Portland Architecture

Glass in session: visiting PSU's light-filled Karl Miller Center

Karl Miller Center atrium (Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In a recent Portland Tribune column, I had the opportunity to write about Portland State University's new Karl Miller Center, the expanded home of its School of Business. So far I've visited twice in as many weeks, and I already can't wait to go back there again and bask in its five-story atrium.

Although I'm a good couple decades past my college years, and honestly would never have majored in business, the Karl Miller Center almost makes me want to go back for an MBA. But luckily you don't have to be a business major or even a PSU student to enter the space.

About 100,000 of the 143,000 square feet comprising this project is actually a renovation of an unremarkable existing building, constructed in two phases in 1979 and 1989. The Karl Miller Center design, led by acclaimed German firm Behnisch Architekten with local firm SRG Partnership as architect of record, creates a new building just to the north as well as an atrium between the two structures.

The new construction, clad in Alaskan cedar, is striking. Its five stories are comprised of a series of interlocking rectangular volumes. While the ground floor is set back from the street, for example, the second story cantilevers outward (with the help of a few stilts) to create a covered public space. The shifting volumes create a sense of kinetics and break up the mass that otherwise would exist there, which stands in stark contrast to the original bulky building on the south side of the block.

But the architects did make a rather bold choice in their re-cladding of the existing building: a combination of aluminum and stainless steel that undulates a bit to create shadows. My understanding is that the facade was initially all aluminum but after design review the stainless steel was added, by request. And indeed: for me the overall effect of the cladding seemed somewhere between the cheap utilitarian corrugated metal of industrial applications and something more shiny or refined. I also wondered if the reflective quality of the cladding helped bounce light into the adjacent atrium. Talking with architects Stefan Behnisch and Matt Noblett of Behnisch Architekten last week, I was told that was not really the case. But it at least makes sense.

Karl Miller Center atrium (Brian Libby)

The narrative of this building for me has everything to do with that atrium and natural light. Of course if you're a student or faculty member in the School of Business, you'll probably spend more of your time in the classrooms than in the atrium itself. But thankfully it's largely in service of those classrooms and their natural light needs that the atrium exists. Instead of light coming in just from the exterior windows, with less and less natural illumination the deeper you go into the building, the atrium brings in a bevy of light through the middle of the building and into those classrooms.

Touring these Karl Miller Center classrooms, I couldn't help but think back to the semester I spent in 2012 teaching a class at Portland State. The classroom was completely windowless. I was still able to do my job, of course. But it felt like I was in a bomb shelter. It was, I suppose, the opposite of what these classrooms felt like. Would I have been a better teacher in a light-filled Karl Miller Center classroom? Maybe not. But the students and I would have all been a little more alert; that's what the studies show.

Perhaps the classrooms and study spaces are the destination and the atrium is merely the interstitial space one journeys through to get there, but it's a heck of a journey. With a series of bridges and stairways crisscrossing the five-story volume, there is a constant sense of activity. The architects also used the central staircase as a gathering place, with a series of long benches extending from the stairs. I could see this being a place to do your homework on a rainy winter day, or to kick back with a coffee between classes.

As I mentioned in the column, during the media tour School of Business dean Cliff Allen admitted that a number of students actually go back to the parking garage and sit in their cars between classes. There was that little space in which to hang out indoors, which our rainy climate requires for much of the year. Allen expressed a hope, which I think is not unreasonable at all, that the Karl Miller Center atrium can act as a shared space for all the university, not just the business, marketing and accounting majors. And that would be good for the business school. I'm not going to say that majoring in business or marketing is wrong. Of course not. But it wouldn't hurt to mingle with some liberal-arts students.

The building is also well positioned urbanistically to act as a unifying space for PSU. It stands in between the university's major built effort of recent years, the Urban Center Plaza, and the majority of its campus. You could use it not just as a place to hang out, but a pathway through campus.

In the column, I also tried to put the Karl Miller Center atrium in the context of other atria in the city that have been constructed in the last 20 years. After all, not only does our rainy climate seem to call out for such winter garden-like architectural spaces, but some of our most acclaimed architecture in recent memory possesses some of the same basic qualities as PSU's new atrium.

I think of Allied Works' Wieden + Kennedy building, for example, in which a multi-story volume was carved out of an old cold-storage warehouse. It too has bridges and catwalks across a huge shared volume. More recently, and perhaps more similarly to Karl Miller, there is the multistory atrium in the Collaborative Life Science Center by CO Architects of Los Angeles (with Portland's SERA Architects as architect of record). I'd still rank the Wieden + Kennedy building first overall for its architecture, but both W+K and the CLSB are less connected to the street than the Karl Miller Center, because on two of its four sides, PSU's building also has glass facades. On the east side of the building, the glass facade tilts in a dramatic fashion, as if leading one up the slope of the site.

Karl Miller Center atrium (Brian Libby)

Portland has a wonderful community of architecture firms, any number of which could have designed a successful Karl Miller Center. Yet cities and design communities are enhanced by having firms from out of town contribute to our built environment. Behnisch Architekten may not be as much of a household name as so-called starchitect firms led by Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel or Frank Gehry, but it has a stellar reputation for green architecture, and is particularly adept at the challenge met in the Karl Miller Center: bringing natural light deep into buildings.

That was true even 20 years ago, on landmark projects like 1997's Norddeutsch Landesbank in Hannover, Germany, which I interviewed Behnisch about in 2013. Designed without some of the high-tech tools available to architects today like energy modeling and parametric design software, it featured a chimney effect to move air from the building’s courtyard up through its double-skin façade.

1997's Norddeutsch Landesbank (Roland Halbe)

Before visiting the Karl Miller Center, I watched on YouTube an interesting presentation made by Stefan Behnisch at a Berlin lighting conference earlier this year, in which he talked about a variety of techniques used to bring more light into a space. In projects like the Allston Science and Engineering Complex for Harvard University and the Genzyme headquarters (both in Cambridge, Massachusetts), as well as a parking garage for the City of Santa Monica, Behnisch has introduced light by relatively uncommon means such as mounting heliostats on a roof to reflect extra light inside.

"I’m very interested in the sensation of light, the experience of light in a room. It appears, it disappears, it changes," Behnisch said in his Berlin talk. "The idea of daylight, of light, can really be a driving force in developing architecture."

That's certainly the case with the Karl Miller Center.

 

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Patrick Burke of Michael Graves Architecture & Design discusses the Portland Building renovation

Patrick Burke (Michael Graves Architecture & Design)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

For the latest issue of Architect Magazine, I had the opportunity to write about the Portland Building's somewhat controversial renovation, which will transform the building to such a degree that the building will probably lose its National Register listing.

Writing the article, as well as an earlier blog post about the proposed renovation, has been an interesting journey in which my impression evolved.

Going into it, I was quite concerned about whether the right approach was being taken. After all, the design, by DLR Group, includes an aluminum over-cladding on the facade that will undeniably change the original structure. It also changes the windows from dark to clear, and in moving mechanical equipment to the roof may negatively affect the composition. For some preservationists, including the local DoCoMoMo chapter, the new cladding in particular was a step too far, given that the original tile and painted-concrete facade probably could have been patched up.

Normally I take pride in always taking the preservationist side. And indeed, whether one supports this bold approach for the Portland Building or not, it isn't the way we should restore most any other landmark building. In particular, it's rightly considered inauthentic for key physical alterations or additions to historic architecture to be indistinguishable from original portions of a structure. Historic Preservation 101 teaches that to maintain architectural integrity of landmark buildings we must make it clear what is original and what is a new add-on.

Yet the Portland Building is, in my view, a special case, in which the original construction—its materials and techniques—was so compromised, so cheaply done, and such a compromise of architect Michael Graves's original vision that to radically alter the building might actually make it more authentic or at least truer to that vision. One might say that this renovation isn't changing the Portland Building but completing it, over three decades after the building first opened.

While reporting on the Portland Building for Architect, I had the opportunity to talk with Patrick Burke, a principal with Michael Graves Architecture & Design who has been with the firm since 1982, joining Graves (who passed away in 2015) just as construction on the building was nearing completion. Burke has testified on DLR Group's behalf in Landmarks Commission hearings and been unequivocally supportive of the idea that making big changes to the building is something that Graves not only would have OK'd but outright advocated for.

"I don’t know if it was technically the first," Burke said as we began our conversation, referring to my point that the Portland Building was the first major postmodern building in the United States. "Charles Moore did the project in New Orleans, the Piazza d'Italia [in 1978]. But there’s no doubt it was the first major significant commission in the postmodern style. It was shocking for the architecture profession. It was in color! It had all these classical allusions and symbols. It was shocking."

"I was in my last year at architecture school, at UIC Chicago, and was applying to grad schools," Burke remembers. "I really wanted to come to Princeton and be in Michael’s studio. Progressive Architecture had an awards issue that came out with the Portland building on the cover as I was finishing school. It was like, ‘Wow, look at that.’ I was working in his office and some of my friends were mocking me: ‘This is what you want to do? This isn’t architecture.’ It really started a debate."

When Burke joined Graves's firm, the Portland Building was about halfway through construction. By the time it was completed October of 1982 the building was finished and dedicated. But how to pay for staff to attend the dedication? "The office spent nights and weekends making 150 collages about the Portland Building and sold them at a gallery to pay for us to all go out for the dedication," the architect recalls.

More importantly, Burke got a first-hand account of Graves encountering what would remain his most famous (and infamous) design. "I remember touring the building with Michael and what he felt was successful and not successful," Burke says. "Michael new there were flaws in certain ways. That building is something that he’s had to own for the rest of his career. It was a building built cheaply and had a lot of problems. Michael knew that."

Although the aluminum over-cladding is getting the most attention, the changing out of black glass for clear glass is something that Burke believes really corrects a wrong, not just in terms of performance but intent. "Michael would have said, ‘Get rid of the black glass.’ It actually was a mistake," he says. "[Architect of record Emery] Roth put it in supposedly for energy efficiency. Michael blew up. They said, 'Too late, we bought black glass.' On the tour, Michael said to me, 'We’re never letting this happen again.' And we never did."

Burke also talked about the original intent with regard to the ground-floor loggias, which have been unsuccessful as retail outlets as well as in terms of place-making in that they're not places where people like to congregate. Yet the intent was to create better street-level urban energy than corporate office towers like the Congress Center across the street.

Rendering of a renovated Portland Building (DLR Group)

"The original intent was to make it pedestrian friendly," Burke said of the covered loggias. "So many of the '60s and '70s urban buildings were building these urban plazas [at the base of office towers, as the Standard Plaza across the street does]. Michael’s point was the building should come out to meet the street line. He said, 'You should fill out the site to meet the street, but we also want to be pedestrian friendly so we’ll create this loggia that will get filled out with shops. We’ll make it deeper for tables and chairs, and people can sit out there and eat but they’ll be covered from the rain.' It wound up being filled with bike racks instead." When it came time to renovate the building, "We said, 'You should just fill that in with glass, either for a larger tenant or let the office space interior come up to the edge.' Today’s glassy buildings you see the energy inside, and that adds to the life on the street. Now at the pedestrian level, the experience is held away."

One of the Portland Building's other shortcomings has always been that its entrance is on Fifth Avenue instead of on Fourth facing the South Park Blocks. Burke was able to shed some light. "You would think the building would want to open itself up to the park," he said. "I spoke to Lisa Lee [a project manager for Graves on the Portland Building]. Why did you put the parking entry facing the park? Why not put program against that? She said, 'I know. The slope dictated everything. We hated putting it there, but so be it.' So when I talked to DLR, I said there was not a design intent with the entrance. It’s unfortunate the parking was there [along the park]. If you could get rid of it, I’d do it and make it more glassy." Which is precisely what the renovation does. "Later on," Burke adds, "I was blown away to find people fighting about the historical intent, as if they don’t see removing parking and putting windows on the park as a positive thing. That one I don’t get."

I then asked Burke about the Portland Building potentially losing its National Register listing. Normally for a landmark building such a removal would be the biggest sign that a renovation was taking an improper approach. "Some of the commissioners were wrestling with that same question," he said of the Landmarks Commission hearings. "One commissioner was trying to look at it from a legal perspective. She was anxious about whether these renovations would force the building into a position of being de-listed. She wanted to keep it on the National Register. Then there was a conversation: 'Do we care?'"

"I said, 'My answer’s from a different perspective. I’m an architect and we faced issues many time with a historic landmark. It’s complicated. What you’d love to have is both the responsibility and the right to modernize a building: to make it better, particularly when it’s still being used. You have an obligation to the users. Monticello, I would think you should forever be restoring it for what it is. But I have no problem with a train station on a landmark list [that's] no longer being used as a train station be changed. I think you should let the buildings live. Michael was asked that question many times. He said, 'Do it. I’d rather see my buildings get updated than be out of date and out of step.' Being on the Register can handcuff you when you’re an active user. But I’m not being brash about it. It’s great that we can come up with mechanisms for saving history. Penn Station was torn down for a crummy train station. That got the preservation movement started. I just think sometimes it’s taken a bit too literally."

We then talked about intent with regard to the facade. "Where the weaknesses are [in the cladding] it’s getting worse and worse," Burke said. "What you’re fixing is something slowly falling apart. There was no [original] material intent. Michael wanted to do a glazed terracotta tile. He found this company in California. They worked up a price. Michael was so excited about it. He thought it was going to be this sparkly building in a rainy climate. Then the contractors told Michael it wasn't going to happen because of budget. So he said, 'We’ll use stucco.' The City of Portland pushed back on some things. They had to go back and do a second round. They didn’t want to accept stucco. They said, 'We don’t want a building we’ll have to repair every five to seven years. Michael said, 'What can I use that’s cheaper than stucco?' They came back. On a Sunday morning they called Michael with an idea. It’s a famous meeting in the history of the project. They said, 'We’ve got a way to use the façade as part of the structural system.' We can paint it. Michael said, 'I don’t care if we make it out of oatmeal.' He hadn’t executed anything at this scale. The way to win the competition was to be within budget."

Design-competition model of Portland Building (Dezeen)

One of the small changes being made at the ground-floor level in the Portland Building renovation is illustrative of the larger debate, perhaps. The tiles are being switched out for tiles twice as large. Unlike with the facade over-cladding or even the window tinting, there isn't an argument to be made that changing tiles is functionally or physically better. It's just an aesthetic change. But again, it's one that may get closer to the original in terms of intent.

At the time of construction, "Michael said, 'Can I use some tile?' They only let him use it at the base," Burke recalls. "And they reduced the size of the tile to the cheapest size possible. The historic people today are nuts about the size of the tile. It was a smaller tile than we wanted. It’s got lots of grout joints. We liked the bigger surface of the new tile." He also says it addresses a problem with the grout. "We’ve always done this: we pick grout colors that come as close as possible to matching the tile," Burke added. "In one of the re-grouts, they re-grouted it with black grout. They thought it was something we did originally. I said, 'No, no, no."

"Michael’s intent was shapes, colors. In truth, Michael loved working with nice materials when we had higher budgets. But he was also very quick to what he needed to do to be within budgets, and he didn’t usually fight material changes. Michael would have been open to talking about other materials. The question is what’s more important here: Michael’s intent or the way he’d treat the design versus an obedient replication of what was there? If you’re going to restore it, what is a responsible restoration?"

Ultimately Burke has become one of the biggest champions of the DLR Group and City of Portland approach. "I think they were incredibly responsible in trying to really think through the issues and come up with the best solutions," he says. "I think they did a very good job, and a tough job."

The Portland Building's restoration, including all of these changes, was approved by City Council earlier this month.

 

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Design calendar: September 16-30

Fair-Haired Dumbbell (Architecture Foundation of Oregon)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Explore Hidden Downtown
Led by author Laura Foster as part of the City of Portland’s Ten Toe Express walk series is an invitation to explore the back streets and hidden pathways of Portland State University and the south end of downtown. Foster will peel back the layers and find vestiges of Portland’s past hiding in plain sight. Tour begins at corner of SW 18th Avenue & Salmon Street. 9AM Saturday, September 16. Free.

Midtown and West End walking tour
Explore downtown between the South Park Blocks and I-405, an area filled with iconic buildings as well as numerous lesser-known architectural gems. Attendees on this Architectural Heritage Center tour will see historic apartment houses, storefronts, cultural and religious buildings, and the remnants of what was once a thriving residential area, while also gaining an understanding of the impacts of development on historic preservation efforts. The West End has also become one of Portland's hottest shopping and restaurant destinations, and includes noteworthy recent projects like Lever Architecture's Union Way, Skylab Architecture's Blackbox building, and ZFG's 12 West tower, not to mention historic gems like A.E. Doyle's Central Library. Tour meets on the north side of  Central Library, on SW Yamhill Street between 10th and 11th Avenues. 10AM Saturday, September 16. $20 ($12 for AHC members).

Historic Kenton walking tour
Located just south of the Columbia River in North Portland, Kenton was a remote farming community until the streetcar and the meat-packing industry transformed this rural hamlet into a classic early 20th century company town. For several decades, Kenton was the Pacific Northwest headquarters of the Swift Meat Packing company with an enormous stockyard and adjacent packing plants. As attendees on this Positively Portland walking tour will see, the residential and commercial buildings still reflect the stratification of a working class neighborhood. We'll start our walk at the iconic Paul Bunyan statue, the best remaining evidence of the 1959 Oregon Centennial celebration. The tour includes a look inside the fully restored and very active Kenton Masonic Lodge. Tour begins at Paul Bunyan statue, North Denver and North Interstate Avenue. 11AM Saturday, September 16. $15.

Old Town walking tour
The commercial district near the historic Skidmore Fountain and the oldest standing buildings in downtown comprise this  tour of Portland’s only National Historic District. Attendees on this Architectural Heritage Center tour will see the work of Portland’s earliest architects, learning how cast iron played a central role in their designs and how the city developed so close to the river, and along the way learning about some beautiful but long-lost buildings while also seeing great examples of historic preservation. Tour meetup location to be announced. 10AM Tuesday, September 19. $20 ($12 for AHC members).

ASID Design Excellence Awards
The Oregon Chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers wishes to acknowledge, elevate and celebrate great design in our region. In order to recognize the skill and creativity of local designers, ASID Oregon instituted an annual design award competition (now in its third year) open to all practicing interior designers and interior design students in Oregon and awarded in this ceremony. Categories include residential, commercial, on the boards, and student projects. Design Within Reach, 825 NW 13th Avenue. 5:30PM Tuesday, September 19. $15 ($10 for ASID members).

In Process: Beebe Skidmore + Made
AIA Portland's quarterly lecture series In Process, which provides insight into the creative process of local architects, designers, makers and creators, continues with architecture firm Beebe Skidmore and custom wood fabrication company Made. Heidi Beebe and Doug Skidmore established Beebe Skidmore Architects in 2007 with modest residential and commercial projects in Portland, Seattle and Boise after wrapping up their duties with Allied Works Architecture on the Seattle Art Museum. Beebe Skidmore was recently awarded two AIA Honor Awards for Swift Agency, a 30,000-square-foot adaptive re-use project with a custom creative office interior. Made is a multi-disciplinary design-build firm that builds furniture, cabinetry, and interior spaces from its Portland studio. AIA Center For Architecture, 403 NW 11th Avenue. 5:30PM Tuesday, September 19. Free.

The Case for Building Integrated Photovoltaics
With the price of solar photovoltaics dropping approximately 50 percent in the last ten years, more and more states gearing up to meet renewable energy carve-outs. And with climate change continually in the headlines, the economic, political, and environmental factors of solar PV are converging. This presentation by Claire McKenna, a senior engineer at San Francisco's WSP USA, makes the case for building integrated photovoltaics systems, addressing the system adoption drivers and advancements in technology as well as discussing a strategy for employing the maximum potential of solar PV. When applied to meet this potential, building integrated PV systems can provide a distinctive aesthetic while meeting high performance energy goals as they link on-site generation, energy storage and the building network to the grid of the future. AIA Center For Architecture, 403 NW 11th Avenue. 12PM Wednesday, September 20. $37.92 ($27.37 for AIA members, $16.82 for Associate AIA members, $6.27 for students or those not seeking AIA Continuing Education credits).

Does This Make Sense Anymore? Energy Efficiency in a Market Awash With Low-Cost Power
As part of the Energy Trust of Oregon's Energy Engineering Forums series, Charlie Grist, the Conservation Resource Manager for the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, will discuss the future of energy-efficiency measures in architecture. The market price of energy is so low that sometimes it’s negative. Wind and solar plants are springing frequently, natural gas generation is so cheap it’s displacing coal, and in many places electric loads are not growing even though population is. These circumstances challenge the notion of energy efficiency as a resource. Yet the Northwest Power Council’s Seventh Power Plan (2016) calls for developing ever more energy efficiency. Ecotrust, 721 NW Ninth Avenue, Second Floor. 12PM Wednesday, September 20. Free.

Tour the Fair Haired Dumbbell!
Get an up close and personal look at one of the most talked about new buildings in Portland, the Fair Haired Dumbbell, in this Architecture Foundation of Oregon tour. Visitors will hear from Kevin Cavenaugh, the building’s developer and co-designer , along with other members of the design team from FFA Design. Learn about the funding model, the challenges the site presented, and the colorful artwork on the exterior. Fair-Haired Dumbbell, 11 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. 5PM Wednesday, September 20. $25.

Trace It Back
The Oregon Chapter of the International Interior Design Association's September Forum features an informative overview of materials transparency, coined “Trace it Back.” Michael Johnson, the Director of Sustainability at 3Form, will present on how materials transparency relates to green building, and socially/environmentally responsible manufacturing. This CEU will touch on the following points: provide an understanding of a life cycle analysis, educate on the use of Environmental Product Declarations or EPDs and other transparency documents, and it will shed some light on the benefits of transparency in the marketplace. Interior Office Solutions, 811 SW Sixth Avenue. 5:30PM Thursday, September 21. $15 (free for IIDA members).

The Work and Legacy of William Fletcher, Northwest Modernist
This lecture by Troy Doss, a principal with FFA Architecture and Interiors, will look at the career of firm co-founder William Fletcher, a talented practitioner of the Northwest Modern residential style that, like the work of architects Saul Zaik, John Storrs, Van Evera Bailey and others, took inspiration from the early houses of John Yeon and Pietro that fused International Style modernism with the influence of local barns and farmhouses as well as Japanese architectural traditions. Design Within Reach, 825 NW 13th Avenue. 6PM Friday, September 22. $10 suggested donation (free with purchase of Midcentury Modern William Fletcher House Tour).

Gothic Revival church architecture: from Pugin to Portland
19th century English architect and designer Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin was was also a prolific writer, publishing several books outlining his architectural principles as a leading proponent of the Gothic Revival style. Presenter Kathryn L. Burton, Ph.D., who has taught at Oregon State University and West Virginia University but now manages the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Gordon House near Silverton, will examine several Portland churches designed in this style in relation to Pugin’s principles, in order to better understand how the style was translated across space and time. She’ll also discuss factors that influenced Pugin’s work and some of his most important designs. Architectural Heritage Center, 701 SE Grand Avenue. 10AM Saturday, September 23. $20 ($12 for AHC members).

Mid-Century Modern William Fletcher House Tour
A founding member of the Portland architectural firm FFA (Fletcher Farr Ayotte), William Fletcher’s work was inspired by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the international style of architecture, but was also influenced by Oregon’s NW Regional Modernism which was flourishing at that time. The resulting homes, as evidenced on this Restore Oregon annual tour, are both modern and appropriate for the landscape. Tour locations provided with tickets. 10AM Saturday, September 23. $45 ($35 for Restore Oregon members).

Pearl District tour - Preservation in the Midst of Change
Over the last 20 years, the Pearl District has been transformed from industrial enclave and rail yards into one of Portland’s most popular residential, cultural and retail districts. A century ago, the area went through a similar transformation, from a working class housing area at the edge of a marsh to the city’s biggest industrial and warehousing area. Many of Portland’s best known architects of the period designed buildings for important local and national companies. Most of these buildings remain, with their exteriors intact, and new uses inside. But as the pending demolition of the Pacific Northwest College of Art's Feldman Building (a renovated old warehouse) reminds us, the current wave of development could threaten more historic buildings. Tour meetup location to be announced. 10AM Saturday, September 23. $20 ($12 for AHC members).

Tour the Aubrey Watzek House
The University of Oregon's John Yeon Center for Architecture and the Landscape invites the public to tour Portland's only National Historic Landmark residence, the Aubrey Watzek House. Completed in 1927, the house helped kick off the Northwest Modern residential style, combining Bauhaus modernism with local vernacular influences such as barns and farmhouses as well as the influence of Japanese architecture. Over the ensuing decades, the genre would grow with houses by Pietro Belluschi, Saul Zaik, John Storrs, Van Evera Bailey, William Fletcher and many others. But Yeon's Watzek remains the crown jewel. Watzek House, 1061 SW Skyline Boulevard. 11AM, 1PM and 3PM Sunday, September 24. $20-30.

Decon + Reuse ’17
The Building Material Reuse Association's international conference and expo on deconstruction and reuse features three days of presentations by leaders and innovators in the reuse and deconstruction fields, sharing their best practices, case studies and research. This event is the premier opportunity for networking with one's colleagues and learning about new tools and practices. Portland State University, Smith Memorial Student Union, 1825 SW Broadway. 8AM Monday-Wednesday, September 25-27. $450

Pioneers to Postmodern: downtown walking tour
Taking a whirlwind tour of Portland's architectural history via this downtown Architectural Heritage Center tour, attendees will learn about the first wooden structures near the river as well as the elaborate cast iron, stone and terracotta decorated buildings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From there one will be transported into the modern age and the sleek designs of Pietro Belluschi and the postmodernism of Michael Graves. Tour meetup location to be announced. 10AM Tuesday, September 26. $20 ($12 for AHC members).

Architects Without Borders: a design/build experience in Arusha
Matt Leavitt, an Architects Without Borders/Oregon steering committee member and a designer at Hacker Architects, will speak about his experiences in Arusha, Tanzania, where he worked with other volunteers and local craftsmen building a children's foster home under the auspices of Real Architecture Workshop. RAW organizes design/build experiences for students and young architects in locations around the world. AIA Center For Architecture, 403 NW 11th Avenue. 6PM Wednesday, September 27. Free.

New York’s High Line and Portland’s Green Loop: Linear Parks and Urban Futures
New York’s High Line park, an innovative promenade created on a disused elevated railway, is one of the world’s most iconic new urban landmarks. Portland’s Green Loop, a proposed six-mile linear park and active transportation path, is an ambitious design concept promoting a new type of civic ecology. Featuring presentations by urban theorist Christoph Lindner and representatives of the City of Portland’s Urban Design Studio, this evening of discussion will explore how these two linear park projects connect with a range of pressing urban issues facing cities, including sustainable design, gentrification, historic preservation and cultural resources, community activism, and the privatization of public space. Linder's work focuses on the interrelations between cities, globalization, and creative practice. Recent books include, with Brian Rosa, Deconstructing the High Line: Postindustrial Urbanism and the Rise of the Elevated Park, Global Garbage: Urban Imaginaries of Waste, Excess, and Abandonment, and Cities Interrupted: Visual Culture and Urban Space. The Urban Design Studio at the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability advances the design quality of places citywide. The Urban Design Studio employs visual and graphic technologies to illustrate ideas and concepts about future physical changes as Portland continues to grow. Architectural Heritage Center, 701 SE Grand Avenue. 6:30PM Thursday, September 28. Free.

Stumptown Goes Uptown: Architect Warren H. Williams in Portland, 1873-1888
Arriving from San Francisco in early 1873 after a devastating fire destroyed many of Portland’s modest wood and brick buildings, Warren H. Williams spent the next fifteen years designing dozens of structures. As attendees of this Architectural Heritage Center tour will learn, the interiors often featured exceptional materials and workmanship. His cast-iron structures lent an air of classical elegance to downtown streets. Williams also drew plans for a sewer line, a tax collector’s boat, a hospital, and a roadhouse, and worked with other talented architects and mentored beginners who developed careers of their own. Did his work ever cross the line into excess and ostentation? Architectural Heritage Center, 701 SE Grand Avenue. 10AM Saturday, September 30. $20 ($12 for AHC members).

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Reverence (and perhaps requiem) for a priceless landscape

Multnomah Falls and the Columbia Gorge from The Shire (Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Today I went for a walk. It wasn't a long one, and it wasn't any different in path from the walks I take most days through my neighborhood. But it was the first walk, and the first time I left my apartment, in nearly 48 hours — all due to the dangerous air quality that has existed this week throughout the Portland area and of course throughout much of Oregon and especially the Columbia Gorge.

As I walked through my Southeast Portland neighborhood this morning, and as I looked out through my apartment's windows yesterday, flakes of ash were raining down from an overcast sky made not from clouds passing from the Pacific over western Oregon, but from the Eagle Creek forest fire and others burning our beloved landscape.

I've been one of the lucky ones. As air-quality indexes pushed into levels three times worse than Beijing or Mumbai, I could turn on my window-mounted air conditioners and breathe filtered oxygen. I also wasn't stranded in the Cascades, like some hikers were, or driven from my home like thousands in east Multnomah County have. (Which is to say nothing of the animals.) I'm even luckier than my mailman, who delivers mail this week while wearing a mask.

Yet I am in deep, deep mourning, like anyone who lives in western Oregon or who has visited here, because one of our greatest treasures—the gorgeous landscape of the Columbia Gorge near Multnomah Falls and a string of other waterfalls—is literally on fire. It's still too early to say whether built structures like the Multnomah Falls Lodge will remain intact, but even if it does, the woods in which the falls and the lodge exist seem to be combusting without any chance of being put out soon. We have tanker planes and helicopters that can't take off because there's too much smoke and wind. Our hoses and fire lines will only do so much.

It still seems so unfathomable, but as others have said, the Columbia Gorge we know seems to be gone forever.

I was thinking this morning of when a friend from England visited last year and we took him down the Columbia Gorge Scenic Highway, first to Crown Point and then to Multnomah Falls. I thought back to other overnight guests we've had in recent years. A nephew and his wife we took to Multnomah Falls too. Before that, a sister and mother in law rode with us there. Same for a visiting college roommate. In other words, whenever a good friend or family members come to Oregon, that's usually the first place we take them.

It's not just about the area around Multnomah Falls, either. These forest fires throughout the Cascades in Oregon and Washington speak to a broader truth about life in the Pacific Northwest and its majestic landscape.

"Unless you’ve lived in the west, you can’t understand the role the landscape plays here," a friend wrote in a Twitter thread today. "When you live on the East Coast, you think you’re the shit because you have the political, financial and media capitals. But when you’re in the west, you know you’re not. You’re dwarfed by mythic landscapes, even on your commute to work. Volcanoes, a roiling ocean, geological upheavals (past and future): all remind you, on a daily basis, of your irrelevance in the universe."

"It’s humbling to know your place," the thread goes on, "but also consoling: an eternal reminder that whatever your worries, this too shall pass. It also consoles by showing you that you’re a continuation – a link in the chain. You’ve born witness to these mountains, these rivers, this life, as Native Americans did, as pioneers did, so on through the generations. In that way, the landscape not only humbles, but also exalts, connecting you to something greater than yourself. To be in Oregon’s vast wilderness is to be free – not just of people, but yourself, your assumptions, what you thought was your personality." 

"This fire represents another humbling, elemental force, of course: destruction. We're looking directly into the American soul right now: wrecked, scarred, blackened, barren, stunted, stifled, hot with rage. We live in so much ugliness caused by random, willful, malicious, and utterly stupid forces laying waste to things that matter greatly. The fires are now at 32,000 acres and are zero percent contained. It will take a century to rebuild what’s been lost — what might be lost still. Sorrow and devastation at every turn. Nothing will ever be the same. Or, to borrow from Wells Tower: 'everything ravaged, everything burned.'"

Columbia Gorge from Crown Point, 2015 (Brian Libby)

I write about architecture for a living: houses, schools, office buildings, courthouses and city halls, restaurants and shops. I so deeply value and appreciate the urban fabric Portland has, from its most historic structures to its newest unveilings. I love seeing the cast-iron buildings of the 19th and early 20th centuries that remain on our waterfront as I bike by the river. I love venturing to see midcentury-modern houses in the West Hills by the likes of Pietro Belluschi, John Yeon and Saul Zaik. I love what today's architects are doing, whether it's the new era of timber-framed buildings by the likes of Lever Architecture or Path Architecture or imaginative new concoctions like Kevin Cavenaugh and FFA Design's Fair-Haired Dumbbell. I love that Portland is a leader in creating a new generation of net-zero and carbon-neutral buildings that can help slow the climate change ravaging our planet. And that's saying nothing of our great parks and other public spaces.

Yet to live in Oregon is to live in the shadow, and in awe, of natural beauty: of mountains, rivers and trees.

One of my all-time favorite books has always been The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, which chronicles his time going between the mountains (of California and Washington) and cities. One passage, when two characters are backpacking in the Sierra Nevadas, comes to mind with regard to the spiritual way one often views great landscapes. Kerouac writes:

Now the mountains were getting that pink tinge. I mean the rocks, they were just solid rock covered with the atoms of dust accumulated there since beginning less time. In fact I was afraid of those jagged monstrosities all around and over our heads.

“They’re so silent!” I said.

“Yeah man, you know to me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sitting there being perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin' for us to stop all our frettin' and foolin'.

Later, as they continue the journey, Kerouac writes:

But it seemed that I had seen the ancient afternoon of that trail, from meadow rocks and lupine posies, to sudden revisits with the roaring stream with its splashed snag bridges and undersea greenness, there was something inexpressibly broken in my heart as though I’d lived before and walked this trail…

The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.

Some of the best poetry about the Columbia Gorge isn't even poetry, at least not in the sense of it being text or verbal language. I think of architect and environmental activist John Yeon, subject of the Portland Art Museum's recent retrospective, and how he created a magical act of landscape architecture—known as The Shire—directly across from Multnomah Falls in order to frame views of it. There has been news of the Eagle Creek fire has jumped the Columbia, so The Shire itself could be in danger. I hope and pray that it's not, of course, but even if we assume Yeon's creation is safe, it pains me to think of Yeon, whose father led the construction of the Columbia Gorge Highway and who himself spent his entire life devoted to beauty, and who led the activism that led to the Gorge being declared a National Scenic Area with its attendant protections, seeing these flames roar.

Hiking in the Gorge, 2011 (Brian Libby)

Whether to The Shire or to places on the Oregon side like Bridal Veil Falls, it's not to say that I spend lots of time regularly going to the Columbia Gorge to hike or to gaze at the waterfalls. I'm largely a city person by nature. My dad, a conservative, once ridiculed me for being a tree hugger who doesn't actually do much tree hugging: no camping or fishing, and in fact waiting until a friend is in town to spend venture beyond Portland for maybe a quick hike and some pictures before venturing back into the air conditioning. My doctor often champions the need for more "Vitamin N," as she calls nature, and seems to spend as much time hiking beneath the evergreens as I do watching football games and tennis matches on TV.

Yet as an Oregonian, even if you don't become regularly immersed in the mountains and trees and rivers beyond city limits, that landscape is always a part of you. It is a kind of secular religion, or as Frank Lloyd Wright put it, "my church I put a capital N on Nature and go there."

Every time I return to Oregon from out of state, there is a moment—sometimes as the plane begins its descent, sometimes earlier—when the landscape becomes familiar again. Whether I'm coming north from California or west from the East Coast, over Idaho and then into the eastern part of our state, there is a moment when the landscape goes from brown to green. It's not just a color change, but a manifestation of moving into the nation's only temperate rainforest, where there are millions of evergreen trees and a string of snow-capped mountains that ultimately put any architecture to shame. It is the vastness of the wilderness landscape, that sense that you can lose yourself in it: that we as humans are ultimately small and vulnerable.

The consolations of literature (Brian Libby)

Maybe the damage won't be as bad as we fear. Maybe someday soon I'll be able to drive down the Columbia Gorge Scenic Highway and to Multnomah Falls and be pleasantly surprised that the topography along the Columbia River from Crown Point heading east isn't all blackened and charred. Some video and photos I saw today gave me hope. It's not over, but in these images one could still see Multnomah Falls Lodge and, just as importantly, the old-growth trees surrounding the building and the trails to the top of the ridge. I'm sure plenty of destruction will be visible as any of us drive down that scenic highway in the years and even decades ahead. Those trees, the ones destroyed, will take a century or more to grow be replaced again by trees that are now saplings. My cousin, a biologist, is also far less alarmist than I: she reminds me that fire is part of the natural cycle.

Even poet Gary Snyder, Kerouac’s companion hiking the Sierras in The Dharma Bums, reminds us in a poem from his seminal collection Turtle Island called "Control Burn" that if Native American tribes were still ruling the land, they would "...burn out the brush every year, in the woods, up the gorges, keeping the oak and pine stands tall and clear."

"Fire is an old story," Snyder writes. "I would like, with a sense of helpful order, with respect for laws of nature, to help my land with a burn, with a hot clean burn."

But call me selfish: I just don't want this landscape to burn. I want to embrace it, by walking its trails with my own two feet, or even by just knowing it exists a half-hour's drive away. I want to be humbled by that majesty, and to be reminded that I am an Oregonian: an inheritor of wonder.

 

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