Portland Architecture

Design calendar: February 1-15

"Helianthus Enorme" by Chad Gaetz (Portland Winter Light Festival)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Portland Winter Light Festival 2018
The Portland Winter Light Festival is an outdoor event that celebrates winter and community through illuminated art installations, vibrant performances, stunning kinetic fire sculptures, and highly interactive activities designed to delight adults and children alike. With more than 40,000 visitors in 2017, this three-night festival brings over 100 artists, designers, makers, and performers together to turn the wintering city into a tapestry of light and celebration. Various locations. Begins Friday, February 1 at dusk and continues through Saturday, February 3. Free.

Pearl District Walking Tour
The Pearl District was practically deserted 25 years ago, but it has since been transformed into a dynamic walker-friendly neighborhood with contemporary and adaptive high rise housing, fine dining and world class entertainment. The Pearl has become a model of high quality urban living and a must-see destination for visitors to our world-class city. This Positively Portland Walking Tour includes the historic warehouse buildings that became the basis for the present Pearl district, including the recently re-purposed and re-opened Schnitzer Center at Pacific Northwest College of Art, now located in the grand classical revival former 511 Broadway federal building dating to 1916. Tour begins at AIA Portland Center For Architecture, 403 NW 11th Avenue. 1PM Friday, February 2. $15.

Aging in Norway: Rob Wilson
Portland State University masters of architecture student Rob Wilson, recipient of the School of Architecture’s 2017 L. Rudolph Barton Travel Fellowship, traveled to Norway to investigate how informed design and planning can facilitate dignified, healthy, and happy lives for people as they grow old. In this latest installment of the Fridays@4 talk series, Wilson will discuss his journey and share his findings from this exploration of the Norwegian eldercare model through three case studies, collectively generating a dialog between architecture, urban design, and the needs of an aging population. Portland State University, Shattuck Hall, Broadway and Hall Streets. 4PM Friday, February 2. Free.

Light Science Talk: Jeff Schnabel
The Portland Winter Light Festival was inspired by light-based events from all over the world. This presentation by co-founder Jeff Schnabel of Portland State University will explore how a wide spectrum of cities feature light art to create community, celebrate culture, and enhance their economies. Schnabel serves on the board of the Willamette Light Brigade, a not-for profit organization that illuminates Portland’s bridges, and teaches in the PSU School of Architecture at Portland State University. Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, 1945 SE Water Avenue. 6PM Friday, February 2. Free.

Backdoor Revolution
Author and accessory dwelling unit expert Kol Peterson will be on hand to discuss his new book, Backdoor Revolution: The Definitive Guide to ADU Development. The book provides a framework for understanding the large-scale, informal ADU housing phenomena that exists in cities throughout the United States. The presence of informal ADUs can be viewed as an ad-hoc housing response to restrictive municipal regulations for ADUs found in the vast majority of US cities and towns; regulations which have historically hindered homeowners from developing formally permitted ADUs. The book offers insightful analysis of the municipal and institutional barriers for permitted ADU development in American cities, and a succinct regulatory prescription for addressing these key barriers. Holladay Park Church of God, 2120 NE Tillamook Street. 6PM Saturday, February 3. Free (registration required).

Downtown Portland's "North End" Tour
Explore the abundant architectural and cultural history in the downtown neighborhood wedged between Old Town and the Pearl District. Along the way, attendees on this Architectural Heritage Center tour will see 19th century gems like the Mariner’s Home, which has been rehabilitated and turned into the Society Hotel, while also learning how the area became New Chinatown, and later Japantown. The tour also includes landmark buildings like Union Station and the former US Custom House. Tour meetup location to be announced. 10AM Tuesday, February 6. $20 ($12 for AHC members).

Christie Coffin and Jenny Young: Making Places For People
San Francisco architect Christie Coffin of The Design Partnership and University of Oregon architecture professor Jenny Young will be on hand to discuss their book, Making Places for People: 12 Questions Every Designer Should Ask. The book explores twelve social questions in environmental design while revealing deeper complexities in addressing basic questions, such as: What is the story of this place? What logic orders it? How big is it? How sustainable is it? Providing an overview of a growing body of knowledge about people and places, Making Places for People stimulates curiosity and further discussion. The authors argue that critical understanding of the relationships between people and their built environments can inspire designs that better contribute to health, human performance, and social equity―bringing meaning and delight to people’s lives. University of Oregon, White Stag Block, 70 NW Couch Street. 5:30PM Tuesday, February 6. Free.

Resilience is the New Sustainability
In the 20+ years since The US Green Building Council's LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] rating system was introduced, disasters like Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy and the Christchurch earthquakes have exposed the need for our buildings to not only have a low impact on the environment, but for the environment to have a low impact on our buildings. The US Resiliency Council was founded to assist architects and engineers in communicating the value of resilience against earthquakes and other natural hazards to their clients and the public. This AIA Continuing Education presentation by Resiliency Council executive director Evan Reis will introduce resilience based design and give architects useful tools to 1) set explicit performance objectives for projects, 2) perform cost-benefit and return on investment analyses of design options, and 3) implement and promote USRC building ratings on projects that add an additional dimension to their overall sustainability services. AIA Center For Architecture, 403 NW 11th Avenue. 5:30PM Thursday, February 8. $15 (plus $2.89 service charge).

Old Town/Chinatown Walking Tour
Discover the history and architecture of Portland's first commercial district, where over 100 years ago ocean-going ships delivered their passengers and goods in this thriving port city . On this Positively Portland walking tour, attendees can see  survivors of the cast-iron era and  swing through Portland's Chinatown, which isn't really Chinatown anymore. Like many neighborhoods in Portland, this district is changing with the times and those changes involve the re-purposing of many underutilized buildings. The tour also includes a look at some prominent success stories and works in progress including the US Custom House (1901), now a We Work office space, and the Sailors Mission (1881), now the Society Hotel. Tour begins at AIA Center for Architecture, 403 NW 11th Avenue. 1PM Friday, February 9. $15.

Indo Pacific: An Instantaneous Region
In 2013 Australia officially moved to the Indo Pacific, a region that expands from South America to the Gulf of Mexico, Southeast Asia to East Africa. The aim of this lecture, by visiting PSU professor Urtzi Grau as part of the Fridays@4 lecture series, is to quantify its physical and intangible dimensions, to articulate facts in order to make visible the cosmopolitical edifice that holds the region together. Due to its abrupt conception, the maps and the histories of the Indo Pacific Region – the social, political, economic, technologic, eco-systemic, and spatial relations that define it – are currently being constructed. Thus, design decisions are still possible. As an imaginary space relentlessly becoming real, this parafictional region is architecture's ideal site. When he's not teaching at PSU, Grau is an architect, director of the graduate degree program in architectural research at University of Technology Sydney and co-founder of Fake Industries Architectural Agonism, an architecture office that has received the AIA New York New Practices Award, has been shortlisted in the MoMA PS1 and the Miami Design pavilions, was finalist the Guggenheim Helsinki Competition, and represented Australia in the Chicago Architectural Biennial. Portland State University, Shattuck Hall, Broadway and Hall Street. 4PM Friday, February 9. Free.

Portland Then and Now
As Portland’s built landscape transforms at an unprecedented pace, our connection to the city’s past faces challenges that can only be met through preservation and documentation. Dan Haneckow, a Portland-based historian and the author of the recently updated and re-issued book Portland Then and Now (Pavilion Books, 2017), will talk about the changes Portland has experienced, while sharing photos from his book as well as unpublished photos from his personal collection. Architectural Heritage Center, 701 SE Grand Avenue. 10AM Saturday, February 10. $20 ($12 for AHC members).

Honoring the Life of Bob Frasca
ZGF Architects founding design partner Robert J. Frasca passed away January 3 at the age of 84 from complications of chronic lymphocytic leukemia. This memorial service honors his legacy. Since its beginnings in Portland in 1966 as a regional practice, ZGF has grown to be one of the premier architectural firms in the world with more than 600 staff members across six offices in the U.S. and Canada. The firm is known for design excellence in a variety of building types, from health care to universities to projects for the U.S. State Department. In 1991, with a portfolio of distinguished work designed under Frasca’s direction, ZGF was honored with the AIA Architecture Firm Award. Reed College, Kaul Auditorium, 3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard. 4PM Sunday, February 11. Free.

Classical Downtown Portland tour
Downtown Portland contains an extensive collection of classically influenced buildings, many of which are clad with glazed terra cotta, a building material that was at its height of popularity in the early 20th century. On this Architectural Heritage Center tour, attendees will see the city’s first “skyscraper”, a bank that could have been a Greek temple, and learn about several architects from this period who left an indelible impression on Portland including A.E. Doyle, the firm of Whidden and Lewis, and the Reid Brothers from San Francisco. Tour meetup location to be announced. 10AM Tuesday, February 15. $20 ($12 for AHC members).

 

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View-corridor debates: civic activism or NIMBYism?

Downtown Portland and Mt. Hood (Ron Cooper)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In a pair of recent newspaper editorials, and in public testimony to City Council, a contingent of Portlanders is sounding an alarm.

The phrase used in a Portland Tribune op-ed by Josiah Failing and in an Oregonian op-ed by Tracy Prince and Bill Failing is "iconic views," which they warn are soon to disappear forever if the Central City 2035 plan and its increased height limits are allowed to go forward.

In one case, they're referring to views of Mt. Hood from the Salmon Springs fountain downtown at Waterfront Park. But they also argue for other views: of the Vista Bridge from the Goose Hollow neighborhood, a view of Hood from the Vista Bridge, and for views of a weather beacon atop the Standard Insurance Center.

Let's start with the Mt. Hood view. There's no doubt the mountain peak itself is an icon of Oregon's and Portland's culture. Just as Mount Fuji has been a sacred site for practitioners of the Shinto religion since at least the 7th century, and a sacred part of mainstream Japanese culture nearly as long, so too do Oregonians think of Mt. Hood as a kind of unofficial natural deity: a reminder of the bountiful natural beauty that exists all around us.

Indeed, it is nice to see Mt. Hood from Waterfront Park and the Salmon Springs Fountain, just like it used to be nice to see Hood when coming out of the Vista Ridge tunnel heading east before the KOIN Center blocked that view in the 1980s. It's also nice seeing Hood from the Vista Bridge. But are those Hood views iconic? I'm not so sure.

It is true that our best architects seem to look to nature and landscape for inspiration and humility. Brad Cloepfil, his generation's most acclaimed local architect, once told me in an interviewthat inspiration in his work came from "looking to the landscape for that sense of evocative space rather than the cities, because the cities don't have it here. I don't mean landscape in just a romantic sense — trees and flowers — I mean looking at the physical, spatial qualities of the land." But would Cloepfil insist a view of Hood had to be maintained from Salmon Springs or the Vista Bridge?

Perhaps my skepticism is tied to the fact that the Prince-Failing op-eds don't stop at the idea of preserving views of Hood from Salmon Springs or the Vista Bridge but continue on to include views of the Vista itself as part of a view corridor, and even a view of a weather beacon. Has it really come to this? One of America's 25 largest cities, amidst an affordable housing crisis that has hundreds more living on the streets each year, and with over half a million people projected to move here in the next 20 years, is actually having a discussion about preserving views of a weather beacon?

There's something about the inclusion of Vista Bridge views and views of the weather beacon. As the Oregonian op-ed indicates, Tracy Prince is vice president of the Goose Hollow Foothills League and Bill Failing is a board member with the Southwest Hills Residential League. In other words, two of the three iconic-views arguments relate to the views from their own neighborhoods.

More downtown and Hood (University of Oregon)

On a not-unrelated note, particularly noticeable in Prince and Failing's Oregonian op-ed is also the repeated use of the word "privatize," specifically as it relates to the question of who should have access to the views. "This important view shouldn't be privatized so that only those rich enough to live in a building blocking the view can see it," they write of the view from the Salmon Springs Fountain." Later, they write that views "shouldn't be privatized only for those rich enough to live in buildings blocking views of the bridge," in reference to Vista Bridge views from Goose Hollow. A few sentences later, in case anyone didn't get the point, they write, "The views shouldn't be privatized only for those rich enough to live in buildings blocking the view."

But whose view would be blocked by tall downtown Portland buildings? Mostly just residents of the West Hills and perhaps some of Goose Hollow. And when we look at the demographics of Goose Hollow and the West Hills, what do we find? Affluence.

For a sense of perspective, earlier today I spent some time reading up on where in Tokyo one might enjoy a view of Mt. Fuji. As one might expect given that Tokyo is a city of 9.2 million and a metro area of 13 million, they are not preserving view corridors from the Imperial Palace or Shinjuku or Shibuya. One travel article I read recommended the observation deck from the Tokyo Tower (the radio/TV tower that apes the Eiffel Tower in appearance) or the SkyTree, its replacement. It recommended catching views from the Roppongi Hills shopping center, which sits on elevated land, and Mt. Takao, which is within greater Tokyo's boundaries. Ultimately Mt. Fuji is hard to see from Tokyo. And you know what? Not only does life go on, but Mt. Fuji remains as sacred to Japanese culture as ever. If anything, the scarcity of Fuji views from Tokyo actually encourages people to get outside the city and experience the mountain, or when they do see it, from an observation deck or a higher elevation, that view becomes all the more powerful.

But then again, Portland doesn't want to be like Tokyo even if we share reverence for our snow-capped peaks in the distance. There are certain Swiss cities that win awards and acclaim for their urban livability but are still all about their views of the Alps.

I will say this: cities that can maintain such visible connections to natural wonders like mountain peaks are special, and I can tell that Prince and the Failings take admirable pride in the fact that Portland is a jewel not simply because of buildings and parks and bridges but because it’s nestled compactly in a wondrous natural setting. By comparison, certain cities in Switzerland get ranked among the most livable in the world, like Portland does, yet their identity is inextricably tied to the landscape—mountain peaks and lakes and meadows—just like ours.

Of course there is also the broader context: that Portland and Oregon have long since committed to the mission of curtailing sprawl through urban growth boundaries, and given the hundreds of thousands projected to move here in the coming decades, we can’t restrict ourselves from growing both outward and upward. I’m sometimes hesitant about making that argument because height does not equal density. So far we still have a substantial amount of vacant or under-utilized land available to develop, and when we do, the city’s density goals can largely be met without going beyond a hundred or so feet of height—unless we’re talking about downtown.

“What I’d remind people that in the entire state of Oregon there is only one place where you can build above 100 feet,” Troy Doss, a senior planner heading the ‎Bureau of Planning and Sustainability’s central city team, told me in a recent interview. “You can’t do this in bend, Eugene, Beaverton: this is it. If we’re trying to hit our density goals, we need to allow for as much density as we can downtown.”

It would be unfair to say that other cities and cultures don't make the case for and preserve view corridors. They do both here in the US and abroad. I mentioned Japan: this country may not be preserving views of Mt. Fuji from Tokyo, but there is a long tradition of framing views and, in essence, creating view corridors. And if we do indeed go in that direction in Portland, it won't be the end of the world. It's not like anyone dislikes seeing Mt. Hood.

But we’ve already restricted our buildings’ height in the downtown core to a very low maximum of 400 feet. That’s why architecture from decades ago—the Wells Fargo Center and the US Bancorp Tower—remain frozen in time as our tallest: those buildings wouldn’t be allowed to go that tall today. That means we’re already acting out of concern for West Hills views. If we lose a view of Mt. Hood from Salmon Springs, it may feel like something is being taken away from us, but to restrict building heights for a view corridor such as Prince and the Failings suggest could be construed as a tipping of the scales too toward the restrictive side.

When we think of great cities we tend to think of enduring monuments and landmarks that remain for centuries or more, but the truth is that all cities are changing all the time: who lives or can afford to live in what neighborhood, what the building heights are, what the dominant architectural styles may be, whether it’s attractive to tourists or ridden by crime. I have a great affection for historic architecture, and so I tend to frequently side with preservationists standing up for that in our built environment which endures. I also am a native Oregonian who grew up hiking and camping in the Cascades, from Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams to the Three Sisters and the Strawberry Mountain Wilderness. Each setting—urban and natural—makes me appreciate the other, and it can be especially delightful when one finds one in the other: a bit of architecture in the mountain wilderness, like Timberline Lodge at Mt. Hood, or a big of wilderness in the city, like Forest Park within Portland. But at least for me, insisting on a view path from behind downtown (the West Hills) to Mt. Hood or from the lowest elevation by the riverbank (at Salmon Springs) just seems like a step too far into the unreasonable given the other challenges we as a collective city face.

But then again, maybe there could be some kind of trade or bargain: how about if we do enact these view-corridor restrictions, but in exchange for that we allow buildings in other parts of downtown to go past the current limits to equal or surpass the Wells Fargo and Big Pink, our two tallest downtown structures?

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ZGF's Gene Sandoval and Jan Willemse remember Robert Frasca

A young Robert Frasca (ZGF Architects)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Last week brought the news that one of the most significant Portland architects of our time had passed away: Robert Frasca, FAIA.

Born in Niagara Falls, New York, Frasca came to Portland in 1959 after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the suggestion of Pietro Belluschi, who besides being the school's dean had also made his name in the Rose City. Over the next five and a half decades, Frasca would had a lead role in building the city's largest and most impactful firm, ZGF Architects. But it's worth noting that his MIT diploma was a graduate degree in city planning, which followed a bachelor's degree in architecture at the University of Michigan. For Frasca, a building that worked well for its occupants was important but not a complete measure of success. He cared just as much, if not more, about the urban and civic context of any project. And that, in turn, served his buildings' occupants all the more.

I had the good fortune to meet and talk with Frasca a few times but did not know him well. So after his passing was announced last week, I decided to talk with two ZGF partners who served with Frasca and were shaped by his mentorship and leadership: Jan Willemse and Gene Sandoval.

First I asked the two about Frasca as a boss and as the leader of design teams, and the two had tellingly similar answers.

"I learned to very much appreciate his desire to include multiple voices in the room," Willemse said. For any new project, "meetings took place in his office so he could have at most five or six people there, but all the expertise represented—the senior designer, the project architect, the interior designer, the partner in charge—to make sure the conversation was a complete one. There was a great efficiency to him that I appreciated. It allowed him to be quite efficient in communicating with teams. I think it’s part of why he was so prolific. He had great respect for the process of doing design. His ability to integrate multiple points of view into something that was holistic in its problem solving was always something he brought to the table."

At the same time, Frasca wasn't the kind of rah-rah coach who relied on motivating rhetoric. "I wouldn’t say Bob was a mentor. I’d say he was the leader. Because Bob would never really sit with you and coach you. You had to learn through example," Sandoval explained. "It wasn’t sitting down and getting lectured. It was testing ideas with physical models and making it real. He said, 'You can talk as much as you want. At the end of the day it’s what you build that makes a difference.'"

Unsurprisingly, both Sandoval and Willemse also emphasized that Frasca was a civic architect who believed in buildings as pieces of a larger puzzle. Willemse recalled Frasca being asked during a talk with critic Randy Gragg what the design driver or the big idea had been behind the Oregon Convention Center. "Bob said, 'Well, the big thing for me was how that project was an opportunity to unite both sides of Portland around the river.' He wasn’t talking about making an object or a monument, but the responsibility of design to the city. He saw it in a bigger context, almost a physiological contact: a physical object with a psychological impact. And that’s what it’s become. When you see it from other side of the river, you see how it belongs to both sides. I think it foreshadowed the emergence of the Central Eastside."

Frasca at the Portland International Airport (ZGF Architects)

And of course the Convention Center wasn't solely about those spires. They were part of a massive skylight that filled this largely windowless behemoth with illumination. In other words, there had to be a functional reason to consider the spires in the first place.

The same goes for perhaps Frasca and ZGF's project that more locals and visitors have experienced than any other: the canopy at the entrance to the Portland International Airport, which stretches over the entire arrivals and departures area to the parking garage. "Bob said, ‘It rains here. There’s no better way to accommodate passengers than a big canopy,’" Sandoval recalled. "There’s beauty in the pragmatism of the problem. And the irony of that canopy is that for a part of the world that gets a lot of rain, it’s the only big covered space in the city we have." Frasca and ZGF tried to do something similar at Director Park, Sandoval added, but the size of its glass canopy was substantially curtailed by what's known as value engineering—in other words, budget cuts.

"Bob was always very direct in saying that the work had bigger responsibilities than to itself or even to the client," agreed Willemse. "He also said recently when we did a celebration of his career at the MAC Club that he always wanted to understand the physical context to see what was worth enhancing. Even a modest building beside it, if it made a courtyard, if it made a gesture to the street—if it had some value—he wanted to play off that and not ignore it. It showed up in projects like the LDS Conference Center. A 21,000-seat auditorium is a pretty heroic space. His idea was he didn’t want that above ground because he thought the scale was inappropriate. He created a public space, a roof garden. Those were things over time that I really grew to respect about him."

Of course Frasca also played a role in the creation of Tom McCall Waterfront Park, which may be as significant to Portland as any building. "To me that’s probably bigger than any of the buildings he’s done," Sandoval said." It wouldn’t be called Portland if we didn’t have the river. Imagine the freeway being in front of our downtown. If you go Back with Bob to the ‘60s, he was part of the group that moved the freeway from the waterfront. He believed that we had to be connected to the waterfront. Bob was really an urbanist."

A young Robert Frasca (ZGF Architects)

I also asked Willemse about the notion of a Frasca tree of influence. After all, certain esteemed architects from the past and present have influenced the architects who came after them in a way that touches a variety of firms and projects. After working and studying under the great Louis Kahn in Philadelphia and later teaching at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Thomas Hacker came to have an impressive list of architects who worked and studied under him, architects now considered among the city's best, such as Brad Cloepfil and Rick Potestio. Willemse believes Frasca had a similar influence, but not across firms.

"People tend to come to ZGF and stay," he said. "There’s more lineage inside the firm, I think, than outside. Some folks have left to spin their own thing: Gary Larsen, Ed Ruffcorn, but I see that more within ZGF. The Doernbecher project is an example: Allyn Stellmacher was the senior designer, I was the project architect, and our intern was Kathy Berg. They all ended up being partners at ZGF. And there’s this spread of lineage through ZGF offices. The Seattle office was populated out of Portland, the DC office largely populated out of Portland. All of those folks had to pass the Frasca smell test, if you will. A lot of our growth has been an extension of bob’s lineage. When designers have felt the need to exit, that was a pretty limited pool. But Gary and Ed both came to our celebration for Bob a few months ago."

Finally I discussed with Willemse and Sandoval the timelessness of Frasca's style. Even though many of his most prominent projects were designed in the 1980s—the KOIN Center, the Oregon Convention Center, the Multnomah County Justice Center—they do not seem dated the way so many projects from that era do. The KOIN Center, for instance, possesses a kind of neo-historicism that might be likened to postmodernism in that they both channel past eras of architecture, but KOIN is simply not postmodern because it's not cartoonish and doesn't scream for attention. "He didn’t want to do fads," Willemse agreed. "He wanted to do stuff that lasted."

"Bob never believed in any kind of architectural movement," Sandoval added. "He was not self conscious about it. He always pursued the idea that the site forms the architecture. When I asked Bob questions about different decisions, he’d say, ‘You have a gut feeling about things’: the proper scale, the proper intervention. I think there’s also a sense of modesty. Oregon doesn’t have a lot of wealth. We don’t have clients with the budgets to be extravagant. Oregon is a more modest place not just in economy but also attitude and the weather. I think Bob’s architecture is aligned to that: a sense of modesty and permanence that is socially responsible. That’s evident in his success."

 

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Design calendar: January 16-31

Minor White's 1939 photo of Front Avenue (Minor White Archive, Princeton University)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Portland 101: Crooked Grids, Tiny Blocks, And The Building Of The City
How did Portland get this way, with its little square blocks and weird intersections, the funny pronunciations and the bridge ramps to nowhere? Why is it even located where it is?  Lecturer Robert Jordan will guide attendees through 150 years of Portland’s development, including stone carver’s mistakes, upside-down pineapples, and mythical tunnels, as well as more major decisions like the city's street grid, the naming and re-naming of our streets, and the eras of commercial architecture that have marked our compact and vibrant downtown, as well as the near blitzkrieg effect of the mic-20th century demolitions that left us with parking lots where the temples of finance and industry once stood. Architectural Heritage Center, 701 SE Grand Avenue. 10AM Saturday, January 20. $20 ($12 for AHC members).

Charrette: School for Deaf Children
The Oregon chapter of Architects Without Borders is holding a charrette for designing the School for Deaf Children, an institution that will be located on the outskirts of Les Cayes, a town on the southern coast of Haiti. The school will include classrooms for 60 students, dormitories for 48, and living quarters for six adults and additional visiting teachers. GBD Architects, 1120 NW Couch Street, Suite 300. 6PM Wednesday, January 24th. Free.

ARE Prep Session 1: Project Planning & Design
This is the first in a series of six monthly events meant to help designers prepare for the Architect Registration Examination, a multi-division exam used to assess one's knowledge and skills regarding the practice of architecture. Developed by NCARB, the exam is accepted by all US jurisdictions and is a key step on the path to earning a license. The ARE is designed to assess aspects of architectural practice that affect the integrity, soundness, and health impact of a building. The exam also assesses an architect’s responsibilities within firms, such as managing projects and coordinating the work of other professionals. The Center For Architecture, 403 NW 11th Avenue. 6PM Wednesday, January 24. $15 + $2.89 fee.

IIDA Oregon Industry Mixer
Please join the International Interior Design Association's Oregon chapter for a celebratory industry mixer with bowling. Teams will be created upon check in. Not a bowler? No problem: non-bowler social tickets are available for those who want to mingle among the teams. Registration includes one round of bowling, food and drink ticket. Amidst these dark days, the organizers ask that attendees wear some kind of shiny or sparkly attire—glitter, gold, sparkles—to celebrate the New Year and a fresh start to 2018. Grand Central Restaurant & Bowling Lounge, 808 SE Morrison Street. 6PM Thursday, January 25. $40 for bowlers ($20 for IIDA member bowlers and annual-sponsor bowlers, $25 for non-member non-bowlers, $10 for IIDA member non-bowlers and annual-sponsor bowlers).

Design Museum Mornings: Business x People x Design
Design can be used as a competitive advantage that defines the most successful companies, and business leaders can implement these strategies at any stage to increase innovation and efficiency, delivering the highest-quality products and services. Roel Uleners uses his extensive experience in problem-solving and design strategy to help organizations tackle complex organizational challenges. Through his work at Chehade & Company and XPLANE, Roel has provided strategic services to the World Economic Forum’s Collaborative Networks on the Digital Economy and Society, American Express, BP, Coca-Cola, Disney, ICANN, Oracle, Samsung, UNICEF and UPS. Iron Fireman Collective, 4784 SE 17th Avenue. 9AM Friday, January 26. $10 + $2.61 fee (free for Design Museum Portland members).

Vocabulary of Architecture
Do you find yourself describing the elements of buildings in terms of thing-a-ma-jigs and what-cha-ma-call-its? In this Architectural Heritage Center lecture, John Doyle will help demystify the language of architecture as it relates to buildings commonly found around the Portland area. After this session one will be able to impress your friends, family, co-workers, and contractors with newfound knowledge of architectural terms such as gambrel, oculus, lintel, corbel, and quoin. Architectural Heritage Center, 701 SE Grand Avenue. 10AM Saturday, January 27. $12 ($8 for AHC members).

Emilie Baltz
Through her work as a food technologist, experience designer, multimedia artist and educator, Emilie inspires diverse points of entry into how, and why, we consume. An award-winning author and public speaker featured by NBC's Today Show, The Wall Street Journal and who is speaking in Portland as part of the Applied Craft + Design program from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and the Oregon College of Art and Craft, Baltz is based in New York City and works out of the New Lab for emerging technologies. She one of the founding members of NEW INC, the first museum-led incubator hosted at the New Museum and is also part of the founding faculty of the School of Visual Arts' Products of Design MFA program. She lectures and consults internationally on the transformative power of sensory experience in the lives of creators and consumers. Bison Building, 421 NE 10th Avenue. 6:30PM Wednesday, January 31. Free.

For more calendar listings, visit Portland Design Events.

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Beyond the bowtie: a conversation with "Shaping Portland" author Paddy Tillett (part two)

Paddy Tillett (Architecture Foundation of Oregon)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

This post is a continuation of my recent interview with ZGF Architects principal Paddy Tillett, who has impacted Portland not only through his three and a half decades working on a variety of planning and urban design efforts for his firm but has also been an active citizen through organizations like the City Club, the American Institute of Architects, the Willamette Light Brigade and more.

As I write this, the local architecture community is in mourning over the passing of ZGF's founding design partner, Robert Frasca, who led the firm's design of so many local landmarks: the KOIN Center, the Multnomah County Justice Center, the Oregon Convention Center, Doernbecher Children's Hospital, and a variety of hospitals and civic projects throughout the nation. Tillett is younger than Frasca by more than a decade, so they're not exactly the same generation, but they both represent pillars of ZGF over the past three-plus decades as well as a broader commitment to their city. They remind us of the words of Frank Lloyd Wright: "All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable."

Thus continues my discussion with Tillett about his book, Shaping Portland: Anatomy of a Healthy City, the city that inspired it, and his own journey to the Rose City.

Portland Architecture: Most of your book looks at Portland overall and the combination of economic, social and climate/geographic factors that have shaped it, but you pay special attention to the Pearl District. Is that because it’s the primary new neighborhood built in Portland over the past generation?

Paddy Tillett: Part of the reason I started with the Pearl is I’d written an article in a book in the UK, published by the University of Western England, about health and cities. I thought I would write about the sort of joie de vivre that seems to emanate from the Pearl. I think it was that chapter that the people at Routledge saw that prompted them to call me up and ask if I would write something. I thought I should write about the Pearl, but with more depth. But I think something evident to me that seems to be a surprise to other people is that the Pearl in a sense is nothing new. It’s emulating the success of inner Northwest Portland. Something that always bothers me is that people are more concerned about parking than almost any other aspect of the built environment. I remind them that Northwest Portland is an example of a neighborhood built when not many people had cars. Even today you can’t park outside your house. But you accept it because there are a lot of other virtues that offset that. But when we look at the way we develop new places, the suburbs particularly, the car has absolutely free reign. One needs to understand the consequences. So I look at urban and suburban and metropolitan development. I think the train of thought was, ‘How can we move on from building these endless unsustainable suburbs?’ We know it’s unsustainable. We know it’s foolish. We know we can do better.

Tillett's new book (Routledge)

It seems like the problem in suburbia starts with segregation of residential and commercial spaces, but isn’t the architecture of single-family houses a disappointment too?

I did a project in Spokane some years ago, a redevelopment of a quarry near the middle of the city. We came up with a mixed-use development with parts of it residential. Because of the position as a little raised piece of land, we thought patio housing would work well: that it would give a sense of privacy and open itself to the landscape. The owner said, ‘I’ve spoken to a lot of people who know about housing, and they all are of one mind that this won’t do.’ He said, ‘This kind of housing has never sold here.’ We did some research and found it had never been on offer. The logic was people are buying the kind of housing they’re buying. That logic seems to drive the housing market. So long as people keep buying it, why would we change the product? It has a lot to do with why we keep buying the same rubbish in the suburbs. We’re smarter than that. So part of the book was an exploration of what aspects of urban development make sense and what are off target. The amount of resources we put into road building: I think of cities like Houston where 12 and 16-lane freeways are not unusual. The money we put into those is huge. The $200 million we want to put into widening I-5 is enough to make a huge dent in our housing problem. But the money’s in a pocket you can’t spend on that.

Who do you see as your audience for this book: the design community, academia, or the general public?

There are particular populations very interested in Portland, in Japan or Europe, for example, that watch Portland as a very special place.

When I gave the publishers the outline, I said, ‘This is not going to be deeply academic. It’s going to be more broadly aimed than that.’

How do some of the different places you’ve lived before Portland in Europe and Asia impact the way you look at the city?

My earliest memories were living in an industrial town in northwest England where steel smelting and coal mining were major industries. My father was a clergyman. We lived in this workman’s house in a working class area. One understood even at that age that after the men went to work that the women would come out and clean their front steps. Everyone knew everybody’ else’s business. Community existed because of social habits, but also because of the proximity of the front doors on the street. It was a microcosm of urban living. At one end of the street was a newsagent, and the other end a park. It had all the components of a successful urban community.

Thereafter I lived in Perth, Scotland, gateway to the Highlands. It was agricultural based. It was really a contrast. It had a different sort of urban texture, a lot of related but overlapping communities. But most of my childhood was spent in a village which was focused on farming. It was all agricultural workers’ cottages. Everybody was out in their garden working and they talked.

The next place was Oxford. I was there for five years studying architecture. It’s almost like a ready-made model city. Everything is there. The colleges have been there for centuries. People on foot and bicycles have never gone away. It’s infused with open space: the quads of colleges, the river, marshy places where you can’t build. Many of the ingredients that Ebenezer Howard looked for in his Garden Cities was there. It’s almost an ideal: a place that’s architecturally complete, with an ordered society. In contrast to what I’d experienced before, this was a sort of set piece.

 

20 years ago a local brewpub named an ale after Tillett (Yoshini White via Pinterest)

Then the exotic experience of living and working in Kyoto and Osaka for nine months: everything was different. The buildings were made of paper and wood. The streets in Kyoto were unpaved. The vendors came by singing their wares. That was a completely different set of things to overlay on what I’d experienced thus far. Coming back, living in London for 12 years, this multiplicity of urban villages that lap against one another and create this wonderful cosmopolitan friction that makes it a vital place. Then some time in Germany and Nigeria building the new capitol city (Abuja), then coming here.

From all of these: that’s where I got my urbanist’s vocabulary. That, I think, qualified how I saw what I saw when I got here. And it also qualified the work that I did. One’s always influenced by the vocabulary one has. I think that was very much the case.

Not only do you bring the lessons of what made those cities and towns work, but sometimes someone new to a place can better see it in context.

I don’t want to say that I saw more than my colleagues, but I think I was aware of the unique factors in Portland: the things that made it different from everywhere else, and the reasons why the Pearl District is, for example, very different from the new urban development in Denver. It’s really because it’s born of those same values you see in the inner streetcar neighborhoods, particularly Northwest. One of the qualities of Northwest I like so much is it was developed before regulations. On one block, you’ll get manufacturing, an apartment building and single-family houses: it’s all mixed up together, this wonderful muddle that actually is a very good way of using the infrastructure. The streets are busy at all times with different needs. It’s that complimentary chaos that is so difficult to create. We have for generations now thought of monocultures: it’s housing, or it’s industrial or it’s offices. We’ve got to get away from that. People tend to take Ebenezer Howard’s diagrams too literally. That big circle with the six blobs was not a plan. It was a diagram. He was saying when you plan a city, you need to plan a green infrastructure. I think that’s where the Olmsteds' plan was coming from when they advised Portland to buy land while it’s cheap so you’ll have room to grow public open spaces. I think that’s still very valid. One of the successes we have is this extraordinary threading of green environment throughout the city and the fact that we’ve hung on to that. Even the tree canopy. Something like 29 percent is covered, which is wonderful, which means continuity of flora and some fauna throughout the city.

 

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Beyond the bowtie: a conversation with "Shaping Portland" author Paddy Tillett (part one)

Paddy Tillett (ZGF)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

As far as I'm concerned, Patrick "Paddy" Tillett is a Portland treasure.

For the past 37 years, Tillett has been a ZGF principal responsible for a host of planning and urban design projects, from downtown revitalization strategies to urban waterfronts, large-scale corporate campuses and transportation systems to more than 25 college and university campus master plans. But Tillett has always been more than an architect and planner. He's also been a City Club president, he's been a key member of the Willamette Light Brigade that lit our bridges and birthed the wonderful Portland Winter Light Festival, and also has taught at Portland State University. But most of all, this native Brit is a true Portland patriot. Perhaps I shouldn't use the word "patriot" given how it has been twisted and co-opted by the political right, but I mean it in the sense that Tillett seems to have an outsized appreciation for the city, its values, and how it has been designed. At the same time, his pre-Portland life not only in the United Kingdom but continental Europe, Africa and Asia gives Tillett a greater sense of context and perspective about the city than most of us have.

It's no wonder, then, that the academic publisher Routledge asked Tillett to write a book about the Rose City, which was published a few weeks ago. Shaping Portland: Anatomy of a Healthy City charts how Portland became the city it is today: namely how this metropolis evolved from the late 1960s onward in a direction that other cities have since followed, favoring density, walkability and mass transit over automobile-dominated sprawl.

What I really like about the book is how it looks at Portland from a variety of vantage points: as a collection of buildings, streets and parks, but also natural factors like topography and climate, as well as the values that underscore all that we do in shaping the city, the past errors we've made, and the great challenge we face in the years ahead preparing for a potentially cataclysmic seismic event.

Recently I sat down with Paddy to discuss his book and to tease out more of his story. This Oxford-educated architect has lived quite a life. Our interview thus ran long, so I'm going to divide our Q&A into two posts.

Portland Architecture: You come from Britain and traveled widely before you arrived in Portland. What attracted you here?

I traveled widely in the US before I came to Oregon, but this is where I felt totally at home. Maybe it’s climatic. I think it’s more than that. Maybe climate has some influence on values: the liberalism we have in Cascadia is not like most of the rest of the United States, and that fits somehow. I think it’s part of what makes this a particular place.

Your bio on the ZGF website mentions that you came to Portland after 14,000 miles at sea. What’s the story?

One strand of my backstory is the sailing one. I think I began with a fascination of boats as a boy, as a lot of people do. But later on, I got heavily into ocean racing, basically in the English Channel. And cruising. Jumping ahead many years, I was sailing with friends in the Caribbean and we got into some bad weather and holed up on an island, probably drank too much rum, and got talking. There was this idea we discussed that some of the great English romantic poets had had, about sailing the South Seas; I don’t think they ever got out of the harbor. But a few months later I was back in London when my friend called and said, ‘Remember that conversation about romantic poets? I’ll go if you go.’ I was working at the Great London Council at the time. My colleagues said, ‘You’re crazy to leave this job.’ I said, ‘I know you’re right but I’ll never get an opportunity like this again.’ So I joined him. We sailed from the Virgin Islands to Panama to the Galapagos to the Marquesas Islands. In that last stretch, we had 23 days without seeing land or vessels. It’s difficult to explain, but being so completely remote from everybody else was quite something. My role was navigating. Eventually, sure enough, the Marquesas appeared and we continued through French Polynesia towards New Zealand, Penryn, the Line Islands, to Hawaii then back to Sausalito. That took about ten months and 14,000 miles. That was really my intro to Portland.

How so?

My now-wife joined us in Tahiti but had had quite enough of sailing by the time we got to Hawaii. She didn’t like sailing. She came to stay with a friend of ours in Portland, a theater critic on the [Oregon] Journal. I joined her when we made landfall at Sausalito. While here, I met Greg Baldwin [of ZGF] and we got on famously. I had no intention of coming here to work. I needed to get back to the next racing season and all sorts of other things. A year and a half later I was working in Cologne, and the phone rang and it was Greg Baldwin. I’d worked on light rail in Japan. He said, ‘There are no architects here with experience in light rail. No one in this country has built it for 50 years. Would you like to come work on it? It was supposed to last 18 months. And here we are 35 years later.

What made you stay?

After I got here, yes I worked on MAX but I also found myself working on other things. After the 18 months came and went, I had about six different projects going on and enjoyed the work and the people. ZGF included 64 people then. You know the joy of working with smart people: it makes you smarter. There was never really a deadline as such at the end of 18 months. At some stage I realized I had crossed the threshold and was comfortable here. The first four years we were in an apartment. At a certain point I think we both realized that this was just a super place to be and we were lucky to be here. Since the firm didn’t seem to want to get rid of me, I stayed on and the work was interesting. Culturally I’d say it was a good fit. I’d grown up in different circles, but my cultural background fitted very nicely with what I found here. I found the things I was interested in in urban design had a great deal of possibility here. Not many people understood what urban design was, and there was a great deal of scope.

What were some of the projects beyond MAX that you found particularly meaningful?

Early on, I got into working with colleges and universities. We worked with Reed College about a year after I got here. They said, ‘We want to consolidate the library.’ It turned out to be rather more complicated. We wound up doing a master plan of the campus, the first since A.E. Doyle’s when the campus was built. So there I was, interviewing extremely smart people to understand what was important to them, and absolutely loved it. We sought out other colleges that needed the same sort of work done. Over the years I’ve done in excess of 30 college and university master plans. I enjoy it so much. Most of those people have never really thought more than a year or two ahead of where they are. Going through the process with them of recognizing what had changed in the last 10 years and what things were likely to change in the next 10, I found that tremendously worthwhile. So that’s been a sort of continuing theme that I’ve enjoyed.

Tillett in his ZGF office (Sam Jones)

Because you were here starting in the early ‘80s, when Portland’s downtown transformation was really first underway with the bus mall, Waterfront Park and Pioneer Courthouse Square, I wonder what you think of the state of urban design and planning in Portland today. Are we resting on laurels? Are we as open to change?

There isn’t an exact answer, but about 10 years ago, I got together with architectural and planning Fellows [from the American Institute of Architects and the American Planning Association] and said, ‘We should be doing something more worthwhile than choosing the next Fellows. Why don’t we think about how we can apply our collective wisdom in a way that addresses something that nobody wants to address? In the Tom McCall era, there seemed to be this consensus on the importance of the natural environment. Everybody said, ‘Of course we must do the bottle bill. Of course we must make the beaches public.’ The challenge was, ‘What are the things the politicians won’t touch because they’re toxic, and businessmen won’t touch because there’s not a profit?’ There’s a whole list of these things that has now distilled into what we call Oregon 2050. Where should we be by 2050 and how are we going to get there?

Where does that effort stand now?

We are in the process of getting the governor’s attention, because it has to be on the state level. We first looked at Cascadia-wide, but the decision-making process is not built for that. The 36 counties we have don’t relate to watersheds or natural boundaries or anything like that. There are these artificial jurisdictions: city, county, state. There’s no way to build consensus around a lot of these challenges. How do we maintain the livability we have now into the future decades? That may sound like a selfish thing to look at. Livability is one of those words that everybody understands differently, but it’s something we’re striving with. I think there are ways to get there. We’ve had a number of conferences about it. The medical profession is thinking about people aging in place and walkable neighborhoods. They could see some affinity. The landscape architects likewise see what it’s all about. It’s rather a silent thing going on. But I think with intractable problems like that, particularly when you have a federal government going in the opposite direction, it’s difficult to change the direction. So much of the political direction we have now is an unthinking momentum. That’s not necessarily going to carry us to the destination we want to get to. Figuring out what initiatives one can take that will revive that awareness of who we are and what we want to be is really what this is all about. I think by engaging the professions, one can get to at least raise an awareness of the things we need to confront.

How does your Portland 2050 effort in the private sector dovetail or contrast with government efforts like Metro’s 2040 Growth Concept, the Portland Plan, or Central City 2035? And do you feel confident in those latter plans? Recently when I interviewed Don Stastny, author of the original Central City plan, he said that document had been much smaller and goal-oriented rather than so prescriptive.

The key thing you referenced there with Don is goals. One thing I really admire about this state is its planning laws are not in the usual cast of the 10 Commandments: ‘Thou shalt not.’ Instead they’re aspirational: the things you should try to do. That seems to me the right way to go about planning. We tend to regulate what you may not do.

It makes me think of the recent conversations happening around building heights, with taller-than-allowed buildings proposed for Riverplace and the US Postal Service site.

There was no limit on building heights until the ’70s in this town. It was just a fear that somebody would do something dreadful, that we’d get a forest of Wells Fargo buildings, that height limits spread like peanut butter across the cityscape. It’s completely unnecessary. We’ve entangled ourselves in so many regulations, largely through fear of something bad happening, and through fear of elected politicians having to make discretionary decisions they don’t’ want to make. I think what Michael Harrison did with the Central City Plan was to take away as much discretionary judgment as possible by writing these minutely specific rules about what you can and can’t do. I think that the basic 2035 Portland Plan, which is based in things like health and education and well being, is absolutely right. It’s aspirational. But I think we still fall into the same quagmire that everybody else does: in regulating what we don’t need to. Yes there are places you don’t want to build tall buildings, but there are so many places which are not sensitive to tall buildings. The north Pearl is one. There’s the Flat Earth Society that thinks anything over six stories should be denied. They say to look at Paris or Washington. But those are not applicable. Here we are in this basin, almost, between the West Hills on one side and the buttes on the other. The topography varies. There’s no reason for buildings to be of one height. The sculptural quality of this place is extraordinary. You can always see trees growing on the hillside. It reminds you about all the things that make this a particular place on earth. The variety of architecture as well as topography is all part of that.

The other aspect that I touch on in the book is Adam Smith’s simple insights about the ability of land to generate wealth. It’s how intensely you use it: growing crops or creating places where people live and work. The more we limit the kinds of uses you can have, and the density and height to which you can build, the more we limit that potential of the city. I think we need to just take a more aspirational look at regulating development.

I think what we point to is that ever since heights were limited, it’s been legal to build to about 500 feet in the downtown. We’ve only had one building, Big Pink, which has done that. Wells Fargo was already there by that time. It’s a simple matter of economics. I know we got a flurry in South Waterfront. That’s because everyone thought we had a boom in housing. But even then we got half a dozen buildings. The economics of development are such that it’s immensely expensive to building a tall building. If you allowed tall buildings anywhere in Portland you’re only going to get a sprinkling of them. Fear of the unknown tends to drive regulation unnecessarily, and we need to get past that.

 

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Design calendar: January 2-15

US Custom House, Portland (Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Extracurricular: First Thursday Panel Discussion with PSU Architecture Faculty
"Extracurricular," the current exhibition at the AIA Center For Architecture, reveals design research—projects, investigations, and buildings—by a selection of faculty at Portland State University School of Architecture. While the classroom becomes a shared space of exploration for both teacher and student, the interests, fascinations, and practice agendas of individual faculty make up an integral part of the identity of the school. This panel discussion, hosted by writer and Portland Architecture blogger Brian Libby, will include short presentations by faculty whose work is exhibited in the show, followed by a question and answer session. AIA Portland Center For Architecture, 403 NW 11th Avenue. 6PM Thursday, January 4. Free.

Master of Architecture: Information Session
In this information session for graduate programs in architecture at Portland State University, one can meet teaching faculty and director, talk with current students, learn about the curriculum and the school's teaching philosophy, discover leadership and design-build opportunities for students, and tour studios and lab facilities. PSU's faculty members bring decades of professional experience and expertise to our studios, where students develop their creative identity while nurturing their civic responsibility, critical judgment, and ability to translate ideas into plausible architectural propositions. PSU's faculty are leaders in architectural disciplines including architectural theory and history, sustainable design, green building science and energy efficient building technology, public interest design, urbanism, urban design, and professional practice. Portland State University, Shattuck Hall, 1914 SW Park Avenue, Room 235. 12PM Friday, January 5. Free.

2018 Construction Forecast
The economic environment is complicated by political, global and business uncertainty. Will the economy continue to maintain steady growth despite a corrupt, bigoted, colluding president and a Congress coldly determined to serve only the wealthy, or is expanded growth possible? Should the industry anticipate additional funding for infrastructure, or will there be the kind of cuts more common to Republican administrations? What are the implications of the skilled labor shortage? Is single family construction expanding or struggling with fundamental problems of demographics and funding? This January chapter meeting for the Construction Specifications Institute's local chapter features a keynote address by Cliff Brewis, a vice president of operations for Dodge Data & Analytics. In addition to operational responsibilities, Brewis is involved in customer support functions, marketing, association relationships, and is a frequent speaker on the construction forecast. He has been with Dodge for over 35 years in sales, planning and operations, and was awarded an honorarium from the American Institute of Architects' California Council for his contributions to the construction industry. Kells Irish Pub, 112 SW Second Avenue. 11:30AM Tuesday, January 9. $40 ($30 for CSI members).

Apollo: To the Moon and Beyond
We are fast approaching the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo landing on the Moon in 2019! Project Apollo's goals went beyond landing Americans on the moon and returning them safely to Earth. Its 17 missions secured our Nation’s leadership in space for generations to come, establishing the technology to meet other national interests in space. In this Clark College class taught by Portland interior designer Rosanne Sachson, a veteran of the NASA program, attendees can listen to a variety of speakers who will introduce us to their passion for space and how the whole concept of Apollo set them on their missions for the space industry, including using Skype to hear from NASA scientists. Clark College, 1933 Fort Vancouver Way, Vancouver, Anna Pechanec Hall. 1PM Tuesday, January 9. $60.

SMPS TALKS: The Process of Strategic Planning
It’s no secret that Portland is growing. With the growth of our city, comes the subsequent growth of the AEC industry and the maturation of firms that have long been established in the Portland market. As a firm grows, is there a strategic plan in place, or is the firm simply reacting to the direction that work comes from? The goal of this event from the Society for Marketing Professional Services' SMPS Talks series is to help experienced senior level marketers understand the ways in which strategic business planning can benefit their individual firm and how they can best communicate this concept to the leaders or key stakeholders of their firm, to consciously and effectively navigate future growth. Panelists include Chelsea McCann, a principal at Walker Macy Landscape Architects; Sarah Bell, Principal, marketing director at Hacker Architects; and Stacy Riger, associate marketing Manager at PAE Engineers. LRS Architects, 720 NW Davis Street, #300. 4:30PM Wednesday, January 10. $20 ($10 for SMPS members).

Pearl District Walking Tour
The Pearl District was practically deserted 25 years ago, but it has since been transformed into a dynamic walker-friendly neighborhood with contemporary and adaptive high rise housing, fine dining and world class entertainment. The Pearl has become a model of high quality urban living and a must-see destination for visitors to our world-class city. This Positively Portland Walking Tour includes the historic warehouse buildings that became the basis for the present Pearl district, including the recently re-purposed and re-opened Schnitzer Center at Pacific Northwest College of Art, now located in the grand classical revival former 511 Broadway federal building dating to 1916. Tour begins at AIA Portland Center For Architecture, 403 NW 11th Avenue. 1PM Friday, December 15. $15

 

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