PSU students engage in Portland Provocations

A re-imagination of the Portland Building (Antonio Crossier)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

A few weeks ago during Design Week Portland, I happened to be speaking to a Portland State University architecture class taught by assistant professor Andrew Santa Lucia, just as an exhibit that was part of the festival and that he helped put together, called Portland Provocations: Architectural Visions for the City, was also opening just down the street. So after speaking to the class about the practice of architecture writing and criticism, it was natural to reserve time at the end of class to go see the exhibit together.

Speaking to the class that morning, I remember talking about how my sense of what it means to be a critic had evolved from when I was first starting out writing movie reviews back in the late 1990s. Back then, I had thought of a review more like a verdict, whereas today I think of it more like an opening argument: the idea being that it's the dialogue and exchange that matters more than any one point, or any one person. Visiting the Portland Provocations exhibit a little while later, I felt like that idea was reinforced, in that each of these student thesis projects, collated by Santa Lucia along with fellow PSU assistant professor of architecture Jeff Schnabel, there was another kind of argument being made.

I don't know about you, but when I was 22 or 24 years old I wasn't ready to make a coherent argument for how to transform some part of the future city like these students did. But that's precisely why I always enjoy visiting exhibits of student work, be it at PSU or the University of Oregon's Portland outpost: for the variety of ideas these students propose. It's a rare opportunity in one's life as an architect, it seems to me. Soon after architecture school you'll be hired by an architecture firm or perhaps start one of your own, or leave the profession for something else. In any of those scenarios, while doing other work of some kind, you probably won't spend the time researching and conceiving a way to change the city.

"The city of Portland has been narrativized and caricatured in popular culture to a degree enjoyed only by larger metropolitan American cities," goes the statement from Santa Lucia and Schnabel accompanying the exhibit. "However, this reasonable metropolis has forged an unlikely alliance with emergent technologies and progressive policies that have helped shape it as a space for provocative architectural interventions. Portland Provocations is a cross-section of architectural projects by bachelor’s and master’s level students at Portland State University's School of Architecture that engage with the nuanced complexities and projective ambitions of the city. With this exhibition, we aim to contribute to reshaping the discourse on architecture, ecology, and humanity in Portland, one project at a time."

Arguing for how to change the city, or narrativizing projective ambitions: it's all the same, really. It's about saying, "Why not this crazy idea?" Even if it doesn't get implemented, that idea can lead to other ones. It's a spark.

Take Antonio Crossier, an undergraduate who presented a radical re-imagination of the Portland Building, that postmodern landmark by Michael Graves that happens to be about to undergo a major renovation. Crossier writes that he's trying to "peel back the facade and uncover the hundreds and thousands of stories that create a messy but whole city. Using the deconstruction of the Portland Building as a way to peel away the constructed image of the city," he proposes this as "a way to re-engage the citizen into this civic structure that is so aptly named: The Portland Building."

A Portland building re-imagination (Antonio Crossier)

It's not that we're going to actually restore the Portland Building this way, but especially that the real restoration is going to be taking some liberties with the original Michael Graves design and substantially change the building, why not go all the way and talk about what a more radical transformation might look like? And Crossier is smart to identify that one of the biggest problems with the original architecture was its lack of transparency: by breaking open the facade in his design study, the building expresses an openness it has never otherwise had.

I felt somewhat similarly about an entry from graduate student Erika Warhus, called Literacy on the Lightrail, which imagines using individual MAX light rail cars as rolling literacy centers where people can learn to read. "Literacy is a matter of public health," she writes, "and community building and is directly related to equity and accessibility. In our society, a lack of literacy comes with a heavy dose of stigma." Her thesis project proposes that the existing framework of a MAX car "can encourage and sustain literacy by casually engaging commuters in a parallel path that is imbued with language, creating moments of learning, expression, and shared public experiences." She proposes a series of seven interventions that "foster interaction between public transit and language in new ways, offering lines of text, graphics, armatures for words, furniture, and fully enclosed spaces."

Literacy aboard a MAX train (Erika Warhus)

Again, it's not to say we're literally going to do this, but in a way a small form of it has long existed on these and on countless subway cars and buses: the "Poetry in Motion" series that placed poems on advertising panels. But more importantly, I like the broader idea that Warhus's thesis offers: that transit, particularly trains, could be given over to functional purposes.

The same is true for an entry by undergraduate architecture student Zephyr Anthony, which alters the Hawthorne Bridge to add a cafe, "giving commuters and tourists a place to rest while bridge lifts are in progress, and a sheltered vantage point from which to take in the expansive river views." It's a new spin on an old idea, for in cities like London and Florence there used to be bridges with all kinds of habitable space for retail or other purposes.

Cafe on a bridge (Zephyr Anthony)

Another entry, Vanport Necropolis by grad student Nicolas Pectol, offered a sobering and striking take on how to present the city's cultural history, namely the Vanport flood of 1948, which destroyed a mostly African American neighborhood and displaced thousands. Pectol designed "a funeral procession and burial ritual to honor those who died in the flood and provide them, and their city, a proper burial." He takes inspiration from shipbuilding, "an industry that played an integral role in the economic and social life of this ethnically diverse community," and includes a series of canals along the Columbia Slough.

Perusing the images, I thought of a memorial I visited in Berlin last year, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe by Peter Eisenman and Bruno Hapold, which had a similar boxy geometry. But the canals of course made me think of Amsterdam and other Dutch cities. It's a beautiful concept.

A Vanport memorial in the Columbia Slough (Nicholas Pectol)

"Creating the Riparian City" by grad student Taryn Mudge imagines a response to the potentially rising waters of a future Willamette or Columbia river tied to sea-level rise due to climate change. Technically I'm not sure rises in sea level Portland would correspond with rising river levels, but even so, it's an interesting exercise to imagine the riverbanks like Mudge does, with a lot more room for a natural, wetland-like transition to land.

Mudge writes, "Can we find a solution that accepts the natural ebb and flow of the river’s invaluable hydrological functions, and begin to embrace the Willamette River’s degrading riparian ecosystem?” Her proposal proposes "the purposeful dismantling of targeted man-made structures such as building complexes and streets to make way for streams and new waterways...new overpasses, diverted public transportation, riparian agricultural solutions such as vertical food-growing towers, and new hydroelectric production facilities are introduced. Former streets within the flood zone become agricultural channels. The long-term plan would enable Portland to survive and even thrive in the advent of rising waters due to climate change."

"Creating the Riparian City" (Taryn Mudge)

What's also fun about Mudge's project is it gives a chance to imagine peeling back much of the downtown waterfront, both buildings and the barrier between land and water as we know it. Suddenly buildings in downtown or the Pearl once obstructed from view become front row attractions.

A project by grad student Kendra Bostwick Malkemus, begins with the notion of festivals and cultural gathering spaces such as parks and squares, but really her proposal is about something that has been seriously discussed by city leaders in the past: capping portions of the I-405 freeway to gain a series of city blocks, ideally gaining public space in the process.

Another project that seems relevant to real-world discussions was by Kyle Norman, which imagined a series of vertical gardens that could reduce the heat-island effect of the downtown core. This is the kind of thinking that is leading to the Green Loop here in Portland, for example, or a plan in Barcelona to add a large amount of greenspace to the city without removing wide swatches of buildings.

And finally there was a project by graduate student Reid Weber that proposes a food waste processing facility in the Lloyd EcoDistrict. "Portland’s landfill is located in an undeveloped area 140 miles from the city and 6 miles away from the river, far from the eyes of most city residents," Weber writes. In an age of scarcity, "cities need to utilize more effective means of waste management to celebrate the reuse of typically wasted resources." Designed for the exchange of food waste and public interaction, this proposal provides environmental and social amenities that physically embody the ideas of reuse and a layering of public usage—answering the question “How can architecture make the waste process more transparent, so that residents of our community are more aware of how their waste is meaningful beyond its initial use?”

Waste treatment in the city center (Reid Weber)

Taken together, these projects "provide a lens to look at Portland not how it is but how it potentially could be," Santa Lucia said in a talk accompanying the exhibition. "And it’s not always an easy conversation. Perhaps it’s about provoking the beast. It’s sort of a testament to not only our thesis research models but our studio models that get at this question of producing work that challenges the city, not only to be better but to be more, and an unqualified more: a discourse within the city with architects, with people."

"What’s in a provocation? When you think provoke, perhaps it’s pejorative. It’s about fighting and what not. But ‘provocative’ does have this question of allure inside of it. It’s always about other: it’s about the provocation between you and another. What’s at the basis of provocation? I think it’s the idea of a mirror. But it’s interesting: what does it mean to provoke when you’re provoking itself? When your idea of the world is different from the world around you? We have work here that challenges this idea of the mirror."