Providence Park expansion (Jeremy Bittermann)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Continuing this multi-post look at some of my favorite architecture of the 2010s, let's step away from all those offices and turn our attention to public buildings of one kind or another: gathering places, university buildings, nonprofit community centers.
As I mentioned in last week's initial post chronicling favorite architecture of the 2010s, this is not meant to be a comprehensive list. I know there are some exceptional buildings and designs I didn't visit. This is merely a group of seven projects I did see that have really struck a lasting chord.
Park Life
In my magazine-writing work, I've wound up over the years writing more about stadiums, arenas and concert halls than perhaps any other type of project. I grew up going to Oregon Ducks football games at Autzen Stadium and Trail Blazers games at Memorial Coliseum (now officially Veterans Memorial Coliseum), not to mention the occasional play or musical at Keller (then Civic) Auditorium. There's something about thousands or even hundreds of people coming together, be it for sports or performing arts, all immersed in a collective experience that can inspire mass joy and sorrow, all step for step with what's happening on the stage, court or field.
Over the past decade, the collective energy coming from sold-out Providence Park during a Portland Timbers match is something to behold. Though the park's capacity is small, it has long generated one of the most intense home-field environments in global team sports. The crowd gives it that energy and makes the noise, but the design of Providence Park has never hurt: specifically the large overhanging roof from A.E. Doyle's original design, which ricochets much of the noise that would otherwise drift away. Plus the old former baseball park has always had atmosphere. The seats hug the field, and there isn't a bad one in the house.
All of which must have made the Providence Park expansion that was unveiled in 2018 a challenge for Allied Works. It wasn't that they were replacing a portion of the old stadium. This side, where the old baseball outfield used to be, had already been rebuilt a decade or so ago. When the latter expansion was announced, it seemed a bit absurd. But the popularity of the Timbers and the smallness of the stadium and the large season-ticket-holder waiting list created enough justification. And the Allied design was compelling enough that, once completed, the new Providence Park addition made it easy to forget the previous renovation.
Providence Park expansion (Brian Libby)
As I wrote in my Portland Tribune column summarizing my best-of-the-decade pics, "It's not easy to expand an intimate stadium without losing its essence, but the design by Allied Works only makes Timbers and Thorns soccer games louder and more exuberant. Led by Brad Cloepfil, the city's most acclaimed architect of this generation, Allied designed a host of noteworthy Portland projects this decade after spending much of the previous 10 years focused on museums and cultural buildings in other cities. That they so clearly scored with the firm's first stadium project will hopefully lead to more." Indeed, if Autzen Stadium ever gets expanded again (following an addition in 2002), I wouldn't mind Allied getting the commission.
The architects took inspiration from Estadio Alberto J. Armando in Buenos Aires, Argentina, better known as La Bombonera (, which "really stood out being surrounded by city on all four sides," Allied Works principal Chelsea Grassinger explained in a 2017 interview, "and one of side is narrow like along 18th [Avenue in Portland]. And we were inspired by the nature of it: the wall of fans and the intensity that brings. That was really the one that stuck out as inspiration for what we could do here." The Allied team also took inspiration from theaters like the Globe in London and the Teatro Oficina in Sao Paulo, for "the stacked wall of audience close to the stage and the action, and really being within the action but also intensifying the stage and the activity," Grassinger added.
Indeed, the stacked upper decks of the Providence Park expansion look unique, even though they're of an existing type. So many stadiums in America get designed by a small handful of Midwest architecture firms like Populous of Kansas City and HKS in Dallas. Allied made its name internationally with creative renovations like the Wieden + Kennedy Building and a string of acclaimed art museum projects from New York to Seattle to Denver. Design is problem-solving first, so they figured out the basic task of stacking more seats into a confined former outfield bleacher (including a cool arcade created by hovering over the sidewalk), but they also did it with style — or, more specifically, a striking visual language that both continues and expands the Allied Works voice.
Refresh as First Step
If we're talking about stadiums and arenas, how could I leave out my beloved Memorial Coliseum? Actually, I did leave it out of my Portland Tribune list of the decade's best projects. That was in part because I didn't want to seem biased. I was involved in a grassroots effort to save the building from demolition ten years ago.
What was called a "refresh" of Veterans Memorial Coliseum (as it's officially been known since a 2011 renaming) was a $5 million investment in mostly things we don't see, like a new roof. But along the way, the design by Merryman Barnes Architects also smartly removed the unnecessary glass partition at the entrance, it refinished the bottom of the glulams between the glass in a natural stain, and much more.
Memorial Coliseum refresh (Brian Libby)
The campaign to save and restore Memorial Coliseum almost perfectly paralleled the decade itself, only it got a head start. In 2009, Mayor Sam Adams announced the Coliseum would be torn down to make way for a new minor league baseball park, following the Portland Beavers' displacement from Providence Park by the Portland Timbers and owner Merritt Paulson, as part of a jump to Major League Soccer that necessitated a soccer-only stadium.
After that plan was abandoned and a stakeholder advisory committee convened by the mayor arrived back at the multi-purpose-arena plan that has always been the Coliseum's reason to be, Adams then brought to council a $32 million restoration plan that failed to come to a vote for various back-room reasons. The arena continued to break even, but then in 2016, Commissioner Steve Novick introduced a measure in City Council to demolish the building. That measure was defeated, and helped prompt a successful application to the National Trust for Historic Preservation for what's called National Treasure status, which was awarded in 2017.
This refresh is just the first step towards a larger renovation that will hopefully be in the many tens of millions. A third-party economic study commissioned by Mayor Charlie Hales found that a Coliseum restoration would pay for itself in the increased bookings as well as $2 billion in economic impact over 20 years. But thanks to the refresh, the Coliseum is already turning a profit.
Smaller Stage, Big Impact
If Providence Park is a distinctively designed gathering place, so too is the Pendarvis Farm in Happy Valley during the annual Pickathon festival.
In 2019 for the sixth year in a row, Portland State University School of Architecture students designed and built its treeline stage. This one utilized 160 wooden apple-harvesting bins to create an immersive environment suggesting an orchard of towering trees—reaching 40 feet high at the tallest point. Taking inspiration from the structure of the apple blossom, the PSU architecture students and faculty constructed a series of towers using the apple bins, lent by a Pacific Northwest fruit producer.
In 2018, the students created what they called a "grove of columns." Built using more than 2,000 pieces of lumber, the stage structure featured a grid of 113 monumental 32-foot columns that formed a wooden grove at the edge of the forest and wrapped the stage a labyrinthine series of intimate spaces for festival goers to explore, and with hundreds of cross braces towering above like tree limbs.
Pickathon 2016 and 2019 (Pickathon)
The stages, which began in 2014, have also followed a diversion-design-build concept. The stage’s building materials are re-used. In 2018, it was to construct structures at transitional houseless villages in Portland.
In an age where inequality is greater than at any point in generations, and those in the upper one-percent of incomes seem to spend ever more lavishly, these Pickathon stages represent a new generation of designers and architects who not only want to get their hands dirty building things but want to serve the public. PSU has made design in service of the public a cornerstone of its School of Architecture, and it's impressive.
Stuttgart on the Willamette
There's actually a stadium connection allowing my transition into another type of public building: the Karl Miller Center on Broadway and Harrison Street at Portland State University. The building was designed by Behnisch Architekten, which originated in Stuttgart but now has offices in Munich and Boston.
Though founder Stefan Behnisch has become an internationally renowned architect in his own right, thanks to landmark sustainable projects like 1997's Norddeutsch Landesbank (which I got to interview him about for Architect magazine in 2013), he is also the son of German architect Günter Behnisch, who designed the stadium for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich (as well as the West German parliament in Bonn).
The project, designed by Behnisch in collaboration with SRG Partnership, began with a remodel of the business school’s existing home, a 100,000 square foot, six-story building dating to the 1970s that was bulky and unimaginative. “Grim doesn’t really even begin to describe it,” Behnisch partner Robert Matthew Noblett recalled to me in a 2018 Metropolis magazine article.
Karl Miller Center (Brian Libby)
But the Karl Miller center is really all about the additions. A 45,000-square-foot expansion to the north, clad in Alaskan yellow cedar, arranges perpendicularly intersecting boxes so that they cantilever to provide shade to outdoor plazas at the northwest and northeast corners of the lot. And the real showstopper—the story of the building—is the five-story atrium bridging the gap between old and new. It fills the interiors of both adjacent buildings—especially the spaces furthest from exterior windows—with natural light.
“It’s structured in a little bit of a European tradition,” said Stefan Behnisch in the Metropolis story. “Normally in Europe for good daylight we would say, ‘Don’t make any floor plan deeper than 14 meters.’ It is something that drives us whenever we build here in the United States.”
Speaking of PSU
Portland State University actually got two new gathering places this decade (not to mention three spots on this favorites list), and like the Karl Miller Center, Viking Pavilion, an honorable mention in my decade-best list, is really a renovation plus expansion—in this case of the Stott Center— yet feels like an entirely new place. Designed by Woofter Architecture in collaboration with Sink Combs Dethlefs (now part of Perkins + Will), the building's name appears to refer not just to the school's sports mascot but to the wood-cladding on the arena as one moves inward from the lobby — it looks like some ancient ship's hull.
The Stott Center was basically an ancient rec center (it actually dates to 1966) doing double duty as the home of a Division I college basketball team, and to say it was inwardly focused is being kind. Now Viking Pavilion actually faces the South Park Blocks, which was a no-brainer, and it does so with lots of glass.
Viking Pavilion is only 3,000 seats, which is still small for college basketball, but it's much more than an arena. There is a range of student gathering and study areas, classrooms, and a cafe. The arena itself is also flexible. When I visited, there was not a basketball game but a school science fair happening there.
Speaking of Vikings
On a smaller scale from these projects, Nordia House by DiLoreto Architecture, on SW Oleson Road near the Tigard border and the Washington Square mall, was perhaps the decade's best community building.
Home to the nonprofit Nordic Northwest, which celebrates the cultures of Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, the roughly 10,000 square foot building is, as I wrote in a 2016 Portland Tribune column, "a humble but wondrous symphony of wood and natural light." Centered around a glass-walled main hall are a gallery, an outpost of the popular Nordic-themed Portland restaurant Broder, and space for everything from concerts and movie screenings to classes and dances to church services (a Lutheran congregation holds Sunday services there).
Nordia House (Jeff Amram)
When I visited Nordia House on a weekday morning, it place was teeming with life: a throng of locals hanging out in the café and a steady stream of visitors to its gallery. Part of the appeal is the setting in which it exists. Set back from busy Oleson Road, Nordia House looks out onto a protected wetland, its tall trees casting a dappled light through the glass. If you're there in a time of precipitation, the rainwater captured on Nordia House’s roof becomes a delightful waterfall at the entrance.
Community of Books
In best-of-the-decade lists I think it's easy to unwittingly favor stuff that's more recent, from late in that ten-year span. Maybe that's why I almost forgot the Vancouver Community Library by the Miller Hull Partnership of Seattle.
This was one of two Vancouver projects I had on my best of the decade list, along with the Vancouver Waterfront development, which I'll cover in an upcoming post.
The signature of this building is not on its relatively straightforward exterior but rather inside: its four-story, nearly 200-foot long atrium, which cantilevered balconies from upper floors look out upon, and beneath a beautiful slatted wood ceiling. I guess I am a sucker for any kind of wide-open atrium space.
Vancouver Community Library (Miller Hull)
Each floor has a specific collection and services with its own distinct character—I particularly remember the colorful children's section— to allow patrons to find the environment that suits them. The bottom of the atrium can feel like a public street, while the wood-wrapped reading room on level five and feel cozy. There's also an expansive rooftop deck with views to the Columbia River and Mt. Hood.
Libraries are an interesting project type. On one hand, the digitalization of media and literature means that people do not necessarily need or use libraries in the same way. Yet most libraries I visit are usually teeming with people. They're part community center and part learning center, part job-training center and part oasis. And given the unprecedented economic inequality plaguing our society today, which has only been hastened by the election of 2016, libraries are more important than ever as resources for those in need. Yet earlier this week, there was also a book-banning bill proposed in Missouri that would actually imprison librarians for sharing certain unapproved books. In this Orwellian nightmare that is Donald J. Trump's America, libraries are intellectual life preservers.
The Vancouver Community Library was LEED Gold rated, continuing a broad portfolio of work from this firm, whose work in Oregon also includes the Tillamook Forest Center and the Water Pollution Control Laboratory.
Ulysses' Opus
One of the architectural pleasures of this decade has been seeing Portland Public Schools embark on a multiyear effort to renovate and rebuild some of our local high schools. So far I've visited three renovated schools: Roosevelt, Franklin and Grant. They all had design qualities I liked, and in varying degrees they have been interesting fusions of old and new architecture.
I think of this three, though, my favorite is the most recent one I visited: Ulysses S. Grant High School, recently renovated by Mahlum Architects.
Grant High School (Benjamin Benschneider Photography)
The culmination of a five-year process that included a two-year student and community engagement effort as well as two years each of design and construction, the renovated Grant High is a vibrant, light-filled learning environment. Though its old hallways and classrooms retain the essence of the old architecture, including a choir room memorable for its use in the movie Mr. Holland’s Opus. The project also includes a handsome brick-clad new wing that meshes well with the original building.
Yet what’s perhaps most compelling is how Mahlum’s redesign clarified the original classical revival design by Knighton & Howell, which had become cluttered with ill-advised alterations. The architects also made creative use of old materials. Hallways are festooned with wood salvaged from the old gymnasium floor. Grant has become a better version of what it always was. The ornamental entry to gorgeous separate arts building, for instance, can be seen for the first time from across the courtyard because the old gym that used to stand there, a shabby 1950s addition, has been demolished and is no longer blocking it. In back, the trailers have given way to a courtyard that allows students to enjoy the school’s bucolic park-side setting.
There's still more to come in this series on favorite architecture of the 2010s. I haven't talked about any housing yet, be it condos or single-family houses, ADUs or tiny houses or homeless housing. And there's a few offices I forgot to mention in my last post. Oh, and then there's infrastructure and landscape design. But public buildings are in some ways my favorite.
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