The Portland Building under construction, 6/20/19 (Brian Libby)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
In an article for CityLab published yesterday, I wrote about the latest in a long line of controversial moments for the Portland Building, that flawed landmark of Postmodernist architecture that is now in the final stages of a transformative renovation and reconstruction.
This latest round of press, not just my article but a host of different national design publications and local media, has resulted from an announcement by the City of Portland's independent auditor, Mary Hull Caballero, found a lack of transparency as the budget has grown to $214 million and equity grants not been given out. What really interested me, though was the audit's finding that from a historic preservation perspective, the project was "on track to meet the baseline renovation goals but will fall short of other aspirations.” In particular, “the exterior design chosen to address water leaks will result in the circa-1982 building’s de-listing from the National Register of Historic Places.”
I was surprised by this last part of the audit, because when I wrote about the renovation design by DLR Group in 2017 for an article in Architect magazine, I remember the city's spokesperson, Kristin Wells of the City of Portland’s Office of Management and Finance, making it clear that they were willing to lose the building's National Register listing in order to pursue an over-cladding to the original concrete facade in order to stop the leaks once and for all. "In our kickoff meeting, the first thing we said was, ‘We will absolutely solve our envelope issues—period’,” Wells explained in that article.
What I wanted to know about the audit and its criticism was whether anyone from the City of Portland, as the Portland Building's owner, had ever explicitly, in writing or verbally, identified the National Register listing itself as the measuring stick for honoring the historic integrity of the building. I posed this question to city auditor Tenzin Gonta, who works under Caballero. She cited project records “that reference historic integrity being part of scope. Each references the listing on the National Register as background about the building but not maintenance of that status as a specific goal.” That was what the audit was criticizing the City of Portland for: not losing or potentially losing the National Register listing, but rather in not coming out and explicitly saying it was worth paying that price.
"It’s not the auditor’s job to say, ‘This is or isn’t historic preservation.’ But if you go back, the team [of client and architect] really presented it as a historic preservation project," said Kate Kearney, president of Docomomo Oregon, in a portion of my interview for CityLab that didn't make it into the article. "They made a case for it. But in reality, they never came out and acknowledged that it could be de-listed."
It's not that the aluminum over-cladding is the only big change being made to the building, nor is it the only one that will substantially change its aesthetics. Simply switching the dark glass for clear glass gives the exterior a different composition. But nobody seems to argue much with that decision because it is so transformative for the interior. As DLR Group's Erica Ceder explained in the CityLab article, “The old glass that we pulled out of the building had a visible light transmittance value of 7 percent,” Ceder said. “The replacement glass is 77 percent.” That and trading drop ceilings for higher exposed concrete structural ceilings (painted white) has made the interior transformation absolutely incredible, as I saw on a recent construction tour.
Rather, it's the over-cladding that seems to be the rub for some preservationists, and understandably so. Other landmark 20th century buildings have had their facades replaced, like the UN Secretariat building by Oscar Niemeyer and Lever House by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, both masterworks. But those were essentially in-kind material replacements, whereas the Portland Building is putting metal over the painted-concrete facade.
"If you cover the character-defining features, how is that historic preservation?” Kate Kearney, president of the Oregon chapter of Docomomo, argued in the CityLab article. “Personally, I don’t think that holds up."
Rendering of the Portland Building renovation (DLR Group)
Could they have patched the leaks without the over-cladding? Absolutely. “What the city said was, ‘We want you to give us a warranty for 10 years,’" architect and historic preservation expert Peter Meijer, who wrote the Portland Building's National Register listing in 2011, told me in the 2017 Architect story. "A repair of the existing façade will get you a warranty for three to five years, depending on the sealant, but not a 10-year warranty. The city raised the bar on their expectations to the point where there is only one solution: to completely cover it up with a brand-new skin. But metal panels will really never be able to have the same look as a painted concrete building.”
It was enough to prompt some critics, such as Antonio Pacheco of Archinect, to declare that the building has done more than lose its National Register listing. In Pacheco's words, or at least the headline-writers at Architect, the Portland Building is "no longer historically significant." On Twitter, Pacheco even went so far as to say he wished the building would have been torn down if the original architecture was not preserved. At least then, he argued, it could have served as an inspiring cautionary tale.
But buildings aren't museum pieces. I wonder if Pacheco ever walked the building, seeing its astonishingly dark interiors illuminated by oppressive fluorescent lights, or inspecting all the water damage.
Kristin Wells from the City of Portland got more specific about that patch job in today's CityLab article. "Keeping punched windows in a concrete shell sets us up for leaks again. At the end of the day, you’re still relying on caulking and re-caulking every five to 10 years," she said. "We do not want to be back in this situation again.”
A preservationist could still argue that caulking and re-caulking the Portland Building every five to ten years was not an unreasonable responsibility, and done right, it could stay ahead of the leaks. I mean, some beauties just require more maintenance. I used to own two old BMWs, and the first one in particular was, in my mind, more beautiful than any new car in production in 2019, and by a long shot. But the upkeep on that Bimmer was so expensive that it actually made it costlier to own a 1983 car than to buy a brand-new one. Eventually I had to get a Volkswagen. So has the Portland Building gone from a BMW to a Volkswagen? No. It's a BMW with some new parts that made it no longer authentic to its showroom-floor self. But it's a better ride than ever.
If one goes looking at the Portland Building with an eye for precedents, sure, there's reason to be alarmed. "It’s precedent-setting," Kearney said. "If it’s okay to over-clad a building from this era, then you’re going to perhaps make it okay for others. What if this happened to City Hall next door? Would we be okay if it was clad in metal? The era is not the issue." Of course that's a bit much. It's stretching the argument to an extreme hypothetical example. But it's also an argument rooted in principle, which has to be respected. We need people making these kinds of principled arguments, even if the Portland Building may be an exception.
Speaking of which — this notion of deciding whether or not this renovation is right or wrong — the one thing that frustrates me a little about the audit is the timing. I love that the City of Portland has an independent auditor. That's an effort to bring integrity to what the city is doing. It's very much a good idea to audit the Portland Building process. I even remember at the time being somewhat shocked by the notion of the over-cladding and openly wondering if such drastic action was a good idea when all that really was required to make the old facade work was essentially just some extra pro-active maintenance.
Portland Building reconstruction, 6/10/19 (Brian Libby)
Yet I decided back then that I would ultimately withhold judgment until I'd walked the completed building and had a chance to live with the renovation a little bit, and talk to the people who work inside. You don't need to wait for that later date to talk about the principle of a landmark building's facade replacement with an altogether different material, because that discussion is not about whether or not the inside of the renovated building is better. Of course it will be better — but at what cost to history? That's the question. Yet even having said all that, I find it odd that the audit is prompting another round of debate about the Portland Building that is neither at the design stage nor at the completion stage. It feels like the mother is in labor and we're in the waiting room arguing about whether to have the kid.
The one decision I do already find myself moving towards, or anticipate having after the building is completed, is that maybe there is no definitive answer. It reminds me of my days as a movie critic back in the late '90s and early '00s. Some movies had clear good guys and bad guys. Some movies ended with closure for the characters — they'd ride off into the sunset after surviving the big plot complication. But other movies came with antiheroes and ambiguous endings. The stars weren't solely virtuous and brave, nor were they demonically evil. They were actual people in evocatively real-life situations, and part of the essence of the story was that you have to accept the ambiguity and lack of closure.
I find the Portland Building as architecture to somehow aspire to be one of those movie heroes: the pure good guy with transcendent power. But it turned out to be the flawed hero in search of a final resolution that may never come.
I think it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that the interior of the new Portland Building blows away the interior of the old Portland Building, and besides, that old interior lacked Graves's fingerprint. "I didn’t do the interiors,” Graves reminded me in 2014 interview for Architect magazine. “I’m blamed for them, because of the [dark] windows. But I didn’t do the interiors of the building.”
These interiors are not just so much more full of light and with bigger, less compressed volumes of space thanks to the removal of the drop ceilings, but they connect the inside of the building to the outside so much more. You're not relying solely on the tiny square windows anymore because the middle portions of the facade wash the whole space with light and give the eye more of a sense of panorama coming from a view across the different windows.
Yet I do suspect that in some ways the be paid will be a slight bit of authenticity lost that one learns to live with, much as the rebuilt old buildings of Germany and Japan that I've visited have felt. Visiting Nuremberg and Berlin and Tokyo, and seeing some "old" cathedral or temple that was essentially rebuilt from rubble and a couple of standing walls after World War II, I knew that they were not as purely old and historic as, say, a cathedral in Britain or elsewhere in Europe or Asia that survived. (In Japan it seemed less of a conundrum because their culture ritualistically rebuilds some of its most sacred architecture.) But it's hard to argue definitively against those cities' desire to rekindle the best of their cultural heritages, and reclaim them from fascist' manipulation and corruption of heritage.
The Portland Building is not some ancient relic, of course. Just the fact that it had such systematic problems a mere 35 years after its completion says something: through the City of Portland's own cheapness, it was inherently flawed from the start. You have to respect the fact that it's not inherently flawed anymore, either in terms of its construction or the user experience. But the ambiguity of its authenticity, or at least the multi-faceted and mult-era nature of that fingerprint, has to be considered an indelible part of the Portland Building story. That's not just true right now, however. In a way, it's always been true. After all, that's really what the architectural language of Graves's design and Postmodernism are about.
As I've said before, maybe it's fitting that the renovation of this Postmodern landmark is itself postmodern. The Portland Building: postmodern Postmodernism.
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Brian – that was a great article you wrote on the status of the Portland Building. I just so happen to come across it at the same time I was rereading the excellent book Frozen Music (1985, Gideon Bosker & Lena Lencek), specifically the chapter titled “Postmodern Face-off”. The authors describe the context surrounding the building’s design and construction, which sat fresh in their minds having written it a few short years after the building came on line.
From the beginning, the City required a design-build process for the Portland General Services Building, with a general contractor acting as lead consultant to ensure that budget, office layout, and energy efficiency would take precedent. To address the demand for a large building with a low initial budget that yielded low operating costs, the obvious direction was to design a simple box comprised of mostly insulated walls, covered with some sort of acceptable (and inexpensive) surface treatment. That is exactly what the Hoffman Construction/Michael Graves proposal provided, and along with a few not-so-subtle nudges from Philip Johnson, that team was awarded the contract.
Within a few short years the building began showing signs of engineering and construction failure. This failure extended into the interior, with Pietro Belluschi, a consistent critic of the building, asserting that “. . . when you go inside, it has no respect whatever for the people who have to work in it.”
Ironically, while the building was failing in many core construction categories, its aesthetic made it a stylistic landmark. The Portland Building became known for . . . well . . . being well known, much like a Kardashian. Is it a good building? Not really. Do you know and recognize it? Yup, absolutely. Its recognizance made it significant (and worthy of listing in the National Register), while its physical failings made it a general liability.
Fast forward to current times, with the City compelled to address the building deterioration by evaluating three options: sell the building and site; demolish it and build new; or conduct a full rehabilitation. Much to their credit, the third option was selected, with the added mandate to not just repair the building, but to actually fix it. In a way, this current City Council was forced to fix the sins of the 1980s Council, and to the tune of over $200M.
The rehabilitation project requires changes to the building’s envelope, disrupting or removing and replicating the original aesthetic elements. To continue (to death) the earlier metaphor, this Kardashian is getting a facelift. This strategy is pretty much a cardinal sin in the historic preservation field, but makes very good sense in envelope design. The big question to ask is this: though losing its material integrity, does the Portland Building retain its aesthetic integrity? If that answer is seen as ‘yes’, or even ‘mostly yes’ then maybe this tradeoff is a good and proper one. In the long run, creating a new and healthy Portland Building that accommodates contented tenants might be considered our gift to future Portlanders, and that is something they might consider to be truly worthy of significance.
Posted by: Paul Falsetto | July 22, 2019 at 10:15 PM