to not only nail functional needs, but to design a building that reinvigorated Old Town and the Waterfront, and reduce the need for Fire Stations in the first place, by including a hopefully popular public safety education center.