National Music Centre of Canada (Jeremy Bittermann)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
An arts center, a winery tasting room and a bank renovation: these were the three projects that took home the Honor Award, the highest honor available, at last week's 2018 Portland Architecture Awards from the American Institute of Architects' Portland chapter, recognizing the best designs by local firms. Actually, though, there were five Honor Awards if you include the two additional ones given out in the small projects category, both going to Fieldwork Design & Architecture: for Day Wines and the Forest Park Bridges. That means wine-tasting buildings in tiny Dundee, Oregon—population 3,284— took home two of the five biggest awards of the night.
Overall, 21 awards were given out by this year's Philadelphia-based jury—Karen Blanchard of SITIO, Jeff Goldstein of DIGSAU, and Jason Smith of KieranTimberlake—plus a handful of additional prizes.
Growing up in McMinnville and passing through Dundee hundreds of times en route to Portland, if you'd have told me then that two buildings in Dundee would someday win architectural awards I would have laughed. It seemed little more than a Plaid Pantry convenience store, an old Baptist church and a brick schoolhouse. But winery buildings in Yamhill County wine country have in recent years become an opportunity for some of Portland's most talented firms to get creative in a non-urban context and to interact with a beautiful landscape. Day Wines and Furioso, this year's winery-building honorees, join superlative winery buildings by firms like Allied Works and Lever Architecture completed in recent years.
Overall I'd say Waechter Architecture may have been the night's biggest winner, taking home the most total awards with three. But Fieldwork would be a close second, given that both of their awards were Honor Awards. Opsis Architecture was also a double winner.
Furioso Vineyards (Lara Swimmer) and Expensify (Garrett Rowland)
Honor Awards
The National Music Centre of Canada in Calgary, designed by Allied Works and an Honor Award winner, is quite a complex project: a series of nine interlocking towers housing a museum, performance hall, interactive music education center, recording studio and broadcast center, stretching over two blocks and wrapping around an existing historic building, the King Edward Hotel. Wrapped in gorgeous glazed terra cotta, the NMCC is like one big inhabitable sculpture, yet in the variety of viewpoints and opening it offers, the project never becomes monolithic. The city's most acclaimed firm, Allied Works has spent nearly 20 years at this point designing high-profile museums and other arts facilities, from the Museum of Art & Design in New York to the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. But this project may be its most architecturally ambitious.
Fellow Honor Award winner Furioso Vineyards is the latest gem from Waechter Architecture and lead architect Ben Waechter, whose resume includes time with Allied Works (as well as the great Renzo Piano) before establishing his own firm. It feels as if Waechter, perhaps even more than Allied itself, wins some kind of Portland Architecture Award for every project entered. And you know what? It's hard to argue with that. Furioso takes inspiration from the agrarian barns dotting the surrounding Willamette Valley, with its largely wood construction and sloping roof. But in this case, the blackened cedar walls are a kind of semi-transparent screen sitting atop a concrete base, while the large overhanging corrugated metal roof, slightly asymmetrical as it peaks just off from the middle and larger than any barn roof, protects visitors from sun and rain while in its materiality also recalling farm buildings. The project combines wine production facilities (screened by the wood walls) with a glass-walled tasting room, offering panoramic views to the surrounding vineyard-covered rolling hillside.
The third Honor Award winner is no surprise: the Expensify headquarters by ZGF. A four-story, sky-lit atrium is surrounded by open offices, with the architects adding a pair of pavilions that cantilever outward from the back of the space. The design, which I wrote about in a September post, celebrates the Beaux Arts style of the original 1916 bank building without being slavish to the original, instead combining classical and modern style.
Forest Park Bridges (Caleb Couch)
For Day Wines, the Honor Award winner in the Small Projects category, Fieldwork transformed an existing 11,700 square foot former vitamin factory and gravel parking lot off busy Highway 99W in Dundee into a communal natural winemaking facility, tasting room and courtyard for Day Wines and 10 other winemakers. Whereas Furioso is in more of a rural setting among the vineyards, Day Wines has to do more to create a sense of place. But the designers did that with a courtyard blending seamlessly with the cedar-clad tasting room, which includes a large cantilevering roof to extend outdoor events into the rainy season. In its horizontal, linear form, the Day Wines project is evocative of classic midcentury modern style, yet its crisp materiality gives the project a contemporary feel.
The Forest Park Bridges project consists really of a trio replacement bridges for three hiking trails. Fieldwork created bridges made of modular components that can be brought to the site by hand, thereby minimizing site disturbance, while making use of weathered steel structural components. I find a certain lyricism in these bridges, and that's not a surprise given that this firm has always excelled at small little projects like this requiring craftsmanship and an eye for minimal forms rooted in function.
Overall this quartet of Honor Award-winning projects could be said to represent three generations of Portland firms. ZGF is the most venerable; while there are plenty of young architects infusing the firm with talent, it's been around for a half century and cracked the code on how to prosper when your founding principals are long gone. Allied Works is the established king of the hill for this generation, having completed almost two decades of great work since its landmark Wieden + Kennedy building. Waechter and Fieldwork represent some of the best of the new generation.
Day Wines (Jeremy Bittermann), Oregon Zoo Education Center (Christian Columbres)
Of course the Honor Award was just one prize given out last week. There were also the second and third-tier Merit Awards and Citation Awards, as well as a few one-off categories for projects and individuals.
Among the one-offs, there was the 2030 Award, which honors the project that best exemplifies efforts to meet the 2030 Challenge for sustainable, net-zero-energy architecture. It went to Opsis Architecture for the Oregon Zoo Education Center, which houses staff offices, six classrooms, an environmental science classroom lab, and outdoor nature learning and play spaces. It's designed for net-zero energy with an extensive rooftop solar array and a rainwater system that will serve the large restrooms on the west side of the zoo. There was also the Emerging Professional Award, which went to Dristi Manandhar of Carleton Hart Architecture; the Young Architect Award, given to Jeffrey Guggenheim of the Guggenheim Architecture + Design Studio; and the President's Award, given posthumously to the late Robert Frasca of ZGF.
Merit Awards
The Merit Award, an equivalent of the silver medal, went to five projects, four of them local: the Oregon Episcopal School's Lower School in Southwest Portland, designed by Hacker; SINBIN in Northwest Portland, designed by Skylab Architecture; Carbon12 in Northeast from PATH Architecture; the University of Oregon's Price Science Commons and Research Library remodel and expansion in Eugene by Opsis Architecture; and Lents Commons in Southeast Portland, also by Hacker. But there were an additional three Merit Awards given out in the small projects category: to Waechter Architecture for Slender House, Webster Wilson for the Fowler Avenue ADU, and Scott Mooney for the Pinwheel ADU.
OES Lower School (Lara Swimmer) and Carbon12 (Andrew Pogue)
The OES Lower School could have won the 2030 Award, for it is also designed to be net-zero and is naturally ventilated. The simple palette of wood and glass, with skylights and a central open stairway flooding the interior with natural light, make this a quintessentially Hacker project: handsome, clean-lined and possessing an elegant simplicity through its embrace of natural materials.
PATH Architecture's Carbon12 may be the most history-making project of all these Portland Architecture Awards winners. As the tallest mass-timber building in the United States at the time of its completion, it exemplifies the future that awaits us, especially here in Oregon: one where even tall buildings are made out of wood, which makes them far more sustainable than even the greenest concrete and steel-framed buildings and also brings us greater earthquake resilience. Winning a design award like this also has to feel validating to PATH, which is led by developer-architect Ben Kaiser and has now fully re-emerged after losing talented co-founder Corey Martin to Hacker a few years ago.
The Price Science Commons is another addition to Opsis's large portfolio of handsome university buildings, which are part of not just UO but Portland State University, Oregon State University, Reed College, and many community college buildings throughout the region. I happened to visit Skylab's SINBIN a few months ago for a Metropolis Magazine Think Tank talk, and was delighted by its odd combination of indoor skate park, residence and meeting space, all with an almost Escher-like sense of geometric sleight of hand. Lents Commons is attractive not just for its natural wood cladding and eye-catching geometry at the ends of its shoebox-shaped buildings, but the tree-lined courtyard that extends from the street deep into the site to add much-needed public gathering space at the street level.
Price Science Commons (Christian Columbres), SINBIN (Jeremy Bittermann)
The three small projects to win Merit Awards all speak to maximizing land on which to build. Both Webster Wilson's Fowler Avenue project and Scott Mooney's Pinwheel are accessory dwelling units, while Waechter's Slender House makes use of a tiny footprint of land between an existing house and a warehouse.
In a broad sense, I've always been interested in how constraints can actually stimulate creativity, and the fact that what we used to call granny flats are winning the design awards instead of mansions is, to me at least, pretty damn cool. It's not to say these projects were cheap to construct, but they make it feel like great residential design isn't just for the well-off.
Fowler Avenue ADU (Caitlin Murray/Built Photo), Pinwheel ADU (Olivia Ashton)
Citation Awards
Finally there were the bronze medal-equivalent Citation Awards. In the main category, five projects were winners: the Rockwood Club for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Portland by Holst Architecture; Viking Pavilion at Portland State University by Woofter Architecture, which I wrote about in an enthusiastic June post that likened this arena to a ship in a bottle; Flex by Lever Architecture, an excellent little commercial building on 82nd Avenue (which I reviewed for the Portland Tribune); a project by Mahlum Architects at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg with a name that to the uninitiated may look like a typo, Tapʰòytʰaʼ Hall, but actually is derived from a Takelma language word that means “to be blessed and to prosper” (Kudos to UCC for the creativity, sense of heritage, and inclusiveness); and Tykeson Hall at Oregon State University's Cascade campus in Bend, by Bora Architects, another net-zero-ready sustainable campus building.
In the small projects category, there three more Citation Awards given: to Open Studio Collective for the El Nido Residence, another accessory dwelling unit; to Beebe Skidmore for the Stephens Street project, a renovation and re-imagination of a modest existing 1914 Craftsman home; and an Unbuilt Citation Award to Waechter Architecture for the Society Hotel project set to be built in Bingen, Washington, just across the Columbia River from Hood River.
Thinking about what projects might have won this year but didn't, my mind goes to the Karl Miller Center at Portland State University by Behnisch Architekten (with SRG Partnership), Hacker's Field Office speculative office building, the Jupiter NEXT project by Works Progress Architecture, and Kengo Kuma's house at last year's Street of Dreams. But it's not always easy to discern what the cutoff date is for one year's round of awards versus another's; Jupiter in particular may go for it next year.
Meanwhile, congratulations to the 18 (by my count) firms that took home these honors. Whether an Honor, Merit or Citation Award, it's a certificate on the wall and, perhaps more importantly, validating recognition from your peers. Many of these firms are not strangers to these awards, but thankfully the list includes newcomers as well. And in this format, the awards are friendlier than ever to small projects, which it's hard not to like.
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