Fair-Haired Dumbbell facing west (Brian Libby)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
As I write this on an early November day, the trees in my neighborhood have already lost half their colorful autumn leaves and are starting to take on that bare-winter look. It was only a week or two ago that I'd go for a run through Southeast Portland and marvel at the vibrant hues, but in another couple weeks most of that color will be gone.
The Fair-Haired Dumbbell building by Kevin Cavenaugh and FFA Architecture & Design was made for these times: for the weeks and months of gray skies and bare trees that take us from November to at least March. With its randomly patterned windows and especially its vibrantly colorful murals covering all eight facades (the Dumbbell is really two six-story structures connected by skybridges), this is a building meant to delight us amidst the long rainy season.
"I’m just tired of sage green and mocha," Cavenaugh, the building's developer and unofficial designer (he's trained as an architect but unregistered), told me late last year for an Oregon Business profile as the Dumbbell was under construction. He went on compare Portland to Cuba. "I mean, Cuba is a vibrant, colorful, sunny island. You go there and you’re happy, regardless of the political or turmoil or poverty. There are happy people and the buildings are vibrant: pink and aqua and turquoise and yellow. You go to Portland, and the sun doesn’t shine, and our buildings are gray. It was just a reaction to that."
With apologies to FFA, you really can't tell the story of the Fair-Haired Dumbbell without fist talking about Cavenaugh. After getting his start in Portland working for FFA following an architecture degree at Cal Berkeley and time in the Peace Corps building houses and schools, he began developing buildings in the early 2000s. First came 2001’s Ode to Rose’s building and 2002’s Box + One, both located in up-and-coming Portland neighborhoods and anchored by popular local eateries with outdoor seating. Those buildings looked relatively tame in terms of their facades and other architectural details, but Cavenaugh came into his own with The Rocket in 2007, his first to feature a colorful, artist-painted exterior. In the ensuing years, he renovated a variety of spaces on or near Sandy Boulevard such as The Ocean and The Zipper micro-retail outlets, each with its visual charms, such as a lenticular facade artwork on The Zipper.
In each case, while this 50-year-old developer certainly wants and needs to make a profit, I've always appreciated that Cavenaugh's buildings seem to always be an experiment, and exhibit a desire to break from the norm. The Dumbbell site was zoned to allow a much taller building, for example, which Cavenaugh eschewed.
"Everything I do is an experiment," Cavenaugh recalled in our interview last year, "an experiment that has to be different each time. Well, it doesn’t have to. But I’m only on this earth so long, and I only have so many buildings in my quiver. I knew it was on a site that had no back. It was a goldfish in a bowl. As a contrarian, I knew if all my neighbors were doing big, tall housing buildings, I needed to do a short, squat office building. So the first reaction was a program: it’s going to be an office building and it’s going to be short. The second reaction is to our gray streets and gray skies. It has to be colorful. So we built the model. I asked Anna [Mackay, the project lead for Guerilla Development] to go get a bunch of different giftwraps. It was just an idea. It wasn’t going to be the answer. I just liked the idea of viewing it from a different lens. She brought back a bunch of different options, and we said, ‘Let’s try these two.’ Both were the same Florentine paper maker. We used one for each building. She built the model and came back a week later. We both went, ‘Jesus, we have to do that!’ The idea was just to get us out of our framework of seeing it as a museum board, as a flat white model. And then I thought, ‘Shit, I have to do that.’"
Fair-Haired Dumbbell facing south (Brian Libby)
"Maybe we wouldn't want every building to take the approach Cavenaugh and FFA have. Like the Portland building, the Dumbbell is playful enough to perhaps seem trite," I wrote while reviewing the building for my Portland Tribune column. "Yet I can't help but smile every time I pass Cavenaugh's confection at MLK and Burnside. And outside of the architecture profession, I can tell I'm far from the only person delighted by the Dumbbell. In a gray and rainy climate, its wild colors and multi-story imagery provide a welcome respite."
"My wife told me when I was designing this, she said, ‘Please don’t do the Dumbbell,’" he added. "I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘Because people will hate it. People will love it. But they’ll also hate it.’ And she’s right: people will hate it. And people will hate Yard and Slate and b-Side Six and One North. They’re all my favorites. You can’t please everyone, or else you end up with a lot of background buildings. Portland has enough background buildings. And now we’re getting a lot more…shitty buildings, frankly. There are some developers in town who have the ability and horsepower to do really amazing work. Sometimes they achieve it, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes it can seem like they mailed it in, that they didn’t try as hard. Using these powers for good: that’s what I want to do."
"I abhor the mainstream of my profession," he added. "I hate that my profession is commercial real estate development. I want desperately to say I’m an architect and I can’t. Because socially that’s a noble profession, and developers, especially in a Trumpian world, are caricatures of greed. All I need is a monocle and then I fit the entire scene. Sadly it doesn’t take much to step out of that lane of traffic and be different, and all of a sudden you’re interviewing me. That’s sad. I don’t have to take a big step out of being a dick and I’m viewed as special. What a low bar to leap across."
In talking with people about the Dumbbell, I've noticed a difference between the reactions I've received from members of the general public, who seem to like the building in most cases, and architects, who seem more suspicious. Cavenaugh's wife was right: it's a polarizing work of architecture. In that way, as well as because of how the Dumbbell is an object building, I compared it to the Portland Building, which thirty-five years ago this month caught the world's attention with its provocative yet whimsical postmodern style and color.
Like the Portland Building, the Fair-Haired Dumbbell has been accused of being trite and cheap. "Pretty sugar icing on a styrofoam cake," one architect wrote. "The main issue I have here is that the decoration has nothing to do with the shed. Call it a paint job, but don't call it architecture. The 'great' buildings—in my opinion—are those which achieve harmony between all their elements, between interior and exterior, between image and use, between scales, materials, between history/context and innovation, between new finishes and how they age over time. Yes, rare is the building (especially here) that balances all these things, but that doesn't mean we lower our standards, does it? The hyper-thin paint job will fade quickly in this environment, and i fear for the all stucco envelope integrity. I doubt this will age elegantly if at all. We used to call these buildings 'skin-jobs' and 'one-liners' but because it's 'different' I suppose its instant novelty is good enough for the Instagram generation (guilty). Just because it's different doesn't mean it's good, or right...right???"
The Dumbbell facing west and south, respectively (Brian Libby)
Another architect questioned whether the random window patterns and the inclusion of several small windows took away from the opportunity to optimize natural light levels.
I can understand these criticisms: that the identity of the building is based on a thin layer of paint, that the building itself might not be durable and that the aesthetic gesture of the random windows should not betray the functional need for light. But ultimately I don't buy them. There is more than enough natural light inside because of how Cavenaugh and FFA broke down the building into two individual halves. As a result, you're never far from a window. And while it's logical to speculate about the durability of the paint job or the stucco, ultimately it's just that: speculation. Even if the paint does fade or the facade springs a leak, is that not fixable? And while I certainly agree that a good design must achieve harmony between inside and outside, between form and function, I don't think having a colorful mural on the outside robs the Dumbbell of that harmony. Why would we assume some beige-toned brick veneer or some cheap, hideous HardiePanel vertical siding would have more integrity?
One also can't talk about the Fair-Haired Dumbbell without mentioning its context as part of the Burnside Bridgehead. As master planned by Will Bruder Architects for the Portland Development Commission (now Prosper Portland) in 2009, this multi-block development of buildings by a variety of architects has become a laboratory for contemporary architecture. It includes a building even more divisive than the Fair-Haired Dumbbell: the Yard apartment tower by Skylab Architecture, which has been frequently compared to something erected by The Empire in Star Wars for its blackness and jagged angularity. The site also includes the Slate building by Works Progress Architecture, which won top honors in last year's Portland Architecture Awards and is an exceptionally striking design in its own right—quite beautiful and highly resolved, in fact—although it too, like Yard, is mostly black. The Fair-Haired Dumbbell couldn't be more different: short while they're tall, colorful while they're monochromatic. And that's part of its appeal. And it sits at a very prominent corner, MLK and Burnside, where rush-hour traffic often slows to a crawl. The Dumbbell offers a moment of multi-hued fun and artistry to the public instead of another advertisement or another facade that looks like all the other facades.
Viewing one side of the Dumbbell from the other (Brian Libby)
The murals are by a Los Angeles-based artist, James Jean, who based his creation on Portland's official flower, the rose, and Oregon's official rock, the thunder egg. Some have asked me why Cavenaugh didn't choose a local artist. Jean was selected out of 60 entrants and four finalists, who came from Portland, Oakland, LA and Buenos Aires. "Once they came back with their proposals. All four were badass, deeply badass," Cavenaugh told me. "We chose the one that was truest to the adjectives that I laid out: whimsical, colorful, deeply contrasting to our gray streets and gray skies palette that we live with in Portland, and inspiring. Slow fender benders in the street, staring at the building. That’s my ultimate goal: no one gets hurt but people just notice buildings, to notice their surroundings, instead of having all these background buildings around Portland."
Maybe that's why the Fair-Haired Dumbbell is controversial or polarizing: it's not just that it is covered in murals but that it's so colorful. As I mentioned, Cavenaugh referenced Cuba in our interview and how much more colorful the architectural fabric is in that Caribbean nation. Usually the architecture of cities is a reflection of their climate. Portland is not alone in being more subdued in its architecture than warm-climate cities and places. To build a wildly colorful building here, be it from Kevin Cavenaugh or Michael Graves, is to be a contrarian voice against the assumed vernacular. If the Fair-Haired Dumbbell was built in, say, Miami, it wouldn't be as surprising. I love Portland and I'd rather live here than Miami or Havana, but you know what? I'm thankful to Cavenaugh and FFA for bringing just a little bit of that warmer-climate color and whimsy to Portland. And I think we can handle it. Here we wear our weirdness on our sleeve proudly, we eschew corporate sameness and the dominance of chains. Not only is Cavenaugh's work colorful and whimsical, but it's always hyper-local. You won't find any chain businesses in his buildings, just as you won't find banality. In its way, the Fair-Haired Dumbbell feels more authentically Portland than most of the buildings in this city.
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Well, it's an interesting contrast to the DeathStar next door. I'd like to see more interior shots since I think it's going to have the same problem as the Portlandia bldg - It'll be like a jail cell.
As far as the exterior, it gets noticed, but it's like wearing outrageous designer clothes. You can do it once, then it's passe.
Posted by: Steve | November 09, 2017 at 08:23 AM