London Sprawling

Hello from London, where I'm on Day 3 of vacation. This is my fourth trip to the city, and it's still one of my favorite places in the world. How does this relate to Portland architecture? Only peripherally, although it allows one to see home in new ways.

This afternoon, for example, I was thinking about the scale of Portland, particularly with respect to height and residential buildings. We've gone gaga for thin, tall condo towers in recent years, of course, and I was always one of the people supporting that transformation. No more squatty stump buildings! But the funny thing is, for how huge of a world capitol it is, London does not have many skyscrapers at all, and those that are seem to be offices. Instead, what I see here is lots and lots of row houses and brownstones. We're staying with friends in a neighborhood called Wandsworth Common, just south of the Thames from the central city. Nothing here is taller than three or four stories, yet it feels like they're using space well here because the homes are right up against each other. Each has a small back yard, too. I'd like to see this housing format used more often in Portland. Of course some of our point towers will have brownstones and townhouses at ground level, and we also have the occasional row of narrow-lot homes, but usually those are pretty ugly. How might we learn from London in this respect?

I also had yesterday and today some of my most profoundly moving architectural experiences. Every time in London, the girlfriend and I always make a point of returning to St. Dunston's in the East, a church designed by the great Christopher Wren that was all but destroyed by German bombs during The Blitz of WWII. However, the authorities preserved the outer facade of St. Dunston's, and placed a garden inside. Now, with the church's proximity to the financial district in The City, workers often go and eat there lunch there. It's a wonderful, lovely public space made possible by unspeakable horrors. I've written on this blog many times before of my perhaps somewhat perverse attraction to remnants of destroyed architecture, the ghosts lurking in the rubble and ashes. St. Dunston's isn't perverse at all, but instead defiantly optimistic.

We also came across near the Tower of London a long stretch of the original Roman Wall surrounding the original City of London. Here was this masonry wall built two thousand years ago, and it looks like it was built yesterday. And ironically, it sits in front of a mid-20th Century building with some of the windows boarded up - the wall is in much better shape!

Speaking of the Blitz, we also made our latest return visit to St. Paul's Cathedral, which is quite probably the most breathtaking work of architecture I've ever experienced. I'm at a loss to describe it in great detail - it's pretty late as I write this - but as we were there yesterday I took a different line of attack. Instead of walking all over the church, such as into the crypt where famous English heroes like the Duke of Wellington (of Battle of Trafalgar fame) are buried, or the many secondary spaces, I instead just sat in the main sanctuary under the dome of St. Paul's, where the ceiling is painted not unlike the Sistine Chapel. Just sitting there under this massive space was incredibly profound - and not because Charles and Diana were married there. Most of all, I think of the miracle of how the cathedral was saved from destruction during the war when everything around it was leveled. During the war, there were hundreds of volunteers - many of them architects - who stayed inside St. Paul's all night, even as the bombs were falling, waiting with their hoses and buckets of water to put out fires and explosions. I may crow about historic preservation when buildings like the Rosefriend Apartments are sentenced for death, but I probably won't place myself in front of the bulldozers. It's the efforts of these volunteers during the war that moves me as much as Wren's genius.

Today we also visited the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, also known as Kew Gardens, where there are some astonishing greenhouses - I think at least one is a world heritage site. Imagine a big building in Portland like Union Station, but then pretend it's made almost entirely of glass. They had just about every kind of plant in the world inside these greenhouses, it seemed, but the structure around them captured my imagination the most. Particularly in a gray, rainy climate like Portland, I wish we had more glass-enclosed spaces like these - not necessarily greenhouses, but winter gardens and such. The park being built behind the Fox Tower is a start - I love that there will be a glass covered area there. But in time I'd like to see something glassy in Portland of a grander scale - not even necessarily a building in the traditional sense, but a transparent, light-filled structure where you can gather in the darkest, rainiest months and feel illuminated - both figuratively and literally.

One thing though: as much as I love big important cities like London or Tokyo, I've realized my ultimate preference really is for 'big' cities that aren't quite as big, be it a city like Portland in the US, or European cities like Amsterdam. There's just a little bit less fear and grime, although to give London it's proper due, there's also more of the sublime.

Comments

[Nikos]

St Paul's in London compared to the Rosefriend Apartments? Have we gone mad?
If Portland is to compete with London it should be craving and championing new architecture (Portland being only 150 years old) and forget preserving what it does not have (significant old architecture). Listening to you guys talking about NW 23rd as if it is Rome's Centro Storico (historic core) is amusing.
London (New York, Paris, etc) cannot (and should not) be compared to Portland. There is a vast difference of scale, not only in terms of size but (as I have observed before)of significance. To the extend Portland creates "content" ie pioneering "green" bulding (and boasting about it)or an outddors oriented lifestyle, it can claim a plce among types of urban living. But to directly be compared to a cultural and financial behemoth is unfair.
Have fun, I am jealous you are there!(Greetings from the very tiny but chic Pearl, where "real Portlanders" never venture, I heard)

[ws]

It's natural to compare your own city to great cities of the world. That's not to say doing so implies your own is neccessarily equal or superior. In some respects, great cities, are inevitably the models people think of when seeking to build and strengthen their own.

I've never been to London, or even across the Atlantic. It must be quite and experience.

[ADH]

"...yet it feels like they're using space well here because the homes are right up against each other... I'd like to see this housing format used more often in Portland."

Unfortunately the British are boneheads when it comes to land-use planning. I’ve never had to drive to the grocery store until I moved to Britain, where now we must rely upon out of town hyper-markets for anything more than milk and newspapers. Essentially we have density without proximity.

And there is often no architectural variety along a street of terraced houses, like you'd find in DC or New York.

That said, yeah, London is a great place to visit. And admittedly I live in another English city.

[nwjg]

Have you noticed how well 100% residential works in the more urban areas with retail only on the main streets? Our penchant for mixed-use (almost everywhere here) is not sustainable.

[george]

mixed use everywhere?

i would say the dominant form in portland is single family home with small lot. peppered with mixed use on main arteries, and a medium sized downtown area.

but back to london, i think people get excited about london as a city because of all the monuments and the history. basically ZONE 1. the majority of london is a really terrible and banal city.

[Bill]

Mixed use is not sustainable? That is a pretty idiotic comment, particularly considering that the only part of town Portland requires mixed-use is in downtown itself!

However, even then the Benson Tower doesn't have ground floor retail, but instead will have a cascading waterfall feature.

We're pretty lucky that downtown has as much retail activity as it does - mixed use works very well; just go visit a few other cities on the continent before jumping to any 'European' conclusions. Most people in Britain I talked to considered themselves halfway to America, as far as their cities were concerned.

[Gabriel]

I love your note about enclosed gardens and conservatories. I would settle for more greenhouses in urban Portland, though I can't make any practical arguments for them. Remembering my one visit into the demolished Clarence Walker greenhouses on Mississippi makes me tingle. I guess the zoo aviaries sort of count (but nothing like Kew gardens).

If you make it to Oxford, please let us know if, judging by the bust there, Christopher Wren was a dead ringer for Barry Manilow.

[ws]

Witold Rybcinski's book, The City, I think is the one, has a section about how London rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666. Good ideas were submitted by qualified people to take advantage of the opportunity created by the destruction to improve the city's layout, but basically, Charles II couldn't get it together well enough to use those ideas. So London rebuilt on the same old twisty street grid. Maybe that's part of the charm that grabs visitors there.

I really would like the Portland area to have at least one serious, reasonably close in estate or country garden and a major scale conservatory. I'm thinking of something that I believe Longwood Gardens and the Brooklyn Botanic have. Big, substantial, well funded and attended.

Maybe somewhere around Hillsboro or West Union would be a good place to build one from scratch. Lewis and Clark College more or less was one. A big conservatory built there would probably interfere with college activities. Location's tough too. Silverton seems just too far down the road.

[cdk]

I also have the good fortune of spending time in UK and London now. One of the things that has most impressed me as my wife and I have been walking through the city and neighborhoods is the nice job many of the architects are doing of integrating and relating modern design with the historical buildings. We have seen alot of really sweet modernist additions to older buildings that respect the original and add new design sensibility. We have seen this both in the city center and strolling through neighborhoods in west london and brighton.
I feel Portland can be doing a much better job of bringing together new and old in ways that relate to each other than we are doing so far.

[Fred Leeson]

Brian, your comment about glassy buildings made me think of the "space frame" (as it was originally called) at the Portland General Electric headquarters (now World Trade Center) facing Naito Parkway. I've always wondered why that space isn't more active and interesting than it is. I think somebody tried a coffee cart there years ago and couldn't even make THAT work. What a shame. Bob Frasca was very proud of it when it was built. This was a case of, "If you build it, they WON'T come." I keep hoping somebody can make something of it. Frasca, if I recall, said the original idea was to extend it across Front (now Naito) and step down into Waterfront Park. Maybe that would give it the circulation it needs.

[george]

man, i love that space frame. good location for photo shoots, as no one actually goes up there on weekends or after 5pm.

why doesn't it work? it doesn't get you anywhere special except if you are going to work.

[Nikos]

Speaking of glassy buildings, this from Alex Ross music blog about the new concert hall planned for Hamburg, Germany. Why cannot Portland plan one of those flights of fancy (OK this is a rhetorical question)

The Flying Dutchman Moors

Hamburg — that's the Free and Hanseatic City, not Hamburg, NY — is getting a dramatic new concert hall, which will look like a glass galleon that has foundered on a warehouse. The design, by the Swiss firm Herzog & De Meuron incorporates a number of current architectural gambits. It invokes nautical imagery, as do Frank Gehry's new IAC headquarters on the West Side of Manhattan and Santiago Calatrava's Milwaukee Musem addition. It anchors (sorry, boating words are hard to avoid) a new harborfront district, as does Diller Scofidio + Renfro's new Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. And it recycles an Industrial Age relic - in this case a disused 1960s warehouse - into a cultural showcase, as does Herzog & De Meuron's own Tate Modern in London.

Hamburgers will enter the maw of the brutalist brick warehouse from the long pier that juts into the harbor. They will then be wafted up through the structure to a vast window that offers a glimpse of the view to come, then turn a corner and ascend to a vast public plaza that sprawls across the warehouse roof or beneath the new structure's bottom, depending on how you choose to look at it. The hall itself is just a kernel of the complex, which includes an apartment building and a hotel, all sheathed in milky glass!

Link for pics (scrol down a couple of posts) www.therestisnoise.com

[ws]

Hard to exactly tell about the concert hall from just the one exterior shot. Interior looks good. But why doesn't Portland aspire to more imaginative architecture?

If you're interested, also check out the pics posted on the following website, post 53:

http://forum.skyscraperpage.com
/showthread.php?t=127419&page=3

Might not some of those ideas be good for Portland?

[brandon]

There's one glassy building in portland I'm quite fond of, I just wish it wasn't a Starbucks. Yes, the Starbucks in Pioneer courthouse square is a great space and a nice glassy building.

[Thurman Chandler]

Yes, we need to see more of our rain and grey skies! Who will clean the moss off the windows, though?