A second-floor meeting area overlooking Chapman Square (Brian Libby)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Because of the extraordinary times we're living in, with all kinds of public events across the spectrum cancelled, it was easy to miss or forget the fact that the Portland Building's grand re-opening was originally scheduled for last month.
After more than a year of construction, and years of hand-wringing about what to do with this leaky and nearly lightless architectural landmark, the city's most famous building has been not just renovated but transformed.
Perhaps that's not so clear to disinterested passers by, who see the same colorful cladding as the scaffolding comes off and the tarp is removed from the Portlandia statue. But on the outside the Portland Building has been re-clad in an entirely different material, something that normally would be a big no-no for any such historically significant building. And that's not even the biggest change. It's inside where one can hardly believe this is the same place.
The new facade we've all been looking at for the past several months. It's what represented the most controversial aspect of the renovation, because normally, one of the most essential proverbs of historic preservation is that any material replacement, particularly on the exterior, must be "in kind": the same material, and hopefully unrecognizable from what was originally there. In this case, however, that wasn't really possible — that is, not unless one committed to the notion of lots of preventative maintenance (patching potential leaks) for the life of the building.
Portland Building in overcast skies from Fourth Avenue (Brian Libby)
To put this another way, nobody would try and build a building with a painted concrete facade today. It's considered downright primitive. So after extensive research and consulting facade experts, instead the architects from DLR Group, along with contractor Howard S. Wright and their client, the City of Portland, chose an aluminum rain screen exterior. There was understandably concern that it would look different, that it would catch the light differently.
But the facade, at least to my eyes, looks quite good. From a distance, it looks like the same Portland Building it ever was. Up close, it does seem true that at times in the morning or afternoon when the sun hits the building, that aluminum catches the light. It doesn't reflect it per se, but it's certainly less of a matte surface. However, there is no oil-canning, or visible waviness of the material. I mean, it's not as if this is the same quality or grade of aluminum that makes soda pop cans.
Portlandia from a Portland Building conference room (Brian Libby)
From the moment one steps inside, it's clear things are very different. The elevator core in the middle of the building is the same, but right there in the lobby, which had been one of the building's spaces most devoid of natural light, you can now see through the building in all four directions. Straight ahead upon entering from the west, it's possible to see straight ahead through floor-to-ceiling glass toward the east. Because the ground-floor retail spaces have been incorporated into the lobby, there are views through the glass to the north and south as well. Particularly on the ground floor, the Portland Building actually feels like a glassy building. Think about that for a minute: a building that used to feel like a bunker inside now feels transparent.
Upstairs offices were the real test, however, because there was no opportunity to create new glass walls on the upper floors. The only move the architects really had available was to make the heretofore dark glass clear and make some of the shadow boxes (where there was glass on the outside but a solid surface on the inside) true windows.
Looking out from an upstairs Portland Building window (Brian Libby)
Except that's not really true, I realized while touring the interior. They also removed the drop ceilings, which gave these floors more height and exposed the original and previously always-covered concrete coffered ceilings. This has allowed light to not only pass through the now-clear glass but to bounce off the walls and ceiling, to "wash" the rooms with light, as designers would say. It makes these offices not just brighter than they were before, but pretty much as bright as any office building considered well-lit. And they don't just feel well-lit. Because of the exposed ceilings, they feel more spacious. It's true that mechanical equipment is now exposed in the ceilings, but that's a small price to pay.
What's more, the newly-exposed concrete coffered ceiling adds a new ingredient to the Portland Building design, or perhaps more accurately, it reveals something inherent to the building that no one ever thought about before. Postmodern architecture was not just a response to decades of Modernism. I think more than anything it was a rejection of Brutalism, which rose in the late '60s and early '70s and placed an emphasis on concrete interiors and exteriors alike. Today with the hindsight of history, we can see a certain beauty in Brutalist buildings. But no doubt the Postmodernism practiced by the likes of Michael Graves, Robert Venturi and Peter Eisenmann was to Brutalism what Johnny Rotten was to Emerson, Lake and Palmer: a rebellion. Yet when the coffered ceiling of the Portland Building was exposed, it revealed a truth hiding in plain sight: being built from concrete, the Portland Building has the pieces of a Brutalist building that it then simply covered up with paint and fake ribbons.
Portlandia from a Portland Building conference room (Brian Libby)
DLR Group principal Carla Weinheimer, who oversaw the project, laughed when I suggested this and agreed, saying: "It's Brutalism in a dress."
Stripping away some of the interior clutter and making the facade glass clearer and more prevalent also better connects the interior to its Postmodern skin, or at least to its famous statue outside. I don't ever remember being able to look out at the back of the Portlandia statue before, or to look past the statue to the view outside. And I know there was never an observation deck to the side of the statue before. Now it's likely to become a tourist attraction.
Portlandia from a new observation deck (Brian Libby)
There's no doubt that this building is vastly, vastly better to work in. But let's return for a moment to the question of the Portland Building, historic preservation and precedent. It's still true that the approach to this renovation is the exception to the rule. The principles that organizations like DoCoMoMo argued for in opposing this approach to the Portland Building project are still sound: that our most important historic landmarks have to be protected, and that starts with their integrity. That integrity is normally always based first on materials, especially with regard to the exterior. And for the most part, that should not change.
However, the principles of historic preservation and how to go about it are based on our approach to an earlier generation of buildings that were well-built and used time-tested construction techniques. Many aspects of building design and construction in the 1970s and '80s turned out to be ill-suited for long term viability. Everyone knows the old adage that they don't build 'em like they used to. I think buildings like the Portland Building embody that.
As a result, we have to think differently about how we preserve certain buildings of this era. That's also necessary and even appropriate given that the intentions of Michael Graves and his design team, once they accomplished the practical tasks of creating an office building, were all about color and expressiveness: not necessarily the materials themselves. After all, did any of us ever look at the old Portland Building and think specifically about the material of its exterior cladding? I don't think so. It was all about the color and the expressiveness of the other decorations like the faux garlands.
How do we know this? After all, Michael Graves passed away before the Portland Building renovation happened, and before the design approach was announced. But the employees from his firm who were there at the time of the Portland Building's design and construction all concur that Graves would have been fine with the new cladding material. The building as built was a huge compromise of Graves's vision, because the budget was so small. Graves just wanted to get the commission, which he won mostly because his design was on budget and the other two proposals were not, and he just wanted to get the building built, like any architect. But he was willing to agree to almost any value-engineering to make the project happen, and in a visit to Portland during the time the Portland Building was threatened with demolition, he made it clear that he was fine with a variety of changes, from making the ground-floor retail spaces part of the lobby to changing out the glass.
One quibble I do have with the Portland Building renovation is that the top is now dominated by large and very visible mechanical equipment. It's not very obvious at all from the street, but I happened to have spent the past year receiving physical therapy treatments on the 17th floor of the 1000 Broadway building, and from there it does not look so good. But that's because the redesign moved the mechanical equipment from where it had been hidden on the second floor: the second floor! That meant intake vents for fresh air were just one floor above Fifth Avenue and all the carbon monoxide coming from the Bus Mall. Now that space has been repurposed. And the equipment had to go somewhere. It's tempting to think of how the original design included some small little houses on top of the Portland Building that were not included in construction. In theory, those could have been introduced for the first time and used to house the equipment. But that would have been a step too far. I guess the rooftop mechanical is just the price that has to be aesthetically paid.
The trident of Portlandia (Brian Libby)
One threat that has been hanging over the Portland Building restoration was that the approach would cause the National Park Service to rescind the building's National Register of Historic Places listing. It seems that might still happen. But you know what? It doesn't matter. We already know that the Portland Building as we see it today is not the same Portland Building that was completed in 1982. But we also know that it is small-H historic even if it's not officially capital-H historic. In fact, we know it's still far more historically significant than at least 90 percent of the National Register-listed structures in Portland. There are college-dropout friends of mine who are clearly more intelligent and learned than friends of mine with doctoral degrees. It's not about the piece of paper.
More importantly, rather than fixate on a historic or not-historic binary way of thinking, I'd rather we embrace the Portland Building as a hybrid of new and old. The more we are upfront about it being neither strictly old or strictly new, the more this work of architecture can be seen for what it is: something in between. That's not to say it is compromised but that it is a fusion. Maybe it's just the Herbie Hancock fan in me, but sometimes fusion can be even better its component parts.
I think that's the case here — so much so that it's actually arguable that the new Portland Building completes the original vision of Michael Graves and his team better than the building completed in 1982. Maybe this isn't a renovation so much as the decades-later final stage of the original building.
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Excellent analysis. I'll add more later.
Posted by: Fred Leeson | April 03, 2020 at 12:29 PM
Preservation/restoration does not have to mean frozen in time. When new materials can do a better job than the originals, they should be allowed as long as the original color, appearance and proportion remain. Back in the 1970s, I watched a Portland Landmarks Commission meeting when an architect (I can't remember the name) proposed adding a decorative element made of fiberglass instead of cast iron to the facade of a cast-iron building where a portion of the original column was missing. I assumed that George McMath, the commission chairman and father of the city's landmarks ordinance, would object vociferously. He was a bulldog for doing restorations in accurate ways. To my surprise, he approved the fiberglass decoration. "Victorians would have loved fiberglass if they had had it," he said. So somewhere in Old Town, unbeknownst to us....
Posted by: Fred Leeson | April 03, 2020 at 01:16 PM