A post-Morphosis metamorphosis: West of West and the Wells Fargo Center renovation

Rendering of the upcoming Wells Fargo Center renovation (West of West)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Last month, the City of Portland’s Design Commission approved a series of alterations to the Wells Fargo Center, Portland’s tallest building. Dating to 1972 and designed by Charles Luckman, the building—originally known as the First National Bank Tower—has long symbolized both the ambition of midcentury modern commercial architecture in the United States as well as the folly of its fortress-like approach to urbanism.

After the 40-story building was completed, it prompted our city to enact height restrictions. For some, this was a kind of alien spaceship that had landed: out of scale with the rest of the urban fabric and, in its unapologetic International Style heroism, possessing no sense of local architectural vernacular. Yet with the elegance of its marble cladding contrasting dark window frames, and the slender sculptural quality that comes from being a taller skyscraper, there is a kind of austere beauty to the Wells Fargo Center. Whether you love it, hate it, or feel indifferent, it’s a major component in our downtown skyline.

That the Wells Fargo Center and its accompanying five-story data processing center building across the street (connected by a sky bridge) are being renovated to be more pedestrian friendly and full of light is not a surprise. After all, the building was sold last year, and the new operators see the value in modernizing the building to be more welcoming at street level as well as inside.

Though the materials and forms of this building are compelling, it had its critics from the start, especially the nation's top critic of that time, Ada Louise Huxtable of The New York Times. “This tower will be tapered and rail-finned, with an accessory block-square box, in a manner that finally died unmourned in Detroit but that the Southern California sun seems to keep alive," Huxtable wrote of the Wells Fargo Center after visiting Portland. "In style, scale and impact it will be alien corn, in every sense of the word."

“No one has stopped looking at the tops of these buildings long enough to see what is happening on the ground," she continued. "Each one is contributing to the devitalization of the city. Virtually all of them eliminate the life on the street. There is nothing on each square block on which these buildings rise- where there should be window, shops, pedestrian activities- but a corporate entrance and a parking garage."

Some 46 years later, the Wells Fargo Center has aged well in the sense of building as sculpture. But it has continued to need a more human presence at the street level. And the task has been handed to a new Portland firm, West of West. As it turns out, West of West's awarding of the commission is somewhat fitting given the principals' roots. Charles Luckman, the Well Fargo’s designer—who was a famous young business executive who once graced the cover of Time magazine before turning to architecture—was based in Los Angeles. That’s where West of West’s principals began their firm before relocating to Portland two years ago.

Lobby and entry of Wells Fargo Center renovation (West of West)

Architects Clayton Taylor and Jai Kumaran are longtime friends who were students together at multiple universities as well as employees at some of the same firms. Both got their undergraduate architecture degrees from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, then graduate architecture degrees from UCLA, where they were particularly influenced by a class taught by the great Thom Mayne, founder of architecture firm Morphosis and co-founder of Sci-Arc, the Los Angeles architecture school. Both Taylor and Kumaran went on to work for Morphosis after UCLA.

I sought out Taylor and Kumaran first to learn more about their redesign for the Wells Fargo Center, but when I saw they had both been students and employees of Mayne, I got even more interested—not simply because Mayne is famous and talented, but because of the idea of Mayne and Luckman being tangentially tied through this project.

Luckman was a leading voice in an era of big, corporate modernism of the Sixties and Seventies. He designed heroic landmarks like the new Madison Square Garden in New York, the Prudential Center in Boston, CBS Television City, the master plan for Los Angeles International Airport, and Aloha Stadium in Honolulu. Mayne, coming 30 years later, was an even bigger name in the deconstructivist architecture of the Nineties, breaking down those heroic forms into something less symmetrical and more messily complex.

Make no mistake: Thom Mayne has nothing direct to do with the Wells Fargo Center’s renovation, but the mere notion of these two very different architects’ ways of looking at the world could be tied together in one building is at least curious. To me, it’s like having an Andy Warhol disciple weigh in on a Rothko painting.

Yet saying it that way suggests I disapprove of this commission going to West of West, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m glad a small firm with mentorship from great architectural minds is tackling this landmark’s renovation instead of a bigger firm with lots of big-project experience but none of it great.

Following is my conversation with Taylor and Kumaran about Wells Fargo, their careers and their firm.

Principals and firm co-founders Clayton Taylor and Jai Kumaran (West of West)

Portland Architecture: Your firm is designing renovations for two big office towers: the Wells Fargo Center and the PacWest Center. How would you characterize these buildings, especially Wells Fargo?

Clayton Taylor: They were built for a certain era, when the pedestrian in the city was seen as a different kind of contributor. Wells Fargo, it literally has a moat around it. First National wanted to build a fortress. You get a building that was about keeping people out, which was fascinating. And they broke all these zoning laws to build the biggest building. Then there’s the Data Processing Building next door.

Jai Kumaran: I actually like that Data Processing Building quite a bit. It’s a completely privatized building for an extinct technology.

Taylor: It’s five levels tall. The top three stick out to the property line. The others form a stem underneath. There’s no lobby.

So how do you humanize them? I see you’ve altered the canopy for the tower, changed its lower-level glass from shaded to clear, and made some more extensive changes to the DPB.

Taylor: You’re inserting something that goes against the original premise, but it needs to happen to keep the buildings alive. Our interventions were surgical: to fit in and make it work, but reposition the building as much as we can.

Kumaran: In the tower, the work is primarily on the interior. But on the data processing center building, that’s our biggest exterior intervention. We ended up asking, ‘What’s a way to create some enclosure without heavily modifying the building, and without cutting the building off from the street?’ So we’re wrapping the lower level in glass.

Taylor: We took the mullion pattern on the tower and dragged it straight down. It gives the whole building a front door now. It becomes a whole frontage along Fourth with this grand stair that leads up into the building. A big set of stairs welcomes people in, so there’s a public lobby to approach the building. I think that’s how we won the project. We’re kind of reworking that lower bit to make it functional. Now it has this great contrast between contemporary office culture and this gorgeous midcentury building. The hope is there’s life around it.

Could you talk a little bit about the journey you two have gone on that led to forming the firm?

Taylor: When we started West of West, we were working in L.A. kind of more from our kitchen tables. When we moved here to Portland, it’s when we actually opened an office. But we had gone to undergrad together at Cal Poly, and we lived in Copenhagen together.

Kumaran: That experience in Europe was a very formative. From there we both went to UCLA for grad school. We were in the super studio led by Thom Mayne. A lot of people thought they’d go to grad school with Thom and do shiny buildings. This was the opposite. In this program we produced a book called The Culture Now Project that really influenced our thinking about our own firm. The book is about how art and culture can influence and spark change within midsized cities in the US. Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco: they always have people looking at those cities. What about all the other cities? In the last 10 years, that attention has started to shift.

Renderings of PacWest Center renovation (West of West)

Taylor: It shifted our thinking a bit in terms of where we wanted to work.

Kumaran: It was really about locating a problem first, and then starting to talk about where to go from there. For us it was fascinating.

So working on the book got you thinking about cities where you could do interesting work, and make an impact?

Kumaran: Exactly. In LA we felt like we could be successful but we’d also be following a series of people we knew and tracing those footsteps. I felt like we felt we needed to strike out on our own and search for something else.

Taylor: ‘We said, ‘Where else would we want to go?’

But you still wound up staying in Los Angeles, at least for a time, because you both went from Mayne’s UCLA graduate class to working for his firm, Morphosis.

Kumaran: Yes, we did for a while. After the book, we shifted into a million square foot master plan in Chengdu in China. Thom is like, 'We’ve got this million-square-foot project in Chengdu. You can figure this out’. It was like, ‘Let’s design this whole city.’

How would you describe Mayne as a boss, as a teacher, or as an architect?

Kumaran: I think he’s a very intuitive person. He’s a generation after Frank Gehry, but he was still embedded in that Venice ’70s art world. He’d print lithographs for artists. He didn’t produce significant buildings until the '90s. He was embedded in how you represent architecture. But that has now transferred into other things. Ultimately he’s a very intuitive architect on one hand. Thom is also a series of contradictions, I would say. On the other hand he’s all about systems and process.

Taylor: For Thom, a building is artistic, but when you’re talking about it, it’s a machine, a mechanism. It’s putting very specific pieces of the puzzle together. There is artistic pursuit going on, but also an incredible technical pursuit. It inspired us. We may do something sculptural, but it has a formal quality. Thom is rolling all these contradictions into what he is. It’s not a simple sketch. It’s a very worked thing. And the rigor is very strong. Thom is known as a formal architect, but to him, it’s super systematic: this is the only way it can go together. It changes your pursuit of architecture a little bit. Thom creates a whole language of things that produces an architectural outcome. It’s not a Gehry expression. There’s a series of things you’re looking at: line, plane volume. I think he kind of helped me create this system that gives birth to a project.

Kumaran: The reason for the systems was to have multiple systems, and then to overlay and overlap those systems. The result is something more complex than anyone could just design linearly from point A to point B. for Thom I think that’s a deep urban response. It’s a series of systems that have been built up and overlaid. They may not come from the same time or the same person, but it creates this rich and complex final product.

Rendering of the Wells Fargo Center (Dan Haneckow)

A lot of architects might have been content to stay at a firm like Morphosis. What inspired you to set out on your own?

Kumaran: We would always have a drink and talk about ideas, even when Clay left for Rios Clemente Hall. For two or three years while we were working, first together and then separately, there was this discussion happening. I think that ultimately congealed and jelled into us saying, ‘You know what? We can take that next step.’

Taylor: Friends would say, ‘Design this thing for me.’ A friend came through and wanted us to design this tiny interior project for an eyeglass store. We showed them a sketch, and it was like, ‘We start next week.’ Meanwhile the giant urban projects are taking years and years.

Kumaran: At the time I was still at Morphosis, and working on the US embassy in Beirut. At that point it was 10 to 12 years out from completion. There was this radical shift in scale between working on something 1000 square feet for our friends and a million square feet for these firms. That became a foundational idea of our firm, and it still plays out today, going between projects like the Wells Fargo Center and the PacWest versus some of our smaller projects.

Can you tell me about the firm’s name? Why not call it Taylor & Kumaran, or Kumaran & Taylor, like many would?

Taylor: At first, we were working under that kind of very general name as a practice. We said, 'We really need to think about this.' There were a lot of discussions of what to name our practice, and at this point we had five years of work together. We were really into the idea of the west coast and how it was seen as this strange place on the horizon for the longest time. We found these great Teddy Roosevelt quotes from his time in California, saying, ‘I’m west of the west.’ There are even some old maps out there that depict California as an island.

Kumaran: For us, West of West represents an idea. It’s something that can never be reached or achieved.

Taylor: We liked that infinite search for something. It’s not about the end game. It’s always trying to find something. We consider all that we do an experiment.

Hacienda competition entry (West of West)

Looking through West of West’s portfolio, I enjoyed some of the firm’s competition entries, like the Desert Hotel and the ODOT Blocks. Can you talk a little bit about those?

Kumaran: the Desert Hotel is outside of the Joshua Tree. We don’t typically do competitions, but one of our long-term fascinations is the whole land art movement. This proposal was taking a piece of Americana, the roadside motel, and cues from land art, mixing those and embedding our own sensibilities to produce something different. It’s at once recognizable and strange.

Taylor: With ODOT on the east side there’s a great industrial heritage. How do you not copy it but play in that world a little bit? We took the loading dock typology and tried to mess with it. We split them down the middle. There would be a wood shop in one, a brewery in another. That central spine is big enough for a truck to drive through. At night it can become a public space, a place to gather for things like the Portland Night Market or the Portland Winter Light Festival.

ODOT Blocks competition entry (West of West)

Having participated in the ODOT selection process through Prosper Portland, what do you make of how the city hands out commissions like these?

Taylor: In Copenhagen, where Jai and I spent some time living early in our careers, all the architects have to build models for a competition like this and the public comes to see them. The public can really give feedback. It would be nice to see Prosper Portland dive into that. People love design here. There’s such a robust design community. In L.A. everyone’s too busy to go or care. Here there are good architects and people who care about space.

Most of the firms in Portland I admire most share an ability to retain the essence of a project all the way through construction. What’s your process like? How do you get there?

Kumaran: It starts with discussions. We try to involve everyone on our team. What are the ideas we can embed in the project that are going to be durable to last? What can survive the process and all the people who have to weigh in, from ownership to contactors to the city to the general public? You’re right: as long as we can clarify an idea and see it all the way through, we’ll see it as a success.