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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