Portland Japanese Garden Cultural Crossing (Brian Libby)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
A few days ago in a Portland Tribune column, I picked 25 of my favorite works of architecture and urban design for the 2010s (with 10 honorable mentions). I'd like to talk a little about the choices, although I'm going to break this up into a couple of posts.
Before I begin, though, I want to say that these are just 25 projects I happen to have really liked. The list is obviously in no way a definitive verdict, and I'm sure there are some great projects that may have deserved to be on this list but I somehow missed. Notice, if you will, that the Tribune chose a headline naming this Portland's best architecture of the 2010s. Here I'm just saying these are my favorites.
Why the distinction? It's not some act of false modesty. It's because I only wish I could cover Portland architecture full-time and see a lot more local projects than I do. But in an age where no newspaper or magazine in Portland has architecture writers on staff, I have to spend a lot of my work time covering projects in other cities. This year some of my biggest writing assignments had to do with, to name a few: the Chase Center arena in San Francisco, the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, the Canadian House of Commons in Ottawa, cannabis dispensaries in Florida and California, a hotel renovation in Virginia, houses in Seattle and Spokane and British Columbia, a concert hall in Guangzhou, memorials in Alabama and Boston, an apartment in Venice (Italy), and a warehouse conversion in Austin, among others. I love my job as it is, and I like writing about projects in other cities. But it doesn't leave as much time as I would like to visit every cool project in the Portland area.
I did, though, make it to these projects, all of which struck a major chord, and which for my own amusement I've separated out with subheadings named after old pop songs.
Turning Japanese
If the 25 in the Tribune column weren't necessarily completely in numerical order, an exception was my top pick, which I arrived at relatively easily; or at least it came to mind quickly and decisively: the Portland Japanese Garden Cultural Crossing by Kengo Kuma and Associates with Hacker Architects.
In particular, my thoughts first went to a café with no coffee: the Umami Café, a glass box nestled into the hillside that offers a view across the forested treetops. I may not be able to get my usual double espresso there, but the delicacy of the glass and wood composition and the treehouse-like experience it provides was a delight that transcends beverage options.
Umami Café, Portland Japanese Garden Cultural Crossing (Brian Libby)
And the Umami Café is just one of three buildings comprising the Cultural Crossing. There are two additional buildings, with spaces for gallery exhibits and lectures, classes, and a gift shop. Recalling classic Japanese pagoda architecture yet rendered with contemporary materials, it's a union of past and future. The moss-covered green roof recalls thatched roofs of Japanese farmhouses but its overhangs are made of crisp aluminum. The floor-to-ceiling glass is paired with slats of wood that filter the light in beautiful shadows. The buildings are laid out in zigzagging patterns that create more corners and bring more light inside. And the sequence of walking up that wooded hillside and up the new stairway is a kind of processional, making the Portland Japanese Garden feel even more like an enlightened oasis.
"I am convinced that the Japanese gardens can play a big role in busy urban environments. They can introduce a new way of thinking to people, a particular philosophy of contemplation and deep connection to nature and maybe even themselves, which is completely different from western-style gardens," Kuma explained in a 2015 interview. The new buildings, he added, "can function as a social space and a passage to the rest of the garden. My purpose has always been to give an identity to the building with its surroundings. Integration of the structure and its environment is what I aim for in design, and this design for Portland Japanese Garden is no exception."
Walk This Way
Although I picked the Cultural Crossing as my favorite, Union Way by Lever Architecture for developer Project^, also quickly came to mind.
It's not so much that this is an eye-catching building from the outside. It's not that this is the most ambitious projects on the list in terms of square footage or budget or even much showiness. Most of all, it's also a beautifully simple idea. Renovating an early-20th century auto repair shop in the West End that had relatively little street frontage, the design cut a central spine down the middle and lined it with micro-sized retail outlets. It acts as a passageway between two cultural landmarks: the Ace Hotel and Powell's City of Books. But being inside this passageway is really being at a place of its own. It's lined with native Oregon poplar, left naturally stained, with a succession of skylights above.
Union Way (Jeremy Bittermann)
As a result, being at Union Way almost feels like one of those artworks from the Light and Space movement by the likes of James Turrell. The purpose is to create a kind of street: to make this interior hallway feel almost like it's outdoors. Yet being there, I like to stop and stare upward for a moment, enveloped by natural materials and light.
Union Way was just one of several projects by Lever Architecture that I could have named to this list. Just a couple blocks away from Union Way is ArtHouse, an excellent dorm for Pacific Northwest College of Art. Up on Marquam Hill is the excellent Treehouse housing project for OHSU. There's Albina Yard, one of the first cross-laminated-timber-framed project in the city. There's Redfox Commons, which I have as an honorable mention on the list, and the unbuilt Framework building, which would have been Portland's most impressive and innovative CLT building. One other project, the Fivesquare house, I had on my list right up until the end but bumped off the list to add more firm diversity. But it's terrific too. Lever is definitely in the conversation for top firm in town.
True Colors
In rainy Portland, we don't just need big windows and skylights, but also, arguably, a dose of vibrant color now and then. That's why I smile every time I pass the small Fair-Haired Dumbbell office building by FFA Architecture + Interiors for Guerilla Development at MLK Boulevard and Burnside Street, and why I quickly thought of the design for this list.
Recalling the Portland Building by Michael Graves, it's an example of using the façade as an artistic canvas, in this case not riffing on architecture's past but simply becoming a mural. Absurd? Maybe. Timeless? Perhaps not. Irresistible? Definitely.
Fair-Haired Dumbbell (KuDa Photography)
The Fair-Haired Dumbbell is actually an office building, although I think more than most, people never really stop to consider its purpose because the colorful facade is so much its story. It has small windows like the Portland Building, but because the overall footprint is small, the natural light levels inside are much better.
This has been a divisive project: like the other buildings at Burnside Bridgehead that have been completed, people either seem to love or hate them. When I've professed my affection for the Dumbbell in social media, people have often argued against the building by saying the paint will fade over time and that it's not very robustly built. I don't disagree, but a repaint isn't such an impossible thing, and I don't mind some thin walls if the place has some kind of inspiring presence, which it does. The Dumbbell is also a counter-balance to the other Burnside Bridgehead buildings, all taller and tending to be clad in dark metal, with its vibrant colors and in its modest scale.
The Fair-Haired Dumbbell also comes in the context of Guerrilla Development's portfolio, into which it fits more congruently than FFA's portfolio, quality firm as FFA is. Whether it's renovating older buildings, such as The Zipper or other buildings on Sandy Boulevard from utilitarian single-story warehouses and car dealerships, or new construction like The Rocket on Burnside or the Dumbbell just down the street, Guerrilla stands out for its quirky creativity and how these seem like passion projects more than pure business ventures.
9 To 5
From here I'm going to move from individual buildings to a category. My Tribune list was more of an art than a science, I guess you could say. I wanted to think about trends and project types and what they said about the economy and society along with beautiful buildings. So I'm going here with some commercial projects.
We tend to think of housing as the story of the decade: the overwhelming need for affordable places to live, the proliferation of accessory dwelling units and tiny houses, the march of mediocre apartment buildings. Yet as the economy boomed after recovering from the Great Recession and the upper income brackets disproportionately benefited (especially after t2016), office projects came in large numbers, and often with large ambitions.
Today with more and more people telecommuting, and especially with digital and mobile technology allowing one to work anywhere, offices buildings are competing for tenants with greater emphasis on shared spaces inside and outside — amenity spaces, as I've often heard them called: someplace you can take your laptop to work, or meet a friend for coffee. We have seen the open-office configuration come to more and more companies as well, although seemingly often to the chagrin of employees, who like the greater variety of workspaces but not the loss of their cubicles and privacy.
Expensify (Garrett Rowland)
One of my favorite office projects transformed an old bank. The Expensify headquarters by ZGF Architects at SW Fifth and Stark, for the app developer of the same name, reminded us that the First National Bank downtown had always had an incredible atrium, but the design also transformed the space with contemporary insertions into the Beaux-Arts shell. I particularly like the two floating metal-and-glass boxes at the back of the atrium, which provide extra meeting space while also juxtaposing stylistically against the ornamented original setting.
In adding Expensify to the list, I wrestled with that age-old question when it comes to renovation projects: how much credit should go to the original building, and how much to the renovation architects? Often it's a matter of how the original was transformed. That's why projects like the Wieden + Kennedy Building by Allied Works, for example, have always ranked high. In the case of Expensify, the two contemporary boxes floating in the back of the atrium definitely make it clear that this is not simply a fixed-up old building. There is also some exceptional interior design work in some of the attendant spaces surrounding the atrium. Yet it is still that original light-filled atrium that makes the place special, with its glass roof creating the sensation of a Victorian railway station. All that wide-open volume and light: it's the kind of architectural space I love the most. Yet I still decided to give ZGF enough credit to put this project on the list, because sometimes when you have a wonderful architectural experience, it's best not to over-think it too much. Walking into Expensify was one of my favorite building tour experiences of the last decade. It was the fourth project I thought of after the Cultural Crossing, Union Way, and the Fair-Haired Dumbbell.
The headquarters for ad agency Swift by Beebe Skidmore at NW 17th and Overton, for (once again) developer Project^, had less to work with in renovating a group of utilitarian adjoining concrete-block warehouses in Slabtown. In that way, it's more akin to the aforementioned W+K space. That's probably not a coincidence, since firm co-founders Heidi Beebe and Doug Skidmore worked for many years at Allied. In both cases, you feel the bones and textures of the modest but large original, but no one would mistake the new building for the old one.
Swift Agency (Jeremy Bittermann)
The firm has a way with breathing new life into old structures, be it a warehouse or a house, with big, bold geometry and plenty of glass. But their work also has a kind of organic quality, as if they've responded to conditions as much as they've imposed their architectural will. There are often little architectural quirks with a Beebe Skidmore project born from responding to an existing condition. They don't just seek the blankest canvas they can create in that old shell. Their Lincoln Street Residence also made my top 25, although I'm going to hold off on talking about that one until the next post; suffice to say it boldly reinvents a traditional Craftsman-style house. Without question, this was one of my favorite firms to emerge in the 2010s.
One North by Holst Architecture, built at North Williams and Fremont for developers Eric Lemelson, Nels Gabbert and various partners, is a curvy confection outside and offers light-filled atrium of its inside. In this decade there seemed to be a lot of creativity with window apertures: either giving them wide or angular surrounding frames or, in this case, having the window seem to curve outward from the facade. Was it a move born of function? Doesn't seem to be. But does everything really have to be resolutely functional? You can trace the case for delight as a central responsibility of architecture all the way back to Vitruvius. On one website, I read a description of one north as "Gaudí-esque."
One North (Andrew Pogue)
Holst went through a big transition in the 2010s. Firm co-founders John Holmes and Jeff Stuhr (the first two letters of each's last name gives Holst its name), though still relatively young for architects—a profession where practitioners often seem to work past traditional retirement age—sold the firm and retired. I say more power to them. I wouldn't mind retiring right now. It also gave the group of employees who bought the firm from their former bosses—Kim Wilson, Kevin Valk, Dave Otte and Renée Strand—a chance to leave their own mark.
The buildings that have come since naturally have a slightly different voice than Holst buildings with the founders. But it's dynamic, responsive and attractive stuff. I could easily have added a new-era Holst building to the list, such as the excellent 72Foster or the Rockwood Boys & Girls Club. But I believe some of the new leaders and continuing staff members had a hand in One North too.
Field Office (Hacker Architects)
As an honorable mention on the Tribune list, I also had Field Office by Hacker, one of numerous handsome office projects the firm completed over the decade. I could have easily included the firm's design for First Tech Credit Union headquarters in Hillsboro, at its time of completion the largest CLT-framed office building in the United States, which also had a nice atrium of its own. But Field Office, like its name indicated, was an interesting exercise of trying to integrated indoor and outdoor space in a variety of places within what was also a fairly long, thin constrained site along the railroad tracks. Oh, and guess who the developer was? Project^.
I could also have easily chosen any number of other office projects, especially interior renovations of old warehouses. As more and more creative businesses moved to the Central Eastside Industrial District in the 2010s, many made thoughtful use of the raw spaces available. Others breathed new life into some of the wonderful 19th century buildings of Old Town and the Skidmore Historic District, which in its way is more valuable to the city than the construction of some entirely new office tower — and inherently more sustainable.
I've only covered a portion of the 25 buildings on the list and the 10 honorable mentions. You can read the Tribune column to get the whole roster, but in the next post I'll be looking at some of the public buildings, multi-family and single-family housing, and some urban/landscape design projects that were favorites as well. And in a post to follow, I also hope to look at some great designs by local architecture firms of the past decade that I didn't include on the list but are just as compelling: their work in other cities.
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