Luuwit View Park picnic shelter (Brian Libby)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Skylab Architecture has taken triangles a long way.
When I write it that way, it sounds like a joke or at least a backhanded compliment. But what I mean is that I've long been interested in the notion of an artistic or, in this case, architectural fingerprint: an identifiable visual style that, ideally, malleable enough to be applied to be applied to a succession of projects.
Particularly in architecture, having an easily-identifiable fingerprint can be dangerous or hard to pull off. You don't want your firm's style to be so recognizable that it becomes cliché. And design is a service industry. What if your client doesn't want that style? Yet clients often self-select based on what they think of a firm's style. Yes, design is about function first, and whether you're Skylab or another firm, those needs have to be met. But in that way, architecture is perhaps like clothing: it can be made to fit the wearer, yet can do so in any aesthetic style.
Over the past decade or more, Skylab Architecture has been a firm with one of the most distinct fingerprints in town. I said in that opening remark that it's about triangles, but of course there's more to it than that. Skylab buildings have a signature angularity, as if chomping at the bit to break out of the confines of the box. That's true of 2007's 12th and Alder building and 2013's Columbia Building for the Bureau of Environmental Services, both of which won major AIA awards. It's true of Yard, the controversial apartment tower completed at the east end of the Burnside Bridge in 2016, and it's true of the firm's upcoming Serena Williams Building at Nike. In some of these cases, the building itself still is a box. But Skylab seems to give each one a sense of kinetics and a touch of angular geometry.
Recently, as I wrote about in a Portland Tribune column, I saw that Skylab language applied expertly to a simple picnic shelter at Luuwit View Park, adjacent to Shaver Elementary between the Argay and Parkrose neighborhoods. The project, part of the broader park project completed in 2017 from a design collaboration with landscape architecture firm 2.ink Studio, recently won an American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athanaeum Museum of Architecture and Design.
Luuwit View Park picnic shelter (Brian Libby)
Having just driven into the parking lot of Luuwit View Park, exiting what seemed like a sea of subdivision homes in a landscape largely devoid of mature trees, the picnic shelter stood out, like some large-scale metal origami sculpture. Yet when I opened the car door, the sound of children frolicking was impossible not to notice. Before the sidewalk takes you to the shelter, closer to the parking lot to the east is a children's play area that was quite busy considering it was a Monday morning. Besides the young kids climbing around the play structures, other kids were skateboarding, while dog-walkers crisscrossed the adjacent fields. This park was hopping.
And the southern portion of Luuwit View Park I visited was only a part of a larger whole, including a skate park to the north and a dog park to the west, and plenty of grassy open space in between, totaling over 15 acres.
An overhead view of the park (Google Maps)
The metal and concrete shelter, built over a simple tubular steel frame that's painted yellow to highlight its structure, is comprised of equilateral triangle modules that are replicated in the forms of the roof and walls. According to Skylab's web page devoted to the project, the "folded angular forms are influenced by the triangulated peaks of the surrounding mountains, Native American plank houses, and river fishing platforms." For me, it's still more like an origami bird, maybe because the walls roof seem to be less a kit of parts than one large wingspan that not only protects visitors from the elements but frames views of the mountains beyond. As I said in the column, this structure seems ready to take flight, which is all the more appropriate given the stream of low-flying jet planes landing at nearby Portland International Airport.
Though the design fingerprint of Skylab comes through, it also makes me think of some other precedents. One is the Lumber Industry Pavilion by celebrated local midcentury-modern architect John Storrs, a hyperbolic parobaloid structure built in North Portland for the Oregon Centennial Expo in 1959 but destroyed in the Columbus Day Storm of 1962.
Lumber Industry Pavilion, Portland (Architectural Heritage Center)
Another is the BHP Pavilion Confluence Park in San Antonio by Lake Flato, a concrete shelter of similarly sculptural qualities that also collects and funnels rainwater into a water catchment system. There the geometry is less angular, but curving forms still double as practical shelter and artful installation.
Confluence Park, San Antonio (Lake Flato)
Just using the phrase picnic shelter conjures a kind of purely-functional shed. It's a less fanciful reason for being than the Lumber Industry Pavilion or the BHP Pavilion, both of which make the sculpture itself and its soaring quality the point. I like the fact that the Luuwit designers were able to do something this eye-catching with not a pavilion but a place where potato salad will be served.
This park was actually completed a couple years ago and is not the most recent of Skylab's work. The firm has Sideyard, a four-story building clad in brick and built from cross-laminated timber that's opening at the Burnside Bridgehead soon, a foothill to Yard's mountain and part of the ongoing laboratory for architecture enabled by Will Bruder's master plan. There much of the geometry is squares rather than triangles: an intersecting series of transparent and masonry blocks; yet even there, a little angularity in the roof line is what sets off the whole composition. Something similar is happening on a larger scale with the upcoming Serena Williams building at Nike (but I don't dare post a rendering given how protective and proprietary the company can be about press and imagery). I'm excited to see both buildings in person.
Luuwit View Park picnic shelter (Brian Libby)
Meanwhile, I can't help but feel a sense of delight at the Luuwit View Park shelter, and the park overall. I'm also not the only one. Not only were there all those people there on the day I visited, but when I posted a few photos of the shelter to Instagram, it got an enthusiastic series of comments from a spectrum of people.
But particularly succinct and perceptive was what Portland State University professor Andrew Santa Lucia had to say: "Near our house and we love it there! It’s really impactful design with a keen awareness of the changes in landscapes, picturesque frames and several spaces for activity. It’s just real impressive!" I don't mean to sound like a cheerleader for this picnic shelter, or to make Andrew into one. But I think for both of us, the place just caused us to smile.
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