Portland Architecture

Burnside Couplet Considered Amidst A One-Way Street Glut

I'm still in London on vacation right now, and it's too late at night for me to write a long post right now. And it's also probably a bad idea for me to address again the Burnside Couplet debate before thinking and analyzing and researching the debate properly. But one though occurred to me that I've long meant to address on the blog, and it's very much related to the Burnside couplet debate:

Does Portland simply have too many one way streets?

I ask this not from the perspective of what's technically the most efficient or prudent or proper for either pedestrians or even cars. I'm talking about something more elusive and indefinable - at least by me.

I remember several years ago at the beginning of the NBA season and one ESPN writer, David Aldridge, picked the Trail Blazers to win the championship. The way he said in print was, 'Get ready for a parade down one of Portland's crazy maze of one way streets.' The guy didn't even live here, and probably spent most of his time going between the airport, the Rose Garden, and maybe a restaurant or two (surely El Gaucho if his NBA brethren visiting town are any indication). But still, one of the most fundamental things he observed about the city was that we have an inordinate amount of one-way streets.

I think one of the most principal reasons I'm opposed to the Burnside couplet is the emotional feeling - not so much a practical or cognitive one - that I'm sick of all the one way streets. And especially in the case of Burnside, which is arguably the central spine of the city, the only one that touches Southwest, Southeast and Northeast, I like the idea that it's one grand boulevard that, in addition to moving cars and people and being crossed regularly, also unites the city. And uniting isn't about segregating. A couplet to me is naturally a kind of segregation. Sure, it's more efficient in most cases. But I don't like the idea that it's always the best solution in a broader sense.

Does anyone else share my one-way-street fatigue? Or  a sense that the most efficient, practical solution for an urban design problem or issue isn't always the best one?

London Sprawling

Hello from London, where I'm on Day 3 of vacation. This is my fourth trip to the city, and it's still one of my favorite places in the world. How does this relate to Portland architecture? Only peripherally, although it allows one to see home in new ways.

This afternoon, for example, I was thinking about the scale of Portland, particularly with respect to height and residential buildings. We've gone gaga for thin, tall condo towers in recent years, of course, and I was always one of the people supporting that transformation. No more squatty stump buildings! But the funny thing is, for how huge of a world capitol it is, London does not have many skyscrapers at all, and those that are seem to be offices. Instead, what I see here is lots and lots of row houses and brownstones. We're staying with friends in a neighborhood called Wandsworth Common, just south of the Thames from the central city. Nothing here is taller than three or four stories, yet it feels like they're using space well here because the homes are right up against each other. Each has a small back yard, too. I'd like to see this housing format used more often in Portland. Of course some of our point towers will have brownstones and townhouses at ground level, and we also have the occasional row of narrow-lot homes, but usually those are pretty ugly. How might we learn from London in this respect?

I also had yesterday and today some of my most profoundly moving architectural experiences. Every time in London, the girlfriend and I always make a point of returning to St. Dunston's in the East, a church designed by the great Christopher Wren that was all but destroyed by German bombs during The Blitz of WWII. However, the authorities preserved the outer facade of St. Dunston's, and placed a garden inside. Now, with the church's proximity to the financial district in The City, workers often go and eat there lunch there. It's a wonderful, lovely public space made possible by unspeakable horrors. I've written on this blog many times before of my perhaps somewhat perverse attraction to remnants of destroyed architecture, the ghosts lurking in the rubble and ashes. St. Dunston's isn't perverse at all, but instead defiantly optimistic.

We also came across near the Tower of London a long stretch of the original Roman Wall surrounding the original City of London. Here was this masonry wall built two thousand years ago, and it looks like it was built yesterday. And ironically, it sits in front of a mid-20th Century building with some of the windows boarded up - the wall is in much better shape!

Speaking of the Blitz, we also made our latest return visit to St. Paul's Cathedral, which is quite probably the most breathtaking work of architecture I've ever experienced. I'm at a loss to describe it in great detail - it's pretty late as I write this - but as we were there yesterday I took a different line of attack. Instead of walking all over the church, such as into the crypt where famous English heroes like the Duke of Wellington (of Battle of Trafalgar fame) are buried, or the many secondary spaces, I instead just sat in the main sanctuary under the dome of St. Paul's, where the ceiling is painted not unlike the Sistine Chapel. Just sitting there under this massive space was incredibly profound - and not because Charles and Diana were married there. Most of all, I think of the miracle of how the cathedral was saved from destruction during the war when everything around it was leveled. During the war, there were hundreds of volunteers - many of them architects - who stayed inside St. Paul's all night, even as the bombs were falling, waiting with their hoses and buckets of water to put out fires and explosions. I may crow about historic preservation when buildings like the Rosefriend Apartments are sentenced for death, but I probably won't place myself in front of the bulldozers. It's the efforts of these volunteers during the war that moves me as much as Wren's genius.

Today we also visited the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, also known as Kew Gardens, where there are some astonishing greenhouses - I think at least one is a world heritage site. Imagine a big building in Portland like Union Station, but then pretend it's made almost entirely of glass. They had just about every kind of plant in the world inside these greenhouses, it seemed, but the structure around them captured my imagination the most. Particularly in a gray, rainy climate like Portland, I wish we had more glass-enclosed spaces like these - not necessarily greenhouses, but winter gardens and such. The park being built behind the Fox Tower is a start - I love that there will be a glass covered area there. But in time I'd like to see something glassy in Portland of a grander scale - not even necessarily a building in the traditional sense, but a transparent, light-filled structure where you can gather in the darkest, rainiest months and feel illuminated - both figuratively and literally.

One thing though: as much as I love big important cities like London or Tokyo, I've realized my ultimate preference really is for 'big' cities that aren't quite as big, be it a city like Portland in the US, or European cities like Amsterdam. There's just a little bit less fear and grime, although to give London it's proper due, there's also more of the sublime.

Ladd Tower Goes Rental(Rosefriend Still Rubble)

On Thursday it was announced that the Ladd Tower condominium project will instead be developed that the project will instead be developed as 220 luxury rental apartments, along with the planned four retail tenants on the ground floor.

According to the press release, plans for the temporary move and preservation of the Ladd Carriage House remain unchanged. The Rosefriend Apartments building on Broadway (across from The Oregonian) was not mentioned in the release, so one assumes it's still going to be demolished at the bequest of its owner, First Christian Church. And regardless of whatever practical realities may exist to justify its fate, I still find the Rosefriend's current status on architectural death row pretty depressing. But we've been through that. (Appropriately, a Police song just came on my i-Pod via the shuffle setting as I wrote this, with Sting singing the lyrics, "What is my reaction/what should it be/confronted by this latest atrocity?")

I'm not sure what to make of the business decision to switch from selling condos to renting apartments. One could argue this is part of a somewhat softening condo market in the central city. However, it does seem that the market for higher-end apartments is increasing. A couple years ago I wrote about an Architecture W project in Nagoya for Dwell magazine, and it was just such a building: meeting the increasing demand of a Japanese middle class that after the Asian financial crisis isn't always as quick to live for tomorrow, economically speaking, in the way that home ownership often requires. I think this could be an increasing trend in the US too: people who want a nice place, but for various reasons don't want to buy it.

One other noteworthy part of Thursday's announcement: the partnership between developer John Carroll's Carroll Investments and Opus Northwest is not going forward. Opus is handling the Ladd apartment gig solo. Anything to be inferred from this turn of events? Carroll will still be involved, the press release says, in the Ladd Carriage House preservation, which, paired with his efforts to preserve and house the Lovejoy Columns, keeps alive a laudable collected résumé of preservation.

A Streetcar Named Perspire: Urban Renewal, Rail, Couplet and Planning Considered

Recently Commissioner Sam Adams has advocated for a new Portland streetcar line to the east side of the Willamette River, and to help pay for it the city is exploring expanding or extending the time frame of various urban renewal areas. And there is a sense of urgency to Adams' and others' efforts, because to secure matching federal funds for the streetcar, the city will have to come up with matching funding by an August 14 deadline. The Federal Transit Administration, spurred by Congressman Earl Blumenauer, has encouraged the region to apply for $75 million in matching funds. But how to get our own $75 million to be matched by the feds is difficult for our city's cash-strapped coffers.

However, some are opposed to more or expanded Urban Renewal Areas because they can sap funds from other efforts. For example, Multnomah County chair Ted Wheeler expressed reticence because the county would have to contribute. "We could open 250 beds at Wapato jail," he told the Portland Tribune's Nick Budnick last week. "Given the significant investment the county is making, we should have a direct say in how those dollars are spent."

If you look at the maps of where an east side Grand Avenue/MLK Boulevard streetcar would go, most all of it falls within the current borders of the Central Eastside URA, which extends from the Ross Island Bridge in the south to I-84 in the north, and the Willamette River east to 12th Avenue. The Oregon Convention Center URA extends north from I-84 where the CE URA ends, and extends down Grand and/or MLK all the way to North Portland boulevard.

But the bigger issue is duration. Currently the Central Eastside URA expires in 2018. In order to generate the funds needed on the local side for the streetcar, between $35 and $75 million as I understand it, the URA would have to be extended.

Wheeler is right that something is lost by manipulating URA areas to pay for infrastructure. It's a lot of money that could be used for other budget problems like education.

But Portland has long since gone down the light rail and streetcar path. We've got to keep the faith. And the streetcar is, as the URA fund-generating indicates, a pied piper of investment dollars. Developments spring up along most areas rail tracks happen. Besides, the Grand/MLK area between the Ross Island and Burnside bridges is really an untapped resource. We don't want to scare away all the small businesses in the industrial portion, but these two boulevards are aready zoned for high-density housing but haven't been taken advantage of. A streetcar would change that.

Besides, what's with all the streetcars so far being on the west Side? A few weeks ago I happened to be in South Waterfront on the first day of the new streetcar there. It was empty. Would that have happened with a streetcar on, say, Hawthorne?

Although I agree with Adams on the adding of a Grand/MLK streetcar line, there's just one problem: its attachment to another effort of the Commissioner's -- the Burnside couplet.

I see the Burnside couplet as a 1970s-style effort to move more automobiles. It won't help traffic heading east on Burnside from the West Hills, because there's already the bottleneck of the tunnel feeding into Burnside. Meanwhile, the great "barrier" that some call Burnside will effectively be doubled by making Couch more of an auto-oriented street. I think the couplet plan is contrary to the pedestrian oriented planning that has long been a tradition here. I like Adams, but this plan sucks.

I plan to write a separate post in the days ahead about the couplet plan, but I felt it necessary to bring it into this discussion about Urban Renewal Areas as well.

Whether it's the streetcar or URAs, we also have to remember that neither City Council members nor the Portland Development Commission are planners. Portland has a long history of laudable city planning, and we need to remember that plans like the streetcar or a proposed couplet are not for elected officials or development agencies to put forward without it fitting into comprehensive city-wide plans. It's a shame we haven't had a Central City Plan update that's in step with the Grand/MLK streetcar efforts and the Burnside couplet efforts.

PSU Students Imagine New-Old City Stories

Today and tonight two Portland State University Department of Architecture classes are offering public presentations of their projects at the Unitus Building (2121 SW Fourth Avenue, Third Floor). The 'Architecture and Human Action' group presents from 1-5pm, but I know a little bit more about the second group, called "T[h]reading the City" thanks to some correspondence with PSU architecture professor and keen chap Clive Knights.

Instead of paraphrasing what Knights told me in his letter (I actually got a letter in the mail - how quaint!), I'm going to pass on some of it directly (after some laborious retyping) because I think it's fascinating:

Students have been asked to consider the identity of the city, this city, Portland. They are exploring identity not as a single definition or absolute but as a multitude of myths embedded in the landscape, buildings and unfolding human drama of everyday life.

The project speculates on the contribution of the act of walking in interpreting urban space, architecture and cultural meaning...Quite literally, they have been asked to walk in somebody else's shoes (acquired from thrift stores) and over the past several weeks have explored the city on foot.

Simultaneously, they developed a character study inspired by the shoes using narrative to generate a fictional 'other' whose detail developed in parallel with the unfolding of the city. Students then developed stories that interlaced these characters with a particular route and destination. These stories, and the walks that unfold within them, were then creatively transplanted into the form of hand-made books, a hybrid of literature and map, each of which can accompany and guide the reader across the city in unique ways.

It took me a little bit of time to get this whole concept. When I got Knights's letter in the mail, it came with one of the aforementioned hand-made student books, and a long explanation about five-fold the excepts above. But eventually it clicked with me, and I love what they're doing: combining disciplines of architecture, fiction writing, planning, cartography and social needs in one project, and in a very hands-on way.

Apologies for the short notice on today's student presentations. It'll be interesting to see the narratives they come up with. In the hand-made book I was sent, there are collections of small moments. In one, for example, a woman on a sidewalk outside Saks looks through the store's display window at the expensive merchandise and then sizes up herself in the reflection, wearing cheaper clothes. Instead of feeling inferior, she's empowered.

And this begs the additional question: What fictitious narratives might the rest of us invent? There could be the street preacher in Courthouse Square, the vinyl record hound perusing Jackpot and 2nd Avenue Records, the middle-aged woman coming out of a salon with her little dog. It's not about stereotyping, I'd say, but imagining how others use the same city we do.

Considering One-Stop Shops

This weekend, while watching hour after hour of the NCAA basketball tournament, I saw a commercial for Renaissance Homes, the Lake Oswego based residential builder. If I’m not mistaken, Renaissance builds mostly single-family homes in suburban subdivisions. That’s not really my area of interest, to put it diplomatically. But the Renaissance commercial piqued my interest in companies like this as one-stop shops offering design, construction and a kind of mass customization.

In the realm of larger buildings that individual architecture firms and general contractors partner on, I wonder if there’s anything we can learn from these smaller shops that put design and construction under one roof.

A lot of developers seem to do this in an unofficial way, frequently working with the same architecture firm and contractor time after time, kind of like their outsourced in-house team. Larger-scale projects are much more sophisticated and increasingly require a wide variety of experts and subcontractors. For big players on the design or builder side like Hoffman Construction, ZGF Partnership, it probably wouldn’t make sense. They’re already sizable outfits as-is, and they’re working with talented people all over the region and, in ZGF’s case especially, the world.

But I wonder if there’s a scale of project--bigger than single family homes but smaller than huge multistory buildings--that would benefit from offering design and construction in-house, and maybe begin to develop some more industrial-style, prefab expertise of comparable designers of, say, boats and ships. While you’re at it, why not also add marketing and branding efforts to your design process like Ziba Design is doing more and more?

Le Corbusier famously called architecture “machines for living”. Might there be a portion of the building market targeted by a new kind of entity combining these traditionally separate elements?

Duffy and Hall Elected AIA Fellows

The American Institute of Architects has elected local architects Kent Duffy of SRG Partnership and Nels Hall of YGH Architecture (he's the 'H') to its College of Fellows, recognizing a career's worth of achievement.

Hall has been a YGH design principal since 1980. Prior to that, he worked as an architect in Boston and Zurich firms. Trained at MIT and Cal Berkeley, his experience includes new town planning, commercial, governmental, medical, educational and housing facilities in the U.S., Middle East, Africa and Europe. He also has quite a head of hair.

In addition to his work at SRG, Kent Duffy served as AIA/Portland chapter president when I worked there six or seven years ago. I remember working together on the chapter's annual design awards, and he was always exceptionally gracious. Soft spoken with an endearingly old-school architect's penchant for bow ties and tweed (I'm guessing elbow patches on a jacket or two as well), Kent grew up in The Dalles as a builder's son, studying architecture at the University of Oregon and (drumroll please) Harvard. His best known work at SRG is probably the Lillis Business Complex at UO, a pioneering sustainable building completed a few years back.

More recently, Kent and SRG have designed for Mt. Angel Abbey has a host of new classrooms and other spaces adjacent to the masterful library there by legendary Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. In particular at Mt.Angel, Kent has embraced forward-thinking daylighting design principles in collaboration with UO professor and sustainable design pioneer GZ "Charlie" Brown, including classrooms that can be lit year-round entirely with natural illumination. SRGD Partnership, anyone?

Weston the Height Away

Sunday’s Oregonian included a Randy Gragg profile of developer Joe Weston in the Opinion section. Weston has spent decades of developing small apartments and other projects around the city in established neighborhoods. He’s now one of the city’s major players in the boom of larger high-density residential projects.

Weston took over as developer of the Benson Tower in the West End for the late Eric van Doorninck of Vancouver, who originally spearheaded the project. The Benson, which is now nearing completion, will be the first point tower – a condo with 8,000 square feet or less, as compared to the more standard (for Portland) slab tower of 12,000-20,000 square feet.

More recently, Weston has taken the Benson model here and will break ground soon on The Manhattan, a 31-story condo at 14th and Alder. And as Randy reports, there is also a Weston project coming to the Lloyd District: The Cosmopolitan at Grand and Multnomah, which hopefully finally invigorate residential activity there to balance out the shopping, offices, the Rose Garden, and the overall suburban-esque environment.

But what caught my eye most in Randy’s profile was Weston’s campaign to have the city change the building code to remove height limits for buildings with 8,000 square feet or less per floor. With the Central City Plan update coming from city planners, it’s not out of the question. I think it’s unlikely, but an idea worth discussing.

Randy's article calls the emergence of point towers "era-shifting".What do the rest of you think of Weston's proposal? I don't know about allowing unlimited height, but I certainly favor skinnier buildings. This could favor more quarter-block developments as well, which would be great to see. I'm really tired of big condos that take up entire blocks or even half-blocks.

Green Lighting Signal Improvements That Should Have Come Decades Ago

A front-page story in Sunday's Oregonian by Michael Milstein details how local and state governments have undertaken numerous small measures that collectively help offset greenhouse gas levels and, in turn, help fight global warming. Between traffic signal improvements, tree planting and building efficiency measures, Milstein reports, the next few decades years will see these efforts alone reduce carbon dioxide by millions of tons. Of course, that's a good thing.

But one aspect of the report, even amidst the good news of carbon reductions, got me frustrated. According to a sidebar report, Portland transportation managers have recently cut greenhouses gases by adjusting traffic signals. The idea is to allow traffic to flow more efficiently with fewer red-light stops. At intersections like 39th and Division, Martin Luther King between Killingsworth and Broadway, and a stretch of Powell Boulevard, they've tracked traffic around the clock and created new timing plans with the help of computer programs.

At Southeast 39th Avenue, for example, "It shows that all the drivers on an average weekday will now stop 5,051 fewer times at red lights and will together spend 210 fewer hours driving the section of Southeast 39th."

Whoa, stop there a minute. (Or several minutes if you're at the Burnside/Sandy intersection with 12th.) Why did we need the threat of global warming to make traffic lights operate as efficiently as possible?

I'll be the first to admit that when traveling in the city, it's always better to be taking mass transit instead of driving. And frequently that's precisely what I do. My car only accrues a few thousand miles per year. But when I do drive, I want to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible. What driver doesn't? It's always seemed somewhat likely that not all traffic lights are timed together as efficiently as possible, but I always thought there must be people at various local and state departments of transportation working on this problem. And now we learn they've decided to make the stoplight system more efficient because it cuts carbon? How about cutting the years off my life spent stopped at red lights?

I think of all the times I've been in a hurry sometime, passed through one newly-turned green light and, no matter how fast or slow I drive, been forced to stop a block later for an ill-timed red light. Granted I'm probably more passionate about driving than most, but I want there to be a team of top experts working practically around the clock to determine exactly how to get all cars through all of the thousands of traffic lights in this city as efficiently as humanly possible. If they haven't been doing this all along, as in for the last several decades at the very least, then that makes me pretty frustrated.

And as much as I favor any policy designed to reduce carbon emissions and fight global warming, I must confess that I feel even greater motivation simply as a driver. Make these lights work as efficiently as possible -- like you should have been doing for our frickin' grandparents!

Laika Campus: “Terrible Placemaking” For The Very Second Time?

In Friday’s Oregonian Randy Gragg reports on the unveiling of much-anticipated designs for Laika Entertainment’s new campus. Unsurprisingly given that Nike co-founder Phil Knight owns Laika, the new project’s designer is TVA Architects.

No quarrel about that: TVA and head principal Robert Thompson exhibit, as Randy put it, a “brand of classical, highly modernism, a la Mies van der Rohe by way of Richard Meier.” And the Nike campus architecture is first-rate. I also like what I see from the initial renderings (to be posted soon).

But what about putting the headquarters in suburban Tualatin?

The announcement of Laika going to 'burbs reminded me of something said in a Metropolis magazine article I wrote in 2001 comparing the new Adidas headquarters in North Portland (revamped from the former Bess Kaiser hospital) to Nike’s headquarters in Beaverton. Charlie Hales, a City Council member at the time, said this:

Both companies have shown a lot of community spirit and willingness to be good corporate citizens. But I think the real distinction is where these corporations choose to live. That's about as sharp a contrast as you can see.

Nike's corporate campus is the ultimate well-designed, well-executed, attractive suburban pod. It's offices surrounded by parking lots inside a berm across the street from a trailer park and down the street from strip malls. It's great architecture, but it's terrible place making.

Laika’s campus won’t have a berm, and it might be better integrated into the surrounding fabric. I also think the renderings so far look very nice: not as grand as Nike, but perhaps better for it. Laika will also have lots of very nice landscaped open space on its site, something that probably wouldn’t have been possible in a Portland location.

But think of the massive influx Portland is experiencing right now with young creatives, precisely the talent pool from which Laika will hope to draw. I’d wager they’re overwhelmingly choosing to live in Portland proper and not Tualatin or any other suburb.

Laika certainly will have more space and cheaper land way out in Tualatin, as well as ideally close proximity to both I-5 and I-205. But the company has also chosen to sequester itself far from the energy and life in which even most of its employees will live. That means hundreds more people will be driving down the highway each day to get to their job. In that same Nike-Adidas article, I remember Owen Clemens of Adidas (where, in full disclosure, my girlfriend works) saying of the company’s relocation from their own suburban offices to North Portland, “Our lifestyles revolve around downtown more than the suburbs, and being in Beaverton made for some nasty commutes.”

There's one hope for Laika's hapless Portland-habitating employees: a MAX line that takes them there. If that were to happen in time, and Laika were part of a community of businesses advocating for such transit investments, then their going to Tualatin could ultimately be a good thing. But that's a far cry from reality.

It's also not my intention to villify Laika, Nike or Phil Knight. As a longtime film writer, I'm excited about the transformation of the former Vinton Studios into Laika, a studio that could one day compete directly with Pixar and other Hollywood animation studios. Laika has some tremendously talented people on board like director Henry Sellick of Nightmare Before Christmas fame. And I'm also proud to have Nike here, particularly as a Ducks fan, since Nike was born from the Oregon track program. But I wish the locating of these companies' offices was as progressive in its thinking as what they produce.

This shouldn’t be about bashing TVA or even Tualatin. TVA does excellent work, and there are plenty of companies located in the suburbs for whom that was probably the right decision, because their employees and customer base are congruent with that location. But Laika shouldn’t belong in the suburbs. And it’s a shame that Oregon’s most prominent corporate citizen and leader didn’t come to that realization.

Downtown's Retail Challenge(and Opportunity)

In two articles in today's Oregonian, one in the Business section and one from In Portland, Fred Leeson looks at downtown's retail challenge. "Facing competition on all fronts," the In Portland sub headline goes, "business leaders bank on the city center's biggest transformation since World War II to win back shoppers."

In the other article, Leeson summarizes things nicely:

"No fewer than 112 blocks will face a new transit mall set for completion in 2009. Condo towers are putting hundreds of customers steps from shops. Business leaders have a $15.3 million plan to help downtown stores compete with malls, including the new "lifestyle" centers that cater to the regions most affluent shoppers."

These lifestyle centers are just malls with pedestrian areas outdoors instead of indoors, which is supposed to be more like a city but feels a lot more synthetic. However, they've been on an upswing in popularity. With more of a true melting pot downtown (including some destitute, begging and/or hackey-sack playing people) as well as no free parking like most of their mall competitors, retailers downtown have (or at least perceive) more challenges in being reached by their customers.

However, I also think of examples like REI's Pearl District store. In one article I wrote recently, the manager there told me how business had been way up since they relocated from Jantzen Beach Center. Customers told them the store was so much easier to access than before, because they didn't get sucked into the Interstate 5 bottleneck at the nearby Columbia River bridge crossing.

Regardless, I think downtown will fare well in the long run. The biggest asset is housing. However pedestrian friendly lifestyle centers may be once you get there, they usually have to be accessed by car. That means dealing with terrible traffic in places like Tualatin, Tigard and Clackamas. It's probably worth it if you live in those areas already, but I think in the long run downtown Portland businesses needn't worry about Portlanders disappearing to Bridgeport Village.

Downtown may present more practical, logistical and social headaches, but it presents the chance to have shoppers living above you or within a few blocks' walk or just a quick streetcar ride away. In other words, housing is the key to Portland's retail fortunes, as well as the central city's larger health.

I also think that at least from a retail perspective one has to think of downtown and the Pearl District as one place. When I go shopping downtown, I inevitably continue on to the Brewery Blocks and beyond, usually with shops, food/drink and art galleries all part of the same trip. Or vice versa. The notion of two neighborhoods is an imaginary one. If there's both a downtown business association and Pearl District business association in this city, they ought to be having a lot of shared meetings and strategy sessions.

At the same time, I don't think retail concerns should be the biggest driver in urban development. Business and retail are important - we want them to be successful. But they're only part of a larger picture. The needs and desires of homeowners, students, non-profits and numerous other groups should be just as importantly considered in planning the city. Retail in downtown will benefit most from a healthy and balanced downtown, embracing its most distinct asset compared to suburban malls: that they are welcoming of and easily accessible to all--not a Lifestyle Center but a center of life.

UO's Future Arena, Powered By TVA

The University of Oregon's up-and-down campaign to generate funds for a new basketball arena has generated a lot of press over the last couple years. New athletic director Pat Kilkenny, a millionaire and longtime Ducks fundraiser, signed on with the new arena fundraising effort in mind. Beat reporters also inherently tend to follow the money in a story like this, with good reason: only with a sizable budget can the project go forward.

But I think for the long run there's a more important issue at stake: what this new arena is going to look and feel like.

The new arena will replace McArthur Court, a cherished old hall dating to 1926 - the second oldest on-campus gym in America after Fordham's Rose Hill Gym. In 2001 The Sporting News named "The Pit", as it's more commonly known, as the "best gym in America". A lot of that has to do with the fans, but it also has to do with the architecture. The crowd is very close to the action, with a balcony rising almost straight up. Mac Court can be very daunting for opposing teams, as #1-ranked UCLA was reminded this season.

TVA Architects of Portland has the job, in collaboration with Kansas City's Ellerbe Beckett, a major sports facility designer. TVA of course designed the Nike campus in Beaverton, so their designing the UO arena seems to testify once more with the athletic giant's strong connections to the school's athletic department. In terms of design, TVA and founding principal Robert Thompson unquestionably have a feel for the kind of crisp, modern but expressive and quietly monumental style needed. I also get the sense that the architects have a healthy respect for McArthur Court, and I think we're all in agreement that a similarly intimate environment should be replicated. For such a big public project, one could argue for a top international architect, but as a lifelong Duck fan I actually like the idea of choosing a local firm that has a deep, established sense for the university and its athletics.

As always, the attached rendering offers merely a small glimpse at what the arena will ultimately look like. But if we have to say goodbye to Mac Court (I'd actually have preferred rebuilding the original), it's tantalizing to see where Oregon will play basketball for the next century or so.

Incidentally, TVA has also recently unveiled its design for the new Tualatin campus of Laika animation studios, owned by Nike head Phil Knight. More on that soon.

Goodbye WaMo, Hello Condos

This weekend I was driving by the former Washington High School (later Washington-Monroe) along Southeast 12th Avenue near Morrison and noticed a demolition in progress.

Somehow, despite reading The Oregonian cover to cover every day (or at least skimming it), I'd missed the report that Beam Construction has made a deal with Portland Public Schools (years in the making) to redevelop the long-vacant Washington High School site. According to the article, and confirmed to me in a recent phone conversation with Bradley Malsin, head of Beam, the school's original building facade will be preserved, while some of the other surrounding structures are being torn down. I can't argue with that: some of those structures were fairly ugly and compromised the integrity of the original structure.

Malsin also told me that the architect for the project will be MCA Architects, although SERA Architects is also involved on the Portland Public Schools side. MCA is also to design an adjacent five-story condo building for Beam on the site. A recent perusal of the firm's online portfolio included projects such as an air cargo facility at Newark Airport, corporate offices in suburban Hillsboro, and several renovations of downtown buildings including the historic Dekum building - although that was back in 1987.

MCA seems like a solid fit for the restoration of the original Washington High building given their renovation experience. But I didn't see any new condo projects in their portfolio. I can't help but wonder about Beam making perhaps a more adventurous choice for the new condo structure planned for the adjacent site. A frequent Beam collaborator in the past, Works Partnership, would have made a great choice. They recently won an AIA award for the unbuilt but spectacular B-Side-6. The ultra talented Colab was also involved in Beam's bid for the Burnside Bridgehead project. I'd have loved to see a condo of theirs in Southeast. But then again, maybe MCA will design a great-looking building. And I'm prepared to give Beam the benefit of the doubt. I like their Eastbank Commerce Center and adjacent Water Avenue Commerce Center quite a lot.

Neighbors who have for years enjoyed using the grass fields outside Washington High may be happy to learn that the developer's goal is to preserve approximately half of the six-block school site for open space.

Stopping by the site over the weekend, where demolition was already in progress, it was quite moving to see the half-torn down pieces. In particular, the old gymnasium was left partially exposed over the weekend. One could see in huge letters the word "WAMO" painted on the side, along with the school's bear mascot. WaMo is an abbreviation for Washington-Monroe, but it seemed appropriate here as an interjection referring to the wrecking ball.

  This could be a great project for Southeast Portland, bringing new housing, some of which will be priced for middle-income or 'workforce' levels. But as I sneaked into the in-progress demolition site, it was incredible just to ponder the ghosts of WaMo's distant and recent past escaping into the winter air. Not only were countless basketball games and school assemblies held there over the generations, but when Hurricane Katrina struck a year and a half ago, refugees were given temporary shelter in that gym.

More information will be forthcoming about architectural plans for the site, but in the meantime, I favor pausing to consider what once was.

Found Photos

Yesterday I was rummaging for something in the basement and found a handful of old photographs of various Portland buildings, most of which originally came from the Oregon Historical Society but that I picked up at a garage sale years ago.

One photo - or in this case what seems to be a drawing - is of the Lipman Wolfe Building. The architect was A.E. Doyle, who as most know also designed Central Library, the Meier & Frank building, the US National Bank, and much of Reed College in addition to mentoring Pietro Belluschi. I found the following entry about the Lipman Wolfe building from the PDX History website:

The roots of Lipman Wolfe & Co. go back to 1850 in Sacramento when gold-fever had a grip on everyone. Adolphe Wolfe, who was originally from Germany, had immigrated to America many years before and teamed with his uncle Solomon Lipman, to become successful merchants. Wolfe opened a branch of the family store in Virginia City, Nevada to capitalize on the wealth of the Comstock Lode Silver Mines. But in 1880 Wolfe decided to try his luck elsewhere and he moved to Portland.

Wolfe set up shop in a building at Washington and First streets where Portland’s first store elevator transported patrons vertically. His customers marveled at being able to move among the other floors without using stairs. Later, Wolfe moved his store two blocks up Washington to the grand new Dekum Building at Third Street, but that wasn’t far enough to spare him from the great flood of 1894. By 1912, Lipmans had moved uptown to its own huge building at Fifth & Washington, which was located across the street from the north end of Meier & Frank.

Buying offices were opened in London, Paris and Berlin. The Oregon Journal announced that Lipman & Wolfe displayed gowns within 12 days after they appeared on the boulevards of Paris. During World War I, the entire eighth floor was turned over to the Red Cross. Wolfe died in 1933.

The Lipman family decided to sell to the Dayton Hudson Company in the 1950’s. Then in 1980, Marshall Field’s bought all six Lipman’s Stores and made them Frederick & Nelson stores.

  Two other photos I found in the basement documented downtown at SW Sixth & Washington and along SW Fifth. You can see some buildings in these shots that remain today, but most of them don't. And to a degree, I suppose that's appropriate. We want to preserve quality historic architecture whenever possible, but every city evolves and changes over time. The key is achieving the right balance of preserving the past but making way for the future. At times Portland has been better than most, but we certainly don't hit the right note all the time, as evidenced by old and new demolitions like the Portland Hotel and new tragedies like the Rosefriend Apartments. (Any Ladd Tower buyers listening?)

Looking back at a more recent era, there's this photo I found of the Fremont Bridge taken in 1978. Theoretically you could take the same photo today - if you had a really big ladder. But somehow this photo evokes for me the spirit of the 1970s, when massive capital projects such as the Fremont were still a possibility. I like the Fremont Bridge a lot, and its quintessentially sculptural freeway overpasses. If anybody knows anything about the Fremont's designer, please pass on the info. The bridge photo also makes me think of the current considerations for a new Interstate 5 bridge over the Columbia. Will it be something we want to look at a photo of 29 years later?

Hacker's Latest Library

The last few years have seen a succession of libraries in the Portland area designed by Thomas Hacker Architects. The Woodstock branch of the Multnomah County Library system in Southeast was ranked as one of the top 10 library projects in the nation by the AIA and the American Library Association. The Beaverton library is also a gem, and I'm particularly fond of the Hillsdale branch in Southwest, which I wrote about for Architecture Week a year and a half ago.

The latest Hacker-designed library isn't in Portland or even Oregon, but Alameda, California. However, I wanted to pass it on because it's another fine example of what seems to be a specialty for the firm. What's more, there's a design element in the Alameda project that connects Thomas Hacker to legendary architect Louis Kahn, in whose Philadelphia office Hacker worked many years ago. The curving ceilings with skylights very much resemble Kahn's Kimble Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

The photos show a concrete facade with lots of glass, achieving the solid presence one wants in a public building but also the natural light that makes us want to linger. The exterior also includes a series of arcades that create a covered walkway at the entrance. Overall, the concrete feels a little bit monolithic outside to me, but it's enlivened by the curving forms and angle glass. Inside, the sense of warmth is further enhanced by the use of wood, particularly on the barrel-vault ceiling. There is also a central stairway that helps unify the space and distribute light between the floors.

Hacker's firm is busy these days, with the Atwater Place condo in South Waterfront, the 1700 SW Fourth condo downtown (a much-welcome offering from Gerding Edlen development for middle-income buyers), a new church building also downtown, and much more. As I've said before, if Brad Cloepfil is the Pietro Belluschi of our era, the famous name and big talent, then Hacker is A.E. Doyle, the older master who's more quietly creating one dignified, enduring Portland mini-landmark after another.