Portland Architecture

Thinking about the Willamette Valley landscape

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

BY BRIAN LIBBY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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New life for a century-old warehouse

2181 NW Nicolai Street (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

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

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

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

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

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

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

2181 NW Nicolai (photos by Brian Libby)

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

 

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EcoFlats: bike-friendly and ultra efficient on Williams Avenue

EcoFlats (photo by Ben C. Gray)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ecoflats (photos by Brian Libby)

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

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

EcoFlats (photos by Ben C. Gray)

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

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

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

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

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

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The Living Building Challenge is gaining ground

June Key Delta Center (image courtesy greenposting.org)

BY JULIETTE BEALE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tower House (rendering courtesy Benjamin Waechter, Architect)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Park Avenue West tower (rendering courtesy TVA Architects)

BY FRED LEESON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Park Avenue West site (image courtesy skyscraperpage.com)

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

BY BRIAN LIBBY

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

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

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

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

Con-way headquarters (image courtesy Gerding Edlen)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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