Portland Architecture

Portland Aerial Tram celebrates its fifth anniversary

Portland Aerial Tram (photo by Bradley Maule)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

On the heels of Oregon Health & Science University releasing its plans for the Collaborative Life Science building on its South Waterfront campus, the once controversial transit project at the center of the development - the Portland Aerial Tram - is celebrating its fifth anniversary.

It's hard to believe that it was only five years ago that the tram was opened to the public, for its gestation is still fresh in one's mind.

Only the second major-city aerial tram in the United States (the other connects Manhattan with Roosevelt Island), the project got off to a difficult start to say the least. Initial projections in 2002 estimated the cost at about $15.5 million, but the final tally wound up at $57 million after sharp rises in cost for materials like steel as well as moving the upper tram station (it became its own structure instead of being attached to the adjacent building). "Instead of landing on a mountainside and anchoring into bedrock, Portland, Oregon’s new aerial tram soars between two 200-foot towers, representing Olympian engineering gymnastics," wrote Randy Gragg in Architectural Record.

Portland Aerial Tram (video by Brian Libby)

In retrospect, it was folly to ever have expected such a major transit project to have cost so relatively little. The $15.5 million price tag seemed to reflect the cost of a ski lift more than a tram, although the uniqueness of the project could easily have been to blame rather than any intentional bait-and-switch tactic. That said, at the time Commissioner Randy Leonard called the affair an "outrageous shell game...all at the expense of taxpayers." The city threatened at the time to withdraw from the project, but in the end, all parties re-committed themselves to sharing the extra costs. Perhaps it was a case of Portland's collaborative, consensus-oriented culture saving the day, or perhaps it was the fact that the tram stood as the lynchpin of the entire South Waterfront district: a new OHSU campus connecting the medical school with its Marquam Hill buildings, as well as a high-density mixed use neighborhood built from scratch on a former brownfield site.

The tram also gave us the only major international design competition of the last quarter century and the first since the Portland Building competition that produced Michael Graves' design. Each of the major finalists brought impressive pedigree and great ideas. New York firm SHoP suggested a lower tram station that recalled Rome's iconic Spanish Steps. Engineer Guy Nordenson (also NYC-based) proposed an elegant sculptural configuration. Dutch firm UN Studio offered a changed configuration that might have better incorporated access for surrounding neighborhoods. Switzerland and Los Angeles-based AGPS Architecture suggested a wood-based tram station evoking the look of ballet dancers, but the firm was chosen most of all for the charisma and smarts of lead architect Sarah Graham, a native Portlander.

In the end, the completed project looked very little like AGPS's original proposal, but the fact that it was still visually striking anyway became all the more credit to the firm. Given that the tram cars would fly over one Portland’s oldest neighborhoods as well as two parks and a freeway meant that the architecture needed to be not just functional but beautiful. The angular pillar of the lower tram station as well as the metallic bubble-shaped cars themselves are now icons of Portland design along with its bridges and MAX trains.

Portland Aerial Tram station (photo by Bradley Maule)

"Portland's Aerial Tram is a pragmatic but philosophical conversation piece," wrote Jeff Jahn in PORT. "Pragmatically it was made for transporting people from the tall new glass towers in the South Waterfront neighborhood to Oregon Health and Sciences University at the top of Pill Hill. But it has courted and accumulated a lot of other meanings. Like the Eifel Tower, Space Needle, Arc de Triomphe and Statue of liberty it will forever be considered alongside the pervasive philosophical challenges and contexts in which it was built. For Portland today the context is questioning man's relationship to the environment (fossil fuels in particular), health care and science as a partner with nature, our use of increasingly scarce real-estate, issues of civic interdependence and the nature and use of the US's power. It is a unique architectural project and time will tell how the conversation it spurs will pan out."

Indeed, five years after the tram's opening, even though city budgets are more strapped than ever, the cost of the tram - ballooned though it was compared to original estimates - seems to have faded away while what the city and OHSU bought has become as embedded in the city's cultural and architectural fabric as the upper station is in Marquam Hill bedrock.

Of course it's not to say that a project budget nearly quadrupling should be cast off as unimportant. Yet how many of you can tell me the cost of Pioneer Courthouse Square, or the first MAX line? What often seem like big costs at the time can fade away in the ensuing years if the project holds up as a well-used, well-functioning, beautiful design.

When I took a ride on the Aerial Tram a few weeks ago (for a music video project I'm working on), it was a seemingly lazy Tuesday afternoon. But the tram was full to capacity, not only on my trip up and down the hill but countless trips before and after as I photographed the outside of each station. The tram is clearly what it set out to be: an invaluable connector for doctors, patients and administrators at OHSU, enlivening the burgeoning South Waterfront neighborhood with bustle and energy. If South Waterfront is still, compared to the rest of the central city, somewhat isolated and its streets without bustle, that is only going to change as more residents are added to the neighborhood and the Collaborative Life Science project takes root.

And in the broader picture, whether riding on the tram or driving on Interstate 5 or walking along the banks of the Willamette, one can see emerging a continuous strip of high density urbanity from downtown moving south. Now that there's a MAX and pedestrian bridge across the Willamette River being built nearby, and a pedestrian bridge over I-5 for connections to the historic South Portland neighborhood, the urban fabric will continue to be made - something the tram helped make possible.

 

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Cloepfil to speak Thursday at Portland Art Museum

National Music Center, Calgary (rendering courtesy Allied Works)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

This Thursday at 6PM, Portland Art Museum director Brian Ferriso will host an interview and conversation with Allied Works founder and lead designer Brad Cloepfil.

The conversation comes at an interesting juncture for both Cloepfil and the museum. Today Allied Works is not only coming off the high-profile success of a well received Clifford Styll Museum in Denver, but is seeing other large scale projects beginning to come to fruition like the National Music Centre in Calgary, only adding to the firm's impressive portfolio of public arts institions in St. Louis, New York, Ann Arbor, and Seattle.

“We’re inventing an institution here,” Cloepfil told Fast Company last summer. “It’s an exciting thing but it’s a daunting thing. It’s a building type that doesn’t exist yet.”

National Music Center, Calgary (image courtesy Allied Works)

After beating out famous firms and architects like Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Jean Nouvel, among others, one of the first things Cloepfil did was to question whether such a building was really necessary. “Why build a national music center when everyone’s on their iPods?” he said. “Does a music institution need a venue anymore?”

In the end, both Cloepfil and his clients resolved Canada's music-loving public needed a place to congregate and call its own. “It’s about people coming together,” Cloepfil said in the Fast Company interview. “People always talked about how libraries would disappear. But they didn’t. People still go and bring their laptops. People like to be around people. So this space is about bringing people together for music.”

One could lead this notion into a similar conversation about the Portland Art Museum. Unlike the music center, PAM already has two buildings to call home. But there are increasing whispers that the museum may be gearing up to fundraise for development of the block it owns one block north of its existing Belluschi Building and Mark Building. Rather than an international design competition, as many cultural facilities use to bring top-shelf architects on board, PAM could easily simply sign on Allied Works. Portland as a city has a strong preference for all things local, and Allied is hands-down the local firm with the most international acclaim as well as the most experience with major art museums.

Vancouver Connector (images courtesy Allied Works)

Meanwhile, Allied's biggest local project for now seems to be the Vancouver Connector, which may be one of the few positive results from the Columbia River Crossing project. To buid the  newI-5 Bridge between Vancouver and Portland, mitigation is required under federal law, requiring improved connections between downtown Vancouver and the Fort Vancouver historic site, including an expanded pedestrian overpass at Evergreen Boulevard.

In partnership with landscape firm Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, the 14-acre Connector will feature a promenade lined with flowing water, a native Camas prairie and a wetland meadow. The Connector is organized as a series of intersecting and overlapping plates that allow light to pass from upper to lower levels, and offer framed views of the city and sky.

Trolling the web for other Allied news and Cloepfil quotes, I came across a conversation at UCLA's Hammer Museum between Cloepfil and Portland-based director Gus Van Sant.

As Meara Daly recalled for the Los Angeles I'm Yours blog, the evening began with Van Sant asking Cloepfil about why he lives in Portland. "For both, it seemed to be a respite from the noise of places like NY and LA: it is a place where they are most productive) and how does one find inspiration," Daly writes. "Cloepfil meandered a bit on this topic, but essentially he believes architecture is a means of mining things – they do not have to be new things or even profound – to create a lens that brings insight into things. In a way he feels they both 'edit' experiences and the goal for him 'is not to expand but to limit the conversation.' Van Sant actually contradicted this notion though: he feels that in film 'scale is preferable, to make it personal AND include a vastness.”

In his Hammer talk, Cleopfil on more than one occasion "made a disparaging reference to 'corporate' architecture," Daly adds, and stated "that there are only two kinds of architecture: architecture as commodity, which is about replication and making money, and the 1% (very clever to hit that note!) who do it for the ideas and architecture that lives on its merits." This is a bit confusing to characterize the 1% as the good guys in this scenario, and Daly disagrees with this premise. "I do not believe architecture can be boiled down to these two extremes," she argues, "and in fact it does the profession a disservice to characterize it as such. Is his work for Pixar not a commodity? Is Frank Gehry’s work not considered a commodity AND in that 1%? I would love to hear other people’s thoughts on the subject, particularly folks who work in the industry." Indeed, Cloepfil seems to have a left-leaning sentiment and sympathy for the overwhelming majority earning less than a bundle, even as his clients are often very well-heeled.

Cloepfil's talk at the Portland Art Museum goes from 6-7PM on Thursday, and the museum is at 1219 SW Park Avenue.

 

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OHSU unveils first look at riverfront Collaborative Life Sciences Building

Collaborative Life Science Building (rendering courtesy OHSU)

BY FRED LEESON

There are few opportunities left in Portland to take a flat, vacant 12-acre site and erect a cutting-edge building that will establish a new use for many decades and set a template for related development nearby.

Such was the challenge for the Collaborative Life Sciences Building, the first of potentially several new buildings that will be known as the Schnitzer Campus of Oregon Health & Science University, located on the west bank of the Willamette River just south of the Marquam Bridge.

This first piece is a 650,000-square foot structure with a 12-story tower at the north end and a five-story element at the south end, sandwiching auditorium-sized classrooms and an atrium. All three components sit on a plinth that covers 470 parking spaces and seals polluted land below left behind by prior industrial uses.

If form says anything about function, this will be a busy building, indeed.

The complex structure is a collaboration between OHSU and the Oregon University System, which includes Portland State University and Oregon State University. PSU will use the structure for biology, chemistry and pre-med classes; OSU will expand its pharmacy program and research labs; and OHSU will use the Skourtes Tower for its dental school and a biomedicine program.

Collaborative Life Sciences Building (undersized renderings courtesy OHSU)

The final design, approved by the Portland Design Commission on Jan. 19 after several public hearings extending over eight months, is a joint effort between SERA Architects of Portland and CO Architects of Los Angeles. The LA firm, which led the large-scale design, has worked on dozens of projects around the nation involving health care, medical education and science and technology.

The overall size and shape of the building changed little during the public design process, but the Design Commission lobbied successfully for a more simplified palette of exterior materials and changes to the pedestrian and bicycle circulation.

“It has been quite a journey,” Brian Newman, OHSU’s planning director, told the commission at its final hearing. “We all feel the project has improved significantly because of your participation.”

Given its size and scope, there was little public testimony at the hearings. The AIA’s Urban Design Panel submitted written testimony that was more a criticism of the city’s master plan. “Instead of a composition of urban buildings in a connected field of urban blocks, the site master planning and building design offer our city a suburban-style university campus of buildings that fail to engage with the urban fabric,” the panel said.

Given the seeming isolation of the South Waterfront location, access the building should be excellent. The Portland Streetcar will have a stop on Moody Street, and the new Milwaukie light rail line will have a station at the south end of the project. Bicycles also are likely to be a popular transportation choice, and the design affords more than 400 bike parking spaces, some outside and many under cover.

Perforated stainless steel panels, punched with holes of three sizes, break up the glassy masses of the larger structures and provide sun protection where needed.

“The building has a lot of positive energy,” said David Keltner of THA Architecture, a Design Commission member. “It’s very forward thinking.” Ben Kaiser of PATH Architecture, another commissioner, added, “It is pretty dynamic, but extremely composed.”

The complex should spring upward at a fast pace. The city allowed for the start of construction on the foundation before the final design was approved. PSU officials hoped it would be ready for undergraduate classes in the fall of 2013, but a 2014 completion date may be more likely.

Pylons of pride: traversing the new Martin Luther King Viaduct

MLK Viaduct (photos by Bradley Maule)

BY BRADLEY MAULE

Highway construction projects are never popular, never on budget, and never on time. Even in the utopian City That Works, this evidently holds true. The new Martin Luther King Jr Viaduct, which opened in October, is — at least from a cursory glance at the news stories about it — an unpopular boondoggle that opened a year and a half later than planned. And as a bonus, the road itself is bumpy, with slightly bowed segments that produce the badump . . . badump . . . badump sensation of, well, slightly bowed highways.

Be that as it may, the MLK Viaduct is, I think, pretty great — and necessary. The viaduct it was built to replace opened in 1936, when automobiles had circa-1936 horsepower and the land it crossed was still getting accustomed to the heavy load. Originally wetlands, the area the viaduct traverses was filled in with waste from the sawmills that lined the banks of the Willamette a few blocks to the west. Johan Poulsen, the proprietor of one of the largest of these, built a Queen Anne house in 1891 on the bluff overlooking where the south end of the viaduct and Ross Island Bridge would overlap but not directly intersect.

MLK Viaduct (photos by Bradley Maule)

The Union Avenue Viaduct — as it was known until Union Avenue was renamed for Martin Luther King in the 1980s — made aesthetics an integral part of this WPA project from the onset. Designed by Conde McCullough, the master Oregon bridgeman for whom the Coos Bay bridge is named, it featured gothic railings and artful pedestrian approaches and street lamps. (Check out the Library of Congress’ collection of historic photos of it HERE.) This attention to detail was not lost on the engineers charged with building the replacement.

Landscape architect Lloyd Lindley led a team that included Kittelson & Associates, David Evans & Associates, and ODOT (not to mention the many meetings between neighbors and local businesses) to craft the new viaduct that recalls the period its predecessor represented, but without feeling faux or trite. Along with modern common-sense amenities that include wide sidewalks and bike lanes (despite its highway designation, it’s still an important thoroughfare for locals), it has hexagonal support columns, sharp balustrades and street lamps, and most prominently, enormous pyramidal pylon towers.

“With this project, we had a chance to express the rhythm and texture of [McCullough's] classic architecture in a modern setting,” Lindley explains. A veteran of ZGF Architects, Lindley is familiar with modern (and modernist) projects. “We had concepts with Italianate, Mesoamerican, and Northwest styles, but ultimately we went with a minimalist approach that would meet the modern standards.”

MLK Viaduct (photos by Bradley Maule)

Modern standards, of course, pay close mind to sustainability, so most of the materials used were local, all of them American. There are two stormwater treatment facilities, one next to the Ross Island Bridge (merging with the east side tunnel project), and the other next to the streetcar bridge across the railroad tracks. After the Streetcar crosses the Willamette on the new Portland-Milwaukie Bridge, it will continue to the Eastside Loop at SE Harrison, where it will join its north-south course on Grand Ave and MLK Blvd.

The viaduct’s columns, haunched box-girders, railings, tubular guardrails, and skylights all employ this aimed simplicity too, but where the project thrives is in its lights and towers. “It sounds trite,” Lindley concedes, “but I wanted to somehow convey the Rose City.” Using the rose bush outside his office as an inspiration, Lindley studied the overlapping triangles of young rosebuds, “scanned them and played around with them,” and that eventually led to the lampposts he describes as “unfolding sheets of concrete.”

MLK Viaduct (photos by Bradley Maule)

It is the four pylon towers, though, which are the main attraction: simple and modern, as drawn up. They’re also perhaps the most obvious homage to Conde McCullough, whose Yaquina Bay and Siuslaw River Bridges along the Oregon Coast feature similar ornamental pylons. The 75′ concrete towers are topped with sleek, stainless steel pyramids that glow in the sunlight.

Serving as the gateway between the central city and points south, the MLK Viaduct’s towers stand as vertical points of reference in the otherwise low-rise industrial district. With pedestrian-bike ramps at SE Division Place, they mark a point of entry-exit for the viaduct’s bike lanes to connect to Division and the Springwater Corridor. The towers just to the north at SE Caruthers, though they don’t have similar ramps, create a landmark to the future eastern head of the Portland-Milwaukie Bridge, around which several attractions like OMSI, Portland Opera and Gamblin Arts already call home.

In addition to reference, the towers are also points of refuge: they’re at the approximate halfway point of the half-mile long viaduct, and if you’re going to stop here to catch your breath and take in the view, you might as well learn something. Placards explaining the history of the neighborhood, industry (lumber, railroad), Highway 99E, and the viaduct itself are installed under each of the four towers.

While it’s easy to say that the MLK Viaduct project ran over budget and took longer than it should have, it’s just as easy to demonstrate how the cost of materials became extremely inflated as the bubble burst and that unexpected delays from soil contamination (again, the land is a wetland filled in with century-old mill waste) added months to the buildout. In the end, though, Portland got a complex bridge spanning several streets and a very active railroad line, while never closing its predecessor. That is, though it was mitigated by cones and flags, traffic kept moving during construction. And, well, it looks great.

Coming north on Highway 99E, passing from Milwaukie into Portland by way of McLoughlin Blvd, the pylon towers clearly symbolize the transition into the urban center, and specifically Martin Luther King Jr Blvd. Following MLK north, one passes King’s statue at the Oregon Convention Center, through one of Portland’s only predominantly African-American parts of town, and on to the northern terminus of MLK Blvd at Interstate Bridge. It’s a fitting multicultural, multipurpose dissection of a city often dismissed for a perceived homogeny.

Back on the southern end of the boulevard, where over 60,000 cars pass each day, with still more passing under it alongside bicycles and people and trains, the MLK Viaduct is proof that, even in today’s roads, function and form can coexist.

Bradley Maule is the editor of Portland Urban Resource.

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Terwilliger Parkway at 100 and the Olmsted Brothers' vision

Terwilliger Parkway (photo by Fred Leeson)

BY FRED LEESON

Aside from moving people from one place to another, how often does a strip of pavement add to civility of the city, provide emotional respite and inspiration, and even rank as a tourist attraction?

If it’s Terwilliger Parkway, think “all of the above.” The roadway that skirts Portland’s West Hills from SW Sheridan Street to Barbur Boulevard turns 100 later this year, and citizen activists and the Portland Parks Bureau hope to generate new attention for the Parkway and its interesting history.

In one sense, Terwilliger is more than 100 years old. Its genesis lies in the ground-breaking 1903 report to the Portland Park Board by the pioneering landscape architects John Charles Olmsted and Frederick Law Olmstad. Though Frederick is the better known of the brothers, it was John who did most of the legwork in the 1903 report that urged the creation of an extensive park system, a looping trail around the city and scenic roadways connecting major parks.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the Olmsteds came to Portland to plan grounds for the 1905 Lewis & Clark Centennial Exposition in Northwest Portland. But the amazing sweep of their vision included far, far more, and proved to have a long-lasting impact. Many of its recommendations have been adopted over the years, and many others still lie unfulfilled. Yet contemporary park planners remain aware of the 1903 plan and refer to it on occasion.

The Olmsteds are back in the news now because some devoted citizens who formed Friends of Terwilliger and the Portland Parks Bureau hope to install gateway markers at either end of the Parkway that will – eventually, perhaps – tells visitors and passersby about the Parkway’s fuller story.

“The sequence of views and natural setting is really spectacular,” Rouse said.

For now, however, there will be only one “gateway,” most likely a low-lying blade sign in Duniway Park saying “Terwilliger Parkway” and probably “1912.” “Unfortunately, we have a very limited budget,” said Allison Rouse, the Parks Bureau project manager. In some subsequent year, Rouse said, the city would like to see a similar gateway near the south end. It also would like to add interpretive information about the Olmsteds and other scenic attributes of the roadway.

The blade sign would be designed to catch the eyes of motorists, while the interpretive panels would be views by thousands who use the Parkway daily for walking, jogging and cycling. The preferred location for the market would require the relocation of a stone marker and bronze plate commemorating the life of Abigail Scott Duniway, who carved a reputation as the Oregon’s foremost activist for women’s suffrage, also finally approved – coincidentally – in 1912, the year the Parkway opened.

The original Parkway was a dirt road, which wasn’t paved until 1917 when water damage became apparent. The city government in the 1920s expanded parkway boundaries to include 100 feet on both sides of the road, to preserve the bucolic setting. The city government in the 1980s went further, approving a plan that would regulate development in the corridor and protect specified views.

Overall, “It’s a great piece of history that most Portlanders don’t know about,” said Brian Emerick, an architect and member of the Portland Historic Landmarks Commission. “Most Portlanders don’t know where Terwilliger is,” he added.

One challenge the Parks Bureau faces in creating the blade signs is the city’s own sign code. Rouse said the maximum sign size allowed without a variance is 10 square feet. She added that letters need to be five to seven inches tall to be seen by motorists. The formality of a sign code adjustment appears inevitable.

Rouse said the Parks Bureau hopes to complete the gateway design in March, start building it in April and install it in June. A parade and other events marking the Parkway centennial are scheduled for July 20 to 22.

“Overall, we think it’s a great idea,” said Carrie Richter, landmarks commission chair.

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Next moves for the "capital of conscience"

Photo by Brian Libby

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In a Thursday Portland Tibune op-ed, PORT editor and artist/curator Jeff Jahn makes a compelling argument that Portland should sieze the day: keeping its creative talent by embarking on an ambitious future.

"Portland is the first U.S. city to grow out of the adolescent attitudes of America in the second half of the 20th century," Jahn writes. "The laundry list: non-car-reliant transportation, green thinking, proximity to nature, a very non-1 percent-centric civic attitude, high-tech savvy and a permissive attitude that was essentially humanistic rather than purely capitalistic."

"In other words," he adds, "the original Occupy Portland started around the mid-’90s by artists and has only gathered steam since...it is clear that Portland is receiving credit as the capital of
conscience for the United States. Portland became a 21st-century leader because it rejected both of the 20th century’s main models: Manhattan’s top-down corporate verticality and LA’s car-driven suburban sprawl. Instead, as a more 19th century-style city of shopkeepers and artists (defined by our citizens more than institutions), we should own the title and take care to not become complacent."

Jahn's op-ed responded to a previous Tribune article by Peter Korn exploring why there are no Portland-based winners of the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" fellows. He says our community of artists, designers and other creatives is more "MacGyver" than "MacArthur": smaller scaled as a result of the best work happening without institutional support, be it at alternative art galleries or in small architecture firms. "Some call it benign neglect, but it is simply an institutional lag," Yahn concludes.

Photo by Brian Libby

This notion of Portland having a hive of creative activity but too little leadership at the top enabling it to flourish also brings to mind a Wednesday article in Atlantic Cities about a "green revolution" happening in Chicago.

"Daniel Burnham went on to lay out much of the city's central lakefront area as part of his 1909 Plan of Chicago," David Lepeska writes. But the waterfront area often seemed under-appreciated during the latter half of the 20th century." But then came Millennium Park in 2004, controversial for its $450 million cost initially, yet quickly attracting droves. "It's only the beginning," Lepeska adds. "Several major projects remain on the city's lakefront docket, aiming to complete the makeover that began nearly a decade ago and create an unbroken, three-mile stretch of green jewels." Up first is a $225 million renovation of Navy Pier. By 2015, the city is expecting to redo North Island, a former landing strip that will become a new park and lagoon designed by the firm of Macarthur Fellow recipient Jean Gang and her firm, Studio Gang. There is also a $30 million redo of the northern portion of Grant Park, and a $50 million redo of the Navy Pier Flyover pedestrian crossing.

Obviously Portland doesn't have the wealth and resources of Chicago. But there's still a lesson to be learned. Top Chicago architects like Gang are leading the charge in re-imagining the city's most important infrastructure and public spaces. That's very different from what Portland is doing on projects like the Columbia Crossing, in which government highway engineers have forced design mediocrity and 20th Century thinking about roadways. It's an appalling missed opportunity. We're also building Portland's first new downtown bridge in more than a generation, TriMet's MAX/pedestrian crossing south of the Ross Island Bridge. It's going to be a handsome bridge, but the transit agency dismissed its best proposal, dumping acclaimed Boston bridge engineer Miguel Rosales just as his vision for the bridge began to attract excitement.

Besides these bridge projects, there is also the broader question of how Portland re-embraces its waterfront as Chicago is doing. Sooner or later, we've got to do something about the freeway taking up all our prime real estate along the east bank of the Willamette River. The Vera Katz Eastbank Esplanade was a good start, providing a walking path squeezed between the freeway and the water. But it's completely isolated from the east side itself by Interstate 5. The Esplanade needs to be a point of entry into the east side, not an outdoor hallway skirting it amongst the loudness of automobiles skirting by. It won't be cheap to bury Interstate 5 in a tunnel, and the alternative - having Interstate 405 on the west side become the new I-5, going from two freeways to one beside downtown - would create its own set of problems. Yet removing the freeway from the east side could increase property values and transform the central eastside, just as new streetcar and MAX lines are making the connections to downtown better than ever.

It's easy to feel cynical about the prospects of Portland taking on any major infrastructure projects given dwinding federal funds and given how badly city and state have failed with the Columbia Crossing. There's not money and even if it were, maybe we can't be trusted with it. Yet Jahn is right that Portland can't just assume its current popularity will last forever, and we must use the social capital being generated today to reinvest in the foundation of tomorrow. Maybe there's a wide chasm between a knitting, feminist-bookstore owning Portlandia urbanist and a Richard Daley-scale ambition for building. Maybe we can take pride in having a MacGuyver attitude rather than MacArthur heavyweights. Yet the "City That Works" (to borrow from the local city-government slogan) still has a lot of it to do, and our conscience should be pushing us to grow hungrier.

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Three new housing projects: sign of recovery?

The Janey by GBD Architects (courtesy Neighborhood Notes)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

It's been a long dark winter since the sun set on the economic boom of the 2000s, when construction cranes dotted the central city landscape. For the past three years, modest renovations and public building projects have helped architecture and construction firms to get by, but in many cases just that.

But now there may be reason for at least some modest, guarded optimism. According to the American Institute of Architects' billing index, billings at US architecture firms in November, recorded their strongest monthly gain since the end of 2010. Inquiries for new projects also increased sharply.

Meanwhile locally, according to Portland State University's Center for Real Estate, sales from multifamily transactions "are on track this year to approach the pre-recessionary levels of approximately $800 million per year – a substantial uptick from the $525 million banked in 2010, and a huge increase from the $282 million recorded in 2009," reports the Daily Journal of Commerce's Lee Fehrenbacher.

Granted, the condo market that once provided the foundation for a robust economy is still yet to catch up. Freddie Mac reports that American households lost nearly $400 billion in property value during the first nine months of the 2011. But numerous apartment projects are underway, and even a few condos.

The Janey, for example, is currently under construction in the Pearl District. A six-story mixed-use project in the Pearl formerly known as the West Bearing Apartments, it is designed by GBD Architects and consists of 50 apartment units over 2,600 square feet of ground floor retail space.

Claybourne Commons (image courtesy Vallaster Corl Architects)

In the Sellwood/Moreland neighborhood, a 20-unit townhome project called Claybourne Commons is in the works, pending city approval. As reported by the Daily Journal of Commerce's Angela Webber reports, the  plan calls for splitting the land into 20 lots, each with a 1,400-square-foot, two bedroom condo. Design is by Vallaster Corl Architects, the firm behind successful mixed use projects such as The Jefferson in downtown Portland and The Hawthorne in Southeast.

But the Claybourne Commons developers have also perhaps earned the ire of local music fans. They own the former funeral home next door to the Claybourne Commons site that was until recently home to The Woods, a popular indie music venue. But now The Woods has been forced to close its doors. A rent increase seemed to be the reason, but the owners told the DJC it was not such an increase that did the venue in but simply paying the existing rent. Yet the owners also have plans to renovate the buiding into office space, which would alter significantly the circa-1928 building.

Prescott Apartments (image courtesy Daily Journal of Commerce)

The DJC's Lindsey O'Brien also reports on construction of the $26 million, 155-unit mixed-use Prescott Apartments, which is set to begin in March, at North Interstate and Skidmore. Designed by Myhre Group, the C-shaped building will have 9,500 square feet of ground-floor retail space and underground parking for 111 vehicles. The Prescott will be six stories on its tallest side, facing Interstate Avenue.

Taken individually, none of these projects may represent a turnaround from the downturn. But like a dripping faucet that becomes a full-pressure stream, with a little luck these and other buidings on the boards or under construction may give us hope that the banks will start lending again, that the job market will give more people the resources to rent and buy homes. Make no mistake: no one is looking for the boom of the 2000s to return. Even if it could, we may not want it to, for rampant speculation is what helped ruin the economy. If a sustainable flow of demand and supply were to return, though, that would be cause for enough ribbon cuttings to make a bow.

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Portland's rise is not on a 15-minute cycle (nor is Pittsburgh's)

A contrail over Southeast Portland (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In Wednesday's Washington Post, Maura Judkis argues that Portland's 15 minutes of fame are up.

"Portland, with its elaborate facial hair and abundance of strip clubs, represents irony. Pittsburgh, with its working-class pragmatism, is the opposite: earnest and straightforward," writes Judkis, a Pittsburgh native. "Hipsters take faux working-class attributes — brusque beards, Pabst Blue Ribbon and occupations such as butchery — and integrate them into their lives with an ironic wink and a superiority complex. In Pittsburgh, you can find all of the above, only without the derision and affectation. The natural life span of the hipster has come to an end. What was a lifestyle adopted to make fun of the mainstream has now become the mainstream. There are no more [expletive] hipsters to be looked at...and jokes about them — much like every skit on Portlandia — have started to feel a minute or a paragraph too long."

With due respect to the writer, I think this article, like many from national media outlets, fails to grasp the coalescence of long term trends leading to Portland's rise.

Instead of reading the tea leaves of decades-long socio-economic urban trends that have emboldened Portland and Pittsburgh, or any number of smaller cities around the world, this article and others before it - particularly those covering the Portlandia TV show - have instead confused them with trite, fickle pop cultural cache. The notion of 15 minutes of fame was of course coined by Pittsburgh-born Andy Warhol, but the mentality shown here is less that of a visionary art provocateur than of a TMZ or E! reporter genuflecting or scoffing at a Kardashian depending on the time of day.

It's not just the Washington Post doing it. A New Yorker writer, John Seabrook, described Portland as a city where people "pretend not to care about money and worldly ambition." Did I mention his review predated the Occupy Wall Street movement? We may not be the only ones who see how little of value being in the one percent really buys.

Carnival ride at Oaks Park, Portland (photo by Brian Libby)

The irony here - and yes, as a Portlander apparently I'm preturnaturally conditioned to recognize it, versus a Pittsburgian's quest for earnestness - is that Portlandia itself exemplifies a much better understanding of the city. The show may have a satirical tone (it being a satire and all) in its send ups of feminist bookstore owners and organic farmers, but it recognizes and embraces the city's broader identity of the progressive outsider, that which helped gave birth to Gus Van Sant films, Apple computers, Mark Rothko paintings and Simpsons episodes. The other irony is that Portland is overwhelmingly an earnest do-gooder populace, not cynical and ironic, compared to larger population centers on the East Coast or in Southern California.

In comparing the merits of Pittsburgh to Portland, Judkis can only seem to praise the Steel City by saying it has some supply of what Portland emblemizes. Pittsburgh, she writes, "has its own bike routes, microbreweries, organic food markets, art and lush scenery." If that doesn't work, there's always the cuisine that made unprecedented numbers of people in the Rust Belt and Midwest to which Pittsburgh belongs obese: "Don’t forget that it has one of the country’s weirdest and most delicious sandwiches."

This ought not to be about Pittsburgh versus Portland. As it happens, Pittsburgh does have a lot going for it. The city, more than any other former industrial Mecca flourishing in generations past, has found a way to reinvent itself as a flourishing small metropolis connecting the East Coast and the Midwest. And admittedly, Portland has its problems: we need jobs and greater diversity. But Pittsburgh and Portland, rather than rivals or as combatatants in some kind of cool-cache duel, both represent the rise of the small city at the expense of megalopolises like New York, DC and Los Angeles.

Gone are the days before the Internet and ease of travel when small cities' most talented artists and entrepreneurs felt they had to migrate across the country forever in order to find attention, investment and advancement. Today Mark Rothko wouldn't have to go to New York to become Mark Rothko.

The great diaspora of the 21st century will not be immigrants foreign and domestic heading to two or three American cultura capitols. It will be one that favors the Copenhagens, Kyotos, Portlands and Pittsburghs of the world - not to the same centers of smog, hubris and spit of the past. There is no Ellis Island today but an archipelago.

Go ahead, Washington Post. Try to marginalize this irrevocable broad transformation as mere fashion. After all, daily papers (once the gatekeepers of information, now stumbling to keep up) are part of the changing times theselves, and one that symbolizes something larger: an urban-cultural oligarchy becoming a democracy.

And now that I think about it, it's actually a good thing Portland's 15 minutes have been declared expired. Now that tastemakers might be moving on, we can focus on the truer substance and sustenance that remains.

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Vancouver's midcentury gem: visiting the Smith Tower

Smith Tower (photos by Bradley Maule)

BY BRADLEY MAULE

Vancouver, Washington isn’t a whole lot of things to a whole lot of people — I’d guess most of Portland’s modern emigrant population hasn’t even set foot there (admittedly, it took me over two years to do so) — but one thing it is, is the home to one of the finest specimens of midcentury modern in the Pacific Northwest.

Recalling the famed Capitol Records tower in Los Angeles, Smith Tower is easily the most notable participant in Vancouver’s skyline, save for maybe the enormous industrial elevator next to the railroad bridge across the Columbia River. Technically, SW Washington Medical Center’s Firstenburg Tower is the tallest building in the Couv, a whole two feet (160′) taller than Smith Tower (158′), but it’s way out by I-205, well removed from the old downtown core.

Smith Tower (photos by Bradley Maule)

The 15 story tower opened in 1966 as a retirement home for seniors (over 62) and remains so to this day. Interestingly, its official name is Mid-Columbia Manor, but its nickname “Smith Tower” — allegedly begun by Bill Smith himself, the former president of Mid-Columbia Manor, Inc, who still manages the apartment building — stuck early on and is used today on the tower’s sign and letterhead.

Now 45 years old — five years shy of the nomination period for the National Register of Historic Places — Smith Tower looks like it was built in 1966, but it wears its age well. Perhaps a little too well, even, as its original mustard-yellow scheme was sadly scrapped over a decade ago at the behest of the City of Vancouver. The yellow ribbon panels were simply reversed, leaving the cylindrical building with a more boring beige. Not quite as boring, however, as the Harrison West Tower, Portland’s tallest building at the time, has been from the get-go. (For a better reference, the Lovejoy Fountain plaza also opened in 1966.)

Architects Keith Bradbury & Henry Greybrook practiced in both Oregon and Washington, but they operated primarily out of their Vancouver office opened in 1964 to oversee the construction of Smith Tower. While there, another senior living highrise, the 18-story Ya-Po-Ah Terrace (née Foothills Apartments), came off of their desk and still stands as the tallest building in Eugene. During Smith’s construction, it used a lift-slab technique based around its central core, akin to Chicago’s similarly-corncob-esque Marina City (which opened in 1964).

Smith Tower (photos by Bradley Maule)

At the time of its opening, Smith Tower stood diagonally across the street from Lucky Lager brewery, which wasted no time lending its identity to the building: the beer can. Alas, the brewery closed in 1985, and to no great chagrin to the elderly residents, that nickname has collected dust while the old brewhouse has been replaced with condos. Fortunately (or perhaps "luckily") for Vancouver, it hasn’t been overlooked in the ongoing Beervana revolution. There are currently two breweries — Salmon Creek and Mount Tabor — in production, and an artisan bottle shop with goods from across the region and country.

Otherwise, there isn’t a whole lot of info out there on Smith Tower, an effort compounded by the fact that Vancouver’s much larger neighbor to the north, Seattle, has a more famous, nearly century old landmark of the same name. Three years ago, a 74-year-old man got stuck in the Vancouver building’s garbage chute and had to be rescued by the local fire department. More recently, local citizens expressed concern that the controversial Columbia River Crossing’s Vancouver footprint would enter downtown at roughly the same height as the Smith Tower roofline, the reference point used by engineers at a public meeting. And, while I was there two weeks ago, an old man with long hair in a cowboy hat and boots urinated in the walkway toward the curving underground parking garage. Exciting times.

Whether it’s a first ballot hall of famer come 2016, its first year of eligibility for the National Register, remains to be seen, but it seems that Smith Tower’s tall, beer-can-shaped place as one of The Couv’s architectural icons is safe. The building is ideally situated in a burgeoning downtown Vancouver, and there are soon to be more senior citizens in this country than ever before, although this particular old folks' home still feels as modern as ever. What's more, Smith Tower typifies a generation of midcentury modern architecture that is only just now arriving on preservationists' radar. We can't just rely on being lucky to see these buildings endure.

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