Architect George Crandall and artist Carye Bye on Big Pink

US Bancorp Tower (Carye Bye)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

At a time when more buildings of twenty-plus stories are being built in Portland than perhaps ever before, and when new height limits are poised to allow more buildings to go tall, artist Carye Bye's "Big Pink Love Show," a portfolio of more than a decade's worth of photographs of the circa-1983 US Bancorp Tower (of course more commonly known as Big Pink), give us reason to consider a major part of the city's skyline built more than three decades ago.

"It just stood out," Bye recalled when I asked her how her love for the building came about. "I think it was the moment I found out it had a nickname. Over time I started to realize Portland doesn’t really have a centerpiece like the Eiffel Tower or the Space Needle. Big Pink kind of became one for me because of its standing alone [on the skyline]. I started to notice and take pictures of it. As time went on, I personified it: 'It’s my friend Big Pink.' I’d be biking and think, 'There it is.'"

Big Pink is the second-tallest building in the city, its 536 feet just eight feet shorter than the Wells Fargo Center (but with two more floors). More than the Wells Fargo, though, Big Pink enjoys a more prominent place on the skyline because it sits to the north of the other comparably sized buildings. It forms a kind of bookend for the downtown along Burnside. The '80s wasn't a great time for architecture, including office towers. Much of the elegant transparency of these buildings was lost when energy codes tightened, which called for either more reflective glass or less glass overall. But Big Pink, which arrived just a year before the Portland Building, in many ways its opposite, has a simple elegance thanks to its pink granite facade material and the added visual pizzazz of its trapezoidal shape, which makes the building look different depending on one's vantage point.

Crandall and Bye (Brian Libby)

"It looks different all the time. I didn't notice at first, but at some point, I was like, 'That building is not square.' It seems like it would be obvious from the beginning," added Bye, who also has created a series of guidebooks and zines about Portland and also runs the popular Hidden Portland For The Curious page on Facebook - but unfortunately is leaving the city for San Antonio. "But I never studied architecture and never looked that closely. I realized it looked really different from different viewpoints, and depending on the way the light hits it. It’s an architectural marvel to me."

One of the more enthusiastic visitors to Bye's show was architect George Crandall of Crandall Arambula, the award-winning urban design and planning firm, which has provided central-city planning for cities and towns all over the United States. Before Crandall co-led his own firm, and before he was an urban designer, he worked for more than a decade and a half at the Portland office of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, which designed Big Pink along with other local landmarks like Memorial Coliseum, the Standard Insurance Center (my favorite downtown office building), and Autzen Stadium in Eugene (not to mention landmarks around the world from the Sears Tower in Chicago to the new World Trade Center). In fact, Crandall was a lead designer of Big Pink.

"I thought it was just great," Crandall said of the photo show as the three of us gathered to talk about the building.

Big Pink and an admirer (Carye Bye)

Crandall was raised in Canada and educated at the University of Arizona, but he sought out a job in SOM's Portland office both for the city itself and for the firm. "I wanted to work for the biggest, baddest firm in the country," he said. "I wanted a liberal environment and Portland had that." After being hired in 1967, Crandall remembers US Bank approaching the firm in the early 1970s. "They wanted to do a big building and SOM knew more about big buildings than anyone in town."

The great Pietro Belluschi was also a design consultant for Big Pink, which brought the legendary architect full circle. When Belluschi had left Portland in 1951 to become dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's school of architecture (where he remained until 1965), SOM bought his firm and retained most of its staff. 

The tradition inside the firm was to have an in-house competition inside the firm, and Crandall led one team, which competed against one led by associate principal Thomas Houha. 

The US Bancorp Tower comprised of two parts, an operations center of just a few stories on the south side facing Oak Street and then the tower along Burnside. "The issue was how to do it," Crandall said. "I also knew that the bank wanted their front door on Oak. Burnside was kind of a bad street at the time. As usual, in design competitions, you scratch around and look at a number of schemes. It became obvious to me that Ankeny [which bisects the site about two-thirds to the north] was establishing a seam. I thought if I put the building here and create a galleria through it, and connect to the second phase." But perhaps his biggest epiphany was how a parallelogram shape could open up some of the edges of the site and give the building a more uncommon, angular form. One thing that also occurred to me in doing this scheme was that if the tower was back to the south it would be buried, but if it was up against Burnside it would be prominent forever. You would look down Burnside whichever way you go and it’s this narrow needle."

Drawing of Big Pink's site and shape (George Crandall)

"The other scheme the other guys were working on was traditional: not very imaginative, very clean and simple," Crandall added. "The issue was could we build a parallelogram and not spend a lot of money. Usually with a parallelogram you spend a lot of money. But I had some steel contractors look at it. There was no penalty. So in-house the decision was to go with the scheme I developed. Then the issue was to get the bank to buy in to having the tower on this end [Burnside]. I built a model, eight feet long, of this galleria. They could see that Oak could be their front door. The idea then was to pull the building back and create a little forecourt. That was how it started."

Regarding the role of Belluschi as a consultant, "They wanted an experienced architect who could advise them on what was the best thing to do," Crandall explained. "Pietro came into the office and looked at the scheme. I knew Pietro, being Italian, would know about gallerias. He looked at it and he said, “George, that is the right thing to do. I will talk to the bank about that.”

But Belluschi did more than provide shuttle diplomacy between architect and client. Big Pink might not have been pink without it. "We were looking for a stone. Petro said he’d come across this Spanish pink granite," Crandall remembered. "It was warm and we had a lot of cold buildings. The Spanish pink became the stone and away we went."

This was all still in the 1970s. The seven-story operations center was completed first, in 1975, and there would be a nearly an eight-year gap between that and completion of the 42-story tower.

A woodcut image of the building (Carye Bye)

"I knew it would be different," Crandall said. "The difference between it and most buildings is that the others never change. This one changes constantly because of the fact that it’s not right angles, and because of the way the light hits it. Sometimes it appears to be wide, sometimes not. It's that subtlety, then, and really the form itself, the location, and the color, that makes it unique in the city. It’s changing all the time."

"Going to Union Station up Fifth [Avenue], it looks almost like a triangle, or like a flat building," Bye added.

Despite Big Pink becoming a kind of mini-icon for the city, as well as SOM's local and national legacy, its Portland office closed just seven years after the building's 1983 completion. "We had a downturn in the economy. SOM was highly specialized in two things: office buildings and hospitals. That market just dried up," Crandall explained. "They weren’t diverse enough to survive here."

The architect also said that Big Pink came at a time when Portland was first starting to look more closely at and regulate how large downtown buildings interfaced with the street, and how that impacted his decision to put windows all along the ground floor, something not always common at the time. "The New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable had talked about our Portland bunker buildings, and how we were becoming an example of how to destroy a downtown," Crandall said. "It’s all about how a building relates to the street, to the ground. It’s not about what happens in the air, much as architects like to think. An example would be Nordstrom. It was a wonderful thing to bring downtown, especially in those days: a new department store. But as an urban design solution it’s a failure: blank walls all around it. It doesn’t open up to the street. The change came when we said we needed urban design guidelines. In 1983 we had our first guidelines. I realized what was going on when I did the lower building. We needed glass frontage all around the building. So you see that along these edges. We needed openness. Then you started to see changes around town."

Big Pink and Union Station (Brian Libby)

Big Pink arrived around the same time that the Portland Building was under construction; it too tried to be pedestrian-friendly, but its covered loggias weren't as inviting as planned. They seem less like arcades and more like caves. "Graves didn’t understand what he was doing," Crandall said. "I had dinner with him and he said to me [of the Portland Building], 'It’s going to be the most humane building in the United States.' And of course it’s a jail."

Crandall also recalled a crisis of conscious he felt early in his time at SOM in the late '60s, about a project that thankfully did not come to fruition: the Mt. Hood Freeway. Not only would it have cleared away scores if not hundreds of Southeast Portland neighborhood blocks, but Portland wound up using the funds instead to begin building the MAX light rail network.

"SOM when I came had just done the environmental impact statement for the freeway. The city already had the money in the bank for it. I had a civil engineering degree as well as architecture. They said, 'Could you help out on the project?' I spent half my time upstairs in the design studio, and half my time downstairs on the impact statement. I started to learn the complexities of the urban environment: acoustics, history, all of that stuff. That was an education. I was force-fed in a hell of a hurry. But you could see this freeway would cut a huge path through Portland. We realized how terrible a mistake it would be and we had to remain objective. Thankfully I was then the project manager for a range of alternatives."

 

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Comments

[carye bye]

Thanks Brian and George for a wonderful meet up to talk about Big Pink and many other things catching our eyes in Portland.

The Big Pink Love Show is up through Feb 28 at Coffeehouse Northwest (1951 W Burnside). Photography, illustration and print.

Hours the coffeeshop are open: M-F 6:30am-6pm and Weekends 8-5

There's also On-location show with local businesses hosting photos in their windows. Here's the map link: http://www.hiddenportland.com/bigpink

[Alex Tilley]

I had, and still do, the privilege of George's friendship throughout high school, in Sudbury, in Northern Ontario.

He was always the smartest among us, much to Portland's benefit.

[Fred Leeson]

The northeast corner of the tower has a narrow strip of glass that runs the entire height of the building. I remember walking to work one gray morning years ago when the sunshine breaking through the clouds lit up the strip of glass like a pink light sword 40 stories tall. I've never seen it happen again...wish I had a picture.

[carye bye]

Fred, I know what you are talking about.. I have only seen this happen twice.. and I look at Big Pink a lot!!! I saw this happen not too long ago and I kept looking back in disbelief because I had never seen it light up before... I was wondering if Big Pink had gotten some new lights up the side! I then saw it again closer up but not as amazing as seeing the whole corner lit.

[Tim TK Klassen]

I had a magical day exploring Big Pink from different angles, and saw the SouthWEST corner light up, like what you're describing, Fred. Fortunately I did have my camera and took a photo. It was a fitting way to make my way to Carye's show at Coffeehouse Northwest.

[Jeff Belluschi]

Around 1989 a young architect met with my grandfather, Pietro Belluschi, and the discussion was oriented around modernism. The unaware fellow pointed out over Pietro's drafting table to "Big Pink" as an example of bad design. Pietro, who did did not suffer fools gladly,remarked "I helped design that building and it is one of my favorites". Oops!

Great article thank you to George for enlightening us all to the collaboration. FYI-George is one of the top urban design planners in the country.

[David Dysert]

I too have grown to appreciate the tower over time. Indeed it changes dramatically given one's perspective, time of day and quality of light. I especially enjoy how it can almost appear razor thin--almost 2-D and a bit surreal. I do however regret the lower gallery building not only for its brutal aesthetic but for the unfortunate act of cutting off Pine and Ankeny streets. How wonderful if the Ankeny "alley" could lead one from the Waterfront to a new plaza at the surface parking lot near Burnside and Broadway, and then continue up to the Park Blocks. I would be grand to reinstate the former street pattern and break up the monolith.