Graham Towers (image courtesy Path Architecture)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
I hope you didn't think tonight, tomorrow or this weekend was the time to stay home, watching football in your sweats and grazing on fatty food. (Oops, that was supposed to be my interior monologue.) Instead, how about listening this evening to one of the city's best architects describe his vision? Or seeing homes by that architect and several more on Saturday?
The monthlong Architecture + Design Festival, which started in earnest last week, already had plenty to offer architects and design enthusiasts looking for ideas, inspiration and conversation. But this week also has brought Design Week Portland, which brings a broader array of designers not just of buildings but of clothing, advertising, objects, and more. It begs the question: why couldn't they have got together and made for one comprehensive fest? After all, many of the A+D Fest's events are actually a stitching together of other oganizations' already-happening events under the A+D banner. Design Week has a wider focus than A+D, but Portland is the Capitol of Collaboration. Do we really need two design festivals happening at the same time?
That said, one can always pick and choose, and too many compelling events is a favorable dilemma to have. At the Design Fest tonight, for example, there is a talk called "Portland Writers on the Designs That Shaped a City" at the Ziba Auditorium (810 NW Marshall, free). The panel includes Chris Higgins, a regular contributor to Mental Floss magazine; writer Matthew Stadler; technology/science writer Karla Starr; Ziba editor/researcher Carl Alviani, and Silicon Florist blogger Rick Turoczy. This group should have a lot of insightful things to say, and a different perspective.
Also tonight, the Design Fest will feature a talk by Jeff Kovel of Skylab Architecture called "The Hidden Narrative" (The Cleaners at Ace Hotel, 1022 SW Stark, $28). Kovel got his start designing a home for rock musician Lenny Kravitz for Architropolis in 1996, and since founding Skylab in 1999 has put himself in a very rarified air amongst Portland architects, able to conjure a kind of sleek and sexy modern style, eye-popping without ever seeming ostentatious, that is at the same time rooted in sustainability. Be it restaurants and bars like Doug Fir and the Departure Lounge, temporary installations for clients like Nike, ambitious efforts like the unbuilt Weave Building, or dazzling houses as pop-cultural phenomenons (like the one in Portland's West Hills used in the Twilight movies), Skylab has more inherent style than most of the other firms in town combined.
This Saturday, there are two more Architecture + Design Festival events. First at 10AM at is a lecture by local architectural historian William Hawkins on the Greek Revival style in the Oregon Territory from 1839-59 (701 SE Grand, $10-18). Though many of our East Coast friends seem to think Oregon was an unpaved, unplugged outpost as recently as the 1980s or so, by the mid-19th century there was a plethora of Greek Revival architecture here.
Irvington Residence (rendering courtesy DAO Architecture)
But Saturday's marquee A+D Fest event is Design Matters: A Tour of Exceptional Portland Homes ($28). I've already detailed some of the homes on the tour in last week's post about the A+D fest, including Skylab's modular HOMB project. But there are a few exceptional homes I didn't mention. One is the Irvington Residence by DAO Architecture.
A two-story house that's just 13 feet wide and has a total of only 950 square feet, the Irvington Residence nevertheless accomodates a living room, double-height dining room, kitchen, two bedrooms, bathroom, powder room, a number of built-in storage areas, and ground floor patio and upper floor deck. The house sits on the site of a former garage adjacent to an existing apartment quadraplex, so it's also an ideal example of the density we can add to our already existing neighborhoods.
Unfortunately too much squabbling has occured in recent months about how infill projects often add residents to a neighborhood without adding more parking, which is a sad, suburban-minded mentality to have in America's most progressively designed and livability-oriented city. DAO's project reminds us of how the right infill projects enhance these neighborhoods.
Twigg House (rendering courtesy Darin Dougherty)
The Design Matters tour also includes work by numerous other talented Portland architects and firms, including Paul McKean, DECA Architecture, and Darin Dougherty (of the now-defunct SEED Architecture Studio). McKean and Dougherty's work was part of the very influential 11xDesign tour a few years ago, and they are some of the city's premier young architects. DECA has been building an impressive portfolio for more than a decade, and their CYRK Building on SE Clinton Street is the tour's sole mixed-use exampe, and a very fine one at that.
Packer House (image courtesy William C. Tripp Architect)
Speaking of Darin Dougherty and SEED from the Design Matters tour, one of their previous houses, the SIPS House, is included in an exceptional documentary being screened this Saturday as part of Design Week. Coast Modern (Ziba, 810 NW Marshall) by Mike Bernard and Kevin Froom is an hourlong documentary that traces post-World War II modernism from Los Angeles to Vancouver.
The film expertly weaves architects and architecture from the mid-20th century and today, architects in Califonia and those in Oregon and Washington. It features not only SEED but the wonderful Packer House by Portland architect William Tripp and of course the iconic circa-1937 Watzek House by the great John Yeon.
“I think it starts really with spending time with clients to learn about what’s important to them," Tripp says, "not just the pragmatics of a study here and a room that’s of a certain size, but what do they care about? What are their hopes and dreams? You try and get a sense of what these people are all about. One of the characteristics of modernism is that it has a level of abstraction to it that allows for a kind of timeless quality, but it also allows the designer more flexibility. You’re not bound by the rules of symmetry or axial alignment or a particualrl language of arhitecture. One of the things we look to do is to articulate a deeper connection to the landscape…The house becomes a kind of intstrument for locating the known universe.”
Watzek House (photo by Brian Libby)
Local architect and writer/professor John Cava also provides some well-spoken insight on the Watzek House and the socio-historic context it arrived in during the 1930s. “The Pacific Northwest was more insular [than California]," he explains. "It wasn’t in the thick of it….these were much more provincial places and were cautious about just receiving the full box that came in the mail: ‘Here’s modernism. We’ll just take it as it is? I don’t want to do that.’ Yeon was integrating vernacular traditions of the region, mostly agrarian, into modern buildings."
"The Watzek was for a wealthy businessperson-socialite who would normally have a Greek mansion or a French mansion, something special," Cava continues. "Yeon’s friends used to rib him about what they called the ‘Chicken Shack.’ They said, ‘You spent all this money on this place and it looks like a barn.' But it’s a very mild mannered house. You come to it and it is almost a kind of nothing place. You could drive by it very easily. But you go through and there are things about this hosue that are extraordinary. One is the integration with the landscape. Another is this weaving of modern space and what you might call old fashioned or traditional space…You go through this courtyard space, and it’s as wonderful as anything Neutra or anybody did. You open this door through this walled compound, and your whole body just kind of goes, 'Whoa!'"
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