Michael Flowers and Judson Moore both grew up in west Texas and attended Texas A&M. After graduation, they followed a professor to Montana State University and briefly taught there. Ultimately they set up practice in Portland, but many times drove back and forth between College Station, Texas (home of A&M), Bozeman, Montana (just like the hero of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), and Portland.
As a result, they came to love, as legendary French architect Le Corbusier did when he visited the United States a century or so ago, the simple agricultural silos and other architecture. It make sense: Texas A&M's team is of course the Aggies. It's for that reason, and their west Texas heritage, that their new-ish architecture firm, established last July, is called Farm Architecture and Research. I found this a personal bond as well, having been raised in McMinnville and having farmers in the family. I don't miss living in cow country, but I love some of the old agricultural buildings in my old 'hood.
Visiting today with Tim McCarron of Pettigrove Venture, the developer, we started in a coffee shop on the ground floor of the Triangle that was designed with another small firm, Bolighus (whose work I already liked and blogged about here a couple years ago). There is also space above and behind the cafe for creative and building industry tenants, or whomever.
All of the brick was left exposed, as were the old wood-framed ceilings. All of the wood flooring is from timber reclaimed onsite. It's really a lovely little building.
On its public corner, the building is a pretty reserved but well-done version of a standard warehouse turnaround, but the back parking lot (which they hope to eventually expand the building into, as the original client, Nau apparel, was planning before going out of business (since resurrected but owned by someone else). On that back side, there are a succession of double-height spaces for lease, and an elevator core at the corner clad in natural wood panels. The architect for this project was Stem Architecture of Portland, which frankly I don't know anything about yet but hope to find out.
It's a subtly incredible intersection of cars, trains, and boats as well as industrial and burgeoning condo districts.
And nearby on the other side of the Fremont Bridge's base, you'll soon have the Northern edge of the Pearl District, an open-field park, and the Centennial Mills redevelopment.
This is one of those sleepy little areas of close-in Portland that is about to wake up, it seems, in a big way. And it's often these kinds of slightly out-of-the-way or in-between pockets of land where smaller firms such as Farm and Stem get a chance to show what they can do. Funny how in Portland how these tiny industrial pockets and million-dollar condovilles can be right next to each other.
the triangle building is nice, but what's the idea behind that god-awful color scheme on the exterior?
Posted by: silence dogood | October 31, 2008 at 10:46 AM
That's an interesting area. It always feels a little like a no-mans-land. I wonder how Sydney's makes it. If the NW Neighborhood Association ever lets Conway develop its parking lots (don't get me started), then that area could have a good critical mass of people to enliven the cool, old industrial buildings and create another urban neighborhood within biking distance of everywhere else. What is mainly needed is enough density (hopefully trees) to dampen the opressive roar of the stained freeway overhead.
Posted by: J. Valentine | October 31, 2008 at 01:55 PM
incredible
Posted by: Lance | June 24, 2009 at 09:02 PM