Wood be king: design awards jurors assess Portland style

Tingley-Fortin Residence (photo by John Jensen)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Last night the trio of jurors presiding over this year's AIA/Portland Design Awards gave their annual Jury Critique presentation, beginning with a discussion of their own work and then moving on to observations about local architecture.

This year’s jury was an all-female affair, consisting of Merrill Elam of Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects in Atlanta, Lisa Iwamoto of Iwamoto Scott Architecture in San Francisco, and Vanessa Kassabian of Norwegian firm Snøhetta’s New York office.

Although Merrill broke from tradition by only discussing one of her firm’s projects, an unbuilt cultural and popular music performance venue in Taiwan, Iwamoto and Kassabian both demonstrated a compelling array of projects from their respective portfolios.

Snøhetta's World Trade Center memorial in New York (image courtesy DesignWire)

In particular, Snøhetta’s emergence from an Oslo firm with no American built work to a major presence in New York and beyond was of interest. The firm opened its Manhattan office after receiving the coveted commission for the World Trade Center Pavilion, the only building occupying the site of the former twin towers. Then Snohetta benefited from a kind of happy accident. “Originally the intent was to open as a project office for the World Trade Center,” Kassabian explained. But after the project faced numerous delays, “In order to keep the office open we’ve taken on other work. Now we have 14 projects underway.” Among these are an art school building at Bowling Green University in Ohio, a library at North Carolina State University, and a major expansion of the landmark Mario Botta-designed San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Snøhetta proper has also designed acclaimed international projects like the Alexandria Library in Egypt.

Although her firm designs projects of all sizes from furniture prototypes to regional master planning, Iwamoto is an expert at digital fabrication and the author of a book called Digital Fabrications: Architectural and Material Techniques. “We look at the relationship of modularity and pattern to an overall surface,” she said. With training in both engineering and architecture, she has particularly explored how thin, light materials such as fabric and paper can be made to expand and contract, to be permeable and non-permeable depending on conditions and needs.

Although each year the out-of-town jury is hampered by a lack of time and experience seeing Portland, two of three had been to the city before. And they all had good things to say about local design.

“A lot of what we saw had exquisite craftsmanship,” Iwamoto said. “I was jealous coming from San Francisco: the budget here is often 200 a square foot, but the quality and material lushness for the budgets achieved is remarkable.”

Jurors Merrill Elam, Vanessa Kassabian, Lisa Iwamoto (images courtesy AIA/Portland)

“The architecture that’s coming out of Portland is very beautiful,” Kassabian added. “We have to commend you.”

If one attends the Jury Critique from year to year, it can be interesting to hear over time how different jurors from different cities arrive at similar conclusions. This jury, for example, noted (to put things in baseball terms) Portland ability to hit singles and doubles making up for its lack of home runs.

“At first there didn’t seem to be any super innovative project that popped out above the rest,” Iwamoto explained. “As we started digging more, the true innovation seemed to happen in the subtle innovations that made certain projects sing. It was more like a celebration of a natural material, or just doing enough and not going overboard. There were a tiny handful that were really experimenting with form.” The overall level of quality, the jurors agreed, was stellar, even if it wasn’t eye candy.

Most of all – and this of course is a common refrain from year to year – the trio was taken by how much wood they saw. “We were absolutely overwhelmed with the amount we saw at all scales,” Kassabian said, “from the structure to the interiors to the exteriors to the furniture.”

“In some cases wood takes on a language that is not unfamiliar but is beautifully done, the post and beam construction,” Iwamoto added. “Houses you start to expect to see more wood. But it started to become anything, we realized as we started looking through the portfolio. Even in the large institutional projects it was used selectively as a nice way of humanizing them. Do you guys all get together and swap your wood details? How do you know how to do all that?”

The jury’s next observation, however, was a politely delivered criticism. “I think the language of the projects followed a pretty modernist idiom, but there were only a tiny handful that were really experimenting with form,” Iwamoto said. At the time, the screen was displaying an exception to the rule: a house by Skylab Architecture. Although the jury never announces winners at the annual Critique Session, they did seem to display (in support of some of their positive comments) numerous projects by that firm as well as standout projects by Ben Waechter (the Tower House), Holst Architecture (Bud Clark Commons), BOORA (BodyVox dance studio), and ZGF (the Port of Portland headquarters).

The jury also had especially kind words for public buildings, such as the Bud Clark Commons and the renovation of Portland State University’s Lincoln Hall. “We were amazed by the integrity and the quality of publicly funded projects,” Iwamoto said. “We started to wonder what is going on here in terms of wise public officials shepherding projects through the system. There were a number of projects like that."

Bud Clark Commons (photo by Brian Libby)

Showing a photo of Clark Commons, Iwamoto applauded “the very clever means to create an animated and beautiful façade, in this case just turning some of them upside down and painting them different colors.” In the case of Lincoln Hall, Kassabian added, “This one we thought was interesting because of the historical building with a modern material. This was a pretty radical change from the before, and something we thought was extremely successful.”

At the end of the night, when the floor was opened to questions, one audience member asked, if wood is the default material here, what is it in the cities these jurors work in? “”In Atlanta? Artificial stucco,” Elam said, illiciting a laugh. “We don’t have anything as pervasive. There’s a lot of synthetics going on.”

“We see a lot of glass and metal in new york. Some of the older buildings, obviously brick, but not as nice as what’s here,” Kassabian answered.

“In San Francisco, we have a variety of materials: wood, stucco, metal, glass,” Iwamoto said. “What pervades is the general sense of, ‘Don’t touch anything.’ We love our Victorians, for example. You can’t mess with them. That’s a big thing for us to overcome.”

The notion of historic preservation as a barrier was a curious thought to end on, given how the jury had praised Portland for its tendency towards adaptive reuse. Yet Iwamoto wasn’t saying we should knock our best old buildings down. (Only a few outgoing City Council members and a smattering of baseball fans believe such things.) Rather, she seemed to be expressing the idea that architects naturally embrace the opportunity to dive in: to marry new architecture with old, to use wood for more than residential floors and cabinetry, to marry landscape and building more holistically, and to seek more boldness of form than the decorated box that is the norm not only in Portland but across design circles.

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