Portland Architecture

Pilgrimage to Fallingwater

Sunday I made a trip that for any architecture fan or architect must be akin to a Muslim's pilgrimage to Mecca: to see Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, which the American Institute of Architects ranked in 2000 as the greatest work of American architecture of the 20th century. No argument here, folks.

There isn't anything around it. We'd started the day at a low-quality Quality Inn in Morgantown, West Virginia. (Visiting a nephew-in-law at school there.) Along the way we passed along winding country highways through towns like Point Marion, a dying coal town with dilapidated old row houses along main street and chintzy trailers on the outskirts. Not one person was on the streets. A little further down the road was Fort Necessity, a Civil War battlefield. But mostly it was just rolling Appalachian hills, forests of winter-bare deciduous trees, lots of roadkill, and not the slightest hint of modern architecture anywhere.

Then we pulled into Fallingwater's grounds, my heart almost beating out of my chest. (I'd given my traveling companions the evil eye for daring to want to stop for breakfast along the way.) When we pulled into the parking lot, Wright's house still wasn't visible - just a visitors' center. We were supposed to wait until our 10AM tour started to go down the trail, but I couldn't help myself and jogged down toward the nearest viewpoint.

At first, from that initial angle a few hundred yards away, Fallingwater didn't necessarily look incredible: a series of intersecting planes and boxes. But when it was finally time for the tour, it took scarcely little time for my jaw to drop. We crossed a little bridge over Bear Run river, and came beside a stairway leading from the house right down to the river. It'd turn out to be coming from the living room, where a ship-like glass hatch opened up near one of the sofas and descended right down to the water.

Inside, the house was literally carved into the hillside. Its fireplace was a combination of locally quarried stone that had been combined and fused with the boulders originally sitting on-site, so the fireplace simply extended as part of that boulder there for thousands of years. It was an overcast morning, but there weren't any electric lights on.

The most distinguishing feature of the Fallingwater house is probably its cluster of large outdoor terraces that cantilever out from the facade right out and over the river and about a twenty-foot waterfall. In fact, when I went out on the terrace from the master bedroom and looked down over the ledge, the waterfall was directly beneath. I think it was at that point the tears started to well up a little.

There was also a lot of glass, and I particularly remember a corner of the wall that opened up with two little swinging doors, so not only the glass itself disappeared, but also did so without any hinges in between, so the whole corner of the glass wall merely disappeared.

There was also a guest house and servants' quarters behind the main house, and to give you an idea of the level of genius that went into every detail of the design, we spent several minutes with the tour guide studying just the canopy connecting the two, which was made of one incredibly large piece of concrete that terraced down the hill for about twenty yards.

I also remember the ventilation system, in which all the vents were built into the already custom-made furniture. There was also a desk in one room that was carved around a slinging glass window opening like a quarter of a pie. Oh, and then there was the artwork: I saw two Picassos and two Diego Riveras, but the tour guide didn't even have time to mention them.

In addition to the concrete and glass, a signature feature of the house is its undulating stone facade, which perfectly mimics the natural outcroppings of stone along the riverbank. This is perhaps the best time to mention the overriding feature of the house, how it exemplifies the way modern architecture acts in harmony with nature. This is not cold unfeeling modernism, but a kind of minimalist sculpture that resonates with as much life as the trees and flowing river beside.

Aside from maybe the All-American super burger at the 'Eat & Park' restaurant in Morgantown, I can't necessarily recommend a lot of other reasons to fly across the country and then drive several more hours to this middle-of-nowhere locale. And yet, being at this house you feel like you're in the center, at the apex, of human achievement. A few minutes before writing this, I belatedly watched No Country For Old Men, a brilliant work but one all about the inevitable tide of death, viciousness and violence. It was nice to recover by thinking of Fallingwater, which seems to represent the exact opposite.

Frank Lloyd Wright isn't even necessarily my touchstone when it comes to architects; I'm more of a Mies man, personally. But seriously, if I were talking to any of you reading this in person, I'd grab you by the lapels and shake you until you agreed to (excluding the low quality Quality Inn at which my day began) make this same pilgrimage.

Be "Still" For Cloepfil & Allied Works' New Denver Museum

As reported this week by Architectural Record magazine (and then yesterday the Port blog), local architect Brad Cloepfil and his firm, Allied Works, have unveiled their new design for the Clyfford Still museum in Denver.

Devoted to the seminal painter Clyfford Still, the museum will sit in the shadow of Daniel Libeskind's massive expansion for the Denver Art Museum. But only in scale will the Allied buidling acquiesce to Libeskind's angular titanium edifice; it's quite possible the Still, with its more subtle, restrained form, will better stand the test of time.

Jeff Jahn at Port makes an interesting observation about Cloepfil's work: that there is a "heavy" Brad, seen in projects like the Wieden + Kennedy headquarters, and a "light, dematerializing" Brad, evidenced in newer work like the Museum of Art and Design at New York's Columbus Circle or the 2281 Glisan building here in Portland. Jeff likes the "heavy" Brad better.

The Still museum seems to have a little of both weight and lightness. Some of the exterior materials give the buiding a solidness like W+K, but there will be tons of natural light in this building, as Record describes:

Cloepfil's building is a two-story, rectangular structure of textured concrete and glass set in a tree-lined plaza. Visitors will enter it by way of a cantilevered concrete canopy. A wooden staircase will take them to the second-floor galleries, where Still’s work will be displayed in 10,000 square feet of exhibition space. Natural light, via clerestory windows, will illuminate most of the galleries.

Cloepfil's museum is a two-story, rectangular structure of textured concrete and glass set in a tree-lined plaza. Visitors will enter it by way of a cantilevered concrete canopy. A wooden staircase will take them to the second-floor galleries, where Still’s work will be displayed in 10,000 square feet of exhibition space. Natural light, via clerestory windows, will illuminate most of the galleries.

In imagining this museum devoted to Clyfford Still, I wondered if there might be any type of small museum we could build in Portland. How about a Mark Rothko museum? Granted there's already the Rothko Chapel in Houston, but that's not a museum devoted to showing his artwork. And Rothko spent many of his formative years here in Portland. Granted, our city doesn't have a good track record of supporting bold public projects (unless they're transit), but wound't Rothko's name be able to attract a lot of outside investment?

Brad Cloepfil is also one of the 11 people featured in an Oregonian article I wrote that comes out tomorrow for the paper's A&E section, called "Dreamers + Builders" and highlighting the top names in local architecture and design. So watch out for that.

Maya Lin and Confluence Envy

Seven years ago a group of Native American tribes and local civic leaders approached Maya Lin, designer of the superb Vietnam War memorial in Washington, DC, to participate in a project commemorating the bicentennial of Lewis and Clark's journey with the Corps of Discovery in 1804-6. The idea was to rethink what the commemoration of the bicentennial could be.

Out of this collaboration came the Confluence Project, a series of seven art installations along the Columbia River designed to evoke the history of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the tremendous changes it brought to the Pacific Northwest: not just political or historic, but also natural ones.

Now, many of the seven sites are taking shape, each where the Columbia river meets another key body of water: the Pacific ocean, the Willamette River, the Sandy River, the Snake River, and so on.

By its very definition, the Confluence Project is site specific and meant to exist at key geographical spots. But looking at the map of sites, as an Oregonian I can't help but feel a little bit jealous. The state of Washington has snatched up almost all of the nearest sites. Sure, Oregon has the monument out in Troutdale marking where the Sandy River meets the Willamette Columbia (pictured). But the monument marking the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers? That's in Ridgefield Washington, 10 miles away from where the actual rivers meet - in Portland.

Another site, one of the only ones not associated with another water source meeting the Columbia, marks where the river meets the Klickitat Trail at Fort Vancouver. There will be a new land bridge connecting Fort Vancouver with the riverfront, a nice public works project for the city to enjoy. And the monument marking the confluence of the Columbia with the Pacific? It's not in Astoria, where a revitalized city and economy would have been very excited by the monument, and where you can literally look out and see the river meet the ocean, but in Ilwaco, Washington at Cape Disappointment. Indeed.

As I write this, I realize it's petty of me to be keeping score about whether Washington or Oregon gets more of Maya Lin's Confluence works. When the Corps of Discovery actually traversed this land, of course, these artificial state boundaries didn't exist. And of course the terrain and geography and history should be the determining factor in where these sites go. The last thing I'd want to do is politicize the site selection process.

At the same time, though, the Ridgefield site bothers me. The project was originally set to be at Frenchman's Bar, another Vancouver Park. But it was moved to Ridgefield in order to be paired with an environmental research center at Washington State University's satellite campus there. So what was more important here, development or history?

This move, in my mind, opens the door for Confluence sites to be selected by means other than history and geography. So using that logic, we have license to ask why in the world the Willamette/Columbia Confluence site isn't somewhere in Portland. After all, if Ridgefield is ten miles away from the actual confluence, why not move a few miles down the Willamette and put Maya Lin's work in a prominent urban site along the river, such as Waterfront Park?

No offense to Washingtonians, but if you ask most people which American city sits at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, they wouldn't respond with "The Couve", let alone Ridgefield. Now, for reasons I don't think are good enough, Clark County on the Washington side of the Columbia gets two monuments overseen by Maya Lin, the most acclaimed monument designer of our time, while Portland, the vastly bigger and more relevant urban big brother, gets more or less zero. To me, that's like naming the Lewis & Clark expedition the 'Lewis & Jones' expedition after Lewis and a subordinate of Clark's.

Then again, having expressed my petty Confluence envy, I am very glad that at least some of these Lin monuments will be within a day's drive. Maybe I'll even stop at that enormous factory outlet mall in Troutdale after communing with nature and history in Lin's bird-blind installation by the Sandy River.

Coming Around to Bend

Yesterday afternoon I drove to Bend for an evening book signing. It was the first time I've been to Bend in a few years, and if you don't keep up with this town's astonishing growth, it'll probably feel substantially different every time.

When I was a kid we used to visit here annually, and I remember the population then being about the same as my hometown of McMinnville: around 15,000. Today, about twenty-five years later, Bend's population is over 75,000.

As I was driving into town, I saw two signs. One said, 'Entering Bend.' But the next one, about a mile down the road, said 'Bend: 3 miles.' That's how quickly this town has sprawled outward. On that front, the way in which the town has grown is unfortunate and similar to most American cities. But there is also substantial development downtown. This morning, walking around downtown in search of an espresso, I passed a circa-1920 fire hall that had been converted into shops. Next door was a super-cool coffee place serving espresso. I figured I'd have to settle for Starbucks out here, but this was a superb shot.

I also saw a brick three to four-story mixed use condo going up. It was kind of a funny feeling, because the architecture was very traditional and tame, like something I might give a luke-warm review to at best in terms of its design. But here, where the alternative feels more directly to be a cookie-cutter house on the outskirts of town, it seemed like a masterwork. Everything's relative, ya know?

Yesterday my book signing was in the Old Mill district, where some sort of former industrial place has been converted to a kind of outdoor mall. The place was again in the tradition of something I hate: the so-called 'lifestyle center' malls that create a kind of fake urban environment for their chain stores. At the same time, this Old Mill shopping was right along the Deschutes River, with a delightful little walking path across from the Bend Amphitheater, where superlative Portland band The Shins were winding down a concert amidst the thunder and lightning of a summer storm. My problem with lifestyle centers is that they take a step towards urbanity, but don't really integrate with the existing city's fabric. When it's more part of the environment and blends in like this, though, the verdict is a little different. Oh, and I love that smell of pine and sagebrush in the air - it's like mother nature's potpourri.

I certainly don't want to whitewash some of the less attractive things about Bend. It's growing so fast the city could probably do a lot more to be progressive about planning and architecture. Yet there's also a lot to like about this town. It seems clear that Bend could someday equal or even surpass Eugene and Salem as the second biggest (and most relevant) Oregon city.

Learning From Sluseholmen

The May issue of Metropolis magazine profiles an interestingly collaborative new high density housing project in Copenhagen that got me thinking about how such a thing might happen in Portland.

Sluseholmen is a housing development along Copenhagen's harbor, which, as in many cities, is being converted from shipping container terminals to housing and other urban uses. It includes a 14.5-acre site crisscrossed with canals that form a grid of row-house and apartment blocks. The project, inspired by a similar effort in Amsterdam, is being overseen by a large Danish firm called Arkitema (not Dutch, as I originally wrote here), but with as many as 1,100 units to build and concerns about too much uniformity of style, the architect is commissioning 20 young Danish architects to design about 150 different facades for the individual units, which are tall, thin buildings based on Amsterdam canal houses but also not dissimilar to the narrow-lot or "skinny" houses increasingly being built in Portland and were the subject of the city's Living Smart competition.

Of course designing facades isn't really designing buildings, but there are a lot of things to like about the collaborative opportunity Sluseholmen provides. Here in Portland, we face a similar threat of bland ubiquity in neighborhoods where a lot of high-density housing is going up quickly. How we might employ a similar spirit to involve a lot more architects, and preferably younger ones in particular, in a meaningful way? I see this as the kind of thing that might give a developer or lead architect more work and headaches, but also a lot more unique product, which the market would have an appetite for if it was done well.