Talking with Bill Rouzie, one of Memorial Coliseum's original architects

At least if Memorial Coliseum has to be threatened with demolition, it has caused the community of architects and fellow design enthusiasts to come together. A case in point: the call I received yesterday from Bill Rouzie, a retired architect who was part of the bravura team at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill that designed the Coliseum.

"That building is marvelous," Rouzie says.

Talking by phone, he recalled visiting the Coliseum in 1960 shortly after the building was finished, on a day its curtain was opened to allow natural light to stream into the arena, which on that day had a skating rink set up inside. "The sunlight was streaming through. Everybody was skating on the ice in their costumes," he remembers. "It was just a beautiful sight."

Rouzie came to Portland in 1957 from SOM's Chicago office, where he had worked closely with one of the firm's best known architects, Walter Netsch, to design the Air Force Academy cadet building in Colorado. (It would go on to become a landmark of modern architecture in its own right.) The Coliseum was the first project he worked on in the Portland office, which was initially headed by SOM partner John Merrill. (Architects like David Pugh, Richard Ritz and Ned Kirschbaum would also distinguish themeselves there.) The Portland branch had emerged out of legendary architect Pietro Belluschi's office. And Belluschi, of course, had taken over that same office from A.E. Doyle. Rouzie had also attended graduate school for architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for which Belluschi served as dean.

A few years later, Rouzie was also part of the design team at SOM that designed a new home for the Oregon Ducks football team: Autzen Stadium.

The whole concept behind Memorial Coliseum's design, Rouzie says, was to give the arena a sense of transparency and connection to the outside - something anathema to most large performance spaces.

"We were thinking, we’ve got this oval bowl that is going to sit in a glass box," the architect recalls. "When you’re in the bowl looking at something happening, you can either have light or not with the control of the curtain. To get out of there, or at halftime, you walk out into a space and instead of being in some blind corridor, you come out and you’ve got glass and you can see the city. You know where you are, and whether it’s day or night." 

"That was the whole point of the design," Rouzie adds. "You never feel lost there. I can even get lost in some of the buildings I've designed, especially the hospitals. But not the Coliseum."

Rouzie remembers the powerful influence held by the timber industry in Oregon. "They even had a preliminary design for it," he recalls of the Coliseum. "It was going to be a big wood dome structure. That wasn’t exactly what SOM had in mind. But we worked with them. The entire glass wall is supported by huge glulam slabs that hold up that whole curtain wall all the way around. They got their share of wood in it."

If the timber industry was a powerful force, so was Gordon Bunshaft, one of SOM's New York-based partners and a legendary architect in his own right, known for such masterpieces as Lever House in New York City (which I think compares favorably to Mies Van Der Rohe's famouse Seagram Building directly across Park Avenue). Bunshaft wanted Memorial Coliseum to be made of glass all the way up to its top, and SOM had, Rouzie remembers, figured out how to make it a reality. But the Coliseum's distinctive white band around its top, made of wood, became part of the compromise. It also helped keep the project from going over budget: Bunshaft's all-glass cube was too expensive. Today, though, the white perimeter seems indelibly part of the Coliseum: the glass cube's headband.

Besides the transparency of the building, the Coliseum is noteworthy for how the concrete seating bowl is completely independent from the glass box. There are only four columns in the whole building, and as Rouzie proudly points out, "Those columns are completely outside the perimeter of the seating form. There’s one point where they come close together but they don’t touch. They never touch."

Rouzie says he will try to make it to the pro-Coliseum rally we have planned for Tuesday at 6PM at the Center for Architecture, but regardless, it was a treat to speak with this living legend of Portland design. And needless to say, while exceptionally modest on a personal level, Rouzie is understandably against the notion of this architectural gem that helped define his career being laid to rest unnecessarily.

Comments

[ken bauer]

I always felt they should play without the curtain. Always thought it looked cool when they had it down for walkthroughs. Without the curtain it is a rather cool looking building. Saw many a concert & quite a few Blazer games there. Not enough though. It was way too small for Basketball.

[dave]

Today's editorial in the Oregonian is spot on:
http://blog.oregonlive.com/portlandarts/2009/04/demolishing_memorial_coliseum.html

Demolishing the MC for a minor league baseball team that has never done well in my lifetime (37 years) is not wise.

I know we are fighting one thing at a time but has anyone heard what Paulson plans to do to PGE Park? We've only seen vague watercolors. I had heard he plans to remove the see-through gate on 18th and replace it with concessions and bleachers. If this is the case, he will destroy the best part of PGE Park's recent renovation. Being able to see the action inside PGE Park from the street or a Max train brings a certain amount of transparency to the ball park, just like the glass cube does to the MC.

Like I said, it's hard to flight more than one battle at a time. I am just concerned that under the cover of darkness Paulson will manage to ruin the few redeeming qualities of PGE Park.

[pylon]

Use the glass-all-the-way-to-the-top MC design for the replacement building If the MC absolutely must come down.