Portland Architecture

Making connections: the Collaborative Life Sciences Building

CLSB from Moody Avenue (photo courtesy Alene Davis Photography)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

At the Collaborative Life Sciences Building, there is a lot going on.

For starters, it’s really not one building that comprises its 650,000 square feet but three: the 12-story Skourtes Tower on the north end, the smaller South Bar to the south, and a large glass-ensconced atrium in between that includes wood-wrapped auditoriums at the building’s front and back entrances.

There are also three different schools occupying a variety of classroom, laboratory and office spaces located here: Oregon Health & Sciences University is moving the first two years of its MD program to the CLSB, as well as its entire School of Dentistry. Oregon State has its joint program with OHSU in pharmacy here and Portland State University has moved its undergraduate biology and chemistry departments to the building.

Having this cross-section of institutions and students (some 3,000 will come here each day) isn’t just a matter of the trio of schools pooling their resources. It’s also a chance to encourage the kind of cross-disciplinary interaction between students and faculty that often leads to scientific breakthroughs and synergies.

While the architecture of the Skourtes Tower and South Bank is fairly routine for a medical school—laboratories and classrooms, stacked together in boxes wrapped in glass and perforated metal panels—the communal spaces in the atrium provide the most striking sense of design, not simply aesthetically but socially. 

CLSB atrium and Pae White light installation (photos courtesy Alene Davis Photography)

Arriving for a recent tour of the CLSB with Brian Newman, OHSU’s director of campus planning, development and real estate, and SERA Architects associate principal Alene Davis, it was into this atrium that I first stepped. I had to pause to take in the dramatic view before meeting up with them. 

From the ground floor, one looks up at a host of different gently sloping bridges going across the upper portion of the atrium; they connect the Skourtes Tower and South Bar, and affixed underneath the spans is a light-based art installation by Pae White. Although classes had not started when I visited and thus there were few people inside the building, it was easy to imagine this atrium as a future hive of activity and energy: the modern version of a town square. The bridges are even outfitted with plush benches and chairs to encourage it.

The Skourtes Tower and the South Bar, the two main structures, actually have different floor-to-ceiling heights, because of how they’re constructed and because of different needs. Newman explained that the Skourtes is built from a concrete moment frame, with much thicker slabs, and higher floor-to-ceiling height. “That’s where all of our uses such as research labs, teaching labs, and the dental clinic are located,” he said. “The South Bar, which is this big dominant form on the south side, is post-tension concrete slab: much thinner decks. That’s where we have our education spaces: classrooms, simulation, offices. And the atrium, which spans between the two, is steel construction.” Because of the different floor heights, the atrium bridges “are a bit of a ramp,” he added. “But the whole point was that for undergraduates, researchers, professors, professionals, staff, they want them to circulate through and have reason to stop and hang out.”

CLSB atrium (photos by Brian Libby)

I happened to explain this configuration to a friend, who quipped, “You mean they use the word ‘Collaborative’ in the name and the floors aren’t even the same height?” I don’t think the slight ramping really matters in and of itself in terms of the experience of crossing them, but it may be true that it bespeaks a slight lack of visual clarity to the architecture overall. On the outside, it’s hard at first to get a feel for the different interlocking forms of the three buildings, be it the Jawa Sandcrawler-like South Bar or the way the auditoriums are wedged into the atrium. But when viewed from a distance, especially on the river side the pieces and how they relate to each other come together.

Overall the CLSB, at least to me, seems to be trying to walk some kind of fine line between wanting to be one structure and wanting to be a conglomeration of different architectural pieces. Which is understandble, because the whole reason for the project is these different schools coming together. It makes a certain amount of sense that they would be represented by architecture that's made of big pieces partially unifying yet partially remaining separate.

What's more, the place where this union of buildings and programs does happen - the atrium - I found contributed a potential for hive-like energy that was compelling. Standing in the middle of the space, beneath the bridges, I felt like I was at the epicenter of innovative working and learning environments. 

The CLSB is just one of several buildings that OHSU has planned for the South Waterfront and Tilikum Crossing bridgehead (on either side of the Zidell Yards parcel). Soon the school plans to break ground on an eight to 11-story cancer center building near the CLSB, as well as another structure one block south of the Center for Health & Healing beside the tram. In fact, while the CLSB has an unobstructed view of the new bridge, there will eventually be another building between it and the water. But there is a promenade running along the east edge of the CLSB facing the Willamette that will connect it with the rest of the campus. Newman says the hope is that some of the CLSB’s picturesque views of the bridge, the river and downtown will be preserved.

CLSB from the east, south and west (photos courtesy Alene Davis Photography)

The entire building (save for the mostly windowless large auditoriums) when I visited was teeming with natural light: not too glaring, not too soft. That’s no surprise given that SERA, which co-designed the building with CO Architects of Los Angeles (the former as executive architect, the latter as design architect), has an arguably firmer grasp on the science of daylighting architectural spaces than any other firm in the city, learned in projects like the Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt federal building (with Cutler Anderson) and the Oregon Sustainability Center (with GBD Architects). The building is also sustainable in many other ways. It is targeting a Platinum LEED rating with high levels of water and energy conservation. 

Touring the wide variety of spaces and facilities here was like taking a tour of American bio-sciences education in the 21st century: so many different disciplines, but all interconnected both technologically and physically. (Particularly memorable were the operation training rooms, equipped with dummies that can respond auditorily to various moves made by the doctors in training.) Perhaps one could even characterize the web of different bridges as a metaphor for the opportunity and challenge of making breakthroughs through disparate parts becoming connected. Although people will spend almost all their time in the two primary buildings to the north and south, it’s the atrium where this sort of academic melting pot of medical and science students from three schools will come together. I just wish being in the middle of the atrium felt a little more visually connected to the outside, but the enclosed auditoriums at either end block some of that view. 

CLSB from across Moody Avenue (photo courtesy Alene Davis Photography)

In time, as the neighborhood develops, outdoor greenspaces will be built near the building that can bring students, researchers and faculty together. For now, though, the CLSB is still somewhat isolated, with Tilikum Crossing’s massive construction site continuing just outside for another year, and vacant land of the Zidell Yards beyond it to the south. To the north is Riverplace, but that’s about a mile away, with buildings in between. That means the CLSB’s atrium is all the more important to its occupants.

To that end, I can’t help but wonder if it might have been worth it to find a way to fit the large wood-wrapped auditoriums at either end of the atrium in the Skourtes Tower and the South Bar, just to free up even more space and articulate the atrium as a pure glass shape. But it’s easy for a writer sitting miles away from the building and all its design and construction practicalities to throw in program-changing ideas after the fact.

CLSB promenade facing the river (photo courtesy Alene Davis Photography)

To be fair, the presence of the auditoriums in the atrium adds a distinctive sculptural quality to the middle of the building that, because of the spaces’ wood cladding, can be seen from a distance, in a way that makes the CLSB feel like more complex a facility than just two building halves connected by a glass roof. It reinforces that sense of the CLSB as a hive of activity. I just felt like some transparency and connection to the outside was sacrificed along the way. Even so, there really is a lot going at the CLSB in an interesting way, and the deeper I went inside the more captivating and inspiring the place became.

 

 

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The Blue Room, biophilia and retrofitting Oregon's prisons

Inside Snake River Correctional Institution's Blue Room (photo by Beth Nakamura)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In yesterday's Oregonian, reporter Bryan Denson looked at how a new initiative at the Snake River Correctional Institution near Ontario is demonstrating how access to nature can change the behavior of even our most hardened criminals, and how Oregon prisons could bring pioneering reform to prison design.

For the 216 inmates housed in solitary confinement at Snake River due to violent, combative, or escape-prone tendency, 23 hours a day (save for one hour of exercise in barren prison yards) are spent in small, windowless, claustrophobic enclosures. Though their own behavior may have got them there, solitary confinement seems to only make their mental state worse.

"I've seen over the years how an inmate will come into the facility, and they'll almost appear to be completely normal," Randy Gilbertson, head of Snake River's solitary confinement told Denson. "After a phase of isolation, those guys – especially those guys with mental health issues – tend to decompensate. They break down and go a different route. And it brings out a whole different person in them." A more violent person.

But now, prisoners in Snake River solitary have been given a brief mental respite that has helped improve behavior and morale. In the Blue Room, prisoners are shown still and video images of nature such as babbling brooks, tropical beaches or wind-swept forests. And the effects have been unmistakable: those sent to solitary confinement who didn't get the Blue Room therapy posted more referrals for disciplinary infractions, while those allowed to use the Blue Room showed a decrease.

Snake River's Blue Room experiment happened when one of the prison's officials saw a TED talk by forest ecologist Nalini Nadkarni, who now teaches at the University of Utah. Nadkarni had collaborated with Washington state prison officials on a similar pilot program, which exposed inmates to nature, either projected imagery or even small excursions to help re-introduce endangered animals and plants to the wild. But what Snake River officials also stumbled upon, by extension, was a growing body of research data demonstrating that human psysiology is significantly impacted by how much access we have to nature.

Some of this we've known intuitively or even scientifically for a while: that natural light helps schoolchildren earn higher average test scores and office workers take fewer breaks and sick leave, or that hospital patients have shorter stays and need less pain medication when they have access to nature and views, the latter of which Michael Kimmelman explores in today's New York Times.

But biophilia goes beyond natural light and time amongst natural settings. Earlier this year while writing an article for the American Society of Interior Designers' magazine, ICON, I learned that there are several tenets of biophilia and human response.

Human wakefulness and productivity begin in the autonomic nervous system’s contrasting sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. The sympathetic system stimulates us when quick response is needed—a “fight or flight” mechanism. The parasympathetic system relaxes us, decreasing stress and increasing concentration. Regular access to a dynamic array of natural settings and spaces keeps the battery-recharging parasympathetic balanced with the crisis-mode sympathetic system.

A report by Terrapin Bright Green called "The Economics of Biophilia" denotes three tenets: “Nature in the Space,” “Natural Analogues,” and “Nature of the Space.”

“Nature in the Space” means incorporating plants and water features inside and out, whether it’s potted plants inside or courtyard gardens and fountains visible outside of a building. The idea is to provide non-rhythmic visual connections: something that will catch the eye for a split-second of stimulating distraction. "Nature in the Space” includes access to fresh air, whether indoors or out.

Sometimes the mind can be tricked into getting the same effect as nature (or at least a diluted version of it) from “Natural Analogues,” a series of biomorphic forms and patterns found in images of nature that can, to a lesser but still measurable degree, provide a similar response to being outside. Sometimes even natural surfaces in an interior space such as wood can also prompt a response. “The body does know the difference,” Bill Browning, a principal with Terrapin Bright Green, told me for the ICON story, “but where there’s no other option, simulated nature has a beneficial impact.”

That's where the Blue Room slideshows come in. It turns out that while being in nature is unsurprisingly the best means of experiencing nature, viewing images of nature can have a real effect.

"Dr. Nadkarni believes Snake River Correctional Institution is the first in the nation to bring nature imagery to inmates in solitary confinement," Denson told me by email. "Other prisons in Oregon are interested in replicating the Blue Room – but it’s too early for that. Dr. Nadkarni and others want to see whether the Blue Room strategy works. If research backs up the hypothesis that it does, I’m almost certain the Oregon Department of Corrections would bring nature imagery to all of its prisoners in solitary housing."

Again, though, the research is already there. It's already proven. In an ideal world, I would have hoped that Oregon corrections officials had someone on staff who was on top of the latest behavioral research and was seeking to employ it. In the case of the Snake River Correctional Institution, there was no such person, but thankfully there were still people in power who saw Nadkarni's TED talk.

I asked Denson to tell me his general impressions of Snake River. "I toured three eastern Oregon prisons with photojournalist Beth Nakamura earlier this summer," he said. "For me, walking into the medium-security institutions was a bit like walking through the guts of an American shopping mall – except there was nothing for sale. They were wide hallways lit by stark fluorescent lights, a visual tedium broken up by the occasional inmate-produced mural. It occurs to me as I write this that many of those murals featured nature scenes. The most sensory-deprived of the prisons was Two Rivers Correctional Institution, near Umatilla, Oregon, which was designed as a big rectangle. Each cellblock there has its own seating and eating areas, with a recreation yard that – on sunny days – pours sunlight onto grassy yards and basketball courts. But you can’t see the horizon from these rec yards, only the sky. Every now and again, a bird might pass by, or an airplane, but you’re cut off from little else in the way of imagery, natural or otherwise. I can only imagine the excitement inmates might feel when a thunderstorm passes by, or snow."

Obviously no one wants to coddle prisoners, and talk like this about giving prisoners access to nature could easily prompt conservatives to make accusations of not being tough enough. When I was growing up in McMinnville, I remember many townspeople complaining that the federal prison being constructed at the time near Sheridan was somehow a "Club Fed" because its architecture consisted of several small cottages with Spanish style roofs. Yet the aim of prisons is reform, not revenge, and it's clear that a combination of architecture and access to nature can help the rehabilitation process, or at least do something to prevent prisoners to be more hardened when they're released than when they went into the facility. In other words, investments like the Blue Room (which only cost about $1,500 according to Denson's article) easily pay for themselves.

I'd like to see not only a Blue Room in solitary confinement at every prison, but aspects of biophilic design incorporated throughout these facilities. Giving a murderer a view of Mt. Hood won't reverse the crime and it may not stop any one individual from being violent or dangerous, but in the long run it definitely helps prisoners retain or grow their sense of humanity. And that's good for everyone except the crime-obsessed fearmongers who have led to our near police state, where ordinary citizens and even journalists can be attacked by militaristic authorities for exercising their constitutional rights.

"One thing I found is that inmates constantly seek beauty," Denson added. "Some of the artwork done in the prison metal and wood shops I visited was astounding. I remember one inmate who was serving a long prison term. He had created these magnificent metal fish. One was a life-size marlin. He had taken a blowtorch of some kind to “paint” deep shades of blue into the metal. I just kept thinking, “How can men kept away from the natural world so long create such beauty?” I think perhaps the answer is that you can’t take that away from humans. They carry it with them even into the worst corners of life. In short, I think the overall architecture of prisons keeps the public safe but robs prisoners of the beauty those of us on the other side of the razor wire take for granted."  

 

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Ode to a glass box: the new downtown Apple store

Apple store (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

For the past several years, Apple's flagship Portland store has been located in the lower depths of downtown's Pioneer Place mall. Despite the refined palette of natural wood and white walls, it could sometimes feel a bit claustraphobic there with large crowds cramped into a small, windowless space.

For a new Portland flagship store, Apple initially planned a store in Northwest Portland on 23rd Avenue in the mid-2000s before abandoning the proposed development after disagreements with the city's Historic Landmarks Commission over its design.

But now, however, the juggernaut from Cupertino has a home big enough to accommodate its hordes of shoppers, as well as a far more prominent presence on the street and, more broadly, an architectural setting that befits its beautifully designed devices.

The new Apple store, located downtown at SW Yamill and Fourth (across from its old location in Pioneer Place), has a striking presence, albeit one created after an unsettling and unsustainable precursor. The company tore down an existing two-story building on this site, which had been occupied by luxury retailer Saks and was less than 15 years old. But if there has to be such waste, at least we're getting more attractive architecture in its place. The old building was new enough to have been of use for many decades more, but it was basically a banal two-story concrete box with a cornice and some storefront windows.

Apple store (photos by Brian Libby)

The design of the new Apple store, by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, is very simple, and that's what makes it powerful. It's basically a big glass box, set back from the street and raised a few feet up so as to include a small concrete plaza. There is also a large roof overhang that appears to float over the glass box. The main glass-enclosed space is quite tall—it feels like a story and a half at least—giving a sense of volume inside even when the store is packed with customers and blue-shirted Apple employees. The surrounding plaza also feels like an extension of the interior space. The flooring inside and out is identical, and one’s eye almost forgets the glass is there.

In fact, as I stood inside the store on a visit last week, I was reminded of one of the guiding truths about my own love of architecture.

Much as I adore all kinds of historic styles, from the symmetry and proportion of classical architecture to the humble welcoming quality of a Craftsman bungalow, there is nothing I find more compelling than modern architecture when it has a generous amount of volume and transparency. When you're inside a pristine glass box, it feels like being inside and outside at once. It touches upon and mines the most basic human biophilic needs of what's called prospect and refuge: to see out and get a sense of the exterior even as one feels shelter and protection from the elements.

A love of volume and transparency is why I got involved five years ago with trying to save another glass box: Memorial Coliseum. I'd never in my life, whether on travels in Europe and Asia or here in the United States, ever experienced such wide-open volumes and transparency as one gets in the Coliseum, where a 12,000-seat arena stands on just four columns, and one can enjoy (on those rare occasions when the curtain is open) a 360-degree view to the outside, including the entire downtown Portland skyline.

Apple store (photos by Brian Libby )

At the Apple store, one doesn't have the same panoramic view, but the glass curtain wall is rendered so crisply and without clutter that it's easy to stand at one of the wood tables, gazing at a Mac or an iPad on display, and wonder why there is a roof but no walls. The Apple store glass brings that phrase - curtain wall - more resonantly to mind. Particularly with the roof hanging over, it feels as if the building is not a building at all but just a roof suspended from the concrete wall of the adjacent building. Even the corners of the building are just glass on glass.

Apple stores are already the most successful retail spaces in America, making over $4,500 per square foot. And anecdotally it seems like the subterranean Apple store in Pioneer Place most likely was already at that sales level. But the company has been making an effort to increase the volume of its stores to make them feel less cramped and more like an emporium for not just sales but tutorials and even hanging out. Apple is also hoping it can increase the share of iPhones and other devices sold in its stores versus online. And certainly in all these ways, the new downtown Apple store has exponentially increased the company's presence as well as elevated the experience of being in one of its stores. Standing inside the new Apple store last week, I didn't have that same urge to flee from the hordes of people and the lightless environment.

Much as its light, transparency and volume make the new Apple store a successful piece of architecture, or at least an aesthetically pleasing one, what takes away from the experience for me is knowing the store is not unique. The Portland Apple store seems nearly identical in look to the Apple store Bohlin Cywinski Jackson designed for Palo Alto, and, in the years ahead, plans to unroll in several locations. BCJ, with offices in Seattle, San Francisco and Pennsylvania, has won a lot of major design awards, and they possess a rigor and an eye for detail that makes these stores so pristine. But in retail design, where the vastness of America in particular means a company has to plan for scores of stores across the map, it's inevitable that architects and clients take a cookie-cutter approach. Portland's Apple store is a beautiful piece of architecture, but it's still cookie-cutter.

Apple store (photos by Brian Libby)

That said, I'm still happy to have the new Apple store here. After all, Apple and I go way back. In the early 1980s, my dad became the first and, for many years, the only retailer of Apple computers in my hometown of McMinnville. I remember the pride of being the only kid in my elementary school class to have an Apple II-Plus. Nevermind that no useful software beyond a couple of video games had yet been invented. You could tell the company was special even then.

For most of its history, Apple has been overseen by the great business and tech genius of our time, Steve Jobs. Now that we're in a post-Jobs world, it will be interesting to see where Apple goes: whether it becomes just like any other corporation, or whether the design acumen showed in generations of computers and devices will continue. To that end, Portland's Apple store reinforces its greatness as designer, but it also reminds us that a corporation this big often finds it difficult to bring a personal touch to each of its customers and locations.

 

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Design Calendar: August 16-31

Wells Fargo Tower (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Summertime is almost over. The oppressive 90-plus heat waves are about to retreat, and Oregon's magically mild climate will return, bringing with it a full calendar of design and arts events. Until then, August winds down with a handful of tours and other events.

Walking Tour: Yamhill Historic District and Beyond
What is today the nationally registered Yamhill Historic District was separated from the rest of Old Town when the new Morrison Bridge was constructed in the 1950s. This Architectural Heritage Center tour contains fantastic 19th century cast-iron buildings, as well as some of the most notable historic commercial architecture in Portland. Attendees will also learn about how this one-time market area was home to the city’s early Chinese immigrant community. 10AM Saturday, August 16. $20 ($12 for AHC members).

Buildings and Places: A Walking Tour of Portland's Architecture
Sample more than a 100 years of classical beauty, modern marvels, pioneering firsts and the newest in contemporary and sustainable design. This AIA/Portland-produced downtown walking tour highlights the most significant styles, architects and stories of the 20th & 21st centuries. Featuring individual works by Whidden & Lewis, AE Doyle, Pietro Belluschi, and Michael Graves, the tour also spotlights the modernist contributions of SOM, the contemporary designs of ZGF, TVA and SERA as well as special, less well-known gems. This two-hour tour starts at 11 AM at the Center For Architecture (NW 11th Avenue and Flanders Street) in the Pearl and ends near the Portland Building at SW Fifth Avenue and Main Street. 11AM Saturday, August 16; Sunday, August 24; and Sunday, August 30. $20.

Preservation Pub: The Demolition Epidemic
By year’s end, it is estimated that a record 400 Portland houses will be lost to demolition. With modern McMansions and high-density apartments quickly filling lots that once housed single-family homes, the recent demolition trend means millions of pounds of waste are going to the landfill, the character of established neighborhoods is rapidly changing, and tangible reminders of our history are disappearing forever. And while not every older building should be preserved, Portlanders will continue to see quality houses demolished without meaningful delay periods, public discourse, or neighbor notification unless reasoned code changes are adopted by the City Council. Restore Oregon is hosting two installments of its happy hour Preservation Pub series to discuss the demolition epidemic and learn about solutions proposed by the Coalition for Historic Resources. Velo Cult Bar, 1969 NE 42nd Avenue. 5PM Friday, August 22. Kells Irish Pub, 210 NW 21st Avenue. 6PM Tuesday, August 26. Free.

Jade District Tour
This Know Your City walking tour of the Jade District and SE 82nd Ave – home to East Portland’s Asian immigrant communities. Among the stops will be Wing Ming Herbs, the Portland Chinese Times, Portland Community College’s new SE center, and the Fubonn Shopping Center. The tour will also include meetups with business owners and community stakeholders to hear a variety of perspectives on development and neighborhood revitalization. The three hour tour (barring marooning on any uncharted islands) will end at the inaugural Night Market, an outdoor celebration with local food vendors and music. The tour begins at Union Station downtown and will then journey to 82nd Avenue by MAX train. 3PM Saturday, August 23 and Saturday, August 30. $10-20 suggested donation.

Architects Without Borders: Focus on Homelessness
AWB-Oregon's August meeting features a discussion of past, present, and future approaches to solving the problem of homelessness in Portland. Our guest presenters are: Sally Erickson, manager of the Portland Housing Bureau's Ending Homelessness Initiative; Tony Bernal, Director of Funding & Public Policy for Transition Projects; and Marc Jolin, executive director of JOIN, a nonprofit that has helped more than 6,000 homeless people find and retain permanent housing. The meeting will also review two relevant local AWB-Oregon projects: A remodel at St. Andre Bessette Catholic Church which provides services to the homeless, and a market-style distribution plaza for the Northeast Emergency Food Program. AIA Center For Architecture, 403 NW 11th Avenue. 6PM Wednesday, August 27. Free.

Lair Hill Neighborhood Walking Tour
One of Portland’s oldest residential neighborhoods, Lair Hill contains a fascinating mix of historic homes, along with notable buildings significant for their connections to the city’s early immigrant populations. Named for the lawyer, author, and editor William Hair Hill, the area, covered in this Architectural Heritage Center walking tour, is part of the broader South Portland, a district once home to many Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants, but much of which was demolished by the construction of the I-405 freeway in the late 1950s. 6PM Thursday, August 28. $20 ($12 for AHC members).

 

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PSU students design and build Pickathon stage

Pickathon Tree Line Stage under construction (image courtesy PSU)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

This year’s Pickathon music festival, held last weekend at the Pendarvis Farm in Happy Valley, featured a performance venue, designed and built by students and faculty in Portland State University’s School of Architecture. 

Over the weekend, the Tree Line Stage, as it was called, hosted performances by 14 different musical acts. Situated at the boundary between meadow and woods, the Tree Line Stage takes the place of the former Café Stage and offers a more spacious, yet intimate, place for attendees to experience music. Made from approximately 550 wooden shipping pallets, the stage was built with easily disassembly in mind: when the weekend was over, no trace of the venue was left behind.

The project follows on the heels of last year’s collaboration between Portland State University School of Architecture and Pickathon, when architecture students designed and built a gateway structure from hundreds of bamboo stalks. That collaboration successful enough that, when the festival needed a new performance space, Pickathon director Zale Schoenborn and fellow organizers appealed to Assistant Professor Travis Bell and School of Architecture Director Clive Knights to enlist PSU Architecture students to create the new performance space. It needed to be beautiful, temporary, and inexpensive.

 

 

Pickathon Tree Line Stage (images courtesy PSU)

“After introducing the brilliant minds of the PSU architecture faculty and students to the excitement of Pickathon last year, I hoped they would see the huge design possibilities inherent in this magical event, and begin to dream the big dreams with us,” Schoenborn says. “I secretly knew we were going to end up something that was going to blow people’s minds and create a space that offers a fantastical alternate reality. I’m so happy that this dream came true.”

The design for the venue explores the theme of diversion, drawing connections between the purpose of a pallet (to transport or carry goods) and the experience of being emotionally transported by the music.

The concept of the body, moving and dancing in response to the music, figures prominently in the design. As described in the Designers’ Statement, “individual wooden pallets join limbs in unison to make something greater, together. They embrace the earth, negotiate its topographic idiosyncrasies with their mathematical regularity by combining themselves into horizontal layers, like the muscular first tier of acrobats in a human pyramid… Flexing their bodies this way and that, catching the sunlight as it moves across their faces, filtering the light as it penetrates their ribs, they mark out a territory in which the diversion of air, by vibration into sound, and by imagination into music, can ensue.”

“Our design/build projects with Pickathon have been such a wonderful opportunity for our students to engage the full life of a piece of architecture – from concept to design development, to material sourcing, to construction, to deconstruction,” Bell says. “These students have been able to experience the magic that happens beyond the drafting board when design meets reality…albeit the amazingly, fun, creative and enthusiastic reality that is Pickathon.  It has been an inspiring collaboration.”

 

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Pattern language: a visit to Overton 19

Overton 19 (photo by Joshua Jay Elliott)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

The Overton 19 building in Northwest Portland’s Alphabet District, designed by Works Partnership Architecture, is a bold arrival in a district where many architects might have focused on just fitting in.

Located, as its name indicates, at the corner of NW 19th and Overton, the project is situated in a transitional area where the fabric of historic early 20th Century homes and buildings gives way to light industrial structures to the north. Some architects might have used a little brick, for example, to tie in with the old buildings while others could easily have chosen an industrially tinged modern palate to tie in with the warehouses, or maybe just built a box and clad it with reclaimed wood, the material du jour.

But instead, Works created something more visually arresting and memorable: a three-story building with an eye-catching façade seemingly veiled by a grove of trees. And yet because of its modest scale, the building fits in well with the rest of the neighborhood.

The project began when local artist Linda Hutchins and her husband, John Montague, hired Works to transform an adjacent single-story warehouse next door into a home, and decided to develop the adjacent parking lot in order to create a private walled-in garden for the residence. Overton 19 consists of five two-story loft units (which act as live-work spaces, making them ideal for creative small businesses) that occupy the first two floors, wrapping either side of a glassy ground-floor retail space at the corner. On the second and third floors above the retail space are two apartments.

Overton 19 (photos by Joshua Jay Elliott)

By placing the three-story portions at the corner, there is a kind of graduation of scale that allows the building to step down to the height of nearby homes while also creating a geometry of interlocking upper and lower cube forms in how these three stories at the corner relate to the loft units on either side. Yet the building is still defined visually by the series of reed or tree-like forms on the façade that undulate to form a series of uniquely shaped windows as they rise from the first to second or second to third floor.

The strands help create “a sense of privacy for the residents while also maximizing the amount of natural light,” Works Partnership co-founder Carrie Strickland explained by email. It allows floor-to-ceiling glass but reduces the fishbowl effect: a balance between transparency and privacy that makes sense given how the lofts’ ground-floor spaces could be residential or commercial in use.

Although Works Partnership first gained notoriety (and a number of design awards) in the 2000s for transforming a succession of old industrial buildings, particularly ones in the Central Eastside Industrial District for Beam Development such as the Eastbank Commerce Center and the Olympic Mills Commerce Center (as well as the more recent Eastside Exchange), it’s not surprising that the firm would go for a bold façade pattern. After all, this is the firm behind 2009’s b-SIDE6 on East Burnside, one of the most striking Portland buildings of the past decade with its protruding cube-like forms that hang over the street, a reference to the lower Burnside’s arcade district (created in the 1920s when the street was widened).

Overton 19 doesn’t look quite like anything else in Works’ portfolio that I’ve seen; my frame of reference might instead be a building like Herzog & De Meuron’s Prada store in Tokyo, its façade alternating glass and masonry in an ameba-like form. But Strickland and co-firm-leader William Neburka have always treated their projects as a chance to create function-driven sculpture. They never make bold shapes for their own sake; all of their designs are rooted in purpose, and so Overton 19’s reed-like façade patterning is a way of delivering the right balance of transparency and privacy.

And it’s not just façade patterning, by the way: the building itself gently undulates back and forth from the sidewalk to allow room for small planters.

Overton 19 (photos by Joshua Jay Elliott)

Personally, I usually have a low tolerance and high skepticism about anything that smacks of faux in architecture: forms that are meant to ape other forms, be it the way that a lot of postmodern architecture mimics (or perhaps lampoons) classical design or how modern, particularly sustainable design (or biophilia) can take obvious cues from nature.

Yet I quite like Overton 19, which probably says something about Works Partnership’s inherent sense of balance: the willingness to design something that stands out yet the restraint to keep it from seeming cartoonish. They don’t take the reed/tree resemblance too far. The organic curve of nature is unmistakable, but Works never lets their gesture take over the architecture, as one might argue is the case with the reed-like screening at the Edith Green Wendell Wyatt federal building downtown.

It also occurred to me that there may be a faint resemblance between the reed/tree patterning of Overton 19's façade and Hutchins' drawings and her other artwork. Her drawings, for instance, have been acclaimed as "a duet between material and immaterial," (Richard Speer, Willamette Week) and have a way of evoking nature. And for the Oregon College of Art & Craft's ean Vollum Drawing, Painting and Photography Building in 2010, she designed laser-cut steel panels to form the railings for an exterior plaza that, like the Overton 19 façade, bring to mind reeds or blades of grass.

Oregon College of Art & Craft railings (images courtesy Linda Hutchins)

Hutchins told me earlier today that despite little advertising or fanfare in the weeks since the building was completed, it is almost completely rented out. For the residents or small business owners who locate there, the look of the building’s exterior is only part of the equation. Inside, the architects have tucked a lot of function into these modestly sized units. When I visited, it was noticeable how an entire kitchen, bathroom or closet seemed to almost disappear into the wall, maximizing the space’s flexibility and adaptability. Both figuratively and literally, the reed pattern on the façade only partially covers what’s inside. Luckily the view there too is, while not as sculptural, just as intuitive.

 

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