Tanner Point (Brian Libby)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
When I first began following the work of Hacker Architects nearly 20 years ago, the firm's portfolio seemed heavily weighted toward public buildings. There were award-winning libraries like the Woodstock and Hillsdale branches of the Multnomah County Library, museums like the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center near The Dalles and the High Desert Museum in Bend, theaters like the Thomas Theatre at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and Berwick Hall at the University of Oregon in Eugene. But there were few offices and residential buildings. Now, however, Hacker has made those two most basic of building types more of its bread and butter.
Hacker didn't start designing offices yesterday. A decade old now, for instance, is the Mercy Corps Global Headquarters along Naito Parkway. In 2013 the firm renovated an old warehouse for the Downstream headquarters a few blocks away. But in recent years, Hacker's office portfolio has ramped up with projects like the Simple headquarters in the Central Eastside and Field Office in Northwest, near the Fremont Bridge. Recently I visited two more offices designed by the firm: the First Tech Credit Federal Credit Union in Hillsboro, and Tanner Point here in Portland in the northern Pearl District.
The First Tech project, which I recently wrote about for Metropolis magazine, is noteworthy primarily because it's constructed with cross-laminated timber, the material that is quickly transforming the building industry with wood buildings that can go taller and are both more fire-resistant and more seismically resilient than conventional "stick-built" buildings, as wood framing is commonly known. At five stories and 156,000 square feet, First Tech became America’s largest CLT-framed building by area when it opened this past summer.
First Tech's headquarters is both a great and lousy location. The company wanted to be near its tech-industry clients, and indeed, Intel and others are close by. The location is actually north of downtown Hillsboro, adjacent to the airport. It's not far from the edge of the urban growth boundary, and it felt like it: strip malls, big-box retail, office parks, and giant surface parking lots, with nearly zero pedestrians or bicyclists in sight. (The Hillsboro Library is actually close by, but it still doesn't feel urban or even modestly-dense suburban.) And as one first enters the First Tech parking lot, it's another ocean of asphalt and automobiles. Yet once I reached the office building itself, there was a little delight: not even the architecture itself just yet but the site of a small wetlands: water, trees, grass. That's something you can have in the suburbs, and which the Nike World Campus has made excellent use of. At best, suburban corporate campuses can feel like college campuses with buildings sprinkled into a park-like setting.
First Tech Federal Credit Union (Jeremy Bittermann)
Hacker's building for First Tech is essentially boomerang-shaped in order to wrap itself around the U-shaped greenery preserve. The LEED Gold-rated building's long, fairly thin floor plate also means that you're never far from a window. The design also makes it easy to access the outside. Though the windows are not operable, on each floor there are balconies carved into the facade, providing every department with easy access to fresh air. Then there's the ground-floor commons, a large, terraced gathering space that spills from the second story to the ground floor and looks out on the wetlands through a double-height wall of glass. In summer, some of the panels can slide away to join an outdoor plaza in a combined indoor-outdoor space.
The wood sets the tone for the interiors. Thanks to raised-access flooring, the beautiful timber ceiling remains relatively uncluttered. The offices are full of natural light thanks to floor-to-ceiling windows. There are also patterns throughout the space inspired by nature. When the sun disappears, for instance, artificial lights mimic natural illumination. Ceiling-mounted LEDs are filtered through perforated screens to create the effect of a tree canopy’s dappled light. The interiors at First Tech are actually my favorite part of the project.
Outside, the facade alternates long, thin metal panels and glass in varying widths, with gives the composition a sense of kinetics. The balconies and some cantilevering on the side of the building, combine with its thinness to keep this from being just one hulking box. This kind of pattern language feels slightly common these days: something populating a lot of architecture magazines and online media. And the metal, while in theory it becomes a kind of mirror for the natural setting around it, or a nod to the high-tech Silicon Forest setting, feels a little sleek to my eyes, and is to my eyes somewhat of a mismatch for the soft warmth of the interior. I wish one could get a sense of the wood both outside and in, like one does in certain other Hacker projects. But don't get me wrong: if I were Siskel or Ebert, I would give this whole production an enthusiastic thumbs up. I just think the best part of the architecture is experiential in this case, more than as an object.
First Tech Federal Credit Union (Jeremy Bittermann)
Tanner Point, Hacker's new Pearl District office building, sits at a fascinating crossroads. The building is situated along the railroad tracks and is more or less adjacent to Union Station on NW Ninth Avenue between Northrup Street and Overton Street. Ninth Avenue is the only street for several blocks in either direction that connects to Naito Parkway just on the other side of the tracks, so this has always been a natural point of congregation for pedestrians and cyclists when a train is passing. Hacker's design even creates a little outdoor plaza along the sidewalk that passers-by are able to access and have a seat until the railroad-crossing guard rails tilt back up again.
The design also takes advantage of the irregularly-shaped site to take on a trapezoidal shape: basically like a triangle but bending a bit at the top (the north side) to contour with Ninth Avenue. Though square-shaped as it meets the corner of Northrup and Ninth, as it stretches out to the southeast and northwest along the train tracks Tanner Point gets pointy. It's from these vantage points that I like the building best, where the large glass panels allow one to see through two facades at once: an effect I always love noticing at my favorite building in Portland, Memorial Coliseum.
Tanner Point from Ninth & Overton (The Wilbert Group)
In fact, Tanner Point seems to me halfway between a glass office tower and a shorter masonry building. It's really more the latter, with two roughly-textured materials contrasting with the glass: a very tactile-looking brick fired with manganese and without the use of glazing, and pre-weathered steel panels with a kind of dark orange oxidized color. The patterning is interesting because the widths of the three materials vary in different parts of the building. Hacker's designers understood that the best views were at the north and south corners and as it looked west down Ninth, so there is more expansive glass in those places.
More than most buildings I've been to in the central city, Tanner Point seems to have great views in every direction. It's a stone's throw from Centennial Mills, where that beautiful old last remaining mill building with the water tower still stands, despite Prosper Portland having one redevelopment agreement after another fall through. (Just make it a ruins park already, for God's sake!) That north view looking toward the mill is also framed by the nearby Fremont Bridge. To the east one can look out beyond the tracks to the river and beyond. That southeast corner of Tanner Point frames Union Station and the US Bancorp Tower quite nicely. And that view west down Ninth Avenue is special too, because of how the building, from that vantage point, appears to hover right over the middle of the street (enabled by Ninth turning slightly from east to northeast here).
It's worth noting that Tanner Point is not made with wood. When I visited its as-yet-unleased spaces, there was concrete everywhere: the floors, the columns, the ceilings. I say that not in a derogatory way at all. In fact, I love it when one material is used for multiple planes and surfaces.
A view out (Brian Libby) and the sixth-floor deck (The Wilbert Group)
The building is also interesting in how it reflects certain office design trends. Today, particularly in the speculative office market, as this project and Hacker's excellent nearby Field Office project are, developers have learned that companies and their employees want a so-called third place, or what's known as an amenity space: somewhere to do work away from the office fray. Both Field Office and Tanner Point offer a not-insubstantial amount of square footage where you can escape. Tanner is really a building in two parts: the first five floors, which basically extend to the property line, then the sixth through eighth floors which are set back, creating an outdoor deck on the sixth floors. That sixth-floor deck becomes an outdoor deck, and the ground floor, which was originally reserved for retail, is now one big lobby with a fireplace, where both tenants and the public are able to congregate.
Tanner Point also comes with a concierge service located in that ground-floor lobby, which seems to be a response to shared office buildings by WeWork and other companies where the building manager won't just call for repairs when something is broken but is there to be a kind of host. It's uncommon for buildings to use their lobbies as amenity spaces, because they can so easily feel like pass-through spaces (which they are). Yet it's in some ways a smart move for Tanner Point because it mixes private and public space. I'm told there will be some kind of micro-retail offering—like a coffee cart—in the lobby. That, at least in theory, along with the view of the trains going by, might make the lobby a place that is more than just the lobby of an office building. After all, people already hang out right outside when a train comes. The big glass-ensconced lobby would seem to be enticing when one of those long, slow freight trains is going by for the better part of a half-hour. And even if it's just nominally like a public space, that still gives Tanner Point a leg up on First Tech through its urbanity—that and the fact that there's a vibrant neighborhood outside with food & drink, park and transit options.
When I began this post by talking about Hacker's earlier era of mostly public buildings, I could have easily talked about how founder Thomas Hacker and his teams imbued those designs with a sense of soulfulness. They were never ornate spaces, or even necessarily elaborate ones. But they always had great light and a reverence for simple natural materials. What I like about some of these present-day Hacker office designs is somehow they retain a little of that DNA. I can't necessarily tell you that First Tech or Tanner Point are light years beyond what other firms might have designed, but it's not an insubstantial thing to say I've scarcely ever encountered a Hacker building that wasn't handsome, whereas there are big firms in town who design lots of offices and condos, and not a single one is very good looking, inside or out. Particularly in the case of central-city office buildings like Tanner Point and Field Office, though, I think these buildings will be somewhat timeless. They both stand out from and feel like seamless additions to the urban fabric.
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