Portland Architecture

Art at the scale of architecture: talking with Lead Pencil Studio about "Inversion: Plus Minus"

"Inversion: Plus Minus" (photo by Rich Rano)

BY RICH RANO

The Central Eastside resides as one of Portland’s industrial sanctuaries with an established goal to evolve its uses while maintaining the close-in manufacturing core for the many makers, producers, and creators who make up much of the city’s identity. But while the zoning hasn't changed, the Central Eastside always has continued to do so. Now, with a new streetcar line at the district's eastern edge on Grand Avenue and MLK Boulevard, the Central Eastside is changing again. And in a public art project constructed as part of the new streetcar line, that slow transformation can be palpably felt.

"Inversion: Plus Minus" by Seattle's Lead Pencil Studio, located at the east end of the Hawthorne Bridge ramp (with an companion installation set to be constructed a few blocks north at the Morrison bridgehead) has been called a "ghost building" for how it evokes a long-gone warehouse on the site. But just as compelling as this large-scale artwork is the process Lead Pencil Studio used to design and construct it, which combined state-of-the-art digital means with traditional fabrication techniques. "Inversion: Plus Minus" is a conversation piece between industrial authenticity and the vision of a growing urban core through a contemporary lens.

Recently Lead Pencil Studio's Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo answered a series of questions about how they put it together, and what they think the impact of the artwork has been thus far. 

Portland Architecture: The piece's welded Cor-Ten steel members are of a traditional analog process, yet "Inversion" yields a quite digital-age aesthetic. Were there any special tools or technologies in the design or assembly of the piece? 

Lead Pencil Studio: We looked at several techniques for developing a fabrication method including one version that involved digitally tracking every stick of steel with Revit and using bolted connections that would have required an absurd level of accuracy. In the end however, we opted for a manually performed assembly methods. The only use of the digital methods were for ordinary drafting, rendering tests and material estimation.

"Inversion: Plus Minus" (photo by Rich Rano)

It seems that no matter the method of drawing or modeling during conceptualization, there is always an uncertainty on whether or not the project will successfully scale-up during the interpretive process of fabrication. On this point, this project was a larger challenge than most because we were not able to see the final assembly until it was craned onto the site. The digital renderings that we worked on were never really able to accurately predict the appearance and density of material and inevitably there is a good amount of finesse performed on site.

In all that finesse, were there strict rules to the placement of each member to maintain your desired aesthetic?

We definitely had a system of techniques that we've developed over the years to keep things from getting away from us. More than half of the individual members had a structural role to play which dictated their connection points, welds and precise placement. The remainder of the material had an aesthetic role and therefore had to be generally located to maintain consistent density and gradation across the overall piece. There were daily checks with all involved to discuss consistency in the layout. The most vexing problem was to avoid the development of recognizable geometric patterns that tend to naturally occur anytime you have highly repetitive work.

"Inversion: Plus Minus" (photos by Rich Rano)

Ghosted images of the former buildings aside, how do you think the assembly methods and design choices relate to and spawn a dialogue with the industrial and manufacturing roots of the site?

From a material point of view, Cor-Ten steel has a leathery brown appearance that is nearly indistinguishable from the cast iron that was produced on the site. The utilitarian nature of industrial methods and materials figured large in our choices as we were looking to lend the project a good fit to the history of the neighborhood. Above everything though, we were challenged to create to a visually compelling piece that could compete on equal terms with the scale, velocity and deafening volume of cars and semi-trucks along Grand Avenue. When we look at it now, the work seems to be at peace within the violence of the context, rising above the crush of traffic and resilient in the face of change. In the end the work is a direct response to the 1950's planning decisions that shaped the site during the intervening 60 years since the demolition of the nascent urban fabric in favor of vehicle throughput.

On the theme of planning and zoned use revision, how have you witnessed the visual impact of Inversion informing the evolution of the area’s experience?

Most of Portland Oregon passes through this neighborhood on route to somewhere else. While many work there during the day, the evening is largely a ghost town - but the seeds of change are clearly in the works. As real estate pressures continues to rise, there will undoubtedly be increasing economic and political leverage applied to loosen the zoning protection of the Industrial Sanctuary. As those demolitions occur, the history of the activities that took place evaporate as well. Do this enough and a neighborhood and the people are forgotten. Our project is a response to this deleterious effect.

For those who are just passing through, we hope that they are able to discern our dialogue with the neighborhood forms, textures and materials and read our project as sketches of buildings that once existed or perhaps ones that might rise again.

Screen capture from "Inversion: Plus Minus" design (courtesy Lead Pencil Studio)

So your project aims to maintain the industrial identity of the area?

Our artwork operates less definitively, but on a personal level we do appreciate authenticity of place and are generally skeptical of developments that alter the built/natural environment one opportunistic project at a time. In the case of the Industrial Sanctuary, we're under no illusion that the area should be reborn with gritty belching shipyard smokestacks. We also feel that it is vital for a city that prides itself on making, such as Portland, that there be affordable, near-in places to get everything you need - hardware, materials, process expertise, basic industrial methods and equipment. Few cities have been able to maintain this and it would be a shame to see it quietly displaced by a completely different identity.

 

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Seeking a monument to Claire Phillips, Portland's forgotten spy-hero

Claire Phillips (photo courtesy Sig Unander & Portland Monthly)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In the new issue of Portland Monthly magazine, I had the opportunity to write about one of the more compelling personal stories that I've come across in my roughly 14 years as a journalist.

Claire Phillips ought to be one of the most beloved citizens this city has ever produced. And for a time in the 1940s and '50s, she was just that. But this woman, who was known alternately as "High Pockets" (for the secret messages stashed in her bra) or "Manila Mata Hari" for her daring exploits, has been forgotten by 99 percent of our citizenry.

Now, Cornelius, Oregon writer Sig Unander and a few others, including local architect and honorary Philippine Consulate Richard Woodling, have embarked on a quest to honor the memory of a woman who risked her life in World War II to spy on the Japanese. Someday, if things go well, there should be a statue to Claire in a prominent Portland locale. She is for all intents and purposes a war veteran and war hero, but because she never officially belonged to the American military, there has been no promotional machine or wave of historians to tell her story.

Poster for the 1951 film about Claire

But this was not always the case. Claire Phillips was the subject of a 1951 Hollywood film called I Was An American Spy, starring Scarface moll Ann Dvorjak. She is the only woman from Oregon to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her memoir, Manila Espionage, was briefly a national sensation. The popular radio show "This Is Your Life" devoted an episode to her, which included Claire being given a free home in Beaverton and a new Packard. But within a decade, Claire Phillips would be dead from alcoholism-related meningitis.

Back during the war, Claire Phillips owned a nightclub in Manilla while the country was occupied by the Japanese. She had created Club Tsubaki specifically for the purpose of luring Japanese officers there, to be pampered and liquored up in hopes they might divulge their secrets. Claire was beautiful and charming, but her husband had also been killed by the Japanese in a prison camp. She  possessed the bravery of someone half-naive and half lusting for revenge. And her plans worked. An entire Japanese submarine squadron was once wiped out in the Pacific because of Claire's tip to American soldiers.

Here's a passage from the story, about the time when, as a cocktail lounge singer in another Manila club, a tortuous moment prompts Claire to come out swinging:

The party at Ana Fey’s nightclub starts to get wild. A Japanese civilian, surrounded by cronies at a corner table, all drunk on cocktails and a self-confidence born of conquering half the Pacific, decides he wants special attention.

He beckons the club’s Italian singer: the tall brunette with the sultry voice, high heels, and shimmering gown, who’s been entertaining Japan’s forces with romantic songs in English from Ana Fey’s tiny, spotlit stage. The patron wants the singer to bring him ice for his drinks personally. The singer demurs. The patron insists—even grasps the woman’s backside. She slaps him across the face.

No one did that to one of Emperor Hirohito’s subjects in occupied Manila. The men take the singer into the club’s back room and beat her; the orchestra plays more loudly to cover her cries. But even as the drunken soldiers teach the nightclub girl “a lesson,” their blows fail to dislodge wartime’s most valuable commodity: the truth.

The singer wasn’t Italian, but American, from a small city across the Pacific Ocean. And she was no mere club beauty, but a budding spy, working to eclipse the Rising Sun. Her real name was Claire Phillips. Her code name was High Pockets—in honor of secret messages she stashed in her bra. She was fighting in the fierce shadow-contest over a city that played a key role in the Pacific theater’s brutal chess match. So the beating Phillips suffered that night—not her worst ordeal, by a long shot—was just part of the job.

Claire had been raised in Southeast Portland and attended Franklin High School. But the city she knew was different from today: There weren't young people flocking here to create a kind of hipster Utopia. Portland was a quiet city of shipyards and saw mills. Claire Philips was a thrill seeker, and she left the city to join a traveling song-and-dance troupe before even finishing high school. As a result, I can't help but wonder if, somehow, the city failed her.

Claire receiving the Medal of Freedom in 1948 (photo courtesy Sig Unander & Portland Monthly)

For generations, talented and ambitious people from painter Mark Rothko to foodie James Beard have had to leave if they sought fame and fortune. Today that drain of our best minds is not so large. But local history here has entire genre of such people who became expatriates. To honor Claire with a public memorial wouldn't just be a way of honoring a war hero and sexy spy, but a chance to acknowledge all those who have departed Portland to find adventure elsewhere.

Speaking of which, if a Claire Phillips monument does get built, where might it go? My first thought is the Rose Quarter. Of course Memorial Coliseum is already an architectural memorial to veterans. Why not put a statue of Claire Phillips, the woman Douglas MacArthur personally recommended for the Medal of Freedom, within a few feet of Oregon's biggest war memorial? A Claire statue could anchor a new riverfront esplanade beside the Broadway Bridge - a space currently used as a parking lot for Rose Garden employees. Or it could be part of a newly landscaped and activated space between the arenas. Either way, I think honoring one of the most dramatic and heroic of Portland stories dovetails seamlessly with our new reborn east side Mecca.

After all, Claire would class up the place, as this passage may indicate:

The Tsubaki Club enjoyed a view of Manila’s docks, which, in 1943, teemed with Japanese naval and merchant marine ships. It was the hot new place, opened by the Italian-born Filipino gal known as Madam Tsubaki, who used to sing at Ana Fey’s. Tsubaki also boasted Ana Fey’s former head dancer, Fely Corcuera, who was fluent in Japanese. (Meanwhile, an affluent Chinese businessman, along with Madam Tsubaki’s pawned diamond rings and watch, supplied the club’s initial stake.) Corcuera dressed in a kimono and regaled Imperial Navy boys with traditional Japanese songs. Afterward the floor show—with dancers wearing little more than gold satin G-strings, coconut shells, and headdresses fashioned with turkey feathers—went deep into the night.

And then there was Madam Tsubaki herself.

Six decades later, the writer Hampton Sides described the Tsubaki Club’s proprietress in his book Ghost Soldiers: “She … dressed in a white evening gown with a plunging neckline and a slit halfway up her thigh …. Her olive skin would glitter with jewels.” Each night, Madam Tsubaki greeted patrons and escorted them, as Sides tells it, “through the cream-colored bar, past the dancing stage with its curtains of lavender satin, to the rattan settees along the back wall.” There, Madam Tsubaki cuddled up with her club’s most prominent guests and asked questions in a pidgin of Spanish, Japanese, Tagalog, and English: When do you leave Manila? Where will you go next?

A saucy dance revue. Doting waitresses. Cocktails. What war-weary sailor wouldn’t relax and let a few details slip?

Claire's story wasn't all glamourous dance numbers and cocktail evenings, though.

Phillips spent her days—and her club’s profits—on another mission: smuggling food, notes, and medicine to American POWs held at the Cabanatuan prison camp outside Manila. For these men—sick, starving, prone to maltreatment and random execution—she was both a practical and emotional tether to the world. One imprisoned soldier wrote to Phillips: “You’ve done more for the boys’ morale in here than you’ll ever know … You deserve more gold medals than all of us.”

For her part, Phillips always signed her dispatches: “Yours in war, High Pockets.”

Eventually, the Japanese caught Phillips. Interrogators shot water into her mouth from a hose. “Guards held my head so that I could not move,” she wrote. “I held my breath. A Nip noticed this and hit me in the abdomen. I gulped the water down … drowning on dry land … then oblivion.” Captors burned her skin with cigars until she awakened. By the time American troops liberated her prison on February 10, 1945, she had lost 55 pounds.

If you'd like to get involved in the campaign to build a memorial and monument to Claire "High Pockets" Phillips, or if you or someone you know came into contact with Claire before her passing, please contact Sig Unander, the primary keeper of her flame, at airart@aracnet.com.

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Tradition and eccentricity: City undergoes acupuncture treatment as part of Portland Plan

Needle installation at Mt. Tabor, image courtesy The Portland Acupuncture Project 

Over the past several years, I've received acupuncture treatment for a variety of ailments: headaches, bronchitis, a pinched nerve, even stress. Sometimes it has worked, and sometimes it hasn't. But if a person is in a lot of pain, it's worth a try. And it'd be a disservice to dismiss acupuncture's effectiveness just because it's different from, or unprovable by, standards of Western medicine.

Chinese acupuncture, which Wikipedia defines as "the procedure of inserting and manipulating needles into various points on the body to relieve pain or for therapeutic purposes" has been around since at least the second century BC. Yet there is no factual evidence proving the central idea, of placing these needles at body points situated on meridians along which qi (or "life energy") flows.

I describe this tension behind acupuncture practice in the West after thinking about the symbolism of the Portland Acupuncture Project, which is actually not medicinal but an outdoor sculptural installation by Portland artist Adam Kuby. The work, consisting of 35-foot-high steel poles made to resemble acupuncture needles, was commissioned in accordance with the current process of formulating the Portland Plan through a series of workshops. The Portland Plan just entered Phase II with a workshop on April 26, and the next one is scheduled for April 29 at Beaumont Middle School. 

Needle installation at Waterfront Park, image courtesy The Portland Acupuncture Project 

Kuby's needles are being installed - literally pricked into the ground as if it's our collective skin - at sites throughout the city such as Waterfront Park, Kelly Point Park and Mt. Tabor.

"This project explores the interface between art, regional planning, traditional Chinese medicine and the health of a city," his Portland Acupuncture Project's website explains. "Unfolding over the course of 2010, this 6-month art installation will coincide with a series of public workshops to help steer the Portland Plan, a guide for the city's growth over the next 25 years.  Needles appearing across the city will bring attention to the some of the city's most challenging problems, greatest assets, as well as places with enormous potential."

“Using the body as a metaphor for the entire city, Kuby hopes to identify those places in the landscape that are important to us as a community," added Susan Anderson, director of the Portland Bureau of Planning & Sustainability, "drawing attention not only to the significance of each focal point but also to the interconnectedness of them to each other as well as to ourselves.”

Portland has a strong Chinese medicine community for an American city, with two schools of Chinese medicine and more than 500 acupuncturists in the three-county area. As a result, the project has gained not only public donations from the Regional Arts & Culture Council and the Oregon Arts Commission, but also several dozen individual and business donors and the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine. Yet the $40,000 fund raising goal to install the large poles/needles for six months, has not been reached. Kuby, a Mount Tabor-area artist with a background in landscape architecture and public art installations, told Keri Brenner in The Oregonian that he still needs to raise about $12,000 to $15,000 more if the project is to be able to be installed in all quadrants of the city.

Acupuncture chart from Hua Shou (1340s), image via Wikipedia

Each series of up to five needles/poles will remain in place for eight weeks before being moved to new meridian-like "points" in the city for another eight-week installation, continuing the rotation one more time after that. Brenner also reports Kuby worked with city planners to dovetail the placement of needle sculptures with strategies and initiatives identified in the Portland Plan, the city's roadmap for the next 25 years. Some of the needles/poles will be placed at sites to represent focus on transportation issues, for example, while others might stimulate discussions on housing problems or jobs creation. 

I mentioned at the outset of this post the tension between acupuncture's thousands of years of tradition and its lack of complete acceptance from Western medicine. That's because along with the general metaphor of acupuncture needles healing the city, or contributing to higher energy levels or flow between different parts of the topography, perhaps acupuncture itself may be a fitting metaphor for the current moment Portland is experiencing amongst the broader American zeitgeist as the potential model for how other American cities might look in the future. A recent article by English political magazine, for example, explored Portland as and "The new model" for "elite cities", asking, "Is Oregon’s metropolis a leader among American cities or just strange?"

Portland is building on thousands of years of tradition too, continuing compact pedestrian oriented city building of Europe and most of Western civilization. We are the descendant, urbanistically speaking, of cities like Amsterdam, Barcelona, Glasgow and Kyoto. And yet people in other places, even progressive urban-minded ones, still look at the city as quirky and off-kilter. But hey, what does it matter? Like the local slogan goes, Portland is, despite all its inevitable missteps, the City that Works. Or maybe it's the other, unofficial slogan, urging us to keep weird.

Incidentally, I think some of Kuby's needles are very much needed along Southeast Grand and Martin Luther King Boulevards while this streetcar construction is in progress. Traffic is a black hole there these days. Either Kuby needs to place some needles there, or I need some in my forehead and toes while slowly inching by the orange cones.

Down by the water: visiting Fort Vancouver, the Confluence Project, and the Columbia riverfront

Although I was born and raised in Oregon and have spent all but about six years of my life here, I can't think of a single past instance when I've visited the banks of the Columbia River on the Vancouver side. Before last Sunday, that is, when I went there as part of an excursion to see the Vancouver Land Bridge that's part of the seven-project Confluence Project overseen by legendary designer Maya Lin of Vietnam Memorial fame.

It turns out that Vancouver has a lovely little strip of pebbled beach there, as well as lovely if frustratingly short tree-lined walking path that extends east from the Interstate 5 bridge. I've been missing a nice place all these years, although I think the built landscape and infrastructure here has something to do with it.

To access the riverfront, I started at Fort Vancouver, walking past an assortment of military barracks and other offices (such as those of Congressman Brian Baird). Some of the buildings date to the early 20th century or earlier.

Without having brought a guidebook, I'd have had difficulty finding which way it was to the Vancouver Land Bridge over State Route 14. Eventually I moved down a curving pathway, past barbed wire-enclosed fencing and a couple of windowless storage structures, passing the log-festooned historic Fort Vancouver structure, and twisting again past a vacant un-landscaped grassy field to the land bridge. It could be a pretty route to the bridge, but it's not at all.

Although the rest of the Confluence project is Lin's, the Vancouver Land Bridge was designed by Seattle architect Johnpaul Jones. On the project's website a quote from Jones reads, "The land bridge is a real link connecting back to the Klickitat Trail, Lewis and Clark, and the development of the Northwest. It completes a circle that's been broken."

The 40-foot-wide pedestrian bridge is lined with indigenous plants and Native basket weavings. There is also to be what's called a 'treaty table' designed by Maya Lin, although I did not see it there yet.

The Confluence Project website also explains:

"European and Native American cultures once converged at this Columbia River site, where the Hudson’s Bay Company stood as the first European trading post in the Pacific Northwest. Lewis and Clark camped here, and Fort Vancouver was built here 20 years later. Today, the site features an earth-covered pedestrian bridge that arcs over State Route 14, reconnecting historic Fort Vancouver with the Columbia River, which helped extend the fort’s influence from Mexico to Alaska and across the Pacific Ocean."

Entering from the south, you can also access the land bridge by walking under the land bridge’s Welcome Gate, designed by Native American artist Lillian Pitt. Two cedar canoe panels, each adorned with a cast-glass sculpture of a Chinook woman’s face, evoke the site’s role as a historic tribal crossroads as well as a point of contact between European and Native people.

It's great that Vancouver has a pedestrian connection between the Fort and the riverfront again. That there is a freeway-like state highway running so close to the water, as well as a train track, makes it difficult for the city to establish a strong tie to the Columbia's edge. When I was on the Land Bridge, a stopped freight train was blocking the river view entirely. That shouldn't be. Vancouver could be so much more enticing and beautiful city if there were people and buildings and life along the water there like there is in downtown Portland along the Willamette (although if you look at our east bank, we still have a long way to go too with the I-5 freeway along the water).

This new pedestrian bridge, especially such an artful and historically-minded one, will be a step toward Vancouver becoming a much more appealing city. And it's worth taking some steps, because there is truly a lovely resource in the riverfront here (the decaying Cisco & Pancho's and Joe's Crab Shack by said banks notwithstanding).

Considering that Jones' Vancouver Land Bridge is the closest of the seven Confluence Project sites, I'd have liked to see either Lin, Jones or both of them be given a site along the river itself, with a pedestrian bridge over SR-14 being built in tandem with the Confluence effort. I mean, at the end of the day, Jones's bridge is a bridge, one that looks out at four lanes of asphalt and a series of freight trains. It's about as picturesque a setting as one of the I-405 bridge crossings downtown, where the smell of carbon monoxide competes for your attention with the Mt. Hood view.

(Incidentally, the couple in the above photo, who I photographed randomly, turned out to be the parents of architect Darin Dougherty, who's SIPs House I just wrote about last week.)

And while the overall Fort Vancouver site, including both the military barracks and the other facilities there, is undoubtedly overall a resource and a treasure for the city, walking around there I couldn't help but feel that this land so close to the river was being under-utilized.

Again, there's no doubt most of the historic buildings there need to be preserved, and no one is trying to kick out the military - they're part of the history of Fort Vancouver. One might even argue that the Army is being kind even allowing public access here without much restriction. 

Even so, when you get a taste of the good parts of there being a beautiful Columbia waterfront, and this thoughtful Confluence project being rooted there, as well as the character of the Fort and barracks buidings, it makes one wonder what it would be like if this were a denser, more pedestrian and public-oriented place along the Vancouver side of the Columbia banks, with housing and retail and parks part of the mix. If the city were to grow dense along the river, Vancouver could some day in a generation or two become a more equal urban sister to Portland.

There has been significant progress nearby this stretch of Vancouver riverfront. To the east there is Columbia Shores with a hotel, waterfront restaurants office buildings, condominiums and apartments. To the west there are 26 acres adjoining downtown from the former Boise Cascade site; this is planned to become a more dense urban waterfront. This adjoins to the regular part of downtown Vancouver where Esther Short Park and several new mixed use projects have given the area more vitality.

Of course when we're talking about Fort Vancouver on the other side of I-5 from downtown, the other major presence in these parts is the historic Pearson air field, from which an occasional small-engine Cessna plane was taking off on the Sunday when I visited. Portland has a functioning airport that includes service for smaller planes, and the proximity of Pearson is seriously compromising the design of the Columbia Crossing. I mean, it's downright absurd to me. But that's another conversation for another time. Right now, I'd be happy to see Vancouver continue moving towards a closer relationship with the riverfront. If nothing else, Johnpaul Jones' bridge is just that.

Portland Center Stage Removes James Harrison Light Sculpture

Portland Center Stage, occupant of the renovated Portland Armory (now known as the Gerding Theater), has removed the sculptural marquee it commissioned from acclaimed local artist James M. Harrison for its 2006 opening.

The piece is called "Aiorema" after the Greek word for "God in the Machine". On his website, Harrison explains, "Originally this was a more literal concept- a crane used in ancient Greek theater for flying in the gods.  I thought this was an appropriate way to link old and new.  New Theater, Old Concept- Old Building, New Marquee, etc."

The sculpture is made from stacked layers of light diffusing acrylic pieces. It's shaped like a cloud at the base, and shaped like a star against the sky.  The layers gradually transition from the one shape to the other shape.

Harrison first gained notice in Portland as part of the art-architecture collective Rigga. He's done sculpture for the Eastbank Esplanade as well as projects in Seattle, London and elsewhere. Those 'beehive' booths at the Gotham Building Tavern were also his, designed in partnership with the restaurant's co-owner, Michael Hebb, who has since moved on to Seattle (with tail betwen his legs).

Harrison was also the initial choice for the public art commission in Old Town/Chinatown that ultimately went to that dragon sculpture that was removed for offending locals, particularly Chinese-Americans. The light sculpture James made would have been a vastly better choice, but to the selection committee it apparently wasn't enough of a tchotchke, which ironically turned out to be the problem with the sculpture they did choose.

In the Aiorema light sculpture's place outside the Armory is a new sign that acts more as a traditional marquee. I spoke with a few people from Portland Center Stage about this, including artistic director Chris Coleman. What I sympathize with the most is their assertion that Portland Center Stage needed a sign that does more to draw people inside. It's perfectly reasonable for them to want a marquee that advertises the plays being put on and so forth.

However, it also seems that a major driving force in the removal of Harrison's sculpture besides the need for more explicit signage is that Portland Center Stage's leadership simply wasn't crazy about Aiorema. The message I heard from PCS was that they were big fans of Harrison's work before and after this one, but that they were disappointed by Aiorema. It wasn't tall enough. It had a funny shape. It was hard to clean.

I'd wondered if a compromise could be found in which the new marquee could stay at the entrance, but Harrison's light sculpture could be moved elsewhere, such as to the other side of the Gerding Theater along 10th Avenue. So far, though, my understanding is that Aiorema will not be relocated. Depending on whom you talk to, it seems to be a board member who doesn't like Aiorema, or a member of PCS in-house leadership. But for whatever reason, they're just not into it.

This brings up an important question. PCS paid Harrison $45,000 for the sculpture (not a lot for that kind of piece but still a large chunk of change), and they own it. They can do whatever they want with Aiorema, including remove it or even destroy it. PCS hasn't done the latter; the sculpture is in storage at the theater. But in the year or two that the sculpture has been standing and glowing on 11th Street, I and many others have developed a fondness for it. What recourse do fans of public artwork have when the client decides they don't like a piece that we do? I also wondered if somehow the sculpture could be altered to remove the name 'Portland Center Stage'. Heck, why not move it to Chinatown where the remains of that removed dragon sculpture sit pitifully?

I also think PCS's need for a bigger, more obvious sign speaks to the architecture of the Gerding Theater. Historic preservation laws would have prevented a major alteration of the Armory, and we might not have wanted that anyway. But in transitioning from an armory to a welcoming public theater, I don't think the architects or client solved the issue of what a massive barrier exists there. One of the exciting aspects of the Gerding Theater was supposed to be that it acted as a people magnet and as a place to congregate even when there wasn't theater showing: a viable public space. I don't the theater does that at all. It's a very nice theater inside, but it still feels like an armory on the outside. And armories were explicitly built to forcefully keep people out.

On top of that, the building's entrance was switched from the 10th Avenue side, where there's a big curving architectural entryway, to the 11th Avenue side. That means they're swimming against the current, so to speak, in directing people into the building. When you make a move like that, you need big obvious, airport-like signage to show people the way.

Harrison's piece isn't right for that mission. But however justified PCS is removing Aiorema, either legally or morally, I think they ought to bring Harrison's fine work back into the public realm where it belongs.