Earlier today I attended a lunchtime panel discussion that was part of the daylong “Revolve-Evolve” symposium offered by the Oregon chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects. The discussion was titled “Our Stake in Designing Portland’s Future”.
Moderated by OPB radio host April Baer, the panel included Carol Mayer Reed, partner at landscape firm Mayer/Reed; Dennis Wilde of Gerding/Edlen Development; Jan Semenza, a board member of the City Repair Project; Portland Development Commission special projects director Robert Alexander; Portland State University urban studies professor, historian and author Carl Abbott; and Don Rood, partner of multidisciplinary design firm The Felt Hat.
The aim was to look at the progressive history of Portland planning, with its achievement of healthier, more sustainable urban environments, and explore the challenges ahead through that prism. Are we resting on our laurels? Who will lead the next generation?
Here are some miscellaneous quotes I jotted down:
PSU’s Carl Abbot, answering an opening question from Baer about whether we should be optimistic or fearful about Portland’s future, said, “There’s really a generation of students I see thinking about sustainable issues in ways we never did.” Maybe PSU students are not representative of the overall societal temperature, but Abbot said he felt encouraged.
Abbot also said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that the challenge for a city like Portland is not in promoting sustainable design but its civic culture. It reminds me of a time a couple years ago when I went to my first US Green Building Council conference in Austin. That afternoon I came out of the conference center feeling energized about how sustainable principles were really going to amount to something big, a real transformation of the built environment. Then I got into a cab, and as the driver and I got talking, he asked what conference I had been at. I told him it was about green building and he said, “What’s green building?”
And this is something that Carol Mayer Reed stressed later in the discussion, that too often the design community insulates itself other than when it’s on the job somewhere. “We need to reach out more, to go outside our own community,” she said. “I think we need to focus on common topics. I think Portland feels like a foreign place to people in other parts of the state. We’ve got to change that.”
Don Rood talked about how designers lend a point of view to political and community deliberations by asking different kinds of questions. He joked, “How many designers does it take to change a light bulb? We ask, ‘Does it need to be a light bulb?’” Sometimes I think that tendency gets on the nerves of non-architects who are looking only for practical, defined thinking. But it’s a good exercise to go through, and it’s one that is crucial for designers to be able to create the best places and spaces.
Taking an audience member’s question, Wilde was asked about the challenge of making room for public buildings (libraries, schools) in new urban neighborhoods. It was a great question, because the two areas where Wilde’s company has built their mixed-use residential, retail office buildings—the Pearl and South Waterfront—are both lacking in those very things. “I think our biggest failure in South Waterfront is creating public amenities,” Wilde told the audience. I really admire how forthright he was about this. But at the same time, it’s not the responsibility of a real estate developer to spearhead this kind of city building. Shouldn’t the local government be on top of this? Oh, I forgot—they can’t even keep open the schools we have.
Semenza, of City Repair and PSU’s Department of Community Health, was quite the orator. Where other speakers spoke softly into the microphone, he brought impassioned oratory. It somehow felt very inspiring and mildly embarrassing at the same time. Which is probably exactly what Semenza was going for. He talked of America spending more on health care than any other country but having millions of uninsured, and used that as a kind of metaphor for larger issues of planning and community building. “We may be comfortable, but we’re not happy,” he said. “People want gathering places, not urban landscapes that isolate people. There’s a real need there.”
One final thought to this already lengthy post, and I apologize for it being a sober one: The Revolve-Evolve symposium was held downtown at the World Trade Center complex. Is it just me, or do they really need to change that name? I mean, it was weird enough when New York’s twin towers were standing, kind of silly even. Now it feels disrespectful. Not only is the ground at Ground Zero sacred, but so is the name.
nice article.
but your final thought; give me a break. being named World Trade Center complex is not disrespectful.
if someone named Brian Libby gets killed by a terrorist are you going to change your name because it's disrespectful?
Posted by: brandonpdx | April 08, 2006 at 01:10 PM