Council Crest Residence (Ian Allen for Dwell)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
In a trio of recent articles, I had the opportunity to visit three different housing projects at three different scales.
For a Portland Tribune column, I visited one of many new accessory dwelling units dotting the backyards of Portland houses. This one, known as Treehouse, is on Southeast 53rd Avenue and was designed by local firm Placeship. Not long afterward came an article for Dwell magazine about the Council Crest Residence in Portland's West Hills by Seattle firm BCJ, or Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. Then a few days ago came another Portland Tribune column, about the Lenox Addition Apartments at Southeast 52nd and Holgate, designed by Portland firm Weil Bixby Architecture.
Why mention them together? In other words, what might they have in common besides being recently-completed housing that seem (to my eyes) handsome and successful? That's what I've been asking myself. After all, while I certainly enjoy a pretty face, architecturally speaking, aesthetics alone isn't enough to make these projects compelling. They have to work. But in each case, I find myself drawn to a combination of form and function That starts with the natural light these buildings draw into their interiors, and how that's achieved with some form of screening that seems at once complex and simple, eye-catching and functional.
I find it encouraging that in a time of falling home ownership and difficult issues of affordability, two of the three projects in this trio are something other than single-family homes, even if the single-family home is the most beautiful. And while none of these three projects is in the city center, they're all close in enough to be part of our traditional streetcar suburbs of the early 20th century, and thus part of largely walkable neighborhoods with existing contexts of early 20th century homes.
Writing about Treehouse, the Placeship-designed ADU, was a chance in part to marvel at how ubiquitous these structures have become across much of Portland in a relatively short amount of time. Since the City of Portland first began waving system development charges for these micro-residences in 2010, the trajectory has been a steep rise. Between 2000 and 2009, Portland issued an average of 27 permits a year. From 2016-2018, the average was 621. Even if the number doesn't stay that high, it's enough to make a not-insubstantial contribution to densifying some of our neighborhoods with mostly single-family homes, along with other types of missing-middle housing such as duplexes.
Beyond numbers, these projects are giving architects opportunities to do some of their most compelling work. At last fall's Portland Architecture Awards, three of the 20 prizes for completed building projects went to ADUs, and a fourth went to another tiny residential project. That means one in five awards went to the kind projects with the smallest budgets, the least square footage. ADUs also tend to be built by small firms and emerging architects, giving some of the award-winning designs by the likes of Scott Mooney, Webster Wilson and Open Studio Collective a special chance to show what they can do.
In the case of the Placeship ADU specifically, I liked how Ady Leverette and Chris Jones created something distinct from simple, functional moves: a somewhat steeply pitched overhanging roof that makes the little dwelling remind me ever so slightly of an Amsterdam canal house. Then there's how the second-story balcony seems to hang from that same overhang, creating a subtle crisscrossing wood pattern that enables some nice light and shadow on a sunny afternoon. The inside, specifically the second-floor great room, has a correspondingly vaulted ceiling that adds a generous volume of light and space to a what's still just an 800-square-foot home.
"ADUs are definitely a special design opportunity," Placeship's Adrienne Leverette told me. "The size, zoning and siting constraints are such that you have to be very clear about what your design priorities are, and think very specifically about how space accommodates living. As you note, constraints are extremely fertile ground for creativity. And even though there are only so many design moves you can make with such a small building, it's very satisfying to consider how a limited set of gestures can create a thoughtful order for the routines of daily life. Plus, ADUs offer an opportunity to create spatial qualities that are often missing in the dim, drafty, small-roomed (but nevertheless charming) houses that were built in the early-mid 1900s. Our patterns of living have changed a lot since then, and older houses often feel too big in some places, too small in others, and not particularly responsive to site or energy consumption issues. I think what's contemporary about ADU design is it's less about exterior form or material, and more about the ideas about living that are embedded in the buildings themselves."
Treehouse (Pete Eckert)
The house I wrote about for Dwell, the Council Crest Residence by BCJ, was interesting whether the architectural pedigree, the client backstories or the ultimate transformation was being discussed. Originally known as the Viewmaster House, it was designed for Karl Kurtz, who developed stereoscopic devices for Sawyer’s, maker of the famous View-Master toy. Its current owner and BCJ's clients, Nike executive Greg Hoffman and wife Kirsten Brady, also had a design-savvy point of view. Hoffman came to Nike from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the couple seem to have exquisite taste for art and furniture, including artwork by Ellsworth Kelly and furniture by the likes of Brazilian midcentury master Sergio Rodrigues.
The architect of the Viewmaster House was Roscoe Hemenway, who over a 30-year degree designed principally houses in traditional styles such as Colonial Revival but also, at times, designed more modern, ranch style-influenced houses. This house, completed in the early 1950s just a few years before Hemenway retired due to poor health, featured an expansive living-room view looking out at downtown, the east side of Portland and a host of Cascade mountain peaks. But while it was well designed, it wasn't such a masterwork that you couldn't change its architecture.
"The house had really good bones and there was a lot of opportunity in entering and seeing through the view," architect Robert Miller of BCJ told me. "But I get the feeling that it was a little too early an architecture to capture everything, all of the opportunities provided. Opening up the space a bit more, improving the views and flow, and adding that upper level and flattening out the roof, I think we did maintain and exaggerate a lot of the positives and added more opportunities for Greg and Kirsten to enjoy with their family."
Known best as the architect of Apple stores, BCJ was chosen for its way with glass. With that in mind, not only were walls between the dining room, living room and the kitchen expanded to include a breakfast nook and glass on three sides, but clerestory windows were added on both the ground floor (along with raised ceilings to increase volume) and the new top floor, the latter of which acts as a master suite.
Inside the Council Crest Residence (Bittermann Photography)
Like a Viewmaster toy itself, the renovated house's design—carried out by Don Tankersley Construction, among Portland's most prestigious and high-craftsmanship house builders—seems to take views and move them in and out of the frame. The architects use a solid wall along the street side as well as a hedge to main privacy, but it's still possible to stand on the sidewalk and see through the house—through glass in the front and back facades—toward the panoramic view. The second floor also balances transparency with privacy through partially frosting the glass. There is also a magnificent wood-paneled library on the second floor that, along with the living room, makes the home feel warm and very Northwest.
The architects and Hoffman had a long series of conversations about how the renovation would take shape. "I also had some specific things I really wanted," Hoffman says, "like, 'Let’s get the lines, forms and materials going from the inside to the outside of the house. Let’s make sure that’s a principle. Then extended roof lines and decks and hardscaping as far as we could go." There were structural and site limitations to just how far outward some of those decks and roof lines could go, and the client may have ultimately wanted something quieter and slightly closer to the original house than BCJ did. They pushed for more contemporary. I definitely was the gravitational pull more towards the midcentury," Hoffman explains. "At the end of the day, I just wanted this totally integrated, harmonious concept, where nothing felt out of place.
And that's definitely what Hoffman got. I'm not sure if the pictures, excellent as they are, do the home justice. Perhaps one has to be inside to fully get it, for while there were some fairly big moves in the redesign like adding a new floor and switching from a pitched to a flat roof, it's ultimately to me a subtle architecture. The renovation adds light to the Hemenway spaces, but it doesn't radically alter them. The house really does feel like a fusion between midcentury and contemporary, between old and new. It's not just about Hemenway's style or BCJ's, in other words, so much as the overall balance. There isn't just lots of light but one that's wonderfully balanced across the house without much of any glare or dark spots. Then it's about the wood walls and surfaces: the walnut bookshelves, the ipe decking on the second floor, and the Douglas fir paneled walls in the living room.
Lenox Addition Apartments (Weil Bixby Architecture)
Natural light also seems to be the dominant concern at the Lenox Addition Apartments by Weil Bixby Architecture. Instead of being arranged with double-loaded corridors with units on both sides—a big box built to the property line to maximize the number of units—the E-shaped building is arranged around two inner courtyards and places all of its circulation outdoors, which cut costs for the developers but also broke up the mass of the structure, dividing the E shape into multiple buildings in a way that allows one to see through the structure.
"It’s true there is more surface area with this type of building, but the benefit is all units get a lot of light and air," Chris Bixby of Weil Bixby told me. "I think 61 of 64 are leased up. Developers are usually obsessed with efficiency. They say, 'You’ve got 50 square feet more corridor here than you need.' Our job is to get those people off of those metrics, and infuse life into these buildings. Otherwise they’re just innocuous boxes."
And speaking of structure, the Lenox Addition Apartments' architectural signature is a combined sun-screen and balcony system. Instead of hanging a series of individual balconies off the facade, Weil Bixby united them in one scaffolding-like aluminum composition. It's really the screening that defines the building's appearance.
Like the award-winning Edith Green Wendell Wyatt Federal Building renovation downtown, it takes a functional move — reducing summertime heat gain with exterior screening — and makes it a kind of sculptural identity for the architecture. Right now Lenox's aluminum screening does produce some unwanted glare in the mornings, as one reader recently complained, but the aluminum will soon weather to a more matte finish.
"The project was really trying to do a better mousetrap: reinforcing and establishing the urban character of this corner in this neighborhood, which is predominantly one and two-story single-family houses," Bixby added. "This intersection is the one commercial node in a decent radius. If you look at the fabric around here, it’s really all houses. The idea was this would become a commercial hub. Right now it’s a Plaid Pantry and a tire store. We’re sure that will change. We really wanted to establish that corner."
None of these three projects at three scales are reinventing the wheel, but they're all thoughtful about the designs, thinking about the experiential side as much as the aesthetics, but in so doing, finding their way to aesthetics that are easy on the eyes.
Advertisements
Comments