Hassalo on Eighth and Oregon Square: GBD's Andersen on making the Lloyd District a neighborhood

A rendering of the future Oregon Square (illustration by MIR/GBD Architects)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Nearly a decade ago, Portland's GBD Architects saw completion of one of the largest projects of the era, and one that helped redefine a neighborhood: the five-block, seven-building Brewery Blocks.

By the time the final Brewery Blocks building was completed, the Pearl District was well on its way into transitioning from an industrial enclave to a place where people lived, worked, and frequented wine bars and art galleries. But the Brewery Blocks, constructed on the site of the old Blitz-Weinhardt brewery, became an instant success, particularly at street level, where the development wrapped around Powell's Books and used that proximity to create a thriving urban setting full of people. The project, developed by Gerding Edlen, was also noteworthy at the time for having all of its square footage LEED rated for sustainability, something far less common at the time.

Now GBD is at work across the Willamette River designing an even bigger cluster of buildings and public space in the Lloyd District. And the firm faces perhaps an even bigger challenge in terms of placemaking.

While there are plenty of shopping and eating options nearby, be it at the Lloyd Center mall or along NE Broadway just a couple blocks further north, as well as a range of transit options from light rail and streetcar to two freeways, the Lloyd District has traditionally lacked any residential component. But in the two-phase development GBD has designed for American Assets Trust, its San Diego developer client (a publicly traded real estate investment trust), there will be a cluster of new apartment buildings.

Looking south through Hassalo to Oregon Square (image courtesy GBD)

The first phase, Hassalo on Eighth, will include buildings of five, six and 21 stories, totaling 657 units (occupying one large block with the existing circa-1970s Lloyd 700 office tower). The second phase, Oregon Square, will consist of four buildings across one superblock ranging from 11 to 30 stories (the maximum height limit) and over 900 units, surrounding a public plaza more than twice the size of Pioneer Courthouse Square.

The city's Design Commission has urged the designers to make sure, though, that for all its size the public space is and feels accessible to the public passing through, not just like a private park for residents. There is also hope that the combined Hassalo plaza and Oregon Square park can create one big outdoor room, proceeding south to the domed Oregon state office building almost in a Beaux Arts-style layout.

Beyond the issue of public space, there is a challenge here to make a neighborhood of several buildings feel like something more organic than just one firm doing seven buildings at once. I've never necessarily been in love with the aesthetics of GBD's work per se, but they know how to handle these kinds of big-scale architectural challenges and make them work at the pedestrian and street level, and they know how to do it with first-rate sustainable credentials. At one point a few years ago, I believe GBD had at one point designed more LEED-rated square footage than any firm in the United States. And the Brewery Blocks area is always teeming with activity, more than can just be attributed to the adjacency to Powells. It's good placemaking. It's true that there are issues to solve if Lloyd District is to become a real neighborhood. Where is the affordable housing - or will it just be for the affluent? But if that kind of foot traffic like the Brewery Blocks has could be transplanted to these blocks between Lloyd Center and busy MLK Boulevard, it would be a step forward.

Recently I sat down with GBD Architects principal Kyle Andersen about the challenges and opportunities of creating a neighborhood virtually from scratch.

Portland Architecture: Can you talk about the challenge of place-making at this scale, and in an area previously without much residential?

Kyle Andersen: I think placemaking, and creating a sense of place, was one of the biggest challenges. There was no there there at the time, just class-B office buildings surrounded by parking.

Which seems to make the landscaping component critical here, to create someplace people, be they residents or visitors, want to spend time lingering at, and not just passing through.

When it came to start working on this project, we even interviewed all of our landscape architects and we made them compete. [Normally the firm just hires one firm or another.] Because place making was such a big thing.

Street and population diagrams of Hassalo and Oregon Square (images courtesy GBD)

Could you talk about trying to combine public space and sustainable features?

We don’t realize this until you’re on the outside looking in that sustainability is part of our culture [in Portland]. And the idea of using sustainability as placemaking echoes our ethos and the culture we’re a part of. There were some tough budget challenges on Hassalo where the client was ready to pull the sustainable features out and just be done with developing three apartment buildings. But it was the placemaking and the culture that will set the tone for the rest of their property. You’re creating a place that’s rich and hopefully, through that, will be successful.

Do you think of these projects as starting a neighborhood from scratch, like South Waterfront and parts of the Pearl were in the last decade? How much do you see the presence of something like Lloyd Center, a struggling mall in a time when malls are becoming all but obsolete, as an asset?

I've often said this isn’t a revitalization project; it’s a vitalization project. The mall and offices there, it’s taking advantage of all those pieces in place, which is in contrast to the South Waterfront. Where else can you sit in your apartment and go, ‘I need a new pair of shoes,’ and go across the street and have your pick of choices?’ The new owners of the mall are revisioning their asset and hope to change the perception of Lloyd Center. There’s really a chance to do a facelift. I am a graduate of Benson High and I am very familiar with the area and the history of the place. The stigma attached to the district is only recent, but it is in for some big changes. When the mall became more introverted it turned its back to Holladay Park, which allowed it to become a dangerous place. The developer sees that we need to put eyes on the park. Until now it’s been a business district, not a neighborhood. It doesn’t even have a neighborhood association. But we are developing a place to both work and play with the majority of the support services established.

With seven buildings by one architecture firm going up together, how do you keep it from seeming diverse in style and scale like a city?

It was the Brewery Blocks model: creating a village requires some diversity. It doesn’t want to look like it was done by the same hand. We had small design teams for each building with a bit more artistic freedom to differentiate. They shouldn’t all look the same. It wants to be unique and diverse like people. One of the criticisms of the old buildings was that they were objects. Residential development is more about people. The scale is different because of that. 

 

Hassalo on Eighth (images courtesy GBD)

Multnomah Boulevard, which forms the northern edge of the Hassalo on Eighth buildings, has become more bike-friendly, and the development is taking advantage. Could you talk a little about the huge bike hub that will be located there?

Each building requires a number of spaces. Since this is a super block it’s considered one site. We can consolidate all of it. We put it in the 700 building. We use valet to store your bike and lock it up underground. Or you can take the ramp down and go down by yourself, lock up your bike. It’s a retail facility yet a traditional bike facility.

We’re putting in over 900 bike stalls in Phase 1. There will be a shop that will sell passes, give information on alternate modes of transportation and be a valet for your bike. They will offer services to fix your flat, or give your bike a tune-up. We later decided to increase the bike facility to 1200 to cover residential, retail and create a district amenity. It quickly became a story that went around the world: 'Hassalo on 8th, largest bike hub in North America.' The client from San Diego says, 'So there’s no minimum car parking, but there is required bike parking? That is crazy.'

How did you approach the mix of ground-floor retail, which can attract people and bring amenities and life, versus having some walk-up residences, which can break down the mass of the towers?

In Phase 1 [Hassalo on Eighth] we’ve have some walk-up units, and some storefront type retail. The client wanted to do more residential on the street. It will totally change this area completely. We have both flats and two-story townhouse type units.

Phase 2 [Oregon Square], on the other hand, is all ground floor retail. I think some ground floor residential might come into that as we get further along in the programming.  The right retail is very important to both phases. We have to be careful to curate the right local retail. We might have too much retail with the addition of all the ground level retail in Phase 2, and we may need to revisit that later.

Oregon Square images (courtesy GBD)

Even so, when I studied urban design in Barcelona, I remember shopping with friends, and going separate ways and then meeting up at a café just down the street from where we were.  There were plenty of cafes and gathering places to activate an urban experience.  Portland needs more of that.

The plaza at Hassalo on Eighth will include landscaping that treats wastewater. Can you talk about the two developments' treatment systems?

We have a wastewater treatment facility up here to the north [of the Hassalo development], and a rainwater harvesting system at the southern portion of the property. The site is surrounded by what’s called a combination system: both storm and sanitary. When it rains heavily in Portland, there is the potential to overflow sewage into the river. Some of the systems built on the site are from the 1800s.

We asked the city, ‘What if we treated our wastewater on site and instead of putting it into the system, and we put it into the aquifer via some drywells? What if we put meters in place showing we don’t have any sewage outfall? We’ll use that reclaimed water for non-potable water and put the rest into the aquifer.' The city's Bureau of Environmental Services said, ‘We’ll give you a 60 percent discount on your SDCs.’ That was around $1.2 million. We ran the numbers of what it’d cost to build a wastewater treatment facility and run it, do all the testing, against what we’d save in the sewer bills we wouldn’t pay. It had a 2.4-year payback.

All the units will use reclaimed water for toilets. That’s never happened at this scale for residential. We’re also running a purple pipe to the 700 building to replenish the cooling tower. This keeps 60,000 gallons of sewage a day out of the city’s infrastructure. It’s going to be an amazing thing. It uses nature, natural systems found in nature, and is similar to how the city treats its own wastewater. But we’re also using it to develop a sense of place and tell a story, which is a microcosm of the culture of our city.

Hassalo on Eighth and Oregon Square (illustration by MIR/GBD Architects)

With some pretty tall buildings on the site, including three over twenty stories, how did you approach the massing in terms of not shading these public spaces all the time?

As we thought about fitting all the program on Oregon Square, [we knew that] one of our towers is 325 feet tall, the maximum height limit for the site. We had to think about where a new tower would fit in with the pattern of the existing towers, and in such a way to maximize solar access to our proposed open space. We ended up biasing our height to the southeast. It casts a shadow in the morning, but after about 11 it’s opened up so the plaza sees sun through the rest of the day. We also used that diagram to study the pattern of views between massing.

What about the challenge of creating wide enough access points to Oregon Square from outside to make it obvious to passers by—to make it truly public? 

One is the openings to that plaza are 60-plus feet wide. These are street right-of ways between the buildings. Since our last time in front of the Design Commission for our third  DAR we’ve created another pass-through opening through the Northwest-most building. We also tried to maintain transparency at the ground level of all buildings, so at times you can see through to there [the plaza]. The lobbies for the other three buildings are double height pass-through lobbies we’re hoping to let the public pass through. It’s not just for the residents. There are coffee shops activating those lobby spaces.

Overall, I think there’s some drama that’s made by enclosing that space and not letting it be completely open to the street—some compression. Thousands of people will come by it on MAX, and there will be a lot of programming. We’re looking to the Pioneer Courthouse Square people to answer how we activate it. We’re talking to the group programming Holladay Park to plant the seeds. The Portland international brew fest was at Holladay Park last year for the first time, and it will be there again this year. This space has that opportunity as well to be complimentary not only to Holladay Park but to Pioneer Courthouse Square. You won’t have to be a rocket scientist to discover this is there. It’s a big space but is broken down into opportunities for smaller rooms. There’s a water feature that can be something, playful or calm depending on the time of day.

 

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Comments

[j]

Where is the middle? We create these large superblocks with no-density wind-swept squares. There are no blocks of brick 4-5 story buildings, or row houses creating fine grained density. All of these developers either want to build a single family home or a blow out that includes NO AFFORDABLE HOUSING. You are creating more of an issue in a district that is already a drive-through place.

There needs to be more fine-grained planning. The Lloyd Center could be knocked down, returned to it's original block structure, and fine-grained density could go in, along with high rise and mid rise. However, this idea of adhering to a square or superblock design is the suburbanization of the inner city. Please stop it.

[maccoinnich]

Which suburbs in particular does this remind of you of, j? Tigard? Forest Grove? Aloha?

[j]

The south waterfront, for one, which continues to remain disjointed. That is tongue-in-cheek, mind you. I am all for the tall towers! We need middle density mixed in too. None of this talk of shadows!

[Brian Libby]

J,

I think some of your concerns are valid, but some things are done to address the design needs you mention. Obviously the city wouldn't choose to build super-blocks today, but the fact that the new land owners inherited them means that they can create some true public space in places like Oregon Square. What's more, these developments are coming at a variety of scales. Some of the buildings will only be a few stories tall, and some of them will create brownstones and other fine-grained details and architectural variety that engages the street. In other words, we have both high rise and mid rise here. What's more, adding density here in the Lloyd District, especially the higher-density architecture, takes pressure off the neighborhoods, where big buildings are more incongruent with single-family homes. I share some of your concerns about this really becoming a true neighborhood with a variety of scales and income levels, but your dismissing this as mere suburban-style development seems unfounded to me.

[j]

It's hyperbole to cajole discussion. I think we are swallowing these monolithic designs too readily. There's a real possibility to transform this district, not pay "homage" to its superblock past. I like the idea of creating public space, but I still have major concerns about the sheer scale of the square in this phase. I suppose it may go through, but the rest of the district needs more focus on smaller plots, and I'm not talking about sacrificing height if it's wanted! High, mid, and rowhouse should all mix together. I have dreams of the Lloyd district becoming this, and working with the city to provide inclusionary communities for low and middle income people as well. These, so far, seem to be too much market rate.

[Brian Libby]

I agree it's troubling when one sees a seven-building development and it doesn't include any affordable or workforce housing, but that's all the more reason we should compel the city to make that happen. It's not necessarily the responsibility of this developer per se.

[j]

Look into linkage fees. I think developers can and will carry this burden with little complaint if it's done in an efficient manner. Linkage fees have been shown to not slow down development. Unfortunately, it looks like the inclusionary zoning bill in Salem either may not pass or will not include renters. So, I think this behooves developers even more to show good faith action to work with the community to include workforce and low income housing. It seemed to work in the Pearl, but Lloyd seems bereft of new affordable options.

[john]

In an ideal sense J is making a good point. But, the developer and architect probably arrived at the best solution given the circumstances. The negative spaces are excellent and should carry the spirit of the design through many years.
A slight crit: The architecture around them is somewhat disappointing. I completely disagree with the statement that they should not look like they are from the same hand. One should carry a coherent theme throughout the project. "Pretending" to not be the same hand is disingenuous. Architecture and architects should be honesty with there work.

[David Dysert]

The term "place making" while perhaps well intended is unfortunately indicative of a two dimensional approach to urban design. The idea that the physical elements of building and landscape can "make" a place reflects a hubris common in the design world. Sure good design can create a beautiful space and enhance the life that happens there, but it cannot create a "place". It is the who, how and why of the interactions of the inhabitants and visitors of these "places" that define them. The who, how and why is how "places" are made. But we are always obsessed with the what. Unfortunately the what we have here is intended for a narrow demographic. The life here will reflect this narrowness. This is the problem with mass scale development and more specifically, new development with its prohibitive costs which limit who and what happens there.
The proposed plaza is a fitting example of this 2-D mindset. We think that with the proper materials and openings and programming that "life" will happen in this space. But we are forgetting the most important element to great public spaces: Intersection. Successful public spaces should be an the intersection of many pathways. This plaza is a "dead end" due to I-84. There are virtually no significant pathways to lead one to this place from other parts of the city but its scale suggests otherwise. I am reminded of how the Rose Quarter fountain plaza was sold as the East Side's "living room" similar to the West's Pioneer Courthouse Square. The absurdity in this logic is only too obvious now after the fog of flashy novelty has lifted. I applaud the attempt to create quality public space. But it's not clear if all parties involved understand where there there is.