Heartline: an alternative to the podium

BY BRIAN LIBBY

A few weeks ago I had an opportunity to write a New York Times article about the new Heartline development in the Pearl District, designed by Seattle architecture firm Mithun for developer Security Properties.

If you had told me a year or two ago that I would be writing positively about a new project on this site, I would have been quite surprised. After all, this is the block that was long home to the Pacific Northwest College of Art's Goodman Building, a renovated warehouse that I'd spent the better part of 20 years visiting. The Goodman always felt like a hive of activity on the inside, where a double-height central space encircled by mezzanines made for a kind of architectural core sample. Then there was the exterior paint job, a remarkable invented language of squares and rectangles created by designer Randy Higgins to transpose an Arthur Rimbaud poem.

Maybe there wasn't anything extraordinary about the Goodman's architecture, for there was no beautiful exposed brick inside and the building was largely windowless. Yet the demolition of the Goodman seemed like an unwanted precedent, where the old warehouses that defined the first wave of regeneration in the Pearl began to be demolished as the neighborhood cannibalized itself in favor of taller, newer buildings. And while PNCA didn't move out of the neighborhood — they now occupy the Beaux-Arts former federal building at 511 Broadway on the east edge of the Pearl—the old location placed a cultural institution in the heart of the district where now it feels like little more than condos, parks and a few offices.

Yet if one judges Heartline units own without blaming the project for the Goodman's demolition, there's a lot to like here, I think. In particular, the fact that Security Properties was willing to build two distinct buildings instead of the usual solution—a thin tower sitting atop a block-sized podium—makes this project architecturally successful.

“What makes the Pearl District is it’s a collection of smaller buildings,” Mithun partner Bert Gregory told me. “It has a unique fabric and texture. The 200-foot blocks are unique in America. That’s what makes it a delightful place to be. It seemed appropriate to have the two buildings and the open space on site. You wanted it to fit into the neighborhood.”

The two buildings, connected by a courtyard, are also distinct in both style and scale, which seems to symbolize the Pearl's warehouse-dotted southern half and its mostly new-construction northern half as well as, potentially, the district's past and future. On the west side of the block is a five-story commercial building framed in wood, clad in brick and affixed with a raised loading dock to resemble the historic warehouses nearby. On the east is a sleek, 15-story tower of metal and glass offering 218 market-rate apartments.

The brick commercial building is a response not just to the general presence of warehouses in the Pearl or its southern half, but specifically the The NW 13th Avenue Historic District, which terminates just one block to the southwest. Heartline didn't fall within that district, so the developers and architects were under no pressure to design a compatible structure. Yet once they decided to do two buildings instead of one, doing a brick-clad building at a smaller scale seemed to make sense. Mithun even added a loading dock, just like most of the warehouses on 13th have.

"Obviously 13th has a unique and wonderful character with the docks on that street. We wanted to make sure we fit quite well," Gregory added. "The docks became important contextually. Some wonderful restaurants spill onto that and make it a wonderful vibrant street."

Yet he also cautioned that Heartline is not a caricature of old architecture. "There isn’t any dock like it along 13th," Gregory said. "The railings are contemporary. You have canopies as you’d want but they’re contemporary. The masonry, we were very careful in making sure we got the right color, the right brick, so it would fit within the context of the street. The window patterns and the detailing are extremely contemporary. All that is of our time."

Heartline (Amanda Lucier)

The taller of the two buildings on the Heartline site, the 15-story tower, is a bit less visually compelling to my eyes, but it's nicely detailed and possesses some attractive qualities, such as the balconies that extend outward from the structure almost like viewing platforms over a canyon. But most of all the building possesses a relative slenderness, and the two structures go well together despite having disparate styles and scales. The courtyard in between feels intimate and somewhat cozy.

This is where what Heartline isn't becomes part of the conversation. The Times article only touched on this briefly, but I think Heartline's best quality is that it isn't a podium-tower combination.

Over the past decade or more we've seen this architectural type dominate construction in the Pearl District and South Waterfront. On a full or half-block, the building is built to the edge of the property line for a few stories and then a thinner tower rises for another ten or more stories. It's a way of ensuring street-level vitality with retail lining the perimeter of the sidewalk while the tower, by being allowed to go tall, is able to remain fairly slender. Instead of, say, a stumpy eight-story building that goes to the property line, a skinnier yet taller tower blocks less light from hitting the street.

I'm not saying there is something inherently wrong with the podium-tower combination. If you're going to build a half or full-block structure, it's probably better than a squatty building. Maybe it's just podium fatigue that I'm feeling when I look at its alternative at Heartline. But I am at the very least getting tired of them. When you're walking alongside one of these buildings, it may be true that the taller thinner tower rising from the podium lets more light hit the street, but as one's walking along a podium at sidewalk level, it's less about the thinner profile of the tower and more about the fact that you have one uninterrupted building. Which is often a bore.

From Hawthorne and Belmont to Mississippi and Williams to Broadway, all my favorite high streets in Portland—the places where I go to shop and eat dinner and meet friends for coffee—have multiple buildings on one block. Obviously the building industry has changed, and in most cases those clusters of smaller buildings were built in past eras and even, of course, past centuries. Today the cost of building means that developers and clients want to go taller to achieve their profits, and the urban growth boundary makes land more scarce and thus more valuable, leading to more density. Outside of the central city there's greater likelihood of smaller buildings and the zoning compels it in many cases. But the Pearl is in many ways an extension of downtown, and thus this is a place where we're not likely to get small buildings. That we can have two distinct buildings on one block separated by a courtyard is the best real option we have.

A commercial realtor I talked to for the Times story, Nathan Sasaki, told me the Heartline non-podium decision was largely about economics and, after that, the fact that the project was comprised of distinct commercial and residential halves.

"I don’t have any problem with podiums," said Sasaki, executive director of Apex Real Estate Partners in Portland, which leased Heartline’s commercial space. "It’s just now you have an office tenant that can be in an office-retail building and residents that can be in a mixed-use residential [building]. It just creates differentiation in the market. It’s very difficult. You don’t have a lot of city blocks that become available. A lot of people want to maximize their density. When you’re paying a lot for the dirt you tend to see more podiums. This parcel, they happened to get at the right time and could approach it as less of a commodity-based podium building. They bought it before the market went from $300 to $600 a foot for the dirt."

If Sasaki is correct, then Heartland's avoidance of a podium was somewhat of a fortunate anomaly. And that's too bad. Yet it's all the more reason to celebrate somebody doing something different, even if it was a reflection of economic circumstances than a gesture of creativity or civic-mindedness. Of course the success of the architecture is not just about podium versus non-podium. This is where Mithun's penchant for quality comes in; the Seattle firm has long been among the city's best.

There were additional dramas playing out as Heartline was designed and constructed. My editors at the Times were most interested in the fact that the project represents commercial real estate's increasing presence in the Pearl, which has heretofore been mostly residential-oriented mixed-use development. Heartline isn't the first office in the district by any means, but it reflects the fact that commercial development has moved out of the downtown core to become a big part of the future of adjacent central city areas like the Central Eastside, the Pearl and South Waterfront. The developers also allowed themselves to be influenced by the Pearl District Neighborhood Association, which openly advocated for an office component to the development in order to help foster a more vibrant urban environment.

Even so, what interested me most about Heartline was what it wasn't: another podium and tower. Perhaps someday we'll look back at the early 20th century in Portland as a defining era of podiums, and perhaps for some reason not yet known, future historic preservationists will come to cherish these buildings. I can't say they're terrible, but I can say they've become a cliche. Heartline doesn't radically reinvent in its approach, nor does it fully embrace an old way of building. But the two buildings are handsome in large part because they get the proportions right.