Meyer Memorial Trust (courtesy Jeremy Bittermann/JBSA)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
It's that time of year again: accolades for the city's best architecture of the past year via the American Institute of Architects' Oregon Architecture Awards, this time juried by a trio of out-of-town architects: Pascale Sablan of David Adjaye Associates' New York office, Bryan C Lee Jr. of Colloqate Design in New Orleans, and Ricardo de Jesús Maga Rojas of STG Design in Austin.
Overall, the list of Honor, Merit and Citation Awards given out is comprised overwhelmingly of projects for public and nonprofit clients. There are two private residences and one private for-profit company office that received awards, as well as one luxury apartment. But that's basically it. A nonprofit headquarters and a nonprofit museum jointly won the highest accolade, the Honor Award, and most all of the Merit and Citation Awards went to high school and college projects, and to affordable housing.
One thing's for sure, though: when you're Allied Works Architecture, the AIA Awards mean you'd better keep expanding your trophy case.
Honor Awards
At last month's ceremony, the firm led by Brad Cloepfil took home AIA Oregon's top prize, known as the Honor Award, for the Benton County Museum in Corvallis. This adds to an already-unprecedented number of Honor Awards won by Allied Works in years past, including last year's top prize for the Providence Park expansion, in 2018 for the National Music Centre of Canada (in Calgary), in 2015 for its Pacific Northwest College of Art renovation here in Portland, in 2013 for the Sokol Blosser Winery tasting room near Dundee, in 2012 for the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, and in 2008 for the Booker T. Washington High School in Dallas.
The Benton County Museum is an exceptional little jewel that fits well into its context of downtown Corvallis near a succession of historic buildings. While visiting and writing about the building for The Architect's Newspaper in October, I was delighted by everything from its Japanese ceramic tile exterior cladding to its light-filled gallery spaces to its endearingly eclectic collection, the latter of which was presented with the help of local design firm Renate. The building is laid out as four simple bays, with half of the third bay made into an outdoor courtyard, onto which the galleries open.
Benton County Museum (Brian Libby)
Allied Works' principal Chelsea Grassinger told me, "We were drawn to the hand-crafted quality of the ceramic tile: the rake texture and how the glaze dips into the valleys. Bringing something that had a kind of masonry scale was important, but marrying the historic context with a contemporary façade." But the design also sought "to open up that bay of the building to the courtyard," she added. "It goes back to breaking down the barriers, and creating some surprising opportunities for transparency. We had all of the typical technical requirements for daylight control and temp and humidity, but it was important to really open up the building visually and experientially."
Yet the other Honor Award winner at this year's AIA Oregon Architecture Awards, Lever's Meyer Memorial Trust, is the true Portland architectural project of the year. Located on Vancouver Avenue in North Portland, with a view of the Interstate 5 freeway that may soon be expanded, the project is exceptional as both product and process.
The Meyer Memorial Trust's designer, Lever Architecture, is also no stranger to AIA awards, having received the Honor Award in 2019 for Redfox Commons and in 2011 for the Design Animation Studio, as well as many lower-tier AIA Citation and Merit awards over the years for projects like the Treehouse apartments at OHSU, the Oregon Conservation Center in Southeast Portland (for The Nature Conservancy), the Flex spec-office space on 82nd Avenue, and the L'Angolo Estate Winery tasting room.
In an article for Metropolis magazine about the Meyer Memorial Trust headquarters, the nonprofit organization's CEO, Michelle DePass, reminded me that moving from the Pearl District to North Portland was a homecoming, as the trust's original benefactor, grocery magnate Fred G. Meyer, originally lived in the neighborhood. Yet with a renewed emphasis on empowering communities of color, DePass added, “We wanted to be in a place where people could walk by and say, ‘I know Meyer. Meyer knows me.’”
Meyer Memorial Trust (courtesy Jeremy Bittermann/JBSA)
The 19,800-square-foot Meyer Memorial Trust headquarters is set back from the street to encourage civic interaction. Metal cladding and a quartet of peaked-roof forms give the building’s exterior hint to both the industrial district and the residential neighborhood nearby. A relatively long, thin building footprint allows the building’s spaces to fill with daylight.
What's also noteworthy about the Meyer project is how its two distinct volumes are both wood-framed but built differently, for reasons related to community. A three-story office building utilized traditional materials and methods, while an adjacent single-story pavilion and gathering space called the Center for Great Purposes was one of the first structures in the United States to be constructed with mass plywood panels, beams and columns.
“Plywood gets used in buildings a lot, but it gets covered up by all the other finishes, and you never see it. It’s such an industrial material,” explained Lever Architects’ Chandra Robinson, who led the design and also won the Young Architect Award from the AIA along with the firm's design awards. The Meyer design utilizes traditional stick framing in the rest of the building "because some of these smaller subs were not going to have experience with mass timber,” Robinson added. “We wanted to pair standard construction they’ve done before with a chance to learn about building with mass timber. We really wanted to make sure that those folks could then go on to another bigger project after having that experience.”
The Meyer Memorial Trust and Lever also received the AIA's 2030 Award for its sustainable design.
One other thing about the two Honor Award winners: these projects were both led by female principals — Allied's Grassinger and Lever's Robinson. These two firms were founded by men, by two of the most highly acclaimed Portland architects of our time: Allied's Brad Cloepfil and Lever's Thomas Robinson (no relation to Chandra). Yet in a time when equality and opportunity have become more important than ever, these firms are empowering women and reaping the award-winning results. In Chandra Robinson's case as a Black woman, it's even more encouraging because architecture is traditionally nota just male-dominated but white-dominated profession. It's not just what you build, but how you treat and empower people along the way, from the smallest subcontractors to the architects designing the whole thing. The award-winning results speak for themselves.
Merit Awards
Four projects received the equivalent of the silver medal: the AIA's Merit Award. One of them is arguably a far-more prominent and widely seen project than any other in this awards program: the new Hayward Field at the University of Oregon in Eugene.
Hayward Field (University of Oregon)
Designed by SRG Partnership, the stadium project began in controversy, as it necessitated the demolition of America's most historic track and field venue. Sports architecture is not traditionally inclined towards historic preservation. Treasures like Wrigley Field in Chicago and the Rose Bowl in Pasadena are unfortunately exceptions to the rule. And when you're the University of Oregon athletic department, which has made newness its brand while taking advantage of Nike co-founder Phil Knight's benefaction, perhaps it was no surprise to see even this track Mecca remade. But you know what? The new Hayward looks pretty great.
Opsis's Multicultural Center addition for WWU (Benjamin Benschneider)
Merit Awards also went to Opsis Architecture for Western Washington University's new Multicultural Center addition in Bellingham, to DLR Group for Discovery High School in Camas, and to William Kaven Architecture for the Heartwood residence in Portland's Oak Grove neighborhood.
Opsis has practically made a career out of handsome university buildings like this Multicultural Center addition, with its striking zinc exterior sun shades, even as the firm has received distinction recently for public projects like the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton and a renovation to the historic Kibbie Dome at the University of Idaho. And DLR is veteran of award-winning K-12 school projects, although its highest-profile recent work has been last year's transformative renovation of the iconic Michael Graves-designed Portland Building.
Discovery High School (Top: Lara Swimmer, bottom: Alan Brandt)
DLR Group is a large multi-city firm and has designed K-12 and higher education projects for clients all over America. Discovery High School was designed around the idea of what's described as project-based learning. I'm not sure what that means, but I think the answer may come in part from the fact that none of the photography seems to depict a traditional closed-door classroom with a teacher lecturing to students. There are science labs and wood shops and apparently yoga classes outside, and it paints a collective picture of a better way, which the light-filled spaces only encourage.
William Kaven's Heartwood residence (Jeremy Bittermann/JBSA)
William Kaven is also a multiple award-winner, especially for houses. This year's Merit Award comes just a few months after its Royal residence in Portland received a 2021 International Architecture Award from The Chicago Athenaeum.
Citation Awards
There were seven Citation Awards (equivalent to a bronze medal) given out by the AIA jury: three for housing projects, two schools, an architecture-firm office and a park pavilion.
That park pavilion, the Gerry Frank Rotary Amphitheater in Salem by CBTWO Architects, is a striking covered gathering area at Riverfront Park, which functions a lot like Tom McCall Waterfront Park in Portland. Its curving forms are made with glulam beams and its translucent skin with fabric, and the basket-weave patterning was inspired by the native Kalapuya people living along the Willamette long before European settlers. And perhaps appropriately, the pavilion recalls architect John Storrs' design for the Lumber Industry Pavilion at the Oregon Centennial in 1959, it too a soaring wood sculpture as well as a shelter.
CBTWO's Gerry Frank Rotary Amphitheater (Matt Swain)
It may also be worth noting this Citation Award going to a Salem firm. Though these are called the AIA Oregon Architecture Awards, until a couple years ago these were always the AIA Portland Architecture Awards. When the Portland chapter was absorbed into the long-dormant state chapter, the awards seem to have become a de facto state awards, but in reality it's mostly still a Portland architectural awards ceremony. That's all the more reason, though, to highlight a non-PDX firm winning.
The Bend Science Station is the latest from perennial AIA award winner Hennebery Eddy Architects, and an interesting dual program. This building, part of the OSU Cascades campus, provides science-related educational space to K-12 students and training teachers. In essence, it's a space for both actual K-12 classrooms and a space to teach teachers. There are two learning labs, a research room, a teacher-training space, and most distinctively, a small tower. The Bend Science Station is also designed to achieve net-zero or even net-positive energy production.
Bend Science Station (Alan Brandt)
Another regular AIA award winner, Hacker, picked up two Citation Awards this year, for the Gilkey Middle School and the Bailey Residence.
The Gilkey building, part of the French American International School in the West Hills and completed in 2019 (the AIA's date-eligibility rules are generous), gives the campus a sense of place that it never had with its preponderance of double-wide modular buildings. Before this building, the school didn't even have its own cafeteria. Now, the boomerang-shaped Gilkey is full of light in every space, from classrooms to hallways to a central gathering spot and cafeteria in the middle.
Gilkey Middle School (Bruce Damonte)
When I wrote about the Gilkey Middle School for Metropolis magazine last year, I remember the head of Gilkey, Emmanuelle Burke, telling me that the building had an immediate impact. “I think this place is fostering community in a different way,” she explained. “It’s created a series of separate spaces, but they all relate back to public areas where we can meet each other, both kids and teachers. We have more space for teachers to work together, and we have more spaces for parents to come in and speak with us. We have spaces for all the people we’re hosting.”
The Bailey Residence is a circa-1972 house at Black Butte Ranch in Central Oregon, a resort community built in the '60s and '70s that at its best can feel like a sibling to the better-known Sea Ranch community in California. Hacker did not change the exterior much, simply adding a large window to the front facade to illuminate a central stairway. Inside, the firm's interior design team transformed the feel to something more nicely contemporary, yet maintained the essence of the original space with its pine wood paneling. "The exercise was really about stitching in new things that helped to elevate the old," Hacker's Jenny Fowler explained in a Dwell article by Melissa Dalton.
Bailey residence (Jeremy Bittermann/JBSA)
Citation Award winner the Custom Blocks Studio, a new home office for the Portland office of Mahlum Architects, is the first Living Building Challenge-certified project in the city. Owned and occupied for more than half a century by the Custom Stamping company, a machine parts fabricator, the two-block cluster of warehouses was soaked in oil and grime before developer Capstone Partners commissioned a 2018 core-and-shell renovation by Scott Edwards Architects to clean up and seismically bolster the structures. The southwest corner of the complex, where Mahlum set up its office, was built in the 1930s as a Chevrolet dealership.
The LBC comprises seven performance categories, or “Petals”: Materials, Place, Water, Energy, Health, Equity, and Beauty. Buildings achieving full Living Building status, like Seattle’s Bullitt Center, meet standards in all seven areas. Satisfying only some can earn Petal certification. Mahlum’s tenant improvement in the Custom Blocks attained certification in Materials, in addition to Place, Equity, and Beauty. From cabinetry and wall panels to desks and screens, Mahlum vetted over 350 manufactured materials, working with partners to confirm ingredients and avoid Red List chemicals and VOCs. The firm also commissioned a 50-year life-cycle assessment to help achieve net-zero embodied carbon emissions.
Custom Blocks (Lincoln Barbour)
“The good news is the industry is moving in the right direction. Large and small companies are rallying around this, and coalitions of companies are coming together around material transparency,” Mahlum's Jay Hindmarsh told me for a 2020 Metropolis article. “They’re saying, ‘Come to us first.’ But it’s still a fairly select group of people. When you call suppliers to trace their material ingredients, you still hear a lot of things like ‘It’s a trade secret.’ We need these LBC projects to prompt manufacturers to invest in transparency.”
The Louisa Flowers (Jeremy Bittermann/JBSA)
Another Citation Award went to Lever Architecture's design for The Louisa Flowers, the largest affordable housing development built in Portland in the last five decades at 12 stories and 240 units. It's named the African American pioneer and civic leader who settled in Portland in the late 1800s. Louisa Flowers's family was one of the first black families to own property on Portland’s east side, operating a farm and building homes near the site of this new building. It's nice to see Lever applying its talents to an affordable housing project, which along with the Meyer Memorial Trust perhaps marks the firm's move into more projects for the public good.
Raleigh Slabtown, the final Citation Award winner, is a luxury apartment building in Northwest Portland that has helped to give the neighborhood a pleasing fabric of medium-density buildings, shops and restaurants. The design does a nice job of nodding to Northwest's traditional apartment buildings while still seeming contemporary.
Raleigh Slabtown (Lincoln Barbour)
This emerging part of Slabtown really has a pleasing medium-density setting and the buildings, while none of them arresting, have a kind of collective simple handsomeness. In keeping with SERA's longtime track record for sustainable design, Raleigh Slabtown is also designed to earn a LEED Gold rating from the US Green Building Council.
Congratulations to all the winners.
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