Portland Architecture

A New Book of Architect Interviews from PSU

Portland State University's Department of Architecture has published a new book of interviews with several architects called Verge: Between Education and Practice. There are Portlanders represented here such as Jeff Kovel of Skylab, Logan Cravens of SERA Architects, Robert Frasca of Zimmer Gunsul Frasca, and Brian White of Architecture W. There are also several prominent designers from Seattle, Vancouver, and a few other places in the region.

I've been perusing the book over the last few days and thought I would pass on a few random questions and answers. Mostly the conversations tend to focus on design education and running one's practice, but there are a few random other ones as well. For example, Brian White has an interesting answer when asked what his favorite building is right now:

"On this hill on Northwest Broadway, right when you cross the highway and you start to go up the hill. It is to your left, an assisted living building, I-shaped. It is green, [and] the columns are on the exterior and it is [by] a no-name architect. I like it as a mark in the landscape, actually a very beautiful building with landscaping. It is similar to what a lot of people are doing in Europe now, in terms of very simple commercial and the way it is expressed. The glass is green, but there is something very nice about it, kind of like the Christian Science Reading Room downtown. My office is down underneath a bridge. And it is pretty cool. It is not a piece of architecture but an architectural space."

Later, Holst Architecture co-principal John Holmes is asked what he thinks should be focused on for students in architecture programs:

"Drawing is very, very important, being able to think with a pencil. It doesn't necessarily have to be careful or pretty, but being able to think three-dimensionally and being able to draw that. You draw something and then you react, then you draw another thing. It's not that I did my drawing and here's my idea, it's more like I did a hundred drawings and here's the best one. Each one of those drawings is fast and encompasses a lot of thinking...

The other thing is being able to understand money when you draw something. People come out of school very talented, but it takes a long time for that person to understand money. When you are in school, you don't have to deal with that, but that's really where I think a lot of people fail in the profession. It takes another level of creative thought to take a more discerning and disciplined approach."

And finally, Daniel Mihalyo of Seattle's Lead Pencil Studio talks about the challenge of integrating place and regionalism into one's work:

"I definitely used to think that was of primary importance, especially coming out of [the University of] Oregon, which has a very powerful learning structure based on regionalism...In the grand scheme of things, though, I feel like the economy is ridiculously powerful and crushes the weaker force of regionalism. The pace at which things are being built and the scale that change is happening makes it impossible to produce enough regional work to really create a lasting influence. I see a lot of firms that attempt to create regional work but it's being lost in this giant machine that's churning out millions of square feet a day. Even so, we feel it's really important that all architects get the basic grounding for understanding how to build work that's appropriate for the climate and to understand that the sensibility of light and orientation to the landscape is completely different in the Northwest than it would be in Phoenix."

Verge: Between Education and Practice is available through the PSU Department of Architecture and (I believe) at the AIA/Portland Center for Architecture.

Audience With Higgins

Last week I caught up with Randy Higgins, a designer who always fills my brain with ideas and theories about architecture.

Randy first gained notice in the ‘90s working at Holst Architecture. Although not registered as an architect, he worked on projects like the Pacific Northwest College of Art and the Edge Lofts. But just as Holst was really taking off, Randy left to do his own thing.

In the last few years, he has designed the Elizabeth Leach Gallery’s new space, a Mario’s boutique clothier at Bridgeport Village, and came up with the incredible exterior paint job at PNCA (I wrote about it for Metropolis magazine in June 2005) in which a Rimbaud poem is literally translated into a language of yellow, gray and white rectangles.

No matter what he’s doing, though, Randy is like an academic in that he devotes a lot of time to research and theory. He reminds me of something I heard Thomas hacker say about his time working in the great Louis Kahn’s office: that private architectural practice should always be intertwined with the academic side of design. Not only is there a fountain of youth there, with new young designers always arriving each year. But even more importantly, there exists the freedom to pursue ideas with much more time and deep scrutiny than the pace of the building industry realistically allows. Design can’t advance in the private sector alone. There has to be a laboratory for new ideas. But a private practice does itself a disservice by being too completely severed from that kind of inquiring intellectual environment. (“Inquiring minds want to know!”)

Perhaps ironically, to be able to approach design this way, Randy increasingly works outside traditional architecture, and more in the sub-field of retail and experiential design. The multidisciplinary design firm he’s working at now, Vizwerks, is more akin to a Ziba Design than a traditional architecture firm. Yet these kinds of firms are increasingly getting involved with designing the built environment and not just graphics, Internet, consumer products, etc.

As we talked over lunch at Gotham Tavern--and by the way, don't let me make him sound like some Buddhist monk of design; he's very easygoing--I was making a case to Randy that I thought because of various trends over the last decade, from sustainability to the condo boom to the influx of many young creative people, the overall caliber of design being generated here was improving. While not disputing the basic premise, Randy played the kind of devil’s advocate role I imagined and wanted to hear.

Randy laments that so much of the architecture filling the skyline is speculative. When the project is a condo or office buildings, in most cases instead of architects designing for clients who will occupy their spaces, they’re designing for the person who will sell them. “Without a more direct relationship between the public and architects,” he asked me later over email, “then how can the few (architects) truly know the needs of the many (public)?”

Major developers like Gerding Edlen have grown more and more sophisticated about how they market their spaces. On projects like the new Cyan condos downtown by Thomas Hacker Architects, for example, the developer hired Ziba Design to come up with a concept, from the blue-green color the building is named after to the concept of the potential occupants aspirations and values far beyond the countertop they choose.

Randy also had something interesting to say about what we often call modern architecture: that it’s no longer really modern in the sense of modernism, but more like a postmodern building—the exterior having very little to do with the interior functions—only dressed in a classic modernist language.

I don’t know what it is about people named Randy in the Portland design community. There’s writer/editor Randy Gragg, developer Randy Rapaport, and the aforementioned designer Mr. Higgins (who is not pictured in these attached shots). It reminds me of a children’s book read to me many years ago, “Randy’s Dandy Lions”. I guess, then, that maybe this trio would be our Dandy Randy Lions.

Seed Architecture Ready to Sprout

Along with major trends like sustainability and condo building, the rise of more studio-sized firms in Portland over the last several years has been encouraging.

One of the latest to take root is Seed Architecture, which is headed by Darin Dougherty, whose resume includes two other first-rate local firms, Skylab Design and Architropolis. His business partner Greg is a contractor, so Seed anticipates being able to handle both design and construction, a very enticing package. As if that weren’t enough, Greg also has founded on the side a sustainable surface (counter tops, tile) manufacturing company, Fuez.

Seed also is one of the few smaller firms you’ll find that’s invested in BIM software, which allows them to design with real-time budget information. “A big issue I often ran into working for other architects was designing way past a budget,” Dougherty says. “Some times double or triple even. Being able to see your budget change every time you change design is a powerful tool.”

Although the company is only a few months old (the house at left is one of their first projects), they currently are working on an office remodel and, on a larger scale, a modern development of 12 single family homes located in Beaverton. If this winds up happening, it ought to be huge for Seed—and Beaverton.  The firm also owns on North Greeley near the Adidas campus, which they’re developing into a sustainable mixed-use home for Seed’s office and other tenants. And Seed may be involved with building a housing development in St. Johns involving shipping containers.

The firm has also been to design and build a project on a rural twenty-acre site in Anacordes, Washington shooting for net-zero or off-grid energy use. That would be significantly beyond LEED platinum. They also had an entry in the city's recent courtyard housing competition, seen at left.

With a little luck, the firm will soon outgrow its own name. But then again, Mature Plant Architecture doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.