Portland Architecture

Street of Misleading Claims? Protecting the title of architect from a popular builder-homes tour

A house by Dreambuilder Custom Homes on the Street of Dreams

BY ROBERT NOBLES

The NW Natural Street of Dreams is the biggest event for the Home Builders Association in Portland every year, heavily publicized in local media and often with thousands visiting the annual development. This year's event, located atop Bull Mountain in suburban Tigard, is continuing through Labor Day Weekend. Presumably for those involved in the five homes (by Arbor Custom Homes, Brentwood Homes, Pahlisch Homes, Steel Creek Homes and Dream Builder Custom Homes) will come added attention and business, particularly in this moribound economy. But the event too often seems to be rooted in a misleading claim: that its homes are designed by Architects.

 

There are no Architects involved in Street of Dreams homes, part of a larger fact of American homebuilding: that less than 10 percent of single family homes are designed by registered Architects. Yet on the Street of Dreams website, Facebook page, and printed guides, are listed the names "architects" associated with each home. (In many cases, after complaints were made to the Oregon Board of Architect Examiners, these have since been changed.) If someone instead searched the ORBAE website for these names, they would find that none are licensed Architects, and some have previous complaints of such false claims.

Architect is a protected title in the State of Oregon. Use of the title first became regulated in 1919 with the establishment of the Oregon Board of Architect Examiners. The board is responsible for ensuring that only individuals that attain a high standard of professional competence are permitted to use the title architect.

Being an architect in Oregon means that you have obtained a professional degree from a National Architecture Accrediting Board program, have completed the minimum 5,600 hours of training units in 16 distinct categories to complete the Intern Development Program, been certified by the National Council of Architect Registration Boards, completed the seven test Architectural Registration Exams, and have passed the ORBAE’s oral and jurisprudence exams.

It is an arduous process to become an architect, but it does not stop there. To maintain your title you must participate in continuing professional education classes to stay on top of new building technology, sustainability, and protection of public health, safety, and welfare.

The public spends most of its time in buildings that have a large effect on our health and happiness. Your home may or may not have been designed by an Architect, but your work surely was, your favorite shops and restaurants, and even your favorite outdoor urban space. Additionally 35-40 percent of energy consumption in the U.S. comes from buildings. There are few titles that require so much effort to attain because there are few professions that have so much potential to affect our lives. That is why it is a serious matter to use the title Architect when an individual that is not licensed by the ORBAE.

It is a slow time for the construction industry in general, and I am sure that the Home Builders Association works tirelessly with the Construction Contractors Board to get unlicensed builders fined and shut down. It is terrible that for the few people who are looking to remodel or build a new home, and possibly hire an architect, the HBA would instead direct them to unlicensed individuals portrayed as Architects. It costs Architects work, damages the profession's reputation, and could expose the public to great risks.

Robert Nobles is a Portland architect.

Advertisement

HPLO seeks guidelines for new architecture in historic districts

Mercy Corps headquarters (photo by Jeff Amram)

BY FRED LEESON

One of the toughest challenges facing an architect is designing a new building in a National Historic District. Is the goal to build something that looks “old” so that it blends in, or should it be relentlessly “new” to let observers know that it belongs to its own time and place?

The Historic Preservation League of Oregon has spent much of the last year trying to capture “design principles” that could help guide new developments in historic districts throughout the state. It may come as a surprise to learn that Oregon has 123 districts placed on the National Register of Historic Places, including 15 in Multnomah County. Many of them contain gaps – often surface parking lots – that could someday be filled with new structures.

Peggy Moretti, director of the state-wide preservation advocacy group, said goal of the year-long project is to provide inspiration and guidance for new projects in historic districts. Too often, she said, preservationists are perceived “as purveyors of ‘no.’” During its study, the HPLO held public meetings in Ashland, The Dalles and Portland where design professionals, preservation advocates and citizens added their voices.

The topic is especially relevant in Portland, where planners, Old Town property owners and preservation advocates have been battling over several vacant “opportunity sites.” The developers, understandably, would like to take advantage of zoning that allows 250-foot maximum heights in parts of the district, while preservation advocates argue that the historic “context” of the district calls for far less. The HPLO study suggests that historic districts get hurt when there is a major “disconnect” between zoning regulations and existing historic fabric – certainly the case in Old Town. 

Some of the most interesting comments at the Portland session came after Ann Naito-Campbell, whose family owns many buildings in the historic district, said she had heard no negative comments about the Mercy Corps addition behind the Packer-Scott Building of 1892 at SW First Avenue and Ankeny Street. Well, now she has.

The addition, which approximately doubles the size of the original building, was designed by Thomas Hacker Architects. It was approved by the Portland Historic Landmarks Commission in 2007, after considerable discussion that resulted in a rare split vote, 4-2 in favor of the Hacker plan. Though the designers took some cues from the older building on the addition’s north and south faces, the east wall facing heavily-trafficked Naito Parkway is substantially a glass curtain wall. Motorists passing by would have no clue that the building is essentially a gateway to a historic district.

William J. Hawkins III, a retired architect and foremost expert on Portland’s historic cast iron buildings, said such modernism makes a “farce” of the historic district.  Henry Kunoski, who teaches architecture at the University of Oregon, said historic districts face “death by a thousand cuts” from inappropriate additions.

So: What could the guiding principles be?  The HPLO is working on as several, some more important than others.  The most significant, however, is that “the district is the resource.” That means designers of new buildings should look at the entire district in which they are designing, not just the immediate neighbors, for design cues and appropriate context.  Inspiration for massing, shape and materials, where possible, should come from the specific district.

Further, infill is secondary to the historic district. This could be a challenge for architects hoping to be daring or dramatic.  While designs should be compatible, they also should be sufficiently distinct to let observers tell easily what is old and what is newer. However, the scale, patterning and texture of new buildings should reflect the district’s character, and floor-to-floor heights should match those of historic buildings. New building materials need not be manipulated to mimic “old.”

Another topic if fertile discussion was whether design guidelines should be regulatory (read: mandatory) or advisory.  Jeff Joslin, a former Portland Bureau of Development Services manager, said many districts throughout the state lack guidelines – and that guidelines drafted for some districts are out-dated or ineffective. The mix is complicated by the fact that in many smaller jurisdictions, bureaucrats charged with overseeing historic districts have no design or historic expertise.

The consensus seemed to be that advisory guidelines are insufficient, but that designers need flexibility to deal with specific unusual circumstances that often arise. John Russell, a Portland developer experienced in renovating historic buildings, said he liked the idea of firm guidelines “with decision-makers” available to hear and rule on special requests. In general terms, that is how Portland functions with its Landmarks Commission.

The HPLO hopes to complete its infill recommendations in the next few months.  That should make them available for the next development fracas in Old Town.

Fred Leeson is president of the Bosco-Milligan Foundation and its Architectural Heritage Center.

Advertisement

Metro city halls photo project: Tigard and Tualatin

Tigard Civic Center (photo by Matthew Ginn, Homestead Images)

BY MATTHEW GINN AND BRIAN LIBBY

Continuing a photographic tour of each city hall in the Portland Metropolitan area brings these adjoining suburbs to the southwest of the Rose City. Tigard and Tualatin are home to 74,000 people collectively, but still dwarfed by larger suburbs like Gresham and Hillsboro.

Tigard Civic Center opened in 1986. It initially housed the library, city offices and police station; the library moved out in 2004, and the city offices expanded into that space. The police station is still there as well. The city was founded in 1961 but only had its first mayor in 1974. 

The area, earlier known as East Butte, was first settled by farmers like Wilson M. Tigard and his family, who arrived in 1852 and became involved in organizing and building a school, general store and post office in the 1880s, around which time East Butte was renamed "Tigardville". Within a decade, the community saw a large influx of German settlers. By 1910, Main Street had emerged with several community buildings and even railway service. Which, in turn, grew the town (known as Tigard since 1907) even more. By the 1930s, Main Street was even paved.

Tigard Civic Center (photos by Matthew Ginn, Homestead Images) 

In the 1970s, the Tigard Development Corporation (a group of business leaders) pushed for a relocation of Tigard City Hall to a shopping center at the end of Main Street where Value Village and Rite Aid sit now, but the measure was rejected by voter referendum.

The current Civic Center is on SW Hall Boulevard is faintly postmodern looking, not in that it features much in terms of ornamentation but in its almost whimsical shapes, recalling renowned civic center building in Mississauga, Ontario outside Toronto, designed by Jones and Kirkland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississauga_Civic_Centre), which opened a year later. Tigard Civic Center’s terra cotta and copper-green color palette also may suggest a southwest influence in the design.

Then there is Tualatin, which was originally called Galbreath in the 1850s after the settlement’s founder, Samuel Galbreath, who built the first bridge over the Tualatin river. It was also known later as Bridgeport.

Tualatin City Hall (photos by Matthew Ginn, Homestead Images)

According to Oregon Geographic Names, its first post office was established there in 1869. Interestingly, it initially had the spelling "Tualitin" but changed to "Tualatin" in 1915.  It was incorporated in 1913. According to the Tualatin Historical Society piece written by its president, Yvonne Addington, a previous city hall built in 1928 never opened for business until 1967.

Tualatin’s city hall is part of a complex built in 1984 from a design by Portland firm SRG Partnership. It was renovated in 2008. The firm explains: "SRG renovated and expanded the existing Tualatin Public Library, built in 1984, as well as performed a minor expansion and renovation of the city offices it houses. The new entrance and circulation spine, sloped to allow natural light deep into the interior and articulated from the exterior, emphasized the building’s distinct civic identity; an adjacent pedestrian plaza provides an inviting outdoor space directly off the Community Room."

Tualatin City Hall (photos by Matthew Ginn, Homestead Images)

The library looks quite nice, simple in its form and combining the sense of permanence that comes from brick with the openness of glass. Having said that, since the focus of this project is on city halls (not libraries), the photos here concentrate on the city offices portion of the building. This portion is, at least on the outside, strikingly ordinary. One can't help but feel curious about the symbolism. We can virtually all agree on the value of libraries in our communities. But politics are by nature divisive, and for all the grandiosity of Roman columns or other architectural expressions of permanence and importance used in larger city government buildings, small towns and suburbs seem to possess a greater sense of modesty about their city halls: not just because they are smaller, but because the role of government is viewed too with an attention to economy: an entity not on your back, to borrow a Ronald Reagan phrase, but quietly facilitating the surrounding community.

 

Ten years of Portland streetcars (actually, more like 63)

Portland Streetcar (image courtesy CityImage.net)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

It was the summer of 2001. The nation was still several weeks away from the terrorist attacks that would mark the beginning of a new era of fear, squashed civil liberties, and a deregulated economy booming but set up to bust. Movie adaptations of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings books were tops at the box office, and the music charts were ruled by now-forgotten bands like Staind, Shaggy and Creed. And Portland saw completion of the nation's first modern streetcar line, extending from Portland State University at the south edge of downtown, through the Pearl District to 23rd Avenue.

Of course this wasn't the first time streetcars traversed the Rose City streets. Between 1872 and about 1925, streetcar lines extended to 14 different neighborhoods. Then, a combination of increasing automobile ownership and collusion by automobile manufacturers (who bought up streetcar lines throughout America and then shut them down) saw streetcar tracks paved over and transit funds allocated instead to freeways and widened boulevards.

Some were skeptical of the streetcar from the start.  Factoring in platform stops and minor delays associated with mixed traffic operations, the average speed from one end of to the other is between seven and 12 miles per hour. The average speed of a person walking is three miles per hour. So if you pick up the walking pace just a bit, chances are you can be faster than the streetcar. What's more, streetcars usually go where buses already went, and bus lines are much cheaper than streetcars. What's more, although Portland has branded itself America's streetcar capitol, it's not as if people have given up their automobiles in droves. The streetcar seems to symbolize for some how Portland's central city is a kind of urban boutique while its outer neighborhoods and suburbs are more or less as automobile dominated as Anywheresville, USA.

At the same time, streetcars do something buses and highways don't: They act as a development tool, and a smart one. The streetcar was a major factor in the transformation of the Pearl District from a largely empty industrial zone and rail yards into a high-density neighborhood. As of 2008, private developers had invested $3.5 billion within two blocks of the original PSU to NW 23rd Avenue line alignment, including over 10,000 new housing units and 5.4 million square feet of office, retail and hotel construction. This represents about two-thirds of all development in the central city over that time period. These developments also utilized more of the allowed floor area ratio (FAR) than developments not near streetcar over 90 percent of its potential FAR compared to just over 40 percent for developments not near streetcar lines. Some of this can be explained by incentives to developers to build near the streetcar, but not all.

With one million new residents expected in the region by 2035, the streetcar has also been a way for the city to plan ahead in a way that minimizes traffic gridlock and greenhouse gas emmissions.

As Mayor Adams noted in a recent celebration of the streetcar's first 10 years, the transit line has created thousands of good-paying jobs, carried 28 million passengers, helped attract $4 billion in private investments and attracted 200 visiting delegations from other cities and regions.

I've long been fascinated in this psychological difference that exists between streetcars or other types of rail transit versus buses. Libertarians and conservatives have long ridiculed Portland's streetcars as an overpriced indulgence, in which we choose to move people in a fixed rail route vastly more expensive than buses that accomplish the same task more economically. Yet that pragmatic point of view just doesn't account for the different perceptions we have about rail, and those perceptions affect how and where we choose to live, work and play.

Consider a seemingly unrelated recent New York Times story about autistic children overrunning the city's transit museum.

"The link between trains and autism is well documented," writes the Times' Christine Haughney. "Autism refers to a spectrum of disorders that typically includes impairment in social interaction and sometimes includes stereotyped interests, like trains. People with autism have difficulty processing and making sense of the world, so they are drawn to predictable patterns, which, of course, trains run by. That explains why children with autism tend to be attracted more to subways, which travel on back-and-forth tracks, with little variability, than to planes, which move in more variable fashion."

In many cases, autistic kids follow bus schedules too, but ultimately trains win out in their imaginations by a considerable margin. I can't help but wonder if there is some connecting thread, or some larger public sentiment to be gleaned. Is it that we crave that same predictability that is associated with trains? Even if streetcars, unlike MAX light rail and regular freight or passenger trains, must often yield to traffic and are in fact part of street traffic, perhaps we still associate streetcars in our minds with transit that is above the fray. Regular automobile traffic offers individual control to drivers, the chance to speed up in hopes of advancing past other cars or to slow down and go with the flow. Even if streetcars are subject to the same limitations of traffic and roads as buses, we seem to view them as a saner alternative that is removed from the chaos of auto traffic.

Meanwhile, more streetcar lines are coming. First, there will be a line to Lake Oswego using mostly existing tracks from the Willamette Shore line. Although it has met with some controversy, with residents of the tony Dunthorpe expressing worry about the lines coming close to their multi-million-dollar enclaves, Lake Oswego is an ideal destination in that much of the walkable-community environment that streetcars are part of already exists here. Downtown Lake Oswego is more walkable than most any of its fellow suburbs. What it largely lacks is high-density housing. Having a streetcar line going there will enable developers to offer Lake Oswego condos as an alternative to the Pearl or South Waterfront, but just as well connected to the central city.

That said, extending rail transit to the suburbs is supposed to be the job of the MAX line, with the streetcar meant for central-city neighborhoods. It begs the question: Instead of having two separate rail lines with different names, purposes and identities, why not just call the whole system either MAX or the Portland Streetcar, and emphasize that rail transit within or going in or out of Portland is all the same? Yes, streetcar tracks and trains are differently sized than MAX. But they're both mass-transit urban rail lines. Shouldn't we be thinking of this as all one system?

A new streetcar line is also under construction along Martin Luther King Boulevard and Grand Avenue (which run parallel to each other). More than the Lake Oswego line, this will be where the streetcar has the most opportunity to act as a development tool. Along these streets, which pair to form Highway 99E, traffic moves relatively quickly and pedestrian ambiance is lacking. As is development. Both streets are littered with surface parking lots and suburban-style development. In the long run, if Portland is to keep growing in population without sprawling at its edges, we'll need high density housing along MLK and Grand. They are centrally located and within easy reach of both downtown and the Lloyd district, two areas full of employers. Instead of used furniture stores, a Salvation Army, a Burger King, this central spine of the east side could be home to thousands of people, who in turn would be patronizing local businesses and contributing to the tax base. If streetcars can lead smarter development of the MLK Boulevard area, they will - even with all the added cost versus buses - more than pay for themselves.

Looking ahead, federal funding for streetcars may be in jeopardy. After President Obama initially took office, he found considerable success jump-starting a wrecked post-Bush economy with a series of investments in jobs, home-buyer credits and mass transit. But after Obama committed most of his political capital to passing national health care in the initial two years of his presidency, public fears about big government helped usher in a new generation of reactionary Tea Party politicians into office, who now have siezed the federal agenda and forced the president to accept an austerity plan like the unsuccessful one underway in Britain that is leading to strikes, riots, and a downward cascading stock market. This means federal funding for streetcars and other mass transit projects, as well as even automobile-oriented projects like the Columbia Crossing bridge, may no longer be counted on. In some cases, this is the sensible move. The Columbia Crossing has become a billion-dollar boondoggle driven more by the highway-industrial complex than the needs of drivers. It arguably deserves a federal pass on funding. For streetcars, though, there is a pied-piper effect on the economy: spending on transit prompts private investment. If the right is correct that a healthy economy is the way to fill federal coffers rather than tax increases, we've got to spend finite dollars wisely in a manner that leverages other investment. And for that task, the streetcar has arrived right on time.

Lamenting America's lackluster stadium and arena designs

Bird's Nest stadium, Beijing (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

When Beijing hosted the Olympic Games three years ago, the biggest star was arguably not swimmer Michael Phelps or sprinter Usain Bolt, but the National Stadium built for the games: more commonly known as the Bird's Nest. The stadium became an instant international icon, and one that has yet to be surpassed or even neared in terms of compelling, unique architecture.

Last week on the ESPN-affiliated website Grantland, writer Peter Richmond viewed stadiums like the Bird's Nest in comparison to the recent stadiums built in New York and elsewehere in the United States, all of which engender a giant yawn. The billion-dollar replacement for legendary Yankee Stadium? A boring clone. The new Citi Field, home to the Mets? It's stuck in even more of a historicist time-warp, meant to evoke Brooklyn's old Ebbetts Field practically brick for brick.

Why is there no Bird's Nest in the United States, and why hasn't there been a great stadium or arena built here in seemingly decades? Consider Richmond's description of the Chinese's thought process as an alternative to our own:

"My guess is that in the rest of the world, when someone decides to commit billions of municipal bucks to building a stadium for their city their first thoughts generally go immediately to the architecture. My guess is that the Beijing Olympics organizers didn't sit down on Day 1 and say, 'First off, which fast-food franchise should we put at the top of all the mezzanine escalators: Snake Shack or a Canton Cat Taco? What's going to work, maximum-bucks-wise? And should we go with a Michael Jordan Steakhouse or Hard Time Café in the end zone?'"

"I'm going to guess that they said something like, 'Who can design something that will put Beijing on the map as something other than a really large city in a really, really large country that likes to run over dissenters with tanks?'"

"How can the former architectural capital of the globe erect three buildings so irrelevant in design that they were greeted by a collective, global yawn — when they were greeted at all?"

"Because, I suspected, the architecture of most of our national stadiums is now, officially, an afterthought. The revenue jones has reduced design to irrelevance — even though a killer, eye-opening edifice, in the long run, is worth its weight in publicity gold."

Here in Portland, our lone stadium is, while nowhere near as compelling architecturally as the Bird's Nest, a success in terms of the sense of place it creates. Jeld-Wen Field, now home to soccer's Timbers, was of course a renovation of PGE Park, which was a renovation of Civic Stadium. In other words, the building has character because the original structure from 1922 has been preserved. Had the architects bulldozed the original and tried to build something new on the same site, chances are great that it would not have matched the presence of its predecessor.

Jeld Wen Field (image courtesy AECOM)

I have yet to encounter a single Oregonian who possesses any love for the city's other home to a professional sports franchise, the Rose Garden arena. Though we love our Trail Blazers, and the arena inside provides decent sight lights for viewing a basketball game, the exterior is a mostly concrete behemoth with a sloping roof, all of which appears to have been designed by Fred Flintstone.

The one beautiful, architecturally significant arena in the city, Memorial Coliseum, was threatened with demolition in 2009 to make way for a minor-league baseball stadium. That effort was defeated by a grassroots compaign to save the building, which has since been added to the National Register of Historic Places and seen a request-for-proposals issued by the Portland Development Commission for its restoration. Yet the Coliseum rehab remains hypothetical until it actually takes place. With Mayor Adams deciding against re-election in 2012, his successor could still try to re-ignite the demolition process and court cases it would trigger. And still, even if it is renovated, the initial instinct was to introduce this building to the wrecking ball, and a minority of mouths continue to foam calling for such destruction.

The connecting thread on a national level with regard to mediocre stadium and arena design - as well as the local evidence of good work done in the 1920s and early 1960s and lousy architecture in the 1990s - may be that for decades, America acceled at designing stadiums and arenas only to lose its way in the 1970s. And we still hasn't found a way out.

In the '70s, cities across the nation started building either ubiquitous multipurpose stadiums such as Veterans' Stadium in Philadelphia, Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati and Jack Murphy Stadium (now Qualcomm Stadium) in San Diego - all distinguished by their cookie cutter circular shape - or domes such as the Kingdome in Seattle, the Astrodome in Houston or the Metrodome in Minneapolis.

Then, in the 1990s, baseball led a wave of retro stadiums such as Camden Yards in Baltimore and Jacobs Field in Cleveland. They were in some ways a big improvement on the circular cookie-cutter stadiums, but the recreation of the past became trite and left an absence of new thinking about the forms these places should take.

When innovation has come to stadium and arena design, it usually has been technological. The most recent wave in American stadiums has been retractible roofs. Rain threatening that baseball game? Close it. Super Bowl in Detroit? No problem.

Yet imagine if your house had a really fancy garage-door opener. Would that do much of anything to determine if it was a beautiful house?

University of Phoenix Stadium (image courtesy Football.Ballparks.com)

There is one exception in America to the uber-mediocrity wave: the University of Phoenix Stadium in suburban Arizona, home to the NFL's Cardinals and a recent Super Bowl. Designed by architect Peter Eisenman, who is known better as a theorist but is part of an acclaimed group of deconstructivists that includes Portland Buiding designer Michael Graves, it is as technologically advanced of any of the retractible roof stadiums - more, in fact, given it also has a retractible natural grass field. Yet it's also beautiful, futuristic, and maybe even a growing icon. From one side of the stadium, you can look through the glass at the coppery Arizona desert hills. The Cardinals themselves, after decades of losing, even rose to become a contender just as the stadium was built. Quarterback Kurt Warner was largely responsible for that rise, but having a home stadium with energy and excitement (and in Arizona's case, air conditioning) certainly contributes to a team's on-field success.

One similarity between the Bird's Nest in China and University of Phoenix Stadium is that each was designed by an internationally renowned architect whose reputation lies far beyond stadium designs: Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron in the former case, and Eisenmann in the latter. Most stadiums, on the other hand, are designed by surprisingly small array of firms, especially HOK (recently renamed Populous) and Ellerbe Beckett. It's not that these venerable firms aren't capable of good design. Ellerbe was the architect for Jeld Wen Field's renovation, for example, as well as two Eugene projects: Autzen Stadium's expansion in 2001 and the seating bowl at Matthew Knight Arena, completed last year. But all those cases are either of renovations or, in Knight's case, of the interior but not the exterior. If one wants a stadium or arena of beauty built from the ground up, it seems it's largley a matter of calling a designer with a wider vision.

Architecture firms are often divided in the business between what are called service firms and design firms: large companies with lots of experience but little ability to create bold, memorable forms, or small firms with strong ideas and design acumen but not enough trust among institutional clients to secure such major commissions. Stadiums and arenas, becuase they are such large and expensive projects by nature, usually go for service firms. But it's design firms that they need. Bird's Nest? Design firm. University of Phoenix Stadium? Design firm. The almost universally derided new Giants Stadium in New Jersey? Service firm. The Rose Garden here in Portland? Service firm.

Qwest Field (image courtesy free-photos.biz)

But sometimes this division is turned on its ear, such as with Qwest Field in Seattle (recently renamed CenturyLink Field). It was designed by Ellerbe Beckett, which has churned out countless stadium and arena designs and not all of them so compelling. But this project mostly had one private, deep-pocketed client in billionaire Paul Allen, the Seahawks' owner. Clients matter to a design almost as much as architects. What this collection of projects seems to indicate, like architecture in general, is that greatness demands a talented, forward-thinking designer as well as a client looking for more than just a completed puzzle of seating, field and concessions.

Besides having a good architect and client, the other connection amongst successful projects may be transparency and a sense of the outside. As mentioned University of Phoenix has a portion of its facade made of glass. CityLink in Seattle exposes its northern facade to the downtown skyline. And in Memorial Coliseum you have the ultimate example: the only arena in the world with a 360-degree view through the glass facade. These buildings by nature are huge and have been traditionally been designed with little regard for transparency and connection to the outside. Yet that is slowly changing. Even some of the ugliest of recent stadiums and arenas, such as the barn-like Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, has a wall of glass.

Maybe you're saying at this point, "Portland doesn't even have a football team. Or a big stadium. What does this matter?"

But Portland, of course, is growing. We may someday be home to an NFL team. And we have numerous big-ticket institutional projects that engender a similar set of challenges, such as the Columbia Crossing bridge proposal, which has been hijacked by state-government bureaucrats and highway engineers, poised to become a case of malt-liquor architecture at champagne's price. We've had the impetus to build the Columbia Crossing, but not to build it right. Sooner or later, a major stadium or arena in Portland will be a similar test. We'll be looking to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, but that won't guarantee a quality product. The bigger a project gets, the less personal and creative it seems to be. Which is exactly the opposite of what these public places need to be.

Advertisement

Mt. Rainier travelogue

Paradise Inn, Mt. Rainier (photo by Fred Leeson)

BY FRED LEESON

It is with considerable embarrassment that someone who has lived in the Pacific Northwest for most of  50 years admits to making a first visit to Mt. Rainier National Park.

The explanation, feeble though it may be, is that it’s so easy to lump the three big Pacific Northwest mountains into the same category – Mt. Hood, Mt. Saint Helens, Mt. Rainier. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Except there is nothing “yadda” about Rainier.  It is taller, fatter, more dramatic, more daunting, more scary. Likewise, the surrounding scenery is more dramatic, more beautiful, more incredible. It represents nature at its best – and its scariest. When the day comes when that active volcano does what volcanoes ultimately do, much of Tacoma, Seattle and everything in between will be at risk. Until then, everything about the park makes it eminently worthy of being the fifth addition to the U.S. National Park system back in 1899.

So now we’ve got all that “nature” stuff out of the way, let’s talk buildings. The only category in which Mt. Hood exceeds Rainier is in its signature building. Timberline Lodge stands head and shoulders above Rainier’s Paradise Inn in design, materials and craftsmanship.

Paradise Inn, Mt. Rainier (photo by Fred Leeson)

Given its historical context, well it should. Timberline was a Depression Era public works project intended to provide jobs for artisans of many stripes. The results are spectacular, from the materials and overall design down to the doorknockers and woven fabrics on the chairs. Finished approximately 20 years earlier in 1917, Rainier’s Paradise Inn was assembled much more hurriedly with an eye more toward profit than to creating and preserving great art.

The history of Paradise Inn is closely linked to Stephen Mather, a wealthy businessman who developed and promoted the old “20 Mule Team Borax” laundry soap. After becoming a millionaire, Mather turned his attention to the young National Park system, which was still substantially undeveloped early in the 20th Century. Mather, whose manic-depressive personality helped make him a success in business, pressured the federal government so strongly that he eventually was appointed to the Department of the Interior as the founding head of the National Park Service.

Mather is often credited with insisting on the “National Park Rustic” style of architecture, of which the Paradise Inn is an early example.  Elemental building forms and indigenous materials were his hallmarks.  Yet Mather had to have been influenced by the Old Faithful Inn of 1903-04, a substantially more grandiose example of rustic splendor.   

Knowing there was no federal budget for park improvements, it was Mather who created the idea of giving private companies exclusive operational rights in return for building park amenities. Mather met with members of the exclusive Rainier Club in Seattle hoping to find an entrepreneur or group of entrepreneurs willing to build a lodge at Mt. Rainier. As the story goes, their initial recalcitrance was overcome only after Mather, who was well-familiar with the corporate powers of Chicago and New York, threatened to go East to find backers. The Mt. Rainier National Park Company was formed to build Paradise.

Thus the Paradise was designed and built in less than two years, and intended to turn a profit.  Which it did, approximately $20,000 in its first year. The building was designed by Tacoma architect Frederick Heath. The structure was formed from Alaskan cedar trees that had suffered years before from a forest fire. The steeply pitched roof was designed to deal with heavy snowfall, ranging from 19 to as much as 34 feet in a winter. Dormers let light in at the second story; French doors add light and accessibility at the ground floor. Large stone fireplaces sit at either end of the 112-foot long lobby.

Overall, the lobby is a wonderful place, mercifully well preserved. Closer inspection of the materials and details will not amaze you, however, the way that Timberline Lodge does. Paradise also is marred by bass-drum-style light fixtures that are not original and that are a poor fit proportionally. Historic photos in the building give only a glimpse of the originals. One hopes that someday a more fitting chandelier solution will be found.  Fortunately, that’s a comparatively easy fix.

Former visitors center at Mt. Rainier (photo courtesy National Park Service)

Ironically, the Park Service strayed from its “rustic” style just a few hundred feet away from the Paradise Inn in the 1960s with a futuristic visitor center. Its circular rotunda was described as a flying saucer or a squashed wedding cake. Its flat roof did not fare well under the heavy snows, presenting a classic example of strong-willed architecture thumbing its nose at nature. Nature won. The flying saucer building was torn down in 2008. Some people who had grown up with the flying saucer professed sorrow at its demise; an impartial glance at its photograph can only lead to the conclusion that the building was wrong on multiple levels.  It has been replaced with a new visitor center featuring a steeply pitched, alpine style roof.

Another older building deserving of architectural appreciation lies on the eastern, sunnier side of Mt. Rainer at the complex called Sunrise. The Sunrise Visitor Center is a two-story, rectilinear log cabin with a beautifully log-trussed roof that is flanked by two block houses, which also appear to be log cabins. In fact, the block houses (the southern completed in 1930 and the northern in 1943) are wood-framed buildings with log-slab exteriors.  They are not open to the public.  The visitor center, also finished in 1943, is composed of real logs. Federal stimulus money paid for cleaning and restoration of the visitor center, completed earlier this year. The work included new orange and honey-colored clear vertical grain fir flooring, which is as soft as it is beautiful. One hates to think of it being stomped into gouged grayness, which now doubt is its ultimate fate.

Sunrise visitor center, Mt. Rainier (photo by Fred Leeson)

The Sunrise complex, originally called the Yakima Park Stockade, was designed by Ernest Davidson, a self-taught landscape architect, and Paul Brown, architect, both NPS employees. They both wanted an indigenous form to the buildings. To their credit, they studied building forms of the native Yakima tribe, but found nothing that could be adapted to the required uses. They chose the stockade form in honor of the early Hudson Bay Company outposts in the Pacific Northwest.  A stone fireplace, perhaps the great cliché of the rustic style, sits at the northern end of the room, while the mostly-glass southern façade offers an impressive view of Mt. Rainier. The clean and gleaming woodsy interior gives on the feeling of standing inside a beautiful wooden musical instrument. 

If you’ve been to Mt. Rainier  before, you don’t need to be told to go again.  If you’ve never been there, GO. And don’t miss the buildings. They’re worth the visit, too.    

Fred Leeson is a Portland journalist and president of the Bosco-Milligan Foundation/Architectural Heritage Center.

Madame of the Willamette River: Nancy Boggs' legend lives on

Portland waterfront, late 19th century (image courtesy Portland Waterfront History)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In the last year or two, The New York Times has certainly showered Portland with plenty of travel and food coverage. But while reading a Times story about, of all things, a hotel comprised of multiple houseboats in Jamaica Bay, Queens, I came across an unexpected bit of Portland history: Nancy Boggs and the west's first floating brothel.

The hotel in Jamaica Bay, called Boggsville Boatel, just opened this year. But its inspiration came in the 1870s, when Portland was really three cities: Portland, East Portland and Albina. Separated by the Willamette River at a time when there was no bridge across, the cities each had their own governments and police forces. For criminals, evading the law sometimes meant simply getting across or even into the water.

Nancy Boggs was a local madame who 40-by-80-foot vessel moved up and down the river to respond to local demand. Her employees could accomodate customers in both cities. Boggs hired boatmen in small rowboats to ferry people on and off her 3,200-square-foot island craft. Not only did this give her mobility and the ability to evade police, but by staying in the river Boggs paid no taxes to either city.

Funnily enough, it's  tax evasion and not prostitution that made the law come down on Nancy Boggs. Repeatedly during the 1870s, police from Portland and East Portland attempted to raid her boat. The rival cities did not co-operate so, like a scene from Kurosawa's Yojimbo, she would simply divide and conquer. When officers from one city headed toward her boat, Boggs would merely hoist her anchor and move to the shore of the city not conducting the raid.

Finally, in 1882, the two cities agreed to conduct a joint raid on the floating brothel from both sides of the river simultaneously. But remember I said Portland was then not just two but three cities? Boggs floated downriver a little further to Albina, where she enlisted a sternwheeler captain all too happy to help anchor her wayward boat full of whiskey and women. But she must have known the jig was nearly up. Boggs soon moved ashore in East Portland, near the present-day intersection of Pine Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard, and began paying liquor taxes.

Portland waterfront, early 20th Century (image courtesy Portland Waterfront History)

Reading the article, particularly given it had nothing to do with Portland other than the Boggs inspiration, made me wonder about the city's reputation over the generations and centuries. We so often tend to think that the current era is the one in which Portland entered the national consciousness with our food carts, indie rock bands and gourmet coffee.

Yet as it happens, the city had a reputation in the late 19th century that, even when there was no mas media except for a few city newspapers, extended across the western world. Despite suffering a devastating fire in 1873 that destroyed much of the central city, by the end of the decade Portland was the largest American city north of San Francisco and the Northwest's major trading center. Yet for all its growth, this was a very rowdy frontier town.

"A proliferation of saloons and bawdy houses mixed with a steady and transient clientele of seafarers gave Portland the opportunity to rise in the annals of vice along with other such metropolises, such as Gomorrah, San Francisco, and Sodom," writes Barney Blalock in his Pictorial History of the Portland Waterfront. "During the latter part of the 19th century up into the early 1920s, just the names of the cities of Portland or Astoria carried with them a worldwide infamy. Much like Chicago in the gangster era of prohibition was known for its machine gun murders, bombings, and bribery, Portland or Astoria was synonymous with shanghaiing."

Today, even though Portland is seen as an attractive destination to move because of its livability and progressiveness, there has always remained a touch of seediness. More than a century after Madame Boggs was locating her riverboat brothel on whichever side of the river had fewer cops pursuing her, for example, Portland filmmaker Gus Van Sant made in the late 1980s and early 1990s a trilogy of films paying homage to the city's downtrodden drug addicts and hustlers: Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho. Decaying Chinese restaurants in Old Town and the now-demolished Saint Francis residence hotel formed a collective ambiance of gritty  transcience. It's not that one seeks decay over newness or safety over crime, yet in an increasingly sanitized world, this dingier urban fabric has a compelling authenticity.

To the rest of the world, Portland has carved an identity as a city of outsiders: far from the cultural capitols of the East Coast or Southern California, and moving to its own beat as a result. Nancy Boggs and her floating brothel weren't an ideal symbol for Portland then or now, but like Bonnie and Clyde, her crimes evoked a degree of sympathy because they embodied some larger sense of the outsider who which many of us, even amidst our glassy condos and earnest citizen initiatives, can easily identify.

Advertisement

Reinventing Portland Community College: a conversation with GBD Architects' Kyle Andersen

PCC's Sylvania Campus (image courtesy Portland Community College)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In the first decade after World War II, the G.I. Bill made it possible for a generation of former service members to obtain an education. And obtain they did, on a massive scale. A total of 2.3 million students enrolled in higher education programs in 1947 swelled to nearly 5 million by 1960. In many cases, it wasn't traditional four-year colleges this wave of new students attended, but one of the literally hundreds of community college and junior colleges built in that period.

Portland Community College's Sylvania campus came a little later, in 1968. But it is the oldest facility in the PCC system, as well as the largest. Like many community colleges in the area and in the nation, it has the institutional feel of the era from which it came, that of Brutalism: a subset of modernist architecture from the 1960s and 70s that was most often concrete in form and, while utopian in its idealistic intent, was often practically the opposite in reality: with banal, repetitive forms that today, despite their clean-lined geometry, feel oppressive for their lack of human scale, natural light and warm materials. In the hands of a few select masters, such as Louis Kahn, Brutalist architecture could be sublime. But walking amidst the concrete ubiquity of PCC Sylvania or, one yearns for the small forest adjacent to the campus. (Sylvan literally means "wooded".)

Currently, however, GBD Architects and Gerding Edlen Development are working with PCC on a group of initiatives, some being enacted as we speak and others on a future wish list, that will help the school potentially save millions of dollars in energy costs while giving PCC a new role in training workers the emerging green economy.

The E6/Net Zero Project, as it is known, seeks to transform PCC Sylvania both in terms of how it operates and how it feels to be there. If the school greenlights all of the sustainable investments recommended, it will actually become a net-producer of energy, generating more electricity than the campus needs. The plan also calls for the school to have close to net-zero water usage by collecting rainwater and recycling water.

Nowhere is the need for reinvention more evident than the central DeBernardis College Center building ("CC" for short), which houses administrative offices, a dining hall, the Women's Resource Center, the Multicultural Center, and more. It's the closest thing to a student union, but unless you're in a select few private offices, it could be noon or midnight and you'd never be able to tell inside the public gathering spaces. And environmentally speaking, although concrete holds its thermal mass like a basement and is thus energy efficient as a material, much of the wintertime heating and summertime cooling disappear through single-pane windows.

Students in PCC Sylvania's CC buiding (image courtesy Portland Community College)

"It's got solid bones," GBD Architects' Kyle Andersen says of the concrete-ensconced PCC campus in Southwest Portland. "This thing is so stout. It’s all columns and beams and waffle slabs. You like to stand back and say, 'What were they thinking?' The architecture really handles you. Now those things are called barriers, and they cause problems for people with mobility issues and it’s disorienting. We talked about removing those barriers and humanizing the space.There’s a lot we’re doing taking private offices away from the windows and create smaller impromptu meeting spaces."

Besides the mechanical and energy side of reinventing PCC Sylvania, the architects are looking at humanizing the campus, where an open area between the buildings in the middle is disjointed because of a convoluted series of passageways and raised platforms, seemingly one added to the other without a sense of the congruent whole. When one moves from the center to the other buildings, it's a matter of following another prescriptive concrete pathway. Then there's the fact that PCC Sylvania students arrive overwhelmingly by car, thus making a surface parking lot surrounding much of the campus a kind of suburban-style banality of asphalt. Along with building design, the challenge is to make people change the way they get to the school.

Although net-zero energy and water are goals, the initial work at PCC Sylvania will focus on 165,000 square feet of renovation for existing buildings, within the strictures of funding in place via a recent bond measure. There will also be new construction, for a child development center construction. But for the most part, Andersen says, "These buildings are 40 plus years old. It’s upgrading the technology, adapting them for new ways of learning."

"Right now we’re base-lining the buildings: measuring the buildings’ performances so we can measure their improvements," the architect adds. "That’s really what it’s about to reach that net zero: starting with energy efficiency savings, and adding alternative energy over time. We’re looking at wind turbines, PV, even fuel cells."

"Students, faculty, facilities people—there are a lot of participants in the discussion. It’s really about consensus building. We meet with them depart by department, document their needs, draw it up, and give it to the contractor to see if it lines up with our budget. If we get it lined up, we have a framework plan. And we do that for every building. We’ve got to prioritize so there’s the most economic benefit and environmental benefit to the campus."

Infographic of PCC Sylvania buiding age (courtesy Gerding Edlen Development)

In some cases, Andersen says, grand plans gave way to the need for band-aids. "The whole E6 thing was supposed to come in and do all these changes and modifications. But then you realize there are changes in the system themselves that need changing. Insulation was falling off," he explains. "There are these tunnels under the buildings, with pipes running through them. There’s valving that was stuck open. We’re insulating pipes and replacing valves. We found that the boilers were really low-efficiency. We found by the time it got to the swimming pool, the hot water dropped by 30 degrees. We’re also adding a de-humidification unit, and taking the waste heat to pump it back into the air or water. That thing will save a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in energy."

As changes big and small are made, students will be along for the ride, not just receiving a better Sylvania campus but learning the kinds of trades that will bring them jobs in the emerging sustainable economy. "The workforce training that’s going on at PCC is a key component," Andersen says. "You'll be able to how to take care of building commissioning, photovoltaic cells. That’s why community colleges are bursting at the seems, why enrollment at PCC Sylvania up 30 percent in last year or two."

Already ties are being made. Vestas, the wind-turbine manufacture that recently located its American headquarters in Portland, now serves as an adviser for the Renewable Energy Systems Program offered at the PCC Sylvania Campus. The program is part of Sylvania’s Electronic Engineering Technology Program. SolarWorld is also a long-time partner organization with PCC’s Microelectronics Program, housed at the Rock Creek Campus. Over time, these partnerships and initiatives can combine and be centralized at Sylvania -- even if there's a boiler to fix, parking to reconfigure, and a host of concrete buildings to re-imagine.

"Our path has changed considerably. It’s been totally modified," Andersen explains. "We’re having to put money in different places to get to the root causes. But we still have our sights on that net zero campus. It's just a question of how we get there."

Advertisement

Funerals to concerts: The Woods exemplifies Portland's quirky but authentic preservationism

The Woods in Sellwood (photo courtesy Portland Mercury)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

For more than 70 years after it was constructed in 1929, the Mission style on Milwaukie Avenue in Portland's Sellwood district was a quiet place where families bid goodbye to loved ones. But like the Chapel Pub in North Portland operated by the McMenamin's chain, The Woods not only has not only resurrected a funeral parlor, but introduced a celebratory mood seemingly at odds with the building's past yet finding a wonderful hand-in-glove fit in the old building.

The venue for a succession of local and touring acts, The Woods' hardwood floors, chandeliers and spaciousness evoke a kind of decayed elegance. This isn't a dank, filthy, cramped club like the celbrated rock venues of yesteryear, be it CBGB in New York or Satyricon in Portland. At The Woods you can not only bask a few feet away from the performing band, but you can wander around the corner to a quiet lamp-lit cubbyhole with copies of old tomes like The Book of Knowlege placed thoughtfully, if ironically, on the adjacent coffee table. Or you can wander out to the adjacent patio for a smoke (these are rock bands and their fans, after all, the last and greatest of tobacco loyalists), or peer from behind curtains seeminly picked out by Granny at the hipster-approved Pabst Blue Ribbon neon sign.

"The atmosphere is part club-house, part secret society," the venue's website aptly proclaims. "Patrons will feel they have stumbled upon another world: candle-lit, eccentric yet stately. Karaoke, avant stand-up comedy and movie screenings are scheduled regularly on non-musical performance nights."

Washington DC's The Caribbean at The Woods, 8/4/11 (photo by Brian Libby)

Or, as Woods business partner Richie Young described to the Portland Mercury, "like a 1930s lobby in the fanciest hotel in Missoula, MT... When you walk in there we don't want you to see any new technology except the PA, just kinda have this feeling you could be at a clubhouse in the '30s or '40s."

As it happens, this isn't the only Mission-style old building in Sellwood devoted to the dearly departed - although the ony one with rock shows. A few weeks ago I visited The Portland Memorial, a mausoleum that is the final resting place for many formerly prominent locals. One sees enduring family names there like Jantzen (of the apparel company) as well as forgotten but fascinating people like Mayo Methot, the former wife of Humphrey Bogart (about whom I'm writing a Portland Monthly article). Even though they fought so viciously that Methot even once stabbed Bogart, he continued sending flowers to her mausoleum slot at the Portland Memorial until his own death several years later.

The stage at The Woods, formerly an in-house chapel, also reminded me of other arts spaces in town reclaimed from utterly different original buildings. At Milepost 5, for example, the housing development for artists on 82nd Avenue that used to be a retirement home, there is a wonderfully intimate and cozy small theater and performance space that was formerly the facility's in-house chapel. From the preserved pews where Gladice, Doris and Abigail said once said their prayers, Tyler, Ashley and Austin are screening experimental films and bobbing heads to bands.

Literary alcove (above) and covered patio at The Woods (photos by Brian Libby)

Given how Portland culture is, via the Portlandia TV show and other currents from food carts to indie rock, enjoying a kind of popular moment in the broader national zeitgeist, there's the temptation to look at these converted spaces and joke about how an old funeral home as rock club is just part of the increasingly cliche hipster surroundings: a utopian society for people in their 20s who simply "put a bird on it" to make art but earn a Ph.D in animal geneology for every chicken they order at dinner, all the while making sure their pants are tapered just so or their circus stilts are ideally absurd. Yet in converted arts spaces like The Woods there is something more authentic going on than any surface-level satire has the shovel to mine. Every society worth its mettle converts old architectural spaces into new ones. Yet the West Coast, for all its progressiveness in many social and political realms, trails the East Coast when it comes to appreciating the beautiful patina of old buildings and the handed baton of history that accompanies such renovations.

Maybe it's ironically funny and cool that rock bands are playing in an old funeral chapel, but it's also a genuinely inviting space with more built-in character than could ever be manufactured in a from-the-ground-up new venue. We're learning here, over the generations, the value in using what we have. It's not just more sustainable, but simultaneously deeply meaningful and frivolously fun. Like cities themselves, preservation isn't just about old and new architectural spaces versus old ones or natural settings versus built ones, but hybrids of both that are stronger than the sum of their parts. It's a matter, you could say, of seeing The Woods for the trees.

Advertisement

What will become of Centennial Mills?

Centennial Mills (image courtesy Portland Development Commission)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Last Monday (July 27), Portland Development Commission chair Scott Andrews and Mayor Sam Adams posted an open letter to PDC's Centennial Mills website. In the wake of the city's contract with Los Angeles developer LAB Holding to redevelop the site broken and each side accusing the other, Centennial Mills needs a new champion.

"We are looking for public service-minded investors to take on a wonderfully iconic but challenging project in a public and private joint venture," the letter begins. "The site, which was purchased by the Portland Development Commission in 2000, represents one of the last vestiges of early 20th-century riverfront industry in Portland. This authentic collection of concrete and wood-frame buildings, mills and warehouses, docks and wharf structures—4.75 acres in total—presents a special opportunity for Portland to celebrate its industrial and economic heritage. However... the poor condition of the Centennial Mills facility presents numerous challenges for redevelopment. That is why we are making this direct appeal. Formal site development plans aren’t necessary; the first step is simply to initiate a conversation about your interest in the site."

The letter goes on to describe "globally-competitive companies" such as Vestas, Standard Insurance, ZGF Architects, Ziba Design, Wieden+Kennedy, Shop Igniter and Urban Airship, that collectively demonstrate "the competitive advantage that a downtown Portland headquarters provides in attracting  creative talent and in leveraging Portland’s reputation as a leading center of innovation."

There are a few different ways to interpret the erosion of the original PDC-LAB Holding deal from 2008, which the developer won over a handful of other proposals. First there is the economy. 2008 was precisely the time in which our 2000s economic boom gave way to the Great Recession. The parameters of what makes a viable deal have changed. Second, PDC changed the structure of the agreement in April, requiring the developer lease at least 50 percent of the property to tenants in “traded sectors” and newly identified industry clusters. This was a departure from the conglomeration of restaurants and retail establishments LAB Holding proposed in the competition stage. What's more, LAB Holding justifiably complained that the change from PDC was simply dictated to them without any back-and-forth conversation. This may be typical of PDC and an indication of its own institutional barriers against successful economic development. Too often PDC seems to say to developers, "Do it our way, or you're out," singing the song of public-private partnership but not at all making it an equal dialogue.

But lest we blame PDC for the failed deal, they also note that LAB never lined up tenants or capital for their idea. What's more, I'm skeptical of a development plan that was centered around just one area: food. LAB's development was to include restaurants, cooking school facilities, and markets, all devoted to cuisine. Whether it's here or in the Rose Quarter, where a district devoted to sports is being planned, I think cities are better off not defining these developments so rigidly. Real places don't need themes. That's the thinking that goes into buiding malls and casinos.

"Either way, it's for the best," wrote The Oregonian's Anna Griffin in a July 19 column. "Portland needs new jobs more than new entertainment options, and the glossy renderings LAB architects produced look more like a Disneyland recreation than actual historic preservation."

Griffin also recently toured the facility, writing: "A walk through the century-old mill, actually an interconnected 11-building complex on Naito Parkway between the Broadway and Fremont bridges, tells the story of modern American manufacturing. Back when it opened, clipper ships docked at the plant, and men turned Eastern Oregon grain into flour for the world using little more than their own muscle. The mill survived the Great Depression and boomed in the 1940s and '50s, when conveyor belts and electronic monitoring systems gradually replaced gravity and sheer manpower."

"In the 1970s and '80s," Griffin continues, "grain processing began shifting overseas, where building codes and public health requirements were looser, and to U.S. factories that were easier for trucks to reach. The city bought the mill in 2000 for $7.7 million; the final owners left behind machinery, files, office equipment, old bills and more grain than you could eat in a lifetime. Much of that remains, ghostly, grainy hints of the days when American ingenuity ruled the world and Portland was known as an industrial hub rather than a cultural hotspot. It's no wonder Mayor Tom Potter and his City Council colleagues agreed to reconsider city plans for the mill in 2004, despite prescient warnings about the potential cost and logistical difficulties of any renovation. This is a branch of our history that we've almost lost entirely."

Centennial Mills (image courtesy Portland Development Commission)

Although adding jobs is a widely agreed-upon priority in the city right now given the still-moribound economy and high unemployment rates, not everyone is happy about PDC's shifting goals at Centennial Mills. In a letter to PDC, Patricia Gardner of the The Pearl District Neighborhood Association writes, "Our primary concern with the 'redirection' of Centennial Mills is that this project will end up another Albers Mills: a building fully of office users and zero public life," she wrote. The PDC call for new investors, she added, "is exceedingly troubling in this regard. None of the businesses you name, while all terrific Portland businesses, have crated the type of public spaces that the community is expecting in this site."

Whereas before the recession the thinking was that Centennial Mills should become a resource for attracting visitors to the River District, the Development Commission seems to clearly believe now that not only are jobs more important than additional retail (for which there is already a glut of space), but that private-sector growth is more important in these times than public space. It's in one sense a pragmatic, logical conclusion. Yet it also would, as Gardner notes, take away a major opportunity for people in the Pearl and River Districts to connect in a physical, palpable way with the Willamette River.

After Tom McCall Waterfront Park reaches its northern terminus at the Steel Bridge, downtown and the west side lose the ability to interact with and reach the waterside. For all the development that has happened in the Pearl over the past decade, the district is only now beginning to fill out its northern and eastern edges at the Fremont Bridge and the Willamette. For years designers and developers (particularly from Hoyt Street Properties, which owns the parcels nearest Centennial Mills along Naito Parkway and the river) have been anticipating a path leading from the boardwalks of Jamison Square and Tanner Springs, through the to-be-built Fields Park open space, and over Naito Parkway to Centennial Mills. The northern Pearl at this northeast edge where the bridge meets the river is more isolated from the central city, without many storefront retail opportunities. Centennial Mills could have been a place for the still burgeoning Pearl's residents to go shopping or to stretch their legs at the waterside.

Regardless of whether one believes offices and company headquarters should be half, all or none of Centennial Mills, there is the broader question of investment. If LAB Holding isn't going to develop the site, who is? Developers from Seattle and Baltimore vied for the Mills contract back in 2008, but again, that was a very different economic climate. Are there local or regional developers willing to renovate this old, dilapidated structure and gamble that its relative isolation can be overcome by the character of the mills themselves and the riverfront location?

Numerous moribound developments in other cities have seen new investment come from outside American shores. In Toledo, Ohio, the New York Times recently reported that the long moribound Marina District along the Maumee River was being revived by investments from two Chinese developers, who plan to turn the former industrial area into a riverfront residential, office, retail and entertainment district. The Times also reported on an infusion of development dollars resurrecting the CityCenterDC project in Washington, which was able to move forward because of a recent $620 million equity investment by the real estate arm of the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. The $700 million complex under construction in the heart of Washington  is envisioned as a modern-day Rockefeller Center, with a public plaza and a park.

These two developments not only are going forward with foreign investment, but also, notably, are a mix of uses. It begs the question with Centennial Mills: does it have to be just a corporate headquarters or just retail? Just buildings and not a plaza or park? Wouldn't mixed use, the mantra that has shaped most of central Portland, be the right....well, mix?

If one development fizzles due largely to economics and another one seeks to prosper in its place, all amidst a still shaky economy, you wouldn't expect it to get bigger. Yet a stumbling block for Centennial Mills may also be the continuing presence of the Portland Police Bureau's horse paddock next door. It takes up a sizable portion of the 4.75-acre site. What if the bureau were to remove these equine storage sheds and open up this riverfront space more fully? Perhaps then Centennial Mills could more easily become a large enough presence in its own right to attract not just a few residents across Naito Parkway but a real destination for workers, shoppers and those at leisure. Griffin understandably argues that the time has come to downsize our expectations for this site. "The time is coming for an unhappy, unavoidable compromise," she writes, "for something that provides public access to the river and preserves the memory of the mill but is far less ambitious or design-heavy than Portlanders expect." Yet having more real estate to make something might help the district more easily reach critical mass.

Regardless, let's just be sure that while changing the plan with Centennial Mills toward more of an office setting is understandable, we can't sacrifice too much of the architecture itself. Indeed, these buildings are difficult structural challenges, but they are also a resource. With an adjacent northern Pearl District full of new construction, these historic buildings are all the more essential as an injection of the past. However difficult the current economic conditions, in the long term, a city that respects and continually reimagines its built past will prosper. And given that even the greenest new construction still uses exponentially more resources, carbon and embodied energy than renovated old buildings, Centennial Mills must be part of our future if Portland is to be the sustainable capitol it seeks.

Advertisement