Redfox Commons (Lara Swimmer)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
In the eyes of the jury, Redfox Commons stands alone. At the annual Portland Architecture Awards, handed out by the Portland chapter of the American Institute of Architects, there are often multiple winners of the night's top prize, the Honor Award. Last year, for example the Honor Award went to five projects. In 2009 and from 2012-16 it went to two projects, and in 2011 the Honor Award went to six projects. In the last decade, only 2010 and 2017 have seen just one project win this top prize.
Indeed, Redfox Commons, which I visited earlier this year and wrote about for a September Portland Tribune column, is impressive. Though the name of the building always makes me think of comedian Redd Foxx and the sitcom Sanford & Son, I was dazzled by the wide-open volumes provided in this pair of 1940s warehouses totaling some 66,000 square feet, as well as the bounty of natural light coming from their skylights and from a glass-ensconced interstitial space between them. The original trusses were sandblasted and remain exposed, becoming a focal point, especially given the new 80-foot clerestory windows that were added to each roof. The exterior is rusty metal, taking on the deep acorn hues. Located near the dramatic colonnaded entrance to the 1905 Lewis & Clark Centennial Exposition, Redfox Commons is also part of a new wave of gentrification that has crossed from residential areas south of NW Vaughn Street and into a heretofore-industrial area.
Outside (Jeremy Bittermann) and inside (Brian Libby) Redfox Commons
If Lever was the sole Honor Award winner, there will still plenty of other prizes to go around.
The 2030 Award, which is presented by the AIA Portland Committee on the Environment to projects with exemplary sustainable-design credentials, went to two projects. One award, reserved for unbuilt projects, went to the Great Smoky Mountains Institute Second Campus in Townsend, Tennessee by Hennebery Eddy Architects.
The other 2030 Award went to Tillamook Row in Portland's Eliot neighborhood, designed by Erica Dunn and Green Hammer. Tillamook Row, which I visited last December and wrote about in a Portland Tribune column, is the first multi-family residential project in Portland available to renters that achieves net-zero energy usage. Designed according to Passive House standards, the five-building, 16-unit development gets all of its electricity from a rooftop solar array and takes advantage of massive cisterns to harness rainwater.
Tillamook Row (Green Hammer)
The Merit Award, essentially the silver medal, was given out four projects.
The River District Navigation Center, designed by Opsis Architecture, was one Merit Award Winner. A 100-bed homeless shelter located on surplus Prosper Portland-owned land on NW Naito Parkway beside the Broadway Bridge that also offers on on-site medical clinic and an array of other services.
River District Navigation Center (Opsis Architecture)
Spearheaded by developer Homer Williams and Dame and funded largely from a donation by Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle (as well as money from Multnomah County), it has been a controversial project: Portland Design Commission approval was appealed by a nearby condo owner and the cleanup plan approved by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality was challenged in the Oregon Court of Appeals by developer Jim Winkler, who owns an adjacent office-zoned property.
The design utilizes a premanufactured Sprung structure, stretching heavy-duty fabric over an aluminum frame. Meant to be somewhat easily movable, it's basically a glorified tent. But the fact that it's been sufficiently embellished and its volume carved into with skylights and storefront windows makes this into a pragmatic architecture with dignity and a shelter that feels like emotional as well as physical protection.
Another Merit Award went to the Jarrett Street 12, a rental apartment project of a dozen units designed by Architecture Building Culture and located on North Interstate Avenue along the MAX line.
Jarrett Street 12 (Architecture Building Culture)
Utilizing modular construction techniques, the project saved money through its reduced construction time. The units were craned into place in just two days. But it's not just quickly built. Jarrett Street 12 is detailed well. The architects get light and shadow from the overlapping facade cladding and slightly offset windows. It's a contemporary building with a subtle hint of the classic base-middle-top configuration. This was one of two awards Architecture Building Culture won from the AIA this year.
A Merit Award also went to the High Desert Residence in Bend, designed by Hacker Architects. As seen in photos, the cedar-clad and glass-ensconced home is a fascinating series of intersecting planes, with a large double-height wall of glass and its overhanging eave stretching to meet upper and lower rectangular wall forms that appear like a series of dominoes or matchbooks. The composition reads as space that's been cut into as much as something that's been erected. But it's not just for aesthetics' sake, or not simply the aesthetics of the house as viewed from outside. These moves help selectively frame views.
High Desert Residence (Jeremy Bittermann)
Though wholly its own, the High Desert Residence makes sense in the portfolio of Hacker, which has worked frequently in the Bend area, particularly since principal Corey Martin joined the firm—lots of beautiful, gently sculptural wood-clad stuff—and it is comparable to Martin's pre-Hacker houses of the early 2000s. Yet the house in its kinetics and reduced geometry also slightly resembles a house in Portland for the same client by Seattle firm BCJ, known as the Council Crest Residence (which I wrote about earlier this year for Dwell). When the relationship is right, design-savvy clients only enhance the work of talented architects, and sometimes they even become a collaborative design voice of sorts.
Hacker was a double winner on the night, also picking up a Merit Award for Berwick Hall at the University of Oregon in Eugene. This project was one of two winners at this year's Portland Architecture Awards that was actually completed back in 2017, as was the Jarrett Street 12. I believe the rules allow one to nominate a project completed as far as two years back, but I wrestle a bit with whether this eligibility window is too large.
Berwick Hall (Jeremy Bittermann)
That said, Berwick Hall is impressive. Provides a permanent home for the Oregon Bach Festival and part of the University of Oregon’s School of Music and Dance, the venue is broken into two portions: the office bar and the rehearsal room. Together, they provide space for program rehearsals, recitals, lectures, and receptions, as well as administrative offices and support space for the OBF staff. The rehearsal room in particular seems impressive, which Hacker's awards submittal likened to an instrument itself. Its walls are shaped for optimal acoustics: curved at the top and flat at the bottom, with the top corners pulled back. There are also variable acoustic banners that can adjust sound qualities. Berwick Hall is also energy efficient: 63 percent better than a building designed to simply meet energy codes.
And now for a quintet of winners for the Citation Award, the AIA's bronze medal.
Silica (Daniel Kaven)
William Kaven Architecture's Silica office building took home one such award. Designed for developer Ruben J. Menashe, The Silica places three stories of leasable office space over ground-floor retail. A concrete base gives way to timber framing above, the wood ceilings and columns revealed through a glass curtain wall. As I wrote about in a 2018 Portland Tribune column, what seemed evident to me beyond the materials and forms was that The Silica gets the details right. Its scale is right for Williams: dense enough for the future, yet modest enough to be congruent with nearby houses.
A Citation Award also went to Lever Architecture's design Oregon Conservation Center, which is the headquarters for the local chapter of The Nature Conservancy. Before Lever (one of this year's quartet of multiple award winners) got involved, this was an eyesore of a Southeast Portland office building, which the architects re-clad in pre-weathered steel while also adding a glass-and-wood-ensconced new addition. At first I was confused as to why the home for an environmental organization like The Nature Conservancy would be clad in what looks like rusty metal. To my eyes, it works better at Redfox Commons, and it seems to give this project more of a post-industrial than an ecologically-minded look. But as Lever's Thomas Robinson reminded me on a tour, very little nature exists in a vacuum. The cladding is a remember that human-made objects will eventually become part of the landscape again. And the steel-clad upper portions now float above the base of the building in a way they didn't before, giving the composition a sense of lightness and breaking down its mass.
Oregon Conservation Center (Jeremy Bittermann)
A Citation Award went to Building 2 of the Center For Health and Healing at Oregon Health and Science University, on its South Waterfront campus. Connecting to the original Center for Health and Healing with both its third and fourth floors, the building is clad with a glass curtain wall in interlocking patterns that express the building’s interior functions. (The first seven of 15 floors are dedicated to ambulatory care, outpatient surgery, and an outpatient care unit while the next three floors line the perimeter with treatment rooms).
There aren't many cuts or indentations into this fairly monolithic building, and the reflective blue-gray glass doesn't offer much transparency, but it does provide a mirror to the nearby riverfront and to other South Waterfront buildings, and the facade through its patterning has a dynamic quality.
OHSU Center for Health & Healing Building 2 (ZGF)
The last two Citation Awards went to an officially unbuilt design and to a completed house in West Vancouver, British Columbia.
Works Progress Architecture won a Citation in the Unbuilt category for 7 Southeast Stark, which is currently under construction at that address, beside the freeway overpasses connecting I-5 and I-84. This type of building could easily be an eyesore, simply because it's more parking garage than office building, with four levels of steel-framed, glass-clad offices sitting atop five levels of concrete parking garage. Yet the WPA design breaks down this mass into what reads as a series of smaller basic blocks, thanks to some semi-translucent screening on portions the parking-garage levels and an upper glass-clad portion that tapers back diagonally from the southwest to the northeast corner. It's almost like a Rubik's Cube with a few of the pieces taken out on two corners.
7 Southeast Stark (Works Progress Architecture)
Architecture Building Culture received a Citation Award for the Howard residence in West Vancouver. Situated on a triangular property sloping downward from an adjacent railroad track, the boomerang-shaped house wraps around a front courtyard, which southern exposure bathes in summertime sunlight.
The interior is divided into two intersecting wings: a two-story portion that allows one to look down from a mezzanine at a double-height kitchen in the center of the house, and then, past a glass-ensconced hallway along the front courtyard, a single-story wing with three bedrooms cantilevered over a small ravine.
Howard Residence (Andrew Latreille)
One thought about the jury, which was comprised of Montreal architects Cécile Combelle of Atelier Barda, Kiel Moe of McGill University and Kim Pariseau of Appareil Architecture: I was somewhat surprised to learn that they did not actually come to Portland. My understanding is that the trio stayed in Quebec in order to avoid carbon-producing travel by commercial air.
Is it wrong for the jury not to be physically here for their deliberations? On one hand, having observed a few Portland Architecture Awards jury sessions over the years, I know they don't visit projects in person anyway, even when they do come to Portland. Or rather, they may visit a few projects to confirm the decisions they were already leaning too, but because it's too logistically difficult for them to see all the entrants, they're doing it by looking at pictures anyway. But something about the remote jury deliberations still feels funny. At least when they come here in person they're getting a sense of the larger urban context. And if they want some help deciding on, say, an Honor Award or a Merit Award for some particular project, they do still at least have the option to visit in person. What's more, staying in Quebec means the jury process is no longer a conversation with the community. When the jury has come to Portland in previous years, they've presented their work and observations at an annual jury-critique night. They attended the awards ceremony. It meant that these jurors stood behind their decisions not just figuratively but literally. Certainly it's important for all of us to be mindful of cutting carbon, but there a lot of ways to offset the carbon generated by three people getting on flights. Why not have the AIA commit to planting 50 trees for each juror instead? Or is it really just a fundraising question?
That said, the jury did well, I think. Or at the very least, if I'd have been a member of jury with those three Montreal architects, I'd have supported most all of these projects winning awards
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