Portland Architecture

Bruce Forster's "Graffiti Funhouse" at Center For Architecture

The list of Portland-based architectural photographers with eye-catching talent and a long history of work is surprisingly short. Michael Mathers is one photographer who has plied his trade here with an array of acclaim, and there are others like Sally Schoolmaster and Rick Keating. But Bruce Forster is near the top when it comes to Portland picture takers focusing on architecture.

This month's show at AIA/Portland's Center For Architecture provides an ideal look at this venerable photographer's work. Called "Graffiti Funhouse: A Tribute to the Artists of Pirate Town", the show documents elaborate graffiti art that was pained on the walls of an abandoned building in Triangle Park, a 35-acre former industrial site on the banks of the Willamette in North Portland. The building was known informally as "Pirate Town" amongst those who hung out or slept there.  It was secluded haven for graffiti artists, skaters and other like-minded souls.

Forster collaborated with Infinity Images  to produce large-format prints and graphics for the show. Sections of painted wall, removed from the building, are also incorporated in the exhibit.

"The graffiti writers are not what you'd expect. They are not pre-teens scribbling their names on bridges," Forster says. "The artists would come into the space with a huge variety of paint and a concept. Their work is beautiful."

The building was recently torn down by The University of Portland, which owns the land and has expansion plans for the area.

Forster settled in Portland in 1970 after earning an MFA in photography and built a substantial client base doing fine art, magazine, corporate, and architectural photography. He also is the owner/founder of Viewfinders Stock Photography, an ever-growing archive of Pacific Northwest imagery. In his Pearl District studio, Bruce has a staff that manages the digital processing, marketing and stock image fulfilliment. He is a co-founder of the Oregon Chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) as well as a member of the Stock Artists Alliance (SAA) and the American Society of Picture Professionals (ASPP).

I don't blame Forster for getting interested in graffiti. It's long been a fascination of mine as well. I like to photograph it, as in the shot below. And the psychology of graffiti is interesting as well.

Here's an excerpt from an Oregonian story I wrote two years ago about graffiti art (and which, like most of the paper's past articles, is shamefully not available online):

In ancient Greece and Rome, artists scratched symbols onto walls. The preserved ruins of Pompeii revealed graffiti in the form of poems and bawdy phrases, not unlike today's public bathrooms. The Vikings and Mayans also wrote graffiti. During the early 20th century, graffiti attracted the art world's gaze. In 1920s Paris, Brassai photographed local graffiti, inspiring the Surrealists such as Salvador Dali and, later in the 1950s, the more socially conscious Situationist movement.

"They saw it as a kind of wild, anti-bourgeois statement, an authentic means of expression," says James van Dyke, an art history professor at Reed College. "Graffiti artists perform in dangerous spaces, and transgressing the law at night fulfills a kind of desire for adventure, of danger, of an authentic existence that jobs -- and their fears of breaking the law -- can't realize."

Forster's exhibit at the Center For Architecture began with last night's First Thursday reception (which I unfortunately missed watching the Ducks play a horrific season opener) and will continue through September.

The gallery is located at 403 NW 11th Avenue, at the corner of 11th and Flanders, and is open 9-5, Monday-Friday.

Jahn pictures the DNA of Oregon design

In the last few years Jeff Jahn has quickly risen to become one of the leading voices in Portland on contemporary art. He is a jack of all trades, acting as the co-founder and a leading critic for the visual arts blog Port as well as a working artist and a curator, in the latter case both with his own organization, Organism, but also in a guest role at other galleries. Jahn has also been involved on a volunteer basis with the Portland Art Museum.

Originally from the midwest, Jahn is also a cousin of famed architect Helmut Jahn, and perhaps for that reason, Jeff has a strong interest in architecture and design (particularly bridges and transit projects), which often figures into his Port writings. He is also, just as I might say of myself to a lesser degree, a really fervent talker with a great deal of stamina. Nor is this pony-tailed multi-tasker lacking in confidence, smarts or chutzpah.

Recently Jeff sent me a quartet of his photos with accompanying commentary by email. He talks about trying to capture the "DNA," or in other words the essence, of a design in a manner that straddles abstraction without crossing over fully. This first shot, of the Portland Aerial Tram, is included in the Visual Chronicle of Portland. Of the tram image and his architectural photography in general, Jahn says: 

"I’m essentially using photography to turn architecture into paintings... a kind of anti-architecture (a la Gordon Matta Clark) based on finding the compelling design DNA of a building and letting it exist visually without any function or physical load bearing... essentially turning a building into a visual philosophy. For this work I’m uninterested in being a documentarian and tend to present disorienting space more like an object that is both emptied and complicated for the purpose of contemplation. I like Todd Eberle too but he's way more documentary in focus, even his abstract stuff is less spatially confusing and more documentary. You can tell I’m a painter and also have made art deco-style stained glass windows as a kid (age 7+). You can really see it in the composition."

This next shot is of the Standard Insurance Building (also known as the Standard Plaza), built in 1963 and designed by Skidmore, Owings, Merrill.

In a piece for The Oregonian I seem to recall ran in late 1999, Randy Gragg listed this as his favorite Portland building, and I think it might be mine as well. "I agree it's underrated," Jahn says. "I love the escalators and the plaza around the building." 

The photo here depicts part of the open plaza design that SOM employed to give the ground level a better integration with the street. You don't see many tall buildings in Portland today where the ground floor just kind of disappears. It's always storefront retail for a mixed-use affair. The Standard stands out in this way as did many buildings by Mies and other architects of this period did.

The Standard, says Bart King's Architectural Guidebook to Portland, was also ahead of its time in having underground parking and a fireproof interior stairwell. 

The next two photos are of the Mt. Angel Abbey Library, designed by the legendary Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, and Pietro Belluschi's Equitable Building  (now called the Commonwealth). 

"I love the plate tectonics of this," Jahn says of Mt. Angel. This was Aalto's last building in the United States (and one of only two along with Baker House at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts), completed in 1970 just six years before the architect's death, and his next to last project of any kind (predating only the Essen Opera House in Germany). 

The wood detailing you see in this picture is a key attraction of the interior - it's not surprising that Aalto also designed furniture. I was also blown away visiting Mt. Angel a couple years ago by the plethora of natural light. It is organized around a central, open circular well, and then ringed by curving reading tables and radiating stacks. Even though the library is nearly 40 years old, it feels like a small Utopian society of the future.

Looking at his photo of Belluschi's Equitable Building here, the look we know is not to be found. After all, the building owns a place in architectural history as the world's first aluminum-clad structure. Jahn says of his picture, "Since the mechanicals of this building are massively important I thought I'd focus on the part of the building that houses and vents those mechanicals.  We take things like air conditioning for granted and how many buildings have good looking mechanical housings?"

Jumpsuits, tai-chi and roving theater: South Waterfront's artistic experiment

If you've ventured down to the South Waterfront district in the last year, at times there haven't been many people around beyond construction workers building condos, medical staff and patients at OHSU, and a few of the first intrepid residents to this new area of town.

But maybe you've seen a woman in a strange orange jumpsuit that's been altered into a dress. If you thought to yourself, 'What's that weird artist doing in South Waterfront?", you weren't far off. Artist Linda Johnson has been acting since September 1, 2007 as the neighborhood's official artist in residence.

What does it mean for a neighborhood to have an artist in residence? It's not necessarily the kind of situation there are rules for. But Johnson, more than presenting her own work, has brought in a steady stream of guest performers and artists (13 in all) to help give South Waterfront something that it can't achieve solely from the metal and glass of its modern towers: a sense of community.

 

Or, as their website puts it, "Artists representing all media have been invited to create time-based, temporary work that explores and promotes a sense of place in the South Waterfront district. The goal of this accumulated practice of installation, performance and written/spoken word is to inspire dialog, inquiry, curiosity and participation among the South Waterfront residents, as well as the people of Portland."

I can't think of too many neighborhoods that have tried such a thing, but SoWa is the perfect place. When you walk around this less than half-finished neighborhood, it desperately needs people to come out of their condos and establish a personality. Many of the artists' efforts may be conceptually esoteric or even a little silly, but that's all part of the fun.

Johnson has a history of art that celebrates and enlivens forgotten or under-utilized urban spaces. In 2000, her performance piece "Tax Lot 1S1E44ODD" converted a median strip near an I-5 offramp into a community garden. The year before, she was part of a group art show at the AIA gallery with architect Mark Lakeman and artists Brian Borello and Vanessa Renwick in which the crisp, modern Jeff Lamb-designed space was covered with hay bales.

Among the artists and presentations so far: In July there was Ten Tiny Dances, with site-based dance performances throughout the neighborhood. Also last month, noted public artist Bill Will created with Johnson in "Promenade" an episodic sound, light and performance piece tuned with the sunset and the landscape.

In May, artist Horatio Hun-Yan Law organized a series of interactive tai-chi workshops. In March, artist Adam Kuby actually treated the landscape itself, subject in previous generations to ruptures and injuries through the building of I-5 and the severing of the Corbett/Terwilliger/Lair Hill neigbhorhoods from the water, with giant acupuncture needles. In April, Maria T. D. ("touchdown"?) Inocencio and Mark Smith created in "Compass" an interactive map-making project with residents that put Portland at the center of the world and asked them to fill in the blanks. There have also been performances and works by the talented jazz musician Tim DuRoche and photographer Christopher Rauschenberg (son of Robert Rauschenberg), among others.

For those still looking to get in on the action, next up is the final month of the guest-Artist in Residence program. Sojourn Theater's "Built" is will investigate the essence of place with a series of games, research, performance and audience interaction. As their press release says, "Sojourn asks participants to help imagine the multi-faceted futures of cities in the midst of growth and change." Today (Saturday, August 23) will include a public dialog, and then performances of the finished piece will be held during the TBA Festival on September 5, 6 and 7.

Congratulations to Linda Johnson on a year's worth of successful efforts to create a sense of place for the architecture and people in South Waterfront to thrive.

Cloepfil's artistic inspirations

Arcy Douglass has an extensive interview with architect Brad Cloepfil on the PORT website today, focusing on how modern and contemporary art has affected his designs. Cloepfil is a big art fan, and he cites works by Richard Serra, Sol Le Witt, Robert Irwin and others:

Douglass: How did your early experience with art feedback into your own creative process as an architect?

Cloepfil: When I was younger, I tended to be influenced by the raw experience of the work itself. At first, I wasn't even aware of who created a work, whether it was Richard Serra or Robert Irwin, it was the experience of the work itself that was important. The experience makes you ask yourself about the spatial quality of that type of work and about the ideas that those artists are exploring. It just resonates with you. 

I wasn't seeing anything comparable in buildings. It just seems like those guys understood more about the intentions of the 19th and 20th century architecture than the architects did. They had clarity of thought and a practice that was built on the exploration of material that became very important to me. The singular act of focus to create a work of art was really impressive. 

I saw Richard Serra's Circuit at MoMA and it is just four pieces of steel propped up in the corners of the room. The physical presence and the mass of the steel and its ability to radiate space into the small gallery was for me a very architectural experience that I could relate to much easier than the so-called "architecture" that was being produced at that time. The experience is about the material and the way that the material is made. It was also easier to learn from the artists because their work is so pure. By that I mean, the work that I was interested in was focused on the exploration of only one or two ideas. 

Buildings tend to be more complicated. It is hard to understand buildings when you are young unless they are a pure pavilion or something. A building is full of program, structure, stairs and support spaces that are necessary for the function of the building but very different than the direct experience of seeing work by Serra or Irwin. As a young student, art was more accessible. It was easier to understand what the artists were thinking about and what they were pursuing in their work.

What art has affected and influenced the rest of you architects out there? Is it an all-black painting that captured your fancy, like Cloepfil, or is there some closet Thomas Kincaide lover out there eager to cite his influence on their quaint English cottage?

As much as art, I also remember Cloepfil talking in a previous New York Times story I wrote about how he was inspired by the landscape of Oregon. ''It's a very romantic perception of space,'' he explained. ''I think it frees you up, and allows you to think of architecture as something more than objects.''