Visiting Tree Farm: color and whimsy enliven an ordinary office

Tree Farm as seen from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard (Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

It was only a month ago that I visited Tree Farm, the new Central Eastside office building designed by Brett Schulz Architect for Guerrilla Development. But of course late February, before the coronavirus pandemic reached our shores and quarantining set in, now seems like a year ago.

What does the coronavirus have to do with Tree Farm? Why even mention the pandemic? Well, in a time of anxiety, when we have quickly learned to follow death counts and infection rates, the whimsy of such architecture is only more pleasing. Or at least it is to my eyes. In a sense, the wallpaper-like colorful painted exterior walls and the series of small tree plantings suspended from its facades are like the springtime blossoming flowers and tree branches accompanying this period of otherwise grimness.

Tree Farm's west-facing facade (Brian Libby)

The first thing to say about Tree Farm isn't about the trees or the paint job on its façade, however, but its location.

Walking there, I first came to City Liquidators, that longtime Central Eastside institution with a quirky array of used furniture and other items. The many colorful little flags strung over the street between its two buildings made a perfect processional leading to Tree Farm. It's also right beside the extended Morrison Bridge ramp over the railroad tracks, which gives drivers a close-up view of the building's upper stories as they cross the Willamette or prepare to merge onto Interstate 5.

Flags and used signage outside City Liquidators (Brian Libby)

Yet right at the same intersection, next to the other side of the ramp, is Montage, another place that's been around for decades and, like City Liquidators, has a delightfully strange ambiance that's part old New Orleans, part Tom Waits song, and part Portland underbelly — with oysters.

In the context of this block, it would almost be weird if a conventional-looking building were built here.

And with the popular Lebanese restaurant Nicholas scheduled to relocate to Tree Farm's ground floor, this ought to be a fairly busy urban hot spot, and a sign of the times that the Central Eastside is continuing to transform. There may still not be people living here, but the Central Eastside's destiny is not industrial per se. Re-zoning of the neighborhood has set all this in motion.

Montage, Tree Farm's neighbor (Brian Libby)

We can't really talk about Tree Farm, however, without mentioning its predecessor, the Fair-Haired Dumbbell, about a half-mile north at Burnside and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Developed by Guerrilla and designed by FFA Architecture and Interiors with completion in 2017, its wildly colorful facade, painted by Los Angeles artist James Jean, has continued to be a conversation piece.

Certainly these mural-like facades are not to everyone's taste.

"Rather than let architecture do its own heavy lifting and command the eye through the poetical and functional qualities of form and space, architects are increasingly taking the easy way out and shoving more and more of the responsibility for beauty and spatial interest onto the realm of two-dimensional art," wrote art critic Richard Speer in a recent Visual Art Source review.

Referring to the Dumbbell specifically, he added: "During construction the exterior was an appealing eggshell color, which accentuated the project’s quirky shape and lent it an ambiance that felt at once prehistoric and futuristic. At last, I thought as I saw it taking shape, a building we can be proud of: an individual among clones! Then one day as I was crossing the bridge I saw what can only be called a bastardization in progress: the pristine façade was being desecrated with a vulgar hyper-chromatic mural depicting what looked like abstracted protozoa as viewed by a lab tech on L.S.D. The building’s form had been lost in a glut of cutesy, iPad-generated-looking claptrap."

The Fair-Haired Dumbbell (Brian Libby)

I've long been a fan of Speer's art reviews, and though I'm a fan of both the Fair Haired Dumbbell and Tree Farm, I think he makes some fair points. It's true that the irregular patterning and sizes of the Dumbbell's facade, which would be eye-catching and unique on its own, competes with or may even be obscured by the loudness of the colorful mural. By that rationale, the small trees suspended in pots from this building's façade compete with the colorful exterior paint job. Both buildings read as quite busy, aesthetically speaking.

Yet I'm not sure I would characterize the relationship between murals and architecture in exactly the same way that Speer does. For starters, I would distinguish single-wall murals seen mostly on windowless portions of buildings from the four-sided painted patterns on the Dumbbell and Tree Farm.

It's true that in recent years we've seen a proliferation of murals in this city as regulations (originally meant to minimize billboard advertising) were eased. But when I go looking for murals, it's rare that I ever find one on anything but a windowless façade, and I can't recall a single one that took up more than one wall at once. In most but not all cases, these are simply blank walls that, without a mural, would simply be blank walls.

Murals near NW Third Avenue and SE Sandy Boulevard (Brian Libby)

To me the Fair-Haired Dumbbell and Tree Farm form a slightly different category from windowless facades painted with murals. Once we have that established, it's perhaps easier to see them for what they are: relatively cheap office buildings.

Today commercial office design is undergoing somewhat of a transformation. For higher-end companies, it's increasingly about having large shared spaces: a multitude of places where one or more people can take their laptops and work. When I've visited high-profile, award-winning works of commercial architecture, the places where people cluster their desks are almost an afterthought compared to shared spaces full of plants and sofas, and highly transparent interior architectural spaces that break down the barriers between indoor and outdoor. There is already developing as well a preference for mass-timber buildings over traditionally drywalled office interiors and low ceilings.

The funny thing about both Tree Farm and the Fair-Haired Dumbbell is that for all the wild paint colors on their exteriors, or in the latter case for all the trees festooned to its four facades, these are actually rather no-frills, even throwback office buildings. If you're inside the Dumbbell and you forget for a moment the irregularly-patterned and irregularly-sized windows, it's actually a bit like being in a commercial office in 1998. I don't mean that as a wisecrack or even a criticism per se. But I think it might serve as a bit of an explainer, and in a way it brings these two buildings back around to partially resembling the mural-covered facades I just got done saying were different.

Tree Farm facing east, from MLK Boulevard (Brian Libby)

If I think about these colorful facades and Tree Farm's signature trees in the context of being just vibrant wrappings for modest-budget office buildings, it makes sense that they would be effective signifiers to a certain segment of the creative class that couldn't afford high-end spec offices teeming with glass and secondary hang-out spaces but also didn't want to settle for some dreary office-park setting. Renting office space in one of these buildings, there is no rooftop deck or sun porch to hang out at, no room for extra sectional sofas and tropical plants. But there is an architectural coat of arms that people remember. It's the youth hostel to a high-end spec office building's boutique hotel.

Tree Farm's colorful painted exterior, and the Dumbbell's, also for me harken back in some hard-to-define way to the quirkier side of the city's personality, the one mocked on shows like "Portlandia" but very much a badge of honor, particularly as a nostalgic antidote to homogeneous gentrification. It reminds me of a car that used to often be parked on my street in Southeast Portland in the late '90s and had been hand-painted in a rainbow of different colors.

Tree Farm's paint job is a bit more like wallpaper than a mural in some ways. Whereas the Fair-Haired Dumbbell was required to go through a public and open artist selection process in step with Regional Arts & Culture Council strictures, this building started non only with the architects consulting an arborist, but also a color consultant who picked out a custom blue color on which local artist Michael Paulus could then create a kind of floral stencil pattern.

Perhaps because Tree Farm's patterning extends to all four sides, while it may not remind me of any single wall mural, this building and the Fair-Haired Dumbbell do remind me of Miami's Wynwood district, where a whole stretch of blocks with old warehouses has been painted in vibrant colors. I guess for me, Tree Farm and its sister building could be seen as the beginning of something. Why not remake the Central Eastside in color?

Then there are the trees themselves. The intent, as architect Ben Carr of Brett Schulz's firm explained, is for the strawberry trees to grow no more than about ten feet tall — only a foot or two larger than the trees as you see them in these pictures I took in February. Strawberry trees, I'm also told, are native to the Mediterranean but have been in Oregon a long time.

Why have trees affixed to the side of the building? Well, it means that when you look out from the building, you'll always be looking past vegetation, much as I'm doing as I write this: looking past a rose bush by my apartment window at the view beyond. And the more urban one's existence is, the more we need touches of nature. Will these strawberry trees have a big impact on anyone's mental well-being? Probably not. Again, the trees may be more of a signifier: that along with those who love colorful quirkiness, environmentalists are welcome. That sounds pretty trite, actually, but I think there's a kernel of authenticity there. If you can't have your office building built in a grove of trees, why not bring the grove of trees to the architecture?

Don't get me wrong: there is a skeptic inside me that, on occasion, looks at Tree Farm or the Fair-Haired Dumbbell and thinks it's all a bit absurd. But you know what? We don't have enough absurdity in our architecture. What we do have is a huge amount of cookie-cutter buildings. So while I may not necessarily be the target market for these relatively cheap yet colorful and vibrant office buildings, I am very glad they're there. It's kind of like how I hate tattoos but I'm glad there are tattoo parlors. The best cities are the ones that feel like the widest diversity of communities and generations have made left their fingerprint.

And in grim times like these, I certainly welcome a little fun.