Fire & Rescue Station 21 from the Willamette (Tom Bonner)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Six years ago, Portland Fire & Rescue faced an emergency on the Willamette River they weren't equipped to handle. Amanda Jo Stott-Smith, a deranged mother, dropped her two young children over the Sellwood Bridge in an act of murder, and the response time was painfully long. "It took almost 40 minutes for the crew from Station 6 [on NW Front Avenue north of the Fremont Bridge] to get all the way to the Sellwood Bridge and begin rescue operations," recalls Marco Benetti, chief of logistics for the Portland Fire Bureau. "Their boat was out for service so they had to take the antique 1927 David Campbell fireboat down there. It can only do 10 miles per hour and causes a huge wake."
Ultimately one of the children survived, but the other drowned. Maybe that would have still happened if rescuers had been there in 10 minutes instead of 40, but a more rapid response also might have helped. And even if it didn't in that scenario, after the Stott-Smith case, Portland Fire & Rescue and then-City Council member Randy Leonard (who oversaw the bureau) resolved that something had to change. So the decision was made to renovate the defunct Fire & Rescue Station 21 at the east end of the Hawthorne Bridge. The station had been put out of service years before because it was flood-prone and, because it was constructed on unstable riverside soil, sure to implode in a large earthquake.
Over the past few months walking and biking past the new station as I crossed the Hawthorne Bridge, none of these thoughts were on my mind. What caught my attention was an exterior screen on the west façade, facing the river. It seemed to look a little bit different from every angle, and it seemed like more than a sun screen.
Visiting Fire & Rescue Station 21 recently with architect Aaron Whelton, Chief Benetti and architect David Suttle (who collaborated with Whelton on the design as a sole practitioner but now is at Skylab Architecture), I was able to live out something that as a child would have been practically a dream come true: getting up close to the fire trucks, the fire pole, and where these brave first responders spend time between emergencies.
Top: Station 21 from the east; bottom: the station's boathouse (Tom Bonner)
Towards the end of the visit (to jump ahead for a moment), I actually accepted my tour guides' offer to let me slide down the fire pole. But as the tour began, I was shown a series of sleeping quarters for firefighters on the ground floor of the building. Like many of the houses I write about, particularly ones with views, bedrooms are on the ground floor so the second floor can be given over to public areas: in this case an administrative office, a command center, and a communal dining area. That makes a lot of sense, but it makes for a funny situation with the fire pole. My tour guides explained how having firefighters' sleeping quarters just a few feet away from the rescue trucks can shave a few extra seconds of time not having to come from downstairs.
But this means that the logical users of the fire pole become not the first responders but the admin people. If they can slide down the pole, I figured, why can't I? For a couple of seconds, my legs wrapped around the pole, I expected to feel like a hero of my favorite childhood TV show, "Emergency 51." Instead I felt more like one of those middle-aged guys they pull out of the audience at an NBA game to try a free throw that wins (or most likely misses) a cash prize. I'll leave it to the professionals from now on.
The building had to have quite extensive underpinnings to withstand a major earthquake on this riverside spot, which necessitated measures such as compaction grouting to stabilize the soil. "The engineers determined we had to pour 343 holes 85 feet deep. That 343 number corresponds with the number of firefighters killed in the 9/11 attacks," Benetti said.
Looking west from Fire Station 21's operations center (Brian Libby)
The ground-stabilization situation also helped determine a smaller square footage on the ground floor with a cantilevered second floor. "A large percentage of the budget went into the ground, just to keep the soils in place and support the building," Whelton explained. "We pulled in the columns in all the places it touched down as much as possible because for every square foot that we went out, it added tens of thousands of dollars for compaction-grout of columns The program starts to build out from that with all these cantilevers and double cantilevers."
Next our tour moved upstairs to a meeting room and adjoining operations area at the southwest corner of the building, looking out at the Hawthorne Bridge, the river, and downtown. "That took some convincing," David Suttle recalled. "They’ve always traditionally been down next to the apparatus bay. You come in on the truck, do some paperwork and pass it through the window."
"But people are more productive when they’re not put in a hole," Benetti added.
I learned more about the decorative façade screening as we moved to a small outdoor area. It turns out the screening is actually a kind of catwalk, but also an artwork spearheaded as part of meeting Percent For Art guidelines (requiring two percent of a project's budget go to art). "We’re way over the bank," said as we stood between the building and the decorative metal. "We wondered: how do you clean those windows? At some point we started talking about this catwalk," Whelton explained. "It allows them to come out and clean the windows. It also allows them to move up and down the entire length of the building and get different vantages, different viewpoints, on the river itself. Eventually it grew into this armature that we used for the artwork. Initially this had a screen on it that was similar to the rest of the building: a perforated metal. But this seemed like win-win: better architecture as an opportunity to integrate the art into the building design, and frankly I think it gives better visibility than any perforation pattern that we could afford—way better. On a site like this, two percent for art is a sizable amount of money, and there’s no place around it where we could go set a sculpture. And there wasn’t room inside. We were in this weird conundrum. This way it benefits the architecture, and it was a challenge to integrate it, but I think they work well together."
Top: Station 21's south-facing entrance; bottom: its west façade (Brian Libby)
The catwalk's metal is shaped not only to allow wide openings but also to resemble rings in the water made from droplets.
"Water is the antidote for fire, but also the adversary at this station, which is located right on the Willamette," explains artist David Franklin, who designed what's called The Rippling Wall, in a statement on his website. "The project is a large sculpture of ripples on water made form large the aluminum blades...water-jet cut to resemble sine waves but when seen at an angle reveal themselves to be a sculpture of ripples. Due to the reflectivity of the aluminum and its ability to take on the ambient color of the light the installation will have visibly kinetic effect that will change as the viewer moves around the piece. As one moves up and down the river, and as the sun rises moves over the piece and sets and light changes with the seasons the sculpture appears to change."
The west façade with Franklin's sculptural screening is the building's signature aesthetic, but I also liked the use of pragmatic materials such as corrugated metal that add texture. Whelton's design also uses a variety of materials to distinguish the trio of primary interlocking volumes - the vehicle bay, the downstairs sleeping quarters and the cantilevered upstairs operations and meeting areas - without letting things seem overly busy. Ultimately this is a modest, functional building that is put together and detailed with a deft touch.
Whelton was originally involved not with the fire station project itself but the David Campbell memorial intended to be built immediately to the north of the building, also on the waterfront as part of the Eastbank Esplanade. For many decades a small memorial to Campbell (who died heroically in the line of duty in 1911) has existed on West Burnside Street near Providence Park, but a few years ago Whelton won a design competition for a new, replacement memorial beside Station 21. Contributions to the nonprofit project (which is not financially tied to the station project) dwindled during the recession and as the bureau focused on building the station itself, but since its completion there is renewed hope that the project could break ground within the next year or two. Recently the Portland Firefighters Association donated $100,00 toward the approximately $550,000-600,000 cost to build the memorial and embarked on a new campaign to see it built.
Renderings of the David Campbell memorial (Whelton Architecture)
"It’s really going to make the experience of the Esplanade that much more appealing," Benetti said. It will be something the public can enjoy and the firefighters can be proud of. The current memorial has been overgrown. It’s still a beautiful site but it’s a constant problem with transients and garbage, needles, you name it. And it’s an odd place, an odd fit."
As it faces the Eastbank Esplanade, the northeast corner of the building was given storefront glass so passers by can see into the apparatus bay (where the trucks are). An array of the bureau's historic fire-fighting vehicles will also be displayed here.
Our tour also extended to the boathouse located on the water beside one of the public docks just down-ramp from the Esplanade in front of the bridge. When it was first constructed, seeing it from outside I thought it looked too hulking and windowless, like someone's warehouse or garage had somehow floated downriver. But it is a garage. It is a warehouse. And over time I've come to like it more as I've paid closer attention to some of its subtle proportions and details, like how the metal siding angles upward in proportion to the rise of the roof. Once inside, it was about checking out some of the bureau's fire boats, including a speedster named after the two young children dropped off the Sellwood Bridge. But it also turns out that while the boathouse may be windowless, it brings in natural light through a perforated metal screen along the bottom of the structure.
Inside the Station 21 boathouse (Brian Libby)
Ultimately Fire & Rescue Station 21 is about achieving practical needs: the ability to provide timely emergency responses and keep people safe, and building something seismically safe despite its position on quick-to-liquefy riverside land. It's a garage for a couple fire trucks, a few sleeping rooms, and administrative and meeting spaces. And it had to be done on a tight budget.
What I enjoyed about Station 21, besides the chance to peek child-like behind the scenes at the working lives of these everyday heroes, or the chance to slide down the fire pole myself, was the way it rises to something greater to the sum of its relatively modest parts. Whelton and Suttle understood that this had to be a practical piece of architecture first, but that if they stayed within budget it was also the chance to make a modest public building sing. Station 21 may be relatively small, but it occupies a prominent riverfront site just across from downtown. Particularly when the Campbell Memorial is built beside it, this will be a small little place with an outsized presence.
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The fire station is built to withstand a big earthquake. But did the designers make doubly sure that the freeway structure that stands between it and the rest of the city will not collapse in a big quake? I hope so, but none of the press about the new station and its seismic resistance mentions the freeway that is right on top of it. I would like some assurance that the fire department took seriously the resistance of that freeway structure to earthquake because if it collapses the fire station may as well not be there at all.
Posted by: Carter Kennedy | December 13, 2015 at 10:03 AM