Portland Architecture

In Search of Portland returns for second podcast season

The former 10th & Alder food cart pod (Nicolai Kruger Studio)

 

BY BRIAN LIBBY

After a long delay, I'm happy to announce that Season 2 of my podcast in collaboration with XRAY FM, In Search of Portland, just debuted yesterday.

I hope this post doesn't read as shameless self-promotion, but I think readers of this blog will find the show interesting. It's a slightly different focus than Portland Architecture, which is not to say that new buildings aren't of interest, but simply that on the podcast I like to feature places with layers of history. Be it a building completed in 2020 or 1920, those sites always have a past, and that past, along with the present and future of that site, collectively say something about our city.

For this first episode, our destination is what’s currently a construction site downtown at 10^th and Alder called Block 216. It’s set to become a 35-story tower: the city’s fifth-tallest building. A five-star Ritz-Carlton hotel is planned here, as well offices and condominiums.

The tower was designed by GBD Architects, the local firm I talked to last season for an episode about the Portland Armory. GBD has designed lots of towers like Block 216, but they’re complicated to pull off: veritable cities unto themselves. The client is BPM Real Estate Group. On its website, GBD explains:

"At 844,117 square feet, the project will likely be the largest Portland building of its era, and it will house a complex blended program: 160,000 GSF [gross square feet] of office, a 249-key five star hotel, and 138 for-sale private residences. Between residential and hotel uses, floors 19 and 20 are dedicated to amenities shared by the hotel and private residences. The amenity spaces on level 19 include a double-height pool, a spa tub, showers, lockers, a fitness area for residents and guests as well as a spa facility that will be open to the public. The amenity spaces on level 20 include a restaurant, and bar, and guest lounge. The ground level will bring 13,000 square feet of lively retail, three distinct entry lobbies for each use, as well as loading, trash, back of house, and the hotel bar."

 

Renderings of the future Block 216 tower (GBD Architects)

 

During the pandemic with millions filing for unemployment, I’ve wondered if construction might come to a halt. After all, that’s what happened during the last recession, to the nearby Park Avenue West tower. So far, though, construction on Block 216 has not ceased.

But ultimately the new tower is not why I decided to make a podcast episode about this block. Instead, I wanted to look back, first at the parking lot that was here for a half century starting in the 1960s, with special attention to the 10^th and Alder food cart pod located here until recently. I got interested in Block 216 for how it told a more than century-long story about the city.

For most of the past century , downtown has been dotted with surface parking lots. One company, City Center Parking, for much of that time enjoyed a near monopoly. These lots were consistently profitable. I mean, what’s better than an asphalt block that needs no upkeep, no investment, but regularly returns each month many thousands of dollars in revenue? Portland prides itself on being one of America’s more pedestrian-friendly cities, with an urban growth boundary encouraging high density over suburban sprawl. Even so, until recent years downtown was a kind of checkerboard of these simple surface lots.

Thankfully, though, that’s changing. The Goodman family sold City Center Parking 10 years ago and kept much of the land from those surface lots, allowing a nice re-invention as property developers. Many of these lots now have buildings on them, or will soon. That’s why Block 216 is a construction site today.

But I think most people walk past the construction crane at 10th & Alder and think about the food carts that were here. A little over a decade ago, Portland’s culinary scene exploded with mobile street food vendors, as a generation of talented young chefs and entrepreneurs went DIY.

And we all benefited, because in Portland’s food carts could find a lot of international cuisines you wouldn’t have been able to find in brick and mortar restaurants.

10^th & Alder was just one place out of many in the city to find these movable feasts. But in the late 2000s and early 2010s this block became a destination: not just for hungry office workers and students and tourists, but food media from all over the world.

In this episode, I first talk with Brett Burmeister, editor of the Food Carts Portland blog, about the 10^th and Alder food cart pod and the explosion of street food in Portland. Brett ate at his first food cart in 1991 and has roughly 1000 visits to street vendors in Portland and beyond. He’s has been featured by CNN, The New York Times, Saveur and The Guardian, among others. 

But before the parking lot and the food carts came an earlier history, with buildings dating back to Portland’s 19^th century beginnings.

There was the Selling-Hirsch Building, completed in 1896, which was not only a beautiful three-story work of architecture but over the first half of the 20^th century its tenants tell a story of America, from political activists protesting to give women the right to vote to the women’s suffrage movement to in the 1910s to a training center for Red Cross nurses during World War II.

 

Selling-Hirsch building, 1965 (George McMath, via Architectural Heritage Center)

 

There was also on this block the People’s Theater, part of a huge boom in Portland theater building that even helped prompt the renaming of Seventh Avenue to Broadway. It was completed in 1911 as just the second movie theater in Portland. It was built by the People’s Amusement Company, founded earlier that year, which eventually grew to control over thirty theaters across the Pacific Northwest. On its opening night of 11-1-11, a performance by opera singer Arthur Ellwell was followed by a comedy film short called A Disturbing Canine. General admission was ten cents.

Designed by Newcomb Engineering, the People’s Theater featured a Classical Revival style with three massive arched openings atop its elevated grand staircase, all modeled after 1875’sParis Opera. Carved classical muses to the left of the arched entries represented music, drama, and cinematic art. Inside, the lobby was trimmed in Mexican onyx and there was a custom $10,000 organ.

People's Theater (Architectural Heritage Center)

In 1929, the J.J. Parker Theaters chain purchased the People’s Theater and renamed it the Alder Theatre, with added seating and a new projection booth. But a year later, as the Great Depression arrived, it was sold again and renamed the Music Box (one of numerous downtown theaters to hold that name). But the theater closed in 1952, torn down shortly thereafter for the surface parking lot that remained there until 2019

The episode’s second interview is with Val Ballestrem, education manager at Portland’s Architectural Heritage Center. I talk with Val about the buildings that used to stand on this site like the Selling-Hirsch and the People’s Theater, and the people who built them.

One thing I realized working on this episode is that Block 216's past and present have a lot to do with recessions. It was the Great Recession of 2008 that helped give rise to the food-cart movement in Portland. The People's Theater was sold on the eve of the Great Depression. It was torn down during the recession of 1953. And going further back, it was the Panic of 1893 that set in motion a house on this block being torn down to make way for the first commercial building here, the Selling-Hirsch.

In the weeks and months ahead, our second season will feature seven more buildings and sites.

The second episode is all about the Ladd Carriage House, another 19th century gem that, against all odds, has survived all the way into the 21st — but only after surviving a demolition threat courtesy of owner First Christian Church in 2006. In that episode, I talk to architect and historian Paul Falsetto about saving the Carriage House, and interior designer Tracey Simpson about creating the wonderful restaurant inside: The Raven and Rose.

In Search of Portland's third episode focuses on Centennial Mills, the former complex of flour and seed mills that, perhaps more than any other site in the city, set Portland's economic engine in motion. Owned by the City of Portland for the past two decades, it was initially set to be cleared for an extension of Waterfront Park, but after public outcry over demolition, has seen a succession of redevelopment proposals fall through, and the city agency charged with managing the process, Prosper Portland, also has since demolished nearly all but the tallest flour mill building. In this episode, I talk first with historian, Portland State University professor and former Oregon Historical Society director Chet Orloff about Centennial Mills' history, and then with Prosper Portland's Lisa Abauf about efforts to redevelop the site.

I have to give thanks to all those who have helped make In Search of Portland. Nonprofit radio station XRAY FM produced the show, with a special assist from editor Jonathan Covington-Brehm. Mutual Materials and Capstone Partners are sponsors of the show. Architect and illustrator Nicolai Kruger creates an original drawing to go with each site we feature. Maxwell Griffin provided graphic design, including the show's logo. And the show's music is courtesy of Beauty Pill.

I was surprised to discover that in 2019, In Search of Portland was actually XRAY's top-rated podcast amongst the many it produces. It took me some time to learn recording from home, but it's great to be releasing these episodes again. It's fun to dig a little deeper.

 

 

 

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An upcoming departure: discussing ZGF's Portland International Airport redesign

Rendering of the future Portland International Airport (ZGF Architects)

 

BY BRIAN LIBBY

It has already been named America's best airport for the seventh straight year. Why change it? Maybe in order to keep being named the best. Airports are always changing.

And as nice an experience as PDX may be compared to larger, more cacophonous airports, it was clear that between the front door and the entry into various concourses — that whole first half of the experience — a seismic shift was necessary.

Recently the Port of Portland unveiled a series of renderings by ZGF Architects to show the major renovation coming. It will be perhaps the biggest transformation we've seen at PDX, even bigger than the removal of that carpet everyone loved.

The Portland City Council purchased the present 700-acre PDX site in 1936 and asked the Port of Portland to sponsor a Works Progress Administration grant to develop the site. Construction of the airport steadily employed over 1,000 workers, and has been called Portland's most significant public works improvement during the New Deal era. The land they chose along the Columbia River had been frequently covered by flood waters, which required the addition four million cubic yards of sand and a series of dikes to stabilize.

Opened in 1941, it was first designated Portland–Columbia Airport to distinguish from then-operating Swan Island Airport. During World War II, the airfield was used by the United States Army Air Forces. The airport originally had a terminal on the north side of the acreage, off Marine Drive, with five runways forming an asterisk. This configuration was adequate until a new terminal and a longer, 8,800-foot (2,700 m) east–west runway were constructed in 1952.

A new terminal opened in 1959, and though it has been expanded and altered numerous times, it’s essentially the terminal we have today. With it came construction of a second east–west runway to the north, and the asterisk became taxiways. "International" was added to the airport's official designation as Swan Island closed. The PDX terminal building was renovated and expanded in 1977 and again in 1986 and 1994, when Concourses D and E were added. The Oregon Marketplace, with its restaurants and shops, was added in the former waiting areas behind the ticket counters. An expanded parking garage, new control tower, and canopy over the curbside were finished in the late 1990s, topped off (both figuratively and literally) by PDX's signature glass canopy between the parking garage and the terminal, completed in 2000.

More recently, there has been unveiled newly expanded Concourse E  (designed by Hennebery Eddy Architects and Fentress) set to open next year, and a new Concourse B by ZGF Architects.

But the big Kahuna of a project is transform the airport’s core: the ticketing and lobby areas, which a new design by ZGF is poised to do. When the project is completed in 2025, they will nearly double in size. A few weeks ago, ZGF and the Port of Portland released the first renderings, and they're pretty dazzling — especially a wood and glass roof that will stretch over everything and fill the airport with light.

 

Rendering of the future Portland International Airport (ZGF Architects)

 

To learn more about the design and the thinking behind it, recently I spoke with Sharron van der Meulen, managing partner of ZGF's Portland office, and partner Gene Sandoval.

Portland Architecture: After the pandemic people are going to be excited to travel. The new PDX won’t be ready for years, but could you talk about the meaning of travel in our lives and how that impacted the way you approached the design?

Sharron van der Meulen: It’s one of the things that we talked about in the beginning stages. How do you get back to the romance of travel, and how do you express that in a building? There’s so many people, me included, who love to go to the airport and to travel. I think it’s really exciting, the experience, and we talked a lot in the beginning about how to channel that energy, and bring excitement into every step into the passenger experience, from curbside into boarding your plane.

We have somewhat of a paradox in that PDX is already top rated by media and in surveys, yet a lot of its configuration is outdated for how we travel today: focusing restaurants and shops pre-security, using spaces for security that weren’t designed for that purpose. What was your assessment?

Gene Sandoval: Everybody loves the Portland airport. Locally and nationally. That was the tall order. How do we evolve the airport when it’s really seven or eight buildings pieced together since 1954? How do you create that airport that people love? And don’t fuck it up, right? And also, Portland has evolved. This airport is really a generational airport. We have to forecast what Portland will be in 25 and 50 years. It will be more international. It will be even more of a gateway to the Pacific.

We studied a great amount of airports, so we know where things are heading: the passenger experience, the processing, the technology. And we also saw airports far afield. The challenge is you have this big floor plate and this big roof. That allows flexibility for when things change with processing passengers and security. But Portland is this quaint, intimate airport. How do you give it that flexibility with that big roof that ties it back to the past?

 

Aerial rendering of the future Portland International Airport (ZGF Architects)

 

One thing I’ve always noticed about Portland International Airport is that it’s quieter. There doesn’t seem to be the cacophony of noise that I associate with some big airports. Some of that is down to differences in size and passenger volume. But I’ve noticed that PDX is one of the few airports I’ve been to with carpet instead of hard-surface floors. Did  your preliminary research touch upon that?

Sandoval: We were on the project for about three years before we started designing. We wanted to know what makes it. It’s the sound, it’s the finishes, it’s the natural light.

van der Meulen: You’re kind of spot-on with the concept of the carpet, but what you might find interesting is that our acoustical engineers disagree. As we have learned, sound has a general propensity to travel upward. The surfaces on the floor don’t really do anything to mitigate. But what you’re getting at is probably even more important, and that’s the psychological idea of what that feels like. When you’re walking on something underfoot that’s soft, it’s more comfortable.

What are some of your favorite airports in the world? How might they have influenced the design?

Van der Meulen: Gene’s is gonna be Hong Kong.

Sandoval: That and Madrid.

Van der Meulen: I would say Hong Kong over Madrid. There’s a reason why they’re usually one and two on lists. I think that Singapore is also amazing: completely over the top and beautiful.

Sandoval: Don’t forget Oslo. It  was really the first big international airport done in wood. Hong Kong was the first modern re-interpretation of the airport in the world. It’s something a lot have used since then. Madrid was an evolution over Hong Kong. It had a cultural expression. It also has a wood ceiling. And it just feels like Madrid. And then Changi (in Singapore) because of the biophilia, the use of the natural environment and natural vegetation. It’s an airport in a garden, really.

 

Singapore's Changi Airport (Nat'l Geographic), Madrid's Barajas Airport (Diego Delso)

 

I’m curious about how the sequence of the major pieces of the experience might change in terms of layout or function: the ticket counter, the journey through security. Particularly when flying from gates on the south side of the airport, I’m aware of how dark and low-ceilinged the space is. It seems like something that could be opened up.

van der Meulen: This idea of compression is something we talked about from the beginning. It starts with the [outdoor] canopy we designed many years ago, this welcoming structure. We knew we needed to kind or re-celebrate that and look again at how that starts the experience: what it feels to enter it, to see it. And then you walk into essentially the new ticket lobby of the airport. We talked a lot: ‘Should it be compressed, should it be open?’ You get this one chance. We decided it needed to be a really tall space. But beyond that point, it gets compressed so you go through a threshold before you go into the new space we’re calling the Market Hall. It’s like the Oregon Market. It becomes open again, and you have wonderful views out to the airfield or to the apron. Then it compresses again as you go through security. It’s more quiet, and it’s a much more controlled environment, so that people don’t have to kind of deal with their stress in their environment. So it’s this kind of series of experiences of feeling very open and you’re in a large kind of space with skylights, to going into more of a compress.

With a lower ceiling, you can control the acoustics more. We all know that by far the security lane and that whole process for passengers is the most stressful. There could be a whole series of things that hold them up. And it’s all related to getting to your flight.

Speaking of which, I’ve always been curious as to how digital information could get more specific and up to date. Often when I’m picking someone up, the text I get from that person upon landing beats the airport’s own data on the TVs. Yet the question of digital information has also changed: what we used to look for from the TVs we can now retrieve instead on our phones. So how do you plan for that?

Sandoval: We always think about airports as physical spaces, but the digital experience is really tied to that. The experience of travel nowadays begins the night before you fly. You start that with your phone interface: whether you want to change seats or check in bags, then you wake up and look at your fight departure info. And a lot of things are changing. There was talk of Uber picking up your bags, for example. Every aspect, the phone could be incorporated into the process. That kind of joining of physical and digital interface is the future of flying.

van der Meulen: You’ve hit on one of the most important aspects, Gene, and that is total flexibility. You don’t know where the technology is going to take us. No one of our generation probably goes and checks in at the ticket counter, unless we have to check a bag. But believe it or not, 50 percent of the population likes to still go up to the counter and have some kind of exchange with a real person. We are caught between generations right now. As we move through the next five to ten years, we’re going to be depending on our smart phones more and more. We won’t really have to engage with too many people. Even with security: biometrics are really going to take over. Not to get into a whole Covid conversation, but that’s actually going to propel the US into pushing that technology forward.

Gene, I remember talking with you informally about the airport design in the past. You’d say something like, ‘I can’t show you yet, but wait until you see this. It’s the biggest project of my career.’ So to each of you, what about the design do you think will most get people excited? Forgive me for putting it this way, but what will be the Instagram-able moment?

van der Meulen: I think the new Instagram-able moment is really going to be the roof structure. You’ve seen the renderings, right? The inspiration came quickly but it took a long time to get it right. It’s a wood structure, obviously, and that seems like a natural for a lot of reasons—sustainability, and it’s a local resource. And we knew we wanted to celebrate that industry in a big way. I think this will be the largest project ever completed in the state of Oregon. I think every part of it needs to embody not just Oregon but the Pacific Northwest. I think people are going to be blown away by the roof structure. What they are going to see is how beautifully it’s detailed and how beautifully it interacts with natural light. It’s one thing to do a real cool form, but it’s another to work with the natural environment outside, and I think this building will do that.

 

Rendering of the future Portland International Airport (ZGF Architects)

 

Sandoval: The interior finishes are amazing. There’s a lot of inspiration. We had a conversation about Crater Lake Lodge and Timberline Lodge. It’s all about natural materials: granite, natural wood. I think this airport is going to be that way. It’s very Oregonian. It’s about the things that come from the land. So those will be the finishes. And we’ll capture a lot of natural endemic building materials.

van der Meulen: Obviously the wood roof is probably the best example of that, but there’s other ways we can tap the natural talents of this region, and whether it’s in ceramics or leather-making or other goods, we’re really trying to think about the industries in the Pacific Northwest that can contribute to a more intimate feel with building materials. This building needs to have a true Pacific Northwest story, from every level of every scale.

Sandoval: There was a lot of research, a lot of time spent to make sure they actually engaged local talent and local craftsmanship. The way the wood is made, it’s not really super high-tech. It’s diverse. It touches on many different aspects of the wood industry, around the region. Every aspect touches the building material trade. It’s bringing everybody together.

van der Meulen: It’s important because this is a public building. For the community to have a part in it, even a small part, it’s significant. This has given me a lot of ideas about how we can take this attitude and apply it to other buildings in other regions.

Sandoval: We had a big conversation about sustainability, and how it’s not just the performance of the building but actually sustaining the economic base around us. The community should have a stake in the way the money is spent. They’re going to be a part of it.

Can you talk about the process of getting input from the public and how that wove into the design?

van der Meulen: The Port of Portland orchestrated a number of charrettes, and they survey passengers on a very regular basis. We had access to the information that they collected. We also developed these passenger personas, and did some journey mapping. I think we had 12, which is a lot. It was building different scenarios. One would be a business traveler, one a travel and leisure passenger, one a kids’ sports team. We journey-mapped them through every single process to just kind of understand what were there stressors and where it made sense to have interventions to support those needs. If you look at the difference between a business traveler and a sports team, they have very different needs. Those are some of the things we did internally.

Could you talk a little bit more about the roof? Does it extend over everything?

van der Meulen: Yes, all of the things that happen in that airport. It’s over the ticket counter. It’s pretty much what you see today but it will be much more open space. A strong part of our design is the way in which we used light to assist the passenger in understanding where their next point is. I think it’s really important. We’ve got a big roof and skylights and we could have put those anywhere, but we wanted to do double or triple duty. As an example, the skylights are what we call the seam, the threshold between the ticket lobby and the Oregon market, a point in which you’re passing from one point to the next.

 

PDX terminal today (ZGF Architects)

 

What about the emotional or psychological impact that wood has?

van der Meulen: [ZGF partner Robert] Frasca used to have this simple saying about any building he was designing. To a certain point it needs to feel familiar, right? To a certain extent I think that’s what this building will do. That’s something if it were purely a steel structure just wouldn’t.

Sandoval: I think there’s a big focus on what makes it Oregon. It’s the scale, it’s a series of rooms, it’s the material in Oregon. The Portland airport was the first to incorporate a lot of wood and plants and natural daylight, going back to the 1970s, and the diversity of local: they were one of the first. Portland was first in a lot of things. And this will be one of the first to be mostly made out of wood. This can be almost like the Lewis and Clark exposition: a demonstration of how wood can be used in a modern way. It’s not just a flirtation with CLT [cross-laminated timber]. This is wood that can be supplied by big, medium and small outfits. Everybody within that industry can actually participate. Then I think you can talk about sustainability. This building is so efficient because of daylighting and mechanically and the kind of mitigations we’ve done with an efficient envelope. Then it is also seismically resilient, and that’s a big deal. Not only are we building a wood roof that’s six football fields big, but it’s seismically resilient.

I feel like a trend I’ve really seen in airport design is incorporating more plants, which ZGF’s design also seems to embrace.

van der Meulen: there’s a ton of research that tells us it’s a good idea — that it has a real impact on even how people breathe, their pulse rates. It really contributes to mitigating their overall stress. That’s an important aspect for sure. But it’s probably not the most important aspect. What we were trying to do is make it relevant to being of a place, of Oregon. What do you think of when you think of Oregon? People go, ‘I didn’t know it was so green.’ We would be remiss if we didn’t include that kind of lushness in the airport. It’s not everywhere. We were really strategic about where we placed it.

 

 

 

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Visiting 5 MLK: crossroads, terraces, transparency

L-R: Towne Storage, Yard, 5 MLK (Brian Libby)

 

BY BRIAN LIBBY

The east end of the Burnside Bridge has become a kind of architectural laboratory over the past five years, with a succession of eye-catching buildings.

That started with the 21-story Yard by Skylab Architecture and the 10-story Slate by Works Progress Architecture, both completed in 2016 and each fusing dark metal and glass. Then came 2017’s Fair-Haired Dumbbell by FFA Architecture & Interiors, not nearly as tall yet standing out even more thanks to a colorful artist-painted façade. And earlier this year came Sideyard, also by Skylab: a four-story, brick-clad mass timber building on a small patch of land created by the Burnside-Couch couplet.

Now comes 5 MLK, which is not officially part of the city-developed Burnside Bridgehead. But standing directly across Burnside at 17 stories, 5 MLK joins them to bookend the bridge with height.

When you factor in architectural neighbors like the Towne Storage building (dating to 1915 and renovated in 2017 from a designed by LRS Architects — now a headquarters for Autodesk), or the nearby Eastside Exchange (dating to 1925 and renovated in 2013 from a design by Works Progress Architecture), these few blocks clustered around the Burnside Bridge really start to feel like a neighborhood between neighborhoods: part Central Eastside, part Lower Burnside, but with a height and ambiance more its own. And bringing that energy across Burnside, as 5 MLK does, helps potentially bring that energy to the Central Eastside. That's important because the other Burnside Bridgehead buildings are in a sense hemmed in by two busy thoroughfares and the I-84 freeway.

In terms of height, 5 MLK project helps legitimize the other big buildings here: together they’re not so much outliers, as if exiled from downtown, but instead, coupled with the Lloyd District, are one growing East Side story.

 

5 MLK as seen from the southwest and east (Brian Libby)

 

For nearly 120 years, this site at the corner of Burnside and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard was home to the Buckman Building, completed in 1900 and long known for its Fishel’s furniture store. But unlike the aforementioned Towne Storage and Eastside Exchange buildings, and unlike the nearby Vivian Apartments, a 1912 building renovated two years ago for Icelandic lodging chain Kex, the Buckman Building was torn down. I think quarter-block buildings under five or six stories tend to make for better placemaking. Yet this site is zoned for height and MLK/Burnside is one of the city’s most prominent and central crossroads.

The project was developed by Portland-based Gerding Edlen, which has spent two decades developing high-density, sustainable mixed-use buildings here and in several other West Coast cities. Here in Portland, the company really made its presence known starting in the early 2000s with the Brewery Blocks development, on the site of the former Blitz-Weinhard brewery. 5 MLK fits the brand: centrally located, glass-ensconced, and highly sustainable offices and apartment/condo spaces.

Gerding has most often worked with local firms like GBD Architects (which designed all five Brewery Blocks buildings for this client, then a few more) and ZGF (designer of the 12 West building in downtown’s West End). For this project, however, Gerding Edlen hired Chicago’s GREC Architects, which has designed a number of office and residential buildings there, perhaps most notably an Ace Hotel project from 2018. Last year the firm also served as architect of record for One Bryant Park, in collaboration with renowned architect Robert A.M. Stern.

The 450,000-square-foot, full-block 5 MLK has five levels of commercial space giving way to residential units above. But it’s not just a skinny tower sitting on a multistory stump, or even a simple L-shape, and not a clean break between office and apartment wings. The design underwent numerous iterations following criticism from the Portland Design Commission. Along the way, it seemed to lose clarity but gain in other ways, namely kinetics and transparency. It’s as if an ordinary podium-and-tower combination has been pushed and pulled apart. It's not enough to keep the overall composition from still seeming a bit corporate, but maybe a more enlightened corporate, rooted in sustainable principles and quality materials.

 

View of Slate and Fair-Haired Dumbbell from 5 MLK outdoor deck (Brian Libby)

 

Despite its girth, the design in some ways tries to keep a lower profile, or at least to be deferential. Its towers step downward to the corner on two sides, for example, bringing more light to the street and creating perhaps the building's most distinctive feature. It reminded me of Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy album cover, or terrace farming practices in Asia . At the same time, to emphasize its verticality, 5 MLK’s glass curtain wall is fused with vertical strands of thin porcelain, acting almost like drapery. The glass itself also seemed to have a mirrored quality, as if to make the reflections of other buildings its look.

But the look of the building from its exterior may not necessarily be the point. Height notwithstanding, its design seems more about the experience inside, looking out.

In my tour with two principals from GREC Architects, that sensation started in the lobby, where office workers and apartment-dwellers mix. With walls of glass, the lobby is set up as a kind of fishbowl onto this urban crossroads, interspersed with local art. It’s possible to look through the glass in four directions: west, north, east, or straight up through an oculus skylight. (Or be mesmerized by a multi-screen video installation by Portland’s Stephen Slappe.)

 

5 MLK from Burnside and MLK Jr. Boulevard, and a lobby skylight (Brian Libby)

 

I was also taken to an exercise room with such great views looking west at the Burnside Bridge and downtown that it felt a bit indulgent or even absurd to put a treadmill there. But as a runner, in the wet cold winter months I dream of such exercise scenarios.

Then there are the two outdoor terraces, the first of which is about halfway up the building and includes both covered and uncovered space. It's low enough to still feel immersed in the neighborhood, yet high enough to enjoy panoramic views. That said, the top-floor view is even more striking, with an outdoor pool and a  360-degree view of skyline and Cascade peaks.

 

Panoramic photo from 5 MLK top floor (Brian Libby)

 

Ultimately this will probably not be the most talked-about Burnside Bridgehead building. And maybe that’s just fine. There is visual interest to it from the outside—the terracing steps at the corners, the draped porcelain lines over the glass, the curving southwest façade, the outdoor decks, and how it’s all put together—but overall it’s a large glass building not wildly dissimilar from other large glass commercial and residential buildings.

Instead, I think 5 MLK can boast its design credibility in another way. It’s the building of this bunch I’d probably be happiest to live or work in.

 

 

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