Portland Architecture

Design writer's diary: houses, a warehouse, a museum and an opera

Beaver Creek Cabin by Outside Architecture (Shawn Records)

 

BY BRIAN LIBBY

I’ve decided to try a new series of monthly blog posts in which I talk about the different articles I’m writing, places I’ve visited, others’ work I might have read, and any other relevant info or stories I can come up with. So here goes!

Going Outside

Recently I completed two articles featuring the work of Portland firm Outside Architecture.

For the current Fall 2021 issue of Portland Monthly, I wrote about a new kitchen that Outside founder Jeremy Spurgin designed for the landmark Platt House, by the great Pietro Belluschi.

Nearly every renovated midcentury-modern home seems to take liberties with the kitchen. Today people don’t want their kitchens isolated from the rest of the house, so at the very least, a couple walls usually come down. But I was impressed at how this kitchen renovation and expansion seemed to do something more. It actually provided a new level of connection and transparency, relating the kitchen to the magnificent garden.

As great as Belluschi was, be it as a designer of houses, office buildings, churches or museums, at the Platt House, the landscape is an equally important part of the design and the experience.

 

The Platt house's new kitchen (Josh Partee)

 

From the article: “In 1940, when then–merchant marine John Platt and his artist-gardener wife, Jane Kerr Platt, asked Belluschi to design a home for their two-acre property, it was not just a commission but an opportunity to marry architecture and landscape…clad in cedar shingles with floor-to-ceiling windows, its low-slung form hugging the top of the hillside almost as if it’s built into the earth. ‘He tucked it up right in the top end of the property so that this whole flow of aesthetic wonderland would be a part of this,’ says Lisa Platt, who lives there with her husband, David—John and Jane’s son. ‘Pietro knew the garden was going to become a primary piece.’ Indeed, 80 years later it’s a park-like oasis of oaks, flowers, and ferns.”

I also happen to be working on another article, this one for Dwell, about a second Outside Architecture design: not just a kitchen renovation but an entirely new house (pictured at the top of this post). It’s a small cabin near the Oregon coast, between Tillamook and Cloverdale. Spurgin and Outside start with a simple form: a pitched-roof building that looks like a Monopoly house. But the design carves a large deck into the side of the building, the roof form stretching over a substantial deck to provide an idyllic indoor-outdoor space on this seven-acre property.

Visiting the project, it was the wooded site with its winding trails that delighted as much as the house. Many were like mossy, fern-festooned versions of English-garden follies: destinations where you'd find old furniture or even an improvised hot tub.

 

A storm-downed tree on the Beaver Creek Cabin property (Brian Libby)

 

The article should be published at Dwell.com next month.

Return to Neal Creek

Speaking of Portland Monthly, last month I took a short three-night trip to stay at a cabin near Hood River now rented by Airbnb that I wrote about for the magazine back in 2012: an article called High-Water Haven. It was designed and developed by architect Paul McKean and his wife, architect Amy Donahue, and includes a water feature: the lovely Neal Creek, which creates a soothing white noise one can hear from the house.

 

Neal Creek Residence (Brian Libby)

 

“When McKean and Donohue discovered the vacant, 1.8-acre property in 2005, it had been wallowing on the market for over two years,” I wrote, “largely because the creek’s proximity made about 1.7 acres of it unfit for building. (Hood River County codes require structures to be set back 100 feet from the water’s edge.) By cantilevering the living space atop a 10-foot-high concrete base and two concrete pillars, he discovered, the dwelling would not only maximize the envelope of its small footprint, it also would rise well above the property’s flood line and provide an excellent vantage point from which to enjoy the surrounding views.”

Staying at the cabin, I thought about how architecture journalism is based on visiting a project for a very short time, maybe an hour or two, and today more than ever, most articles actually get written remotely, with the writer just looking at pictures. Spending a longer amount of time at the Neal Creek Residence, I got a much more immersive sense of the place: how the light and shadow change over the course of morning, afternoon and evening.

Light and shadow are particularly noteworthy at this house because of the wall of wood screening that shades the outer stairway and front windows of the house. I found myself filming the stairway and my walks up and down it, as if those strips of wood had created something irresistibly cinematic.

In fact, I felt inspired enough that a made a short video of the Neal Creek Residence, which you can watch here:

 

 

Factor and SUM

For a recent Portland Tribune column, I visited a newly-renovated warehouse, or what’s actually a pair of conjoining warehouses, in Portland’s Central Eastside Industrial District, between the east and westbound Hawthorne Bridge viaducts that were originally built in about 1920.

The project was designed and co-developed by SUM Design Studio, a firm I first wrote about for this blog back in 2007, in a post called Design + Development + SUM. Over the past decade and a half, co-founders Matt Loosemore and Eric Hoffman have built a handsome portfolio of both new buildings and renovations.

“The newly renovated and seismically-stabilized Factor Building is a reminder of the creative energy that’s possible in a high-density urban setting with architectural character,” I wrote in the column. “In a time when people can work from home more easily than ever, the antique charm of this restored warehouse—one occupied in the past by not only Miller Paint but a tin-can factory, recording studios and most recently a mushroom-jerky maker—makes it a quintessential future hot spot waiting to happen.”

 

Factor Building (Brian Libby)

 

My favorite part was a pair of entries, where SUM peeled back an upstairs floor to create a double-height space. In both spots, some crisply contemporary halo-shaped chandeliers were nicely juxtaposed against and also spotlighting the scruffy materiality of the exposed-wood ceiling above.

Cloepfil Does Corvallis

Growing up in a family of Duck fans, I used to think of Corvallis as enemy territory. But somewhere along the way, I realized its downtown was actually a lot nicer than Eugene’s. So when I drove down to Beaver territory to review the Benton County Historical Society’s new Corvallis Museum by Allied Works for The Architect’s Newspaper, I enjoyed getting there early: taking a walk downtown along the Willamette River and past a number of historic buildings.

I first wrote about Allied Works and Brad Cloepfil close to 20 years ago, I believe initially with a 2002 Q&A for Architecture Week magazine called "Interview with an Emerging Architect."

Libby: What was it about architecture that first fascinated you?

Cloepfil: First of all, the idea that architecture is about construction, and structure, and about the expressive possibility of those, and that architecture needs to respond to its current cultural context. To initiate an act of architecture is to initiate a dialogue: what's around it? There's the institutional context as with the art museum in St. Louis and its nature as a noncollecting contemporary art museum. Then there's the site of St. Louis, which has a complex urban history. There are so many layers of information to respond to.

It was the Wieden + Kennedy Agency World Headquarters that put Allied on the national map, but the firm then made its name nationally and internationally largely with museums. My first New York Times arts story was a profile of Cloepfil back in 2003 on the eve of his somewhat controversial transformation of the former Huntington-Hartford Building by Edward Durrell Stone into a new home for the Museum of Arts & Design.

That project had a lot of pushback from the preservation community. But as now-retired Corvallis Museum director Irene Zenev explained  to me in the Architect’s Newspaper article, it was that museum that prompted her to seek out Cloepfil.

“It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen,” she recalled. “And when I read that he”—Allied founder Brad Cloepfil—“had moved the elevator from the center of the building off to make the galleries more accessible, I thought, ‘This guy knows what he’s doing.’”

 

Corvallis Museum (Brian Libby)

 

The Corvallis Museum is a delightful gem, both Allied’s design as well as the charming exhibit design by Renate, which seems to take its cues from children’s museums. My favorite room, called Hats and Chairs, was just that. But I also loved a room full of framed photos, with frames that could be turned on hinges away from the wall to reveal information about the shots.

About the Allied design, I wrote, “The 19,000-square-foot museum is wrapped in glazed ceramic tile, each piece hand-raked, which helps create varying arrays of reflection and shadow. Inside, the building is divided into four simple bays, with a small courtyard occupying the place of the third. The lobby and multipurpose event space, faced in glass, open onto the small but generous court, and from the event room the glass can slide away to create a hybrid indoor/outdoor space. Galleries are not sized for auras, but for people and objects, and full-size windows invite the street inside to a degree unthinkable for an art museum.”

 

Corvallis Museum (Brian Libby)

 

Which is to say nothing of Bruce, the taxidermy moose that greets visitors upon entry. The juxtaposition between high design and quirky ephemera at this museum was a constant surprise and pleasure. At times it felt like it ought not to have worked so well, but it did.

Before my tour of the Corvallis museum, I also took some time to walk through downtown Corvallis, and was reminded what a lovely collection of historic buildings there are, as well as a pleasing pedestrian-friendly scale to the urban fabric.

 

Downtown Corvallis (Brian Libby)

 

Opera at the Coliseum

Last month Memorial Coliseum really came alive. For the first time since the pandemic began, I and others had the opportunity to venture there for a Third Angle New Music concert featuring the debut of its commissioned opera “Sanctuaries” by Darrell Grant. The performance was actually outside, under the Coliseum’s pagoda-resembling entry canopy. It was a special night, with a jazz-inflected opera about gentrification staged outside a building that was part of a wave of urban renewal projects in the mid-20^th century that displaced hundreds of families, overwhelmingly persons of color who were already subject to redlining and other aspects of institutional racism.

Yet the Coliseum looked magnificent too. The opera was staged just after sunset, on the east side of the property away from the western sky, yet I could still see the last of the yellow evening sky through two glass walls of the arena itself.

An event like the “Sanctuaries” premiere isn’t just about my own impressions, though. Luckily I got to interview both Darrell Grant and the opera’s director, Alexander Gedeon, for a Third Angle blog post called "Resurfacing the Past, Reseeding the Future." It was a long post, but this sentence was perhaps the crux of the argument: "So how do we reconcile these truths? How can we make these discordant and consonant notes into a kind of melody? As Sanctuaries and its creators remind us, we can only tell the tale, and sing the song. But from that ritual, we can begin again. We can make the future our own."

Gedeon also told me, “Aesthetics can’t be divorced from ethics. That’s what the last couple of years have meant to me as an artist: part of activism starts from looking at your own footprint in your work...To be in a space where you’re also touching on things that are social and political and relevant and heightened, and also emotionally cathartic, it’s thrilling.”

Then I was able to get an extended version of that conversation published as an Oregon ArtsWatch story called "Opera, Albina and Architecture." I'm a big jazz fan, so it was a real treat to be able to interview Darrell Grant, who has long lived in the Rose City and taught at Portland State University, but before that was an acclaimed New York-based musician with a string of superb recordings. But his insight about gentrification and staging an opera for the first time in his career was also interesting.

 

One of three "Sanctuaries" performances at Memorial Coliseum (Brian Libby)

 

"I’ve been in Portland since 1997, so I did experience at least one wave of this incredible gentrification that has happened in this city," Grant said. "But what I didn’t know was this impact on neighborhoods: what was no longer there."

Grant's Portland journey has also been about getting past the hype: "We were being covered in The New York Times as this incredible place. There was that sort of utopian story, and Portlandia. But at the same time there was this story that existed below the surface. It wasn’t part of the myth. So learning about the internment of Japanese Americans, learning about the slaughter of Chinese miners, the lynching of Black people and the KKK, all those things that were not part of the narrative, I feel like over my time being here, over time I’ve had to relinquish the myth. Sanctuaries has been a wonderful opportunity to speak to that, to say, ‘This is the history, the continuity. The gentrification we’re seeing now is just the tip of an iceberg. As we look beneath the surface and see urban renewal and redlining and discriminatory housing laws, that’s the only way we can go forward. We can’t pretend that things that are true are not true. Once we see that, we are obliged to try and make decisions that truly do benefit all people."

Dawkins Does Christo

Finally I'd like to end with a tribute to my longtime neighbors, Jennifer Dawkins and Tony Faulkner.

Their beautiful American Foursqaure house in Ladd's Addition is a looker by itself, but their sense of fun has at times transformed the place in very creative ways. Earlier this year, they were a winner in the Rose Festival's "Porch Parade" contest for a yard and front porch in a Prince-themed design, complete with drops of purple rain. But in late September came something outright arresting.

 

Dawkins-Faulkner residence, wrapped (Brian Libby)

 

For their 25th anniversary, Jen took inspiration from this fall's wrapping of the Arc de Triumphe in Paris, conceived by the late artist Christo, and had their house wrapped in silver silk. Since they couldn't travel there, she explained, a bit of that Christo spirit could come to Portland.

Standing in front of the house, I found the wrap mesmerizing as the silk billowed in the wind, especially when I learned that the material was silk. It shimmered beautifully. What also interested me was that, because really only the front half of the house was wrapped, some birds still managed to find their way underneath it. The couple told me the site of a hummingbird flying around on the covered porch was a unique sight.

Happy anniversary, Jen and Tony!

 

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Wood and glass gem: discussing Saul Zaik's renovated Feldman House

Feldman/Milford house (all photos by Grant Harder for Dwell)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In a recent issue of Dwell magazine, I had the chance to write about and share the work of one of my favorite Portland architects, Saul Zaik, upon the renovation of one of his greatest designs, the circa-1956 Feldman House in southwest Portland's Garden Home neighborhood.

One of the last remaining architects of his generation, which came of age in the years immediately after World War II, Zaik may not have been as well known as some of his immediate predecessors like Pietro Belluschi and John Yeon. But like those architects, his work was an exceptional fusion of building and landscape, of natural light and materials.

The Feldman House renovation was overseen by local interior designer Jessica Helgerson and her eponymous firm, who helped clients Ty and Kelly Milford and their family update and reconfigure much of the house without ever losing its spirit. I'd like to share here some of the interview text that didn't make it into the story.

"The house had some really really lovely things about it and some really problematic things," Helgerson explained in our interview for the article. "The living room in particular was great. It’s got a glass window with an outside corner of glass and beautiful existing wood beams. And the detailing, especially on the earlier part of the house, was really nice: the way the panels worked over the doors. There was a sort of a set of rules about how the house fit together."

 

The new design brought significant change in some part of the house and used a light touch in others. "The dining and especially the living room were really nice and definitely worth preserving," Helgerson added. "The kitchen had been sort of oddly remodeled and had a sort of raised platform that sort of disconnected it from the rest of the house. There were two front doors, both to the same place. Then the master bedroom was also funny. And the family room was really long, this great big room with a post in the middle of it. It was hard to use. It’s a really really significant remodel. It’s a lot different than it was. But our goal was for it to look as if we hadn’t done a thing, to be authentic to the era of the house. What would Saul do? I felt like we were really respectful of the era of the house. I feel he would approve. We were so careful in the material selection and historic preservation and continuing existing details."

I also enjoyed talking with Zaik about the origins of his Feldman House.

"Phil [Feldman] was a friend of mine going back," he recalled. "He had this property, and a budget of around $35,000 to do a house. I think they were just married. Mary Ann and Phil were German Jews who somehow escaped in the 30s. They were very bright and successful and moved ahead." The house was a chance for the Feldmans to enjoy a real new beginning, in a landscape that was not unlike Germany but a west-coast American culture that offered opportunity and safety, as well as new ideas about light-filled architecture.

"I’ve always been very site oriented with anything I’ve ever done," Zaik explained. "Living here all my life, I value sunlight. I think that house had a lot of glass in it. It was about the second or third house that I worked on. There was a crew of us in Eugene, like Jim Martin, DeNorval Unthank and his partner. We were all just starting to do what we called contemporary houses. We were all World War II veterans and we were out to change the idea of architecture."

"We were experimenting with how you integrated indoor and outdoor spaces," Zaik added. "That was a big part of that original design. That whole living room was a mitered glass corner. That was oriented to that private outdoor space. Wood was a very reasonable, inexpensive product for us to use. The availability of clear hemlock and fir and cedar were readily available. And those early houses like the Feldman were hand built. The same crew formed the concrete and poured it, and framed and built the house, built everything. That ceiling system was special. It was P&G clear tongue in groove fir. In those years, we did all the structural work. That was part of our education. We didn’t feel the need for structural engineers."

After the Feldman House's completion, Zaik would go on to design a host of residential and commercial architecture, be it the unique Zidell House, suspended in the air from a massive ship's mast, or an expansion of Timberline Lodge.

But just as talented contemporaries like Yeon would become known for many architectural and landscape works but still always remembered most for the Watzek House, so too will projects like the Feldman remain a prideful emblem of what Zaik could do.

That is, what Zaik can do. Even in his 80s, Zaik still comes to work every day. We can all appreciate that kind of commitment and work ethic, but hopefully Zaik knows that his place in history is already quite secure.

 

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Ada Louise Huxtable’s Portland

Ada Louise Huxtable (photo by L. Garth Huxtable)

BY DAN HANECKOW

Ada Louise Huxtable, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times and Wall Street Journal architectural critic as well as a celebrated author and preservationist, died on January 7 at the age of 91.

Although New York City was the primary arena for this greatest of American architecture writers, Huxtable often traveled to other cities around the world, including Portland in 1970.

“Doctors bury their mistakes, architects plant vines and Portland covers them with roses.” So began Ada Louise Huxtable’s piece that appeared in the New York Times on June 19 of that year.

A month earlier, Huxtable had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for architectural criticism. She visited Portland after attending the opening of the Alvar Aalto-designed Mount Angel Abbey Library.

Huxtable, the nation's most influential and acclaimed architecture critic, saw in Portland a prime example of the forces arrayed against American cities, albeit in a spectacular setting. The headline read: "In Portland Ore., Urban Decay is Masked by Natural Splendor."

Her initial impression was positive.

“Small scaled, comfortably pedestrian streets with a cosmopolitan architectural mix are bounded by the hills on the west and the Willamette River on the east, with spreading residential and industrial areas beyond that double the metropolitan population,” Huxtable wrote.

She noted there were battles over whether apartment houses should be allowed on the hills among single family homes, on how to save historic landmarks, and protect neighborhoods from an expanding in-town university.

She rhapsodized on snow capped peaks, a cyclorama sky and 35 miles of rustic foot trails, then concluded, “This is a dreamworld urbanism; a city blessed by nature and by man. It is so lovely that Portlanders are lulled into a kind of false security about its urban health.”

Portland had “a curious apathy,” Huxtable argued, to problems whose symptoms were obvious.

Downtown Portland around 1970

“The scattered bomb-site look of downtown parking lots made by demolishing older buildings that pay less than metered asphalt and the blocks given over totally to parking garages or a combination of open lot and garage, are destroying the cohesive character of the city as decisively as a charge of dynamite wherever they occur. Sixty percent of city ground is now covered by automobiles.”

“Inadequate public transportation was accompanied by rising fares. Suburban shopping centers demagnetized downtown.”

“Everything is not coming up roses.”

She was especially critical of the city’s new corporate skyline. Portland had “… a better-than-average assortment of the Anywhere U.S.A. products of the large, national, big-city architectural firms, with their interchangeable towers and plaza’s multiplying a slick, redundant formula.”

“Against the suave schlock of some of Portland’s current architectural imports, Mt. Hood doesn’t stand a chance.”

First National Bank of Oregon (now Wells Fargo tower)

“This tower will be tapered and rail-finned, with an accessory block-square box, in a manner that finally died unmourned in Detroit but that the Southern California sun seems to keep alive," the Times critic added. "In style, scale and impact it will be alien corn, in every sense of the word.”

“The neatly extravagant Unistyle commercial model by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, suitable for use by any major corporation in any American city, with soap sculpture on the inevitable plaza, rises to 375 feet.”

“No one has stopped looking at the tops of these buildings long enough to see what is happening on the ground. Each one is contributing to the devitalization of the city. Virtually all of them eliminate the life on the street. There is nothing on each square block on which these buildings rise- where there should be window, shops, pedestrian activities- but a corporate entrance and a parking garage."

Georgia Pacific Building (today Standard Insurance Center)

"This deadly design usually employs the most foolproof city-wrecking device ever adopted by architects, for which today’s practitioners must surely be called to account. It is the tower on an elevated plaza, or podium, one floor above ground level, which puts a concrete or marble bunker on the street- a blind, insolent formidable fortress raised against pedestrian humanity, and its friendliest function is to receive cars.”

“The new Portland then, consists largely of towers, bunkers and bomb sites," she wrote. "And the mathematics have not yet been devised that will dispose of all the cars that the working population of each new skyscraper brings.”

Huxtable praised the South Auditorium urban renewal area, somewhat faintly.

“Because the work has spanned the decade from 1958 to 1969, with some later use of rehabilitation for an extension of the original area, Portland was able to learn from the most desolate and early mistakes of other cities. Opinions on the necessity and efficacy of the relocation process vary.” The apartment towers by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill were handsome though. She attributed much of its success to the landscape of fresh lush growth, without which the plan would be sterile.

She adored Lawrence Halprin’s fountain installation.

Forecourt Fountain (today Ira Keller Fountain)

“The project is brought to life by Lovejoy Park – Lawrence Halprin’s fountain plaza, which is the area’s social center and a notable work of environmental space and sculpture. A larger edition is almost finished as a forecourt for the city’s neuter auditorium.” (In a later article she would describe the Ira Keller forecourt fountain as “one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance).

Portland’s Park Blocks and “,,,a handful of Victorian of commercial buildings (that) are protected by fierce citizen determination and a special design district designation,” also drew positive notice.

Skidmore/Old Town walking tour map, circa 1970s

Portland was not accustomed to notice by the New York Times. The attention was not entirely welcome. When The Oregonian ran the piece it was retitled to somewhat soften the blow: "Portland’s New Architecture: Towers, Bunkers, Bombsites."

“I don’t like the article and I’m surprised The Oregonian would publish something like this,” responded Ralph Voss, President of the First National Bank of Oregon, whose new building Huxtable described as alien corn. “I don’t know who she is, but I know who Charles Luckman is," Voss said of the First National building's relatively famous businessman-slash-architect. "I think she was just trying to be cute.”

“I guess she’s entitled to her opinion,” Bob Lee, a Georgia Pacific Vice President noted. “But the (Georgia Pacific) building was designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, among the world’s leading architects. I think they are probably better equipped than the young lady in question. As a citizen I think for someone to blow into town and write an article critical of all Portland structures is presumptuous and preposterous.”

Others found merit it her observations.

“I wish we had more of the same sort of criticism. She said a lot of things many of us have been thinking, but we aren’t really free to criticize our fellow architects,” commented Gary Mitchell, a former chairman of the civic design committee of the Portland chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

“I think she’s brilliant and she’s dead right,” said Richard A. Campbell of Campbell, Yost and Partners (today YGH Architecture).

John Kenward, executive director of the Portland Development Commission, noted cohesive design in Portland was difficult to achieve because 47 percent of the city area was streets. “Full block, or combined block development is encouraged to get around the problem," he said. "Perhaps there is a point in comments about planning, in that we haven’t always given as much thought to it as we should.”

Norman Zimmer, architect (and ZGF principal) noted city dwellers needed to positively assert civic pride to ensure enlightened development and design in the future. “I have the feeling most of the people who make the decisions put on their hats and motor out to Dunthorp at night," he said. "It’s up to us in the city to get public awareness built up”.

Huxtable wound down her 1970 Times piece by writing, "Some day, some American city will discover the Malthusian truth that the greater number of automobiles, the less the city can accommodate them without destroying itself. The downtown that turns itself into a parking lot is spreading its own dissolution. The price for Portland is already alarmingly high. But there are no easy answers, or no American city would be in trouble.”

PDC Downtown Project publication, circa 1976

Two years later, Portland’s Downtown Plan of 1972 would be released. With its emphasis on transit, density, lively street level activity and preservation, it addressed many of the ills that Huxtable enumerated.

In hindsight, her piece was part of Portland’s process in recognizing a need for change. In the architectural community, her observations fell on fertile ground. Even the Oregonian agreed with her that downtown was too automobile oriented.

The results of the 1972 plan - a walkable Portland, lively with a re-magnetized downtown and a more balanced approach to the automobile - continues to be revisited by the New York Times.

Fountain inside Bank of California building

“The Bank of California building even put a fountain in its garage at the incongruous corner where the cars turn around onto the exit ramp. A switch Bernini never dreamed of. In the age of the automobile, it has a kind of ludicrous logic.”

The fountain can still be seen beneath the Union Bank of California building on Broadway between Washington and Stark, with the addition of bike racks next to it.

Two years away from the implementation of the 1972 Downtown Plan, Huxtable ended her article on a note hope, however distant.

"But some day," she wrote, "some American city will discover the Malthusian truth that the greater number of automobiles, the less the city can accommodate them without destroying itself. The downtown that turns itself into a parking lot is spreading its own dissolution.  "

That city to discover the truth and chart a different future, arguably, was the one she had just visited.

 

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Parking, density and politics: balancing vibrant urbanity with practicality

Parking lot in Southeast Portland (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Today's issue of Willamette Week includes a small blurb in its Murmurs section that got me thinking about the relationship between the urban places we most want to frequent and the parking issues that can ensue. We want to be in places with no parking, it seems, as long as we can find a place to park.

The blurb was about how Southeast Portland neighbors are asking the city to freeze construction along Division Street, "hoping to halt the boom in apartment buildings without on-site parking," it explains. The neighborhood's request comes as the result of a four-story, 81-unit apartment complex at Southeast 37th Avenue and Division Street, which has already received permits to go forward. But with a succession of apartment and condo projects along Division and and other major streets, there seems to be a growing chorus of neighborhoods feeling the growing scarcity of on-street parking, much as residents of Northwest Portland's Alphabet District near 21st and 23rd Avenues have felt for the past few decades.

“Our neighborhood will be a congestion nightmare next summer and never the same after that,” Richmond neighborhood resident and novelist Richard Melo (as quoted in WW) wrote to City Commissioner Dan Saltzman, who oversees the Bureau of Development Services, calling the current course “a national case study for unchecked urban development.”

Coincidentally, just yesterday I received a form email from mayoral candidate Charlie Hales addressing parking and multifamily housing projects.

"A recent wave of new apartment projects has provoked controversy in several neighborhoods," the Hales team writes. "In our desire to support urban living and non-auto transportation, have we gone too far? When we first started trying to fit new mixed-use development into streets like Belmont, Division and Alberta, parking was a challenge, but in a very different way than today. Our struggle then was to get developers and banks to accept less parking than would be typical in suburbia. Now, the world has changed. Banks are today willing to lend on apartment projects with no parking provided. While this has resulted in affordable projects for those without cars, there are other unintended consequences impacting neighborhoods in ways that need to be carefully assessed."

So it would seem that there is growing push-back in Portland's neighborhoods about the growing scarcity of parking spots. If that's the case, it's a break from the city's reputation for progressive pedestrian and transit-oriented developments. In urban policy circles, the talk is not of disgruntlement over decreasing parking, but innovating and prospering because of such deliberate moves. In an August 7 Atlantic Cities post, Norman Garrick and Christopher McCahill of the University of Connecticut explore Zurich's approach to restricting parking while most cities in America and the west have parking minimums.

"Since the late 1980s, Zurich has developed an alternative that's worth studying because it breaks all the rules of conventional transportation planning, and yet has been vitally important to the success of that city," they write. "In contrast, the conventional approach has devastated most American cities, and many in Europe as well...Such a policy specifies the minimum amount of parking that must be provided for each square meter of floor space of new construction. The rationale of a parking minimum is to ensure that enough parking is available to meet projected demand."

In 1989, Zurich "turned this regulation on its head by adding parking maximums to their code. A parking maximum is a device for protecting the city from having too much parking that could degrade the urban character of the city....Under this new system, there is a default parking level for the whole city, which is then reduced depending on whether or not a particular location is well served by transit.

Garrick and McCahill's research at UConn found not only that cities with higher levels of automobile use generally supply more parking, but that these cities "also have a much lower density of what matters in cities, residents and jobs. American cities in our study with small numbers of parking spaces have two to four times more people per square mile. This seems to have a lot to do with the amount of space that is needed for parking. In other words, space used for parking is simply not available for more productive uses."

Granted, the Zurich example is focused more on its central core, whereas the aforementioned parking tension in Portland is taking place in close-in neighborhoods of mostly single-family homes. Yet I can't help but think of a previous Atlantic Cities post, by editor and creative-class guru Richard Florida, citing research by San Francisco real-state firm Trulia to determine which American cities have the highest concentrations of restaurants and bars. The two don't necessarily go hand in hand, it seems. The list of top ten cities for restaurants per capita, which included Portland at #10, was comprised entirely of East Coast and West Coast metropolises such as San Francisco (which took the top spot), New York, Boston and Seattle. The South and Midwest, on the other hand, dominated the list of cities with most bars per capita, including New Orleans (in first place), Toldedo, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. The bars list also reflected more cities that have lost out in the migrations of jobs, culture and knowledge to the West. When you're amidst rust rather than silicon, it's time for another round.

Richard Florida also cites a study by Arizona State University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte that finds a connection between the creative class and levels of entrepreneurship in cities. In other words, if you are good at growing restaurants, galleries and arts facilities, you're also probably going to be successful, over time, at attracting and growing small businesses. For example, the tech industry today, particularly social media companies and startups, is increasingly locating itself in cities rather than the suburbs. As the New York Times' Norimitsu Onishi recently reported, Twitter and other big tech companies are heading from Silicon Valley to San Francisco. Portland is also seeing a proliferation of startups headquarting here rather than in Hillsboro and Beaverton.

When I think of the parking tension along Division Street that Willamette Week reported, I can sympathize with the frustration of trolling for parking in one's own neighborhood, as I used to do daily when I lived downtown in the late 1990s. I think of the trolling we all do when we go to Northwest 23rd. But 23rd is ultimately getting a parking garage - not an eyesore of multistory concrete, but one thoughtfully tucked away. I think that's a better solution than restricting apartment and condominium projects because they'll add neighborhood congestion or requiring new developments to build their own parking, as we once did. Nobody likes parking, but it's a bit of a Catch-22 situation here: the more you build parking, the less likely it is to be a place where people want to go - and park, and spend money, and contribute to a vibrant local economy. Portland has long since committed itself to density over sprawl, and we can't have it both ways. And I'd rather we be more Zurich than, say, Houston or Toledo.

 

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Little Big City: Portland's GDP has risen more than we think, but how much does it matter?

Souce: McKinsey & Company/The Atlantic

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In 1978, Portland was a very different place, whether we’re talking economically, culturally, or even its physical makeup. Many of the places that now define the city, from Waterfront Park to Pioneer Courthouse Square to the Pearl District, did not exist. Timber still dominated local industry. There was scarcely an art gallery to be found, and any right-minded artist looking for career advancement and attention knew to head for New York. The local food/drink scene was more Maxwell House, Budweiser and Gallo than Stumptown, Widmer and Sokol Blosser. Sure, we’ve always had our natural wonders, and by the late 1970s a generation of more progressive politics and politicians had taken root. But when the Trail Blazers won the NBA championship the year before, it seemed to trigger not just sporting euphoria but a kind of breakthrough in the national consciousness: the idea that this one-time backwater burg could become a city that mattered – not just to us but to the rest of the country.

Today, the city lacks such inferiority complexes. We receive an embarrassment of riches when it comes to media attention and tourism. People may roll their eyes at a TV show like Portlandia and the local brand of youthful, earnest quirkiness of the demographic it lampoons: the Ivy League-educated barista with tight jeans, Erkel/Costello glasses, tattoos and a fixed-gear unicycle eating artisan offal from a biodiesel-powered roach coach. But there’s more to the nation’s near-fixation than laughing at Fred Armisen in a bad wig. Portland, with its urban growth boundary, pedestrian and transit-oriented development and suspicion of all things corporate, has for a long time now represented another path for the United States, much as San Francisco might have to our parents or Seattle to our older siblings.

But if we were to consider Portland’s transformations according to a cold hard measurement like gross domestic product, would the rising ambition show, or would our lack of Fortune 500 companies and old-money wealth doom us to cultural cache without a financial foundation?

According to a recent report by McKinsey & Company, Portland is not merely producing a colorful socio-cultural mirage to mask the unemployment data. The report, cited in a blog post yesterday by Jordan Weissmann of The Atlantic, compares America’s top 30 cities by GDP in 1978 to 2010. Portland thus winds up one of five US cities to crack the list, along with Tampa, Orlando, Sacramento and Riverside. We’re the only northern city to rise, while four out of the five to drop from the list (Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Buffalo and Columbus) were from the north, although the Northeast and Midwest rather than our Northwest region. And indeed, the emergence of the South and West become major factors in the nation’s changing GDP top 30.

“First, there's the fall of the Rust Belt and the rise of the Sun Belt,” Weissmann writes. “As the country's economy eased away from manufacturing, which tends to be clustered in discrete regions, and towards services, which can be almost anywhere, people moved away from the old, frigid, and declining industrial centers towards states with cheap real estate and warm weather. Population growth ultimately means economic growth. And so you see the emergence of places like Riverside, Phoenix, Orlando, and Tampa.”

Weissman goes on to note the dominance of finance, which kept cities like New York and Chicago at the top of the GDP list. Even as the Internet and other factors made financial capitols like these less relevant in some ways, the rise of financial speculation in the wake of Individual Retirement Accounts in the 1980s and deregulation from the 1980s-2000s made these wealthy cities even wealthier.

Then, of course, there’s the shift to the West. “The locus of world trade moved from the Atlantic to the Pacific during this time period,” Weissman adds, “which benefited cities in California and its neighbors. The tech sectors helped bolster San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle.” And Portland. According to a list of America's leading high-tech metropolises published by Atlantic Cities, the Rose City ranks fourth after Seattle, San Jose and San Francisco. We're clearly part of a West Coast "tech belt" comparable to the Rust Belt of the Northeast during the 20th century. (Hopefully in 40 years Billy Joel won't be lamenting our demise.)

Source: Atlantic Cities

Beyond the parts that Weissman notes, the McKinsey report goes on to note broader population and economic trends. For example, contrary to the notion of the United States being a nation of small-town main streets and Europe being a place where everyone lives in cities, practically the opposite is true. 80 percent of the US population lives in large cities, versus less than 60 percent in Europe. Almost 85 percent of American GDP was generated by 259 large cities in 2010, while the large cities of Western Europe contributed less than 65 percent.

“It is America’s cities that explain why the United States continues to enjoy higher per-capita GDP than Europe,” the McKinsey report reads. “The higher share of US urbanites—and the fact that they command a larger per capita GDP premium over US smaller towns and rural areas than do their European counterparts—explains three-quarters of the per capita GDP gap between the two economies.”

What’s more, despite the continuing presence of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Dallas and Washington as our biggest mega-cities, the McKinsey notes their declining importance compared to middle-sized cities, like Portland.

“The true vigor of America’s urban economy comes from a broad base of dynamic middleweights and the relatively high per capita GDP they achieve,” the McKinsey report goes on. “There are just over 255 middleweight cities in the United States, compared with just over 180 in Europe. And they generate more than 70 percent of US GDP today, compared with just over 50 percent in Western Europe. In fact, the top 28 US middleweights alone contribute more than 35 percent of US GDP.”

It’s easy to assume these numbers say more than they do. The Atlantic post by Weissman is titled “America’s Most Important Cities: 1978 vs. 2010,” yet can or should we so directly equate economic output with importance? Can cultural significance be quantified? To a degree the later can. Sales of performance tickets, albums, and books can be measured, as can tourism via hotel bookings, etc. Even so, in an age of reducing nearly all human activity to algorithms something gets lost.

Meanwhile, you can’t talk about Portland and economics without coming around to the phrase “creative class,” as espoused by economist Richard Florida. Yesterday I actually got into a brief Twitter disagreement with Florida after reading his list of the nation’s most “innovative” cities for The Daily Beast, which had Corvallis ranked higher (#7) than Portland (#13).

Granted, these lists are inherently silly, calling to mind the Simpsons episode where Homer reads in a “US of A Today” newspaper the headline, “America’s favorite pencils: #2 is #1.”

That said, what does it mean to be innovative? Corvallis is home to an HP outpost, and HP files lost of patents, which are a frequent measuring stick for innovation. So is the presence of a large university, such as Oregon State. But is Corvallis truly an innovative city? Not to reduce this conversation to cliché and stereotype, but in the scores of trips to and through Corvallis I’ve made as a nearly life-long Oregonian, the word “innovative” never crossed my mind: not in the fraternity houses on campus, not in the Arby’s or KFC lining its main thoroughfare (9th Street), and not in its downtown shops. Granted, as an Oregon Ducks fan I’m biased as it concerns comparing Corvallis with Eugene, but if Oregonians were polled as to which town is more progressive or culturally vibrant, I’m fairly confident Eugene would enjoy a near-landslide. That’s to say nothing of the idea that Corvallis is more innovative than Portland. We needn’t even bother to explain that one.

Source: The Huffington Post/Richard Florida

Richard Florida, the man who gained notoriety via his 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class, has now penned a 10th anniversary updated edition of the book. “What we are going through is not any run-of-the-mill economic cycle,” he writes. “It's an enormous structural transformation – similar if not larger in scale and scope to the shift from the Agricultural to the Industrial Age.”

Florida notes the declining share of working-class jobs in America, which represented more than 60 percent of the US workforce in the 1880s and “didn't fall below 50 percent until the years immediately following World War II, when it began to decline steadily, falling to forty percent in 1970, thirty percent by 1990, and roughly twenty percent today.” jobs include all not just factory and manufacturing jobs but construction, transportation and maintenance. “Workers who directly produce things in factories account for just six percent of the workforce and are expected to decline even further over the next decade to around five percent,” Florida writes, “roughly equivalent to the level of Agricultural jobs during the last great crisis of the 1930s.”

The creative class, the economist says, “comprised less than 10 percent of the workforce in the late nineteenth century and no more than 15 percent for much of the twentieth,” but began to surge in the 1980s, with more than 20 million new jobs created to become approximately one-third of the American workforce and more than two thirds of the total US payroll. He cites Bureau of Labor Statistics projections that an additional seven million or so creative class jobs will be created over the next decade.

What Florida’s analysis spends less time analyzing, but what is just as relevant if not more, is the service industry. As far back as John Naisbitt’s 1982 bestseller Megatrends, the service industry has been discussed as a bigger and bigger provider of American jobs. And service-industry work isn’t just unappealing because of its relatively low wages. Long-term economic growth is based on gains in productivity, but that’s much more difficult to accomplish in service than in manufacturing. A cook or waiter can’t fundamentally change the way food is prepared and brought to the table from an efficiency standpoint, even if we incorporate present-day phenomena like food carts. And so many of those migrating to Portland are perhaps trained for creative industry jobs but wind up working in the service industry instead.

Florida notes that working-class jobs weren’t always as attractive as they became after World War II. Before then, the Industrial Revolution had brought the factories but not the fair labor standards that would accompany the New Deal during the Great Depression. Factory work saw wages rise and productivity rise after unions pressured companies to take better care of their employees. Florida believes a similar transformation of today’s service industry jobs needs to happen.

“Yes, we will all have to share the cost of higher-paid service work, just as we paid more for cars and manufactured goods after World War II,” he writes. “But think about it this way. What would you rather pay a little more for? The workers who make your car, washing machine or refrigerator, or those who prepare your food and take care of your kids and aging parents? The burden of renewed prosperity is one we all have to share.”

One way that Portland and Oregon are already rather different: our state is one of only seven in the US that does not allow tip credit for minimum wages. In most states, a worker who earns more than $30 per month in tips can be paid a wage less than minimum wage. Only Oregon, Washington, California, Montana, Nevada, Minnesota and Alaska do not allow tip credit and instead have the same minimum wage for tipped and non-tipped workers. This has nothing explicit to do with being a member of the creative class such as a designer, editor or artist. But again, many who enter the creative class start out in the service industry, and the livability of a service-industry job enables one to seek education or other means of transition to more compelling and better paying work.

Making better wages waiting tables isn’t the defining characteristic of Portland’s transformation culturally or economically. That said, each city and region have slightly different values and hierarchies about what’s important. As we all know, the city’s adopted mantra is “Keep Portland Weird”. That’s not just weirdness in the sense of looking and acting goofy, but in pursuing personal passions for largely non-financial reasons. More than 150 years after the Great Migration that brought thousands of settlers west in covered wagons, Oregon and California retain their two-sides-of-the-same-coin relationship: When the Oregon Trail split somewhere just west of the Rockies, California became the destination for those with fortunes of gold in their dreams, and our Northwest region became a destination for those seeking the perfect plot to raise crops.

Source: McKinsey & Company

The fact that Portland’s gross domestic product is now among the top 30 American cities is a testament to the added population here, as more seek the Northwest’s beauty and progressive smart-city livability.  But population doesn’t account for the entire story. In one chart accompanying the McKinsey report, major cities that increased or decreased their GDP and changed accompanying place on or off the list are shown to have done so either more by population increases or per-capita GDP growth. San Jose and Boston lead those gaining in per-capita GDP, but both had low population growth. Southwest cities like Austin, Phoenix, Riverside and especially Las Vegas were high on population growth but relatively low on per-capita GDP growth.

Portland comes out as the city with the most even combination of population and per-capita GDP growth between 1978 and 2010. Portland doesn’t have San Jose’s degree of tech-industry investment, nor Boston’s foundational spectrum of great research universities. We don’t have the warm sunshine that makes sunbathers and retirees alike flock to Southwestern cities. Yet like gymnast in a world of body builders and sprinters, we seem to possess something all the more coveted today: a sense of balance—between work and living your life, between high wages and a sense of place, between scorching Southwestern desert sunshine and frigid Northeast freezes, between economic output and environmental protection, and, in some uncategorizable but nevertheless wholly existent way, between the past and the future.

 

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Not just pickling: incubating a new-old Portland (and American) economy

Sign in Oui Presse cafe, Portland (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

For all the economic activity that has come as a result of globalization and free trade zones, Americans for decades have lamented the loss of the country's manufacturing base and attendant jobs lost to factories overseas. Whether it's Apple iPods, Nike sneakers or any number of other goods, they're made somewhere beyond US shores. But what if there's not a silver lining for the domestic economy, but one which Portland has already embraced?

In Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Adam Davidson explores how craft manufacturing is emerging as a niche for the United States that could actually become a much larger segment of the economy. "Don't Mock the Artisanal-Pickle Makers" is the title of the article, and Davidson's focus is how Brooklyn has become a "ground zero" of the artisanal universe. But of course Portland is the unspoken juggernaut here.

Although Brooklyn is a burough of New York City and thus gets media attention even more easily than our over-exposed city, Brooklyn's rise of both hipsters and an artisanal economy has already been referred to in the New York Observer as a "Portlandification." There too, as on the TV show "Portlandia", the focus has been on style more than economics. Aren't these people in their earnest, quirky enthusiam funny? But People seem to get so wary of or mocking about hipsters that they lose sight of what hipsters are doing - which, it turns out, may be inventing or reinventing a whole new economy. When you don't have to sit in a cubicle anymore and have decided instead to make ans sell something yourself, why not grow that Amish beard you've always wanted?

Instead of the high-volume, low-margin commodity business of giant corporations and manufacturers, who turn out millions of units of soda pop, bicycles or beef jerky, Davidson argues in the Times, making things by hand taps into an increasinly savvy world market whose collective middle and upper-middle classes will pay more for things unique and of quality. "Contrary to popular belief, the revival of craft manufacturing isn't just a fad," he writes. He cites not just the usual pickled foods or clothing or specialty consumer items like candles or bikes, but also companies making precision parts for rockets or helicopters.

What's more, Davidson discusses a "happines index" of note, that "once people reach some level of comfort, they are willing - even eager - to trade in potential earnings at a lucrative but uninspiring job for less (but comfortable) pay at more satisfying work. Much as we may desire more Fortune 500 companies to bring jobs to an under-employed metro area, the reason the city is seeing a migration of college-educated, creative-industry denizens is that Portland has earned the distinction of being a different kind of place, where making money may still be important, but not at the price of a saccharine lifestyle of automobile gridlock and eyesore strip malls. It's not where you'll get rich, the thinking goes, but where you'll have a life on your own terms.

And just as important as being a hive of artisanal manufacturing and small businesses without such domination by or dependence upon a few corporate juggernauts, Portland is a place without the burden of history and generations of old money. This point was made by New Yorker turned Portlander William Deresiewicz in an American Scholar essay called "A Jew in Portland."

"When Barack Obama was inaugurated, in a great national celebration, about a year after I returned from the Northeast to live here, my strongest feeling was one of remoteness from the event, a sense that American history was happening, as it almost always has, somewhere else," Deresiewicz writes. "In the East, you feel as if you’re in the midst of things. Portlanders feel as if they’re in the midst of things, but not the things I’m talking about." He goes on to describe an encounter:

"I was gardening one morning when a blissful hippie couple happened by. 'Hey,' they said, 'how’s your day going?' Then they praised the perennials, savored the look of the mulch, and urged me with a smile to have a peaceful afternoon. As they strolled on down the street, I realized what they’d been doing. They’d been 'sending positive energy into the universe.' How sweet, I thought, and how remarkably naive. What kind of place—and a city, no less—allows you to remain so innocent of history that you can wander through the world on such terms? And yet I remain, and just, perhaps, for these very reasons. New York may be the city of my past, but Portland—green, self-limiting, communitarian—is, I believe, the city of our future. Or at least it needs to be, if we’re going to have a future. As any student of American history can tell you, you reach the new by releasing the old. And as any student of another place can tell you—I mean a certain strip of land between the Jordan and the sea—too much memory can kill you."

It's not to say that Portland's advantage is in its flakey, naive ignorance of the weight of history. But as Deresiewicz argues, the country has taken notice that Portland may not be just a stylish fad, but a pioneer in a new-old way of things.

Ecotrust Building (photo by Brian Libby)

If that's the case, though, what does that mean for architecture? Locally, it would seem to mean a continuation of a trend long since begun with the Great Recession: not so many big projects like half-block condominium towers or office buildings  - espcially in the private sector - but more modestly sized ones. In recent years burgeoning neighborhoods like the South Waterfront have been maligned as million-dollar boondoggles because some of their big condos have been foreclosed upon. That neighborhood, like the Pearl District before it, was still a good idea. Sprawl and a lack of density would have been the alternative. But what we may be poised to add now is more foothills to these and other mountains: littler building projects dwarved individually by the behemoths, but collectively larger and better integrated with the urban fabric. More so than new construction, though, the artisanal economy seems rooted in the existing old buidings they renovated into new-economy hives, such as Portland's Ford Building, the Leftbank Building, or the Ecotrust Building.

Even corporate America and government are recognizing the groundswell of new seedlings replacing the old-growth ecosystem. In today's New York Times, Christine Negroni reports on the historic Town Hall in Stamford, Connecticut being turned into a startup incubator, with the bill being paid for renovations of the building largely by local corporate aviation company Sikorsky in exchange for access to or first pass at entrepreneurs' new ideas. Negroni also cites the Oregon Sustainability Center in Portland as an additional example of cities investing in business incubators.

Although the Sustainability Center may turn out to more than pay for itself in economic actitivy and sustainable-industry innovation, it's also a hugely expensive building project that will come with lease rates significantly above market rate. I worry that this will wind up as a very innovative demonstration project for green design and construction but fail as an incubator. The same could easily be true for Stamford's transformation of its Town Hall. The whole thing feels too institutional to capture and enable startup companies.

I'd give a better shot at success to the more informal Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE) being hosted by Wieden + Kennedy ad agency in its Pearl District headquarters. When I visited their space in the building, one of PIE's co-founders talked about how the right environment was a balance of support and informality: the chance for entrepreneurs to come together and exchange ideas, both with each other and with some of the big corporations and investors to which W+K has access, but also to kick their shoes off and order a pizza - to make the architetual space their own. After all, the space that birthed the original computer industry revolution in the 1960s and '70s was the informal home garage. Would a young Steve Jobs have relocated his new Apple company to an office tower in downtown San Francisco, with government officials and fat-cat corporate types looking on, even if he could?

Ultimately what will help Portland succeed - or Brooklyn or Bellingham or Birmingham - is having more garages, not more gilded incubators. Here's perhaps where the sustainability revolution Portland has long since led meets the artisanal economy it seems to be a large part of: in embracing old buildings of character, be they warehouses or old Victorian houses for their most emblematic headquarters. It's not just how you make artisan piclkles, but where.

 

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Next moves for the "capital of conscience"

Photo by Brian Libby

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In a Thursday Portland Tibune op-ed, PORT editor and artist/curator Jeff Jahn makes a compelling argument that Portland should sieze the day: keeping its creative talent by embarking on an ambitious future.

"Portland is the first U.S. city to grow out of the adolescent attitudes of America in the second half of the 20th century," Jahn writes. "The laundry list: non-car-reliant transportation, green thinking, proximity to nature, a very non-1 percent-centric civic attitude, high-tech savvy and a permissive attitude that was essentially humanistic rather than purely capitalistic."

"In other words," he adds, "the original Occupy Portland started around the mid-’90s by artists and has only gathered steam since...it is clear that Portland is receiving credit as the capital of
conscience for the United States. Portland became a 21st-century leader because it rejected both of the 20th century’s main models: Manhattan’s top-down corporate verticality and LA’s car-driven suburban sprawl. Instead, as a more 19th century-style city of shopkeepers and artists (defined by our citizens more than institutions), we should own the title and take care to not become complacent."

Jahn's op-ed responded to a previous Tribune article by Peter Korn exploring why there are no Portland-based winners of the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" fellows. He says our community of artists, designers and other creatives is more "MacGyver" than "MacArthur": smaller scaled as a result of the best work happening without institutional support, be it at alternative art galleries or in small architecture firms. "Some call it benign neglect, but it is simply an institutional lag," Yahn concludes.

Photo by Brian Libby

This notion of Portland having a hive of creative activity but too little leadership at the top enabling it to flourish also brings to mind a Wednesday article in Atlantic Cities about a "green revolution" happening in Chicago.

"Daniel Burnham went on to lay out much of the city's central lakefront area as part of his 1909 Plan of Chicago," David Lepeska writes. But the waterfront area often seemed under-appreciated during the latter half of the 20th century." But then came Millennium Park in 2004, controversial for its $450 million cost initially, yet quickly attracting droves. "It's only the beginning," Lepeska adds. "Several major projects remain on the city's lakefront docket, aiming to complete the makeover that began nearly a decade ago and create an unbroken, three-mile stretch of green jewels." Up first is a $225 million renovation of Navy Pier. By 2015, the city is expecting to redo North Island, a former landing strip that will become a new park and lagoon designed by the firm of Macarthur Fellow recipient Jean Gang and her firm, Studio Gang. There is also a $30 million redo of the northern portion of Grant Park, and a $50 million redo of the Navy Pier Flyover pedestrian crossing.

Obviously Portland doesn't have the wealth and resources of Chicago. But there's still a lesson to be learned. Top Chicago architects like Gang are leading the charge in re-imagining the city's most important infrastructure and public spaces. That's very different from what Portland is doing on projects like the Columbia Crossing, in which government highway engineers have forced design mediocrity and 20th Century thinking about roadways. It's an appalling missed opportunity. We're also building Portland's first new downtown bridge in more than a generation, TriMet's MAX/pedestrian crossing south of the Ross Island Bridge. It's going to be a handsome bridge, but the transit agency dismissed its best proposal, dumping acclaimed Boston bridge engineer Miguel Rosales just as his vision for the bridge began to attract excitement.

Besides these bridge projects, there is also the broader question of how Portland re-embraces its waterfront as Chicago is doing. Sooner or later, we've got to do something about the freeway taking up all our prime real estate along the east bank of the Willamette River. The Vera Katz Eastbank Esplanade was a good start, providing a walking path squeezed between the freeway and the water. But it's completely isolated from the east side itself by Interstate 5. The Esplanade needs to be a point of entry into the east side, not an outdoor hallway skirting it amongst the loudness of automobiles skirting by. It won't be cheap to bury Interstate 5 in a tunnel, and the alternative - having Interstate 405 on the west side become the new I-5, going from two freeways to one beside downtown - would create its own set of problems. Yet removing the freeway from the east side could increase property values and transform the central eastside, just as new streetcar and MAX lines are making the connections to downtown better than ever.

It's easy to feel cynical about the prospects of Portland taking on any major infrastructure projects given dwinding federal funds and given how badly city and state have failed with the Columbia Crossing. There's not money and even if it were, maybe we can't be trusted with it. Yet Jahn is right that Portland can't just assume its current popularity will last forever, and we must use the social capital being generated today to reinvest in the foundation of tomorrow. Maybe there's a wide chasm between a knitting, feminist-bookstore owning Portlandia urbanist and a Richard Daley-scale ambition for building. Maybe we can take pride in having a MacGuyver attitude rather than MacArthur heavyweights. Yet the "City That Works" (to borrow from the local city-government slogan) still has a lot of it to do, and our conscience should be pushing us to grow hungrier.

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Portland's rise is not on a 15-minute cycle (nor is Pittsburgh's)

A contrail over Southeast Portland (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In Wednesday's Washington Post, Maura Judkis argues that Portland's 15 minutes of fame are up.

"Portland, with its elaborate facial hair and abundance of strip clubs, represents irony. Pittsburgh, with its working-class pragmatism, is the opposite: earnest and straightforward," writes Judkis, a Pittsburgh native. "Hipsters take faux working-class attributes — brusque beards, Pabst Blue Ribbon and occupations such as butchery — and integrate them into their lives with an ironic wink and a superiority complex. In Pittsburgh, you can find all of the above, only without the derision and affectation. The natural life span of the hipster has come to an end. What was a lifestyle adopted to make fun of the mainstream has now become the mainstream. There are no more [expletive] hipsters to be looked at...and jokes about them — much like every skit on Portlandia — have started to feel a minute or a paragraph too long."

With due respect to the writer, I think this article, like many from national media outlets, fails to grasp the coalescence of long term trends leading to Portland's rise.

Instead of reading the tea leaves of decades-long socio-economic urban trends that have emboldened Portland and Pittsburgh, or any number of smaller cities around the world, this article and others before it - particularly those covering the Portlandia TV show - have instead confused them with trite, fickle pop cultural cache. The notion of 15 minutes of fame was of course coined by Pittsburgh-born Andy Warhol, but the mentality shown here is less that of a visionary art provocateur than of a TMZ or E! reporter genuflecting or scoffing at a Kardashian depending on the time of day.

It's not just the Washington Post doing it. A New Yorker writer, John Seabrook, described Portland as a city where people "pretend not to care about money and worldly ambition." Did I mention his review predated the Occupy Wall Street movement? We may not be the only ones who see how little of value being in the one percent really buys.

Carnival ride at Oaks Park, Portland (photo by Brian Libby)

The irony here - and yes, as a Portlander apparently I'm preturnaturally conditioned to recognize it, versus a Pittsburgian's quest for earnestness - is that Portlandia itself exemplifies a much better understanding of the city. The show may have a satirical tone (it being a satire and all) in its send ups of feminist bookstore owners and organic farmers, but it recognizes and embraces the city's broader identity of the progressive outsider, that which helped gave birth to Gus Van Sant films, Apple computers, Mark Rothko paintings and Simpsons episodes. The other irony is that Portland is overwhelmingly an earnest do-gooder populace, not cynical and ironic, compared to larger population centers on the East Coast or in Southern California.

In comparing the merits of Pittsburgh to Portland, Judkis can only seem to praise the Steel City by saying it has some supply of what Portland emblemizes. Pittsburgh, she writes, "has its own bike routes, microbreweries, organic food markets, art and lush scenery." If that doesn't work, there's always the cuisine that made unprecedented numbers of people in the Rust Belt and Midwest to which Pittsburgh belongs obese: "Don’t forget that it has one of the country’s weirdest and most delicious sandwiches."

This ought not to be about Pittsburgh versus Portland. As it happens, Pittsburgh does have a lot going for it. The city, more than any other former industrial Mecca flourishing in generations past, has found a way to reinvent itself as a flourishing small metropolis connecting the East Coast and the Midwest. And admittedly, Portland has its problems: we need jobs and greater diversity. But Pittsburgh and Portland, rather than rivals or as combatatants in some kind of cool-cache duel, both represent the rise of the small city at the expense of megalopolises like New York, DC and Los Angeles.

Gone are the days before the Internet and ease of travel when small cities' most talented artists and entrepreneurs felt they had to migrate across the country forever in order to find attention, investment and advancement. Today Mark Rothko wouldn't have to go to New York to become Mark Rothko.

The great diaspora of the 21st century will not be immigrants foreign and domestic heading to two or three American cultura capitols. It will be one that favors the Copenhagens, Kyotos, Portlands and Pittsburghs of the world - not to the same centers of smog, hubris and spit of the past. There is no Ellis Island today but an archipelago.

Go ahead, Washington Post. Try to marginalize this irrevocable broad transformation as mere fashion. After all, daily papers (once the gatekeepers of information, now stumbling to keep up) are part of the changing times theselves, and one that symbolizes something larger: an urban-cultural oligarchy becoming a democracy.

And now that I think about it, it's actually a good thing Portland's 15 minutes have been declared expired. Now that tastemakers might be moving on, we can focus on the truer substance and sustenance that remains.

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A tale of two encampments: blurring notions of temporary and permanent, home and assembly

Map of Occupy Portland encampment (by Jonathan Hill for Willamette Week)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In this week's Willamette Week, Aaron Mesh reports on his 48 hours living in the Occupy Portland encampment and protest downtown in Chapman Square and the adjacent Lowndsale Square. But it isn't just a campout happening on these blocks, nor is it solely a protest.

As Mesh learns, the Occupy encampment has, in some respects, become its own city. He begins the encampment by visiting an engineering department to have a parcel of grass assigned to him and receive help with a makeshift shelter. He visits a library with over 200 volumes and even a librarian. There is a portion of the Occupy encampment devoted to families and children. There is a KBOO radio station, there are religious services, and a security committee.

Regardless of one's political affiliations, if one stops for a moment to look at the sheer ingenuity and cooperation going on in the Occupy Portland camps, it's a testament that - however much gridlock and standoffishness happens in the US Congress - ordinary citizens are still capable of inspiring cooperation and ingenuity. Yet you wouldn't learn this from most media outlets covering the protests. The Oregonian, for example, took the perspective of following the police blotter. This perspective represents a lot of people who pass by the Occupy camps along Third and Fourth Avenues; they react to the dirtiness of the camps and the lack of a coherent message.

Even so, one of the problems besetting Occupy Portland - the fact that it's become populated with many homeless and street people, some of whom care little about politics - may be result of its own success. The first commenter for Mesh's story writes, "Social service agencies are sending people they can't serve to the camp with the promise of free food. Newly released prisoners are making the camp their first stop in search of something to eat and drink." I can't confirm that this is true, but it would make perfect sense. Given today's economy, local shelters are being pushed to capacity and beyond. So even though Occupy is largely about how economic policy favors the top one percent of the income pyramid in the United States, the fact that homeless and needy people are being driven there for reasons other than politics becomes a detraction.

Two protesters at Occupy Portland (image by Tyler Clifton via Flickr)

Part of the Occupy Portland drama is based on a question that remains unanswered: how long will they remain? For the protesters, abandoning Chapman and Lownsdale squares is equated to giving up on their demands for greater financial parity and opportunity for all. For the authorities, it's a kind of tightrope walk. Most elected officials in Portland proper are left-leaning, and generally sympathetic to Occupy protesters' basic tenets. For now, individual arrests and other issues notwithstanding, they're willing to let the Occupy occupation go on.

Yet this tolerance is based on the idea that ultimately the protest, or at least the tents and tarps marking mass overnight stays in these public parks, are temporary. When and if the Occupy occupation continues on over the weeks and months, the pressure will grow on local leaders to evict them, as is already being done in Oakland, for example.

A few blocks away at Fourth and Burnside, another encampment has a different set of challenges and ambitions.  Right 2 Dream Too, also known as R2D2, is described by Amanda Eckerson of Street Roots as a "rest area for houseless members" of the community.

The effort is organized by a grassroots group called Right 2 Survive, which also organized a similar tent city in Seattle. This isn't just squatting on a vacant lot. It's being done with the owner's permission, complete with a lease and insurance. The lot isn't making its owner money sitting empty, so until or in lieu of a building being built, allowing an organized, paid-for encampment of homeless people in tents is a way to help those in deed and make some very modest income. Eckerson reports that although Right 2 Survive members endeavored to create their tent-city lot lawfully, "When they opened their doors on Oct. 11, the national day of action for homelessness, city planners came questioning their right to be there."

Comparing R2D2 and Occupy Portland, she writes, "one is an occupation of public land, the other has a lease on private land. The occupation has been given tentative permission by the city, while R2D2's occupancy is being disputed as illegal. People are virtually abandoning their homes to join the Occupy Portland movement, while members of R2D2 are reacting to the fact that they have no place to sleep."

"Despite these elements," Eckerson adds, "there is a deeper strand of solidarity that exists between these two movements. Both groups are responding to the larger inequity of our social system, the lack of access to political power, and the rights of all of us to dream."

So far, neither R2D2 nor Occupy Portland has been shut down, but it may be inevitable that both are gone within upcoming weeks or at least months. Ultimately, the Occupy encampments, be there in Portland, New York or elsewhere, have already made a significant impact on the national consciousness. Although there is much skepticism about individual protesters or people populating the  protests, a New York Times/CBS News poll released yesterday (October 25) reports that about 46 percent said Occupy reflects the sentiment of most Americans (compared with 27 percent for the Tea Party). That means that, whatever sniping about people on the front lines of the movement needing showers, the broader message has been heard. More importantly, though, at some point authorities will come back around to the fact that the Occupy encampments are bending to the point of breaking the notion of what can be permanent habitable space.

In the case of R2D, the space is private but the structures themselves - tents, handmade shelters - are meant to be temporary. If the tents are truly permanent, they become architecture, and thus subject to building codes. Even if the individual tents and other structures change, if the use of the land as encampment becomes quasi-permanent, it too could be subject to zoning and code strictures or land-use laws. What's more, the fact that R2D2 is right on Burnside, the border between Downtown and Old Town, is a kind of taunt to Portland's leaders. For years the City Council has devoted resources to curbing homelessness, with the recently opened Bud Clark Commons just the latest example of a public building meant to provide an alternative to sleeping on a park bench or, in this case, in a tent on a vacant lot. R2D2 may be simply an earnest act to provide shelter for those in need, yet it symbolized blight at the epicenter of millions of dollars of effort to stop it. As another recent Willamette Week cover story explored, for all the investments we've made in infrastructure and promoting creative-class development, there is another Portland, surrounding the central city, with no sidewalks and much higher joblessness. R2D2 is a reminder that close-in Portland can't, and shouldn't be, a perfectly pretty bubble untouched by poor people's problems.

No one can say for sure when these encampments will end, or if they will at all. Yet they each, because of this, provide a case of blurred lines between temporary and permanent space, as well as a painful reminder of the Great Recession's deep impact - or, to the select few in the increasingly targeted one percent of Americans controlling nearly half of the wealth, a lack thereof.

Steve Jobs: the first Portlandian?

Steve Jobs, 1982 (image courtesy Elephant Journal)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Steve Jobs didn't come to Portland for youthful retirement. But his inspired drop-out from college may be an indication of a larger collective spirit.

In the days and weeks after an iconic figure's death, it's natural to join in on the veneration, and to feel some sense of broader connection. Since  Jobs' death was announced last week, we've seen comparisons to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, heard tributes calling him the most original and forward thinking of corporate CEOs. And long before his death, Jobs also came to represent the value and necessity of counter-intuitive thinking: that customers cannot always express what they need, for example, or that changing your mind is a sign of strength rather than weakness.

Here in Portland, Jobs' ties to the city have already been celebrated: that he was Reed College's most famous dropout, for example - leaving after just six months, but not actually leaving - and that the metro area's sizable tech industry owes much of its life to Apple. But maybe there's something larger in Jobs' life to sieze upon as somehow quintessentially our own. Was he, in fact, the first Portlandian?

One of the most oft-repeated lines from the Portlandia TV show is a fake slogan for the city: "Where young people go to retire." The joke is meant to alternately mock and celebrate the fact that young people have moved here in droves despite traditional motives, such as the availability of employment (or lack thereof), being veritable non-factors or even a discouragment. But what if we turned around that idea? What if Portland isn't where young people go to "retire", but to opt out of the traditional path?

In a photo from 1982 (seen at the top of this post), Jobs - by then a multimillionaire - was shown in his largely empty living room. "All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that’s what I had," he said later. Jobs spent several years living in an unrenovated old mansion, and even at the time of his death was residing in an unremarkable suburban Palo Alto house. He was following his passion, which happened to make him rich and famous. Everything else was secondary. And trophies demonstrating your wealth and superiority were superflous. I can't help but wonder if that ideology is inherent to this place.

In an Oregonian essay from 1995, columnist David Sarasohn called this region "The Gore-Tex Vortex", suggesting that it wasn't just the rainy climate that left Oregon unspoiled and gave birth to a more democratic place with raincoats outnumbering pinstriped suits.

Sarasohn cited a Depression-era Works Progress Aministration guide to the state that read, "Oregon is still the most unspoiled and uncluttered spot in America, and partly because the gold rushes of California and Alaska left it undisturbed." The same, he argued, was true at the end of the 20th century, with aerospace and cyberspace industries in California and Seattle making stampedes on either side of us.

"The most famous legend of the Oregon settlement is about the fork in the road west, with the sign pointing to Oregon and the gold dust trail leading to California," Sarahson added. "The moral, allegedly, is that the people who could read came to Oregon....Actually, the real moral is that people who wanted to be rich and famous went to California--and still do....In the great population shifts across America, from the conquistadors to the condominiums, there have been two separate, contradictory urges: one set of migrants wants to get rich, and the other set wants to get away. One urge leads to California, the other to Oregon."

Steve Jobs didn't come to Oregon to build Apple into a corporate juggernaut. He came here to become inspired. And perhaps appropriately, given the theme of taking the less-traveled road and not the gold-dusted path, Jobs famously dropped out of Reed College after six months, only to find greater inspiration on his own at that same school.

"I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition," Jobs recalled in a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford. "After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting."

"Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating."

Reed College (photo by Brian Libby)

"None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later."

"Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Jobs and his connection with Portland and Reed and the dropout's path remind me of "Portlandia"

When "Portlandia" first premiered earlier this year, I was struck most not by the satires fashioned on the show, which were often funny and spot-on, but by certain responses in the media. In The New Yorker, for example, Meredith Blake wrote of the city's "peculiar combination of self-seriousness and prolonged adolescence." Another New Yorker writer, John Seabrook, described Portland as a city where people "pretend not to care about money and worldly ambition."

Clearly, even when you write for what is hands down the nation's smartest magazine, it's possible to completely miss the point.

It isn't that the quintessential Portlandian seeks to be without money or rejects ambition. Rather, it's that these are not the driving force. Steve Jobs understood that the path to innovation and fulfilment is not always a direct one. Sometimes, you have to allow for and be open to a calligraphy class - other some other inspiration - that will change how you view the world.

This confusing with means and ends by those who would judge Portlandians, in turn, also reminds me of one of Jobs' most famous quotes, on the inherent nature of design. "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like," he said. "Design is how it works." If you're a 25-year-old Harvard grad working now as a barista instead of in a cubicle, that's just the superficial, surface level description of what you're doing. Maybe being a barista is your own caligraphy class.

"More than any of his other accomplishments, his creations or his branding brilliance, the thing I admired most about him was that he loved what he did," writes Jeanette Mulvey in Business News Diary. "His excitement and enthusiasm was often called charisma, charm and drive. Ultimately, though, he was really just a guy who found his niche and worked it for everything it was worth. Finding a way to do what you love – even if that something is cutting grass or towing cars – is the secret to being great at what you do."

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Imagining density, close-in and on the urban margins

"Scenario A" from Benson Blocks BOMA workshop (rendering courtesy PSU)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Two articles from the Daily Journal of Commerce illustrate the variety of ways - but not the only ones - that development can move forward amidst the persistent Great Recession.

As Angela Webber reports in one story, six Portland State University real estate students presented proposals last Wednesday for a 14-acre site between Northeast Sandy Boulevard, Interstate 84, and 20th Avenue called the Benson Blocks.

Though broken down into two potential proposals, "modest" and "robust" (depending on the economic conditions), each is a mix of high-density housing and retail. The larger plan includes condos and hotels, for example, while the smaller one sticks to rental apartments (both would include senior housing). Other properties proposed in various plans include an urban Costco store, a YMCA, and a new Portland Community College campus with potential for student apartments.

The presentations (available via PDF here) were made to local members the Building Owners and Managers Association, who in turned offered the students feedback. The proposals were also made in cooperation with the owner of this 14-acre site, Joe Weston, who also owns a variety of properties throughout Portland.

Kyle Brown, one of the students working on the Benson Blocks plan, told Webbber his biggest lesson was “how much parking can influence a development’s financial pro forma.” Both proposals called for underground parking and stand-alone parking structures. “It’s the biggest influence, which is kind of a bummer,” Brown said. “That’s the way things have to be built.”

Map of the Benson Blocks study (image courtesy PSU)

That said, the "robust" proposal also included a Sandy Boulevard streetcar, which could be a reality one day given the Portland transportation bureau's plans to move lines outward from the MLK/Grand loop currently being constructed.

Having constructive dialogue between students and members of the development community is certainly something to applaud. What's more, focusing these efforts on one large swatch of property makes things easier in terms of imagining broad multi-block place making.

Yet given how a streetcar line is currently coming to woefully under-utilized Grand and MLK area, one can't help but wonder if such a brainstorming session might have been applied here. After all, local developers would be the first to concede that following the streetcar is a recipe for business success, not simply hoping it comes in 15 years. The central eastside has blossomed over the past decade yet without the boom-and-bust cycle of the Pearl District. How could that district be enhanced, possibly with housing and office space, without overrunning its existing character? MLK and Grand are major thoroughfares, yet planners ultimately hope to create a more pedestrian friendly environment here. What's the right mix of traffic calming, transit and mixed-use buildings?

What's more, I can't help but feel that looking at one 14-acre parcel of land is somewhat of a copout. True urban infill development is difficult precisely because there are countless parcels owned by different people. If we're truly trying to teach real estate students to approach development intelligently, why not have them tackle the real problem and not simply dream within an easier exception?

Living in Southeast, I pass down MLK and Grand on a regular basis, and it's always a disappointment to encounter multistory mixed-use buildings with the upper floor windows boarded up. It would have been perhaps more educational for both the students and for us to have them look at a messier problem but one with help (via the new streetcar line) seemingly on the way.

Come to think of it, Portland already has another large, multi-block development that's been struggling to come up with a compelling vision and the right economic critical mass for half a decade: the Burnside Bridgehead. After initially selecting one developer, the Portland Development Commission ultimately moved to parcel out the parcels in a multi-developer format. Certainly there are economies of scale to be reaped from coordinating multiple buildings in one huge development, yet there is also an added challenge in keeping this house of cards together. Successful developments of this size such as Gerding-Edlen Development's Brewery Blocks may be the exception to the rule. And should the exception be the focus of student dreams?

Meanwhile, the DJC's Nick Bjork reports that the group o 28 local policy makers responsible for presenting recommendations to the Metro Council unanimously support "a modest urban growth boundary expansion" for the Portland-metro area. "But about two-thirds of the group’s members went further," Bjork writes, "and asked that the council also require residential zoning in those expanded areas to be as dense as most Portland neighborhoods."

Urban Growth Boundary map (image courtesy Metro)

This may be a case of one step forward and at least one step backward. Kudos for those trying to make the margins of the metro area's boundaries more walkable, sustainable, desnse and transit-oriented. Yet it also has to be said: why are we expanding the boundaries at a time when both the home building and office markets are at historically low levels? Yes, there are thousands moving to Portland each month. But given the world-renowned fertile farmland being plowed to expand the growth boundary, and the countless swatches of land available throughout the area, why in the world would we loosen the belt?

If we are going to expand the boundary, however, Allison Arieff's opinion piece in Sunday's New York Times, called "Shifting the Suburban Paradigm," might be a timely read. Arieff argues that the single-family homebuilding industry isn't doing nearly enough to respond to the changing needs and conditions involving single family homes. Too often, Arieff writes, home builders have responded to the Great Recession by creating new marketing plans instead of new products.

"We’re beyond the point of a fresh coat of paint and a new sales pitch. If we’re going to continue to hold on to the single-family home, we need to transform it," Arieff writes. "There is a demand for smaller, more energy-efficient homes in less car-dependent neighborhoods; all aspects of the industry, from designers to lenders to planners to consumers, should meet it. In this era of anti-government fervor, subsidizing the American Dream isn’t an option; transforming it is the only one we’ve got."

"I don’t care if we’re talking Le Corbusier, Cape Cods or Corinthian columns," Arieff (who previously was editor-in-chief of Dwell magazine) continues. "We can’t make any progress in housing until we stop thinking about the home as decorative object and begin considering it as part of a larger whole. How does it work on the street? In the neighborhood? How is it served by transit? Is it adaptable, allowing for the housing of extended families or the hosting of an entrepreneurial endeavor? Can the owner build an accessory dwelling (a.k.a. granny flat) to do so? (Most zoning, homeowners’ associations and CCRs don’t allow for it currently.) What needs to happen to zoning, to financing, to our very notions of resale value to change the suburban condition — and by extension, the American Dream as we know it?"

When I posted this article to Facebook, however, local architect Joseph Readdy added a perceptive critique. "Allison Arieff makes some excellent points about the buildings, but doesn't address the issue of urban form that makes suburbia so unsustainable," he wrote. "Bright green cities won't be made by addressing building efficiencies alone. The public realm counts, too."

Indeed, if we look at existing suburbs for infill growth, there is an opportunity - a necessity, actually - to examine how the traffic and the isolation can be improved. Suburbs, be they in Oregon or anywhere else, were designed for the automobile. Can they be retrofitted to make options for getting around other than driving? It's not enough to have a MAX station two miles away, or for the surface parking lots to trade a few of their stalls for extra landscaping and a bioswale. Readdy is right that we have to think not just of how to retrofit a house, but an entire suburb, and to do it with a carrot more than a stick: a way that makes people want to live there, and able to.

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Apps and evolution: assessing how the city works

Screen shot of Portland Smarter Cities app (courtesy IBM)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In Wednesday's New York Times, Mark Oppenheimer reviews a new book about applying evolutionary biology thinking and techniques to a small city: Binghamton, New York.

In "The Neighborhood Project," author and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson describes his efforts and those of colleagues at Binghamton University to use evolutionary theory, along with data collection, to improve the quality of life in this economically challenged area. "The Project’s activities included surveys of students, old people and members of religious groups; attempts to empower neighborhood activists; and competitions to design new parks for vacant lots," Oppenheimer reports.

For example, schoolchildren were given a Development Assessment Profile, which measures sociability, citizenship skills and the conditions that promote them. The project then connected the most trusting, socially-inclined students with a map of the city to see which neighborhoods, as Oppenheimer adds, "seemed to be breeding the most social capital."

“If every neighborhood had exactly the same mix” of “knaves and solid citizens,” Mr. Wilson writes, “then the..map of the city would look like a flat plain. Instead, it looked like the Himalayas.”

Most of the tools we use to measure societal behavior are relatively crude and are oriented towards crime or income levels. In addition, many of the conclusions we draw about which neighborhoods are safe, are entertaining or possess other qualities are based on stereotypes. Yet some obvious indicators were surprisingly accurate.

For example, Wilson and his team canvassed Binghamton neighborhoods on Halloween and Christmas to see which ones had the most most decorative lights. “On a clear night,” Wilson writes, “I could probably measure it from an aerial photograph: the more nurturing neighborhoods actually glowed more brightly during the holiday season.”

The central idea here, the one that makes this relevant for Portland as much as Binghamton, is that any habitat, be it of animals or humans, can survive and flourish when one sees its framework and interrelationships. Wilson, Oppenheimer writes, intends for his data to help the city address issues from prenatal and early-childhood care to high school graduation rates to stress-related diseases and more.

Reading the article, it reminded me of a similar, if more technical than social, framework study currently underway in a partnership between the City of Portland and IBM. The tech company often known as "Big Blue" is fashioning what it calls an "app" but is actually a complex interactive model and simulation containing 3,000 equations to measure and identify relationships among the city's economy, housing, education, public safety, transportation, healthcare, utilities and government services. "The resulting computer simulation," IBM explains on its website, "allowed Portland's leaders to see how city systems work together, and in turn identify opportunities to become a smarter city." The model was built to support the development of metrics for the Portland Plan, the City's roadmap for the next 25 years.

Today our society has become more sophisticated than ever at turning what seem to be elusive, ephemeral bits of social data and arranging them into equations that determine what advertisements to place on our Facebook pages and Google searches. Just a tree's leaf reveals a pattern of veins identical to the pattern of branches emanating from the tree itself (otherwise known as fractal geometry), contemporary technology is awakening us to some of the interconnections amongst different segments of communites, professions, governments and cultures that we always intuitively knew existed but never could completely quantify. That a progressive city like Portland would be the first to sign up for IBM's Smarter Cities initiative is no surprise.

Even so, we must be minfdful not to place to much importance on the results. As any pollster knows, answers often vary according to questions and assumptions. As Greg Lindsay writes in a recent Fast Company article about the IBM-Portland collaboration, not every problem or issue can be measured. For example, the program finds Corvallis to be one of the most innovative cities in America. But that's probably because Hewlett Packard’s Advanced Products Division is based there, and produces many patents. In the IBM algorhythm, patents equal innovation. But is this city of 55,000 people and almost as many fast-food franchises, one centered around a university that US News & World Report has routinely ranked in the lower tiers of America's higher education system, really innovative in the broader sense?

"West’s conclusions are only as good as the data and the models (patents equal innovation) he has to work with," Lindsay writes. Even so, he adds, "This problem--if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it--combined with the impulse to improve cities by models, is driving both IBM’s 'smarter city' strategy and the nascent 'urban systems' movement, which seek to apply complexity science to cities."

Luckily the city is modest in its goals, seeking not so much one chart highlighting every connection perfectly, but to “shine a light on the biggest drivers of change,” said Joe Zehnder, the city’s chief planner, in Lindsay's article. The biggest area of application is sustainability, because of the city’s commitment to a 40 percent decrease in carbon emissions by 2030. This necessitates fewer people in cars, and more walking and biking. This, however - as common sense tells us and the IBM program makes more definitive - can lead to faling obesity rates and, in turn, better overall health.  Even so, Zehnder cautions, “the whole act of choosing variables is a political one, a value-laden one.”

What we're ultimately talking about, be it in IBM's data or amongst the populace, is a kind of awareness. And to assist that effort, the nonprofit Dill Pickle Club may be as useful as Big Blue. Starting this Saturday and continuing through November are six ours examining public
policy in the City of Portland, in order to foster civic engagement in a fun, interactive learning environment while providing a behind-the-scenes exploration of the vital functions that enable our city to operate.

The first such tour, slated for tomorrow (September 3) is called "Where Does Water Come From?" and is a daylong tour of the city's water supply including everything from the Bull Run watershed to the Bull Run vodka distillery. Upcoming tours include "How Is Justice Served?" on October 7, "How Is The City Planned?" on September 18, "How Is News Made" on October 28, "Where Does The Garbage Go?" on November 4, and "How Does The River Work?" on November 19. In each cse, a variety of experts will be along for the ride to answer questions and explain what they do. It's not going to give any one visitor a comprehensive sense of the overall urban system and ecology in Portland, yet each person will have an arguably more nuanced, human sense then Big Blue, for all the impressiveness of its algorhythms, can still provide. After all, that's how we've evolved.

More from Portland Monthly's greatest houses list

M. Lloyd Frank estate (image courtesy Wikipedia Commons)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Continuing our look at Portland Monthly magazine's list of the top 10 local houses of all time (begun in Monday's post), compiled for the April issue, we find what may be the largest house of the group.

The 6th-ranked M. Lloyd Frank Estate was completed in 1924 and is located on the Lewis & Clark campus, which took over the property in 1942 (it now houses the president's administrative offices). The house was designed by Herman Brookman for the heir to the Meier & Frank department store fortune and, as Randy Gragg writes, it is a "merging of graceful period architecture and breathtaking landscape design," as well as a "classic pre-Depression mash-up of opulence and stylistic eclecticism."

M. Lloyd Frank Estate (image courtesy [email protected])

Among the highlights of the M. Lloyd Frank are its hanging stairwell and its brickwork, the latter of which was composed to make the house appear to have been built over multiple eras. Yet it may be the landscaping that truly makes the property stand out. "The Frank Estate," Gragg adds, "is ultimately about the experience of space, drawing you through a compression of intimate rooms and expansive grand halls to the crescendo of an eight-acre formal garden framing a view of Mt. Hood."

Still, the faux-rustic brick work? That to me is architecture trying to be something it's not. If the house was built in one swift stroke, there's nothing that ought to compel a builder or architect to try and indicate otherwise. Why build all that opulence and grandness and then, in effect, apologize for it?

Cobb House (image courtesy Portland Monthly/Oregon Historical Society)

Another grand mansion, the Cobb House from 1917, makes the list at #7. As a jury, we felt that a building by A.E. Doyle practically had to be included. It's not to say the Cobb was chosen because Doyle was the designer, but given his role in building early-20th Century Portland, it was a pleasure to find one of his houses worthy of inclusion.

"Arguably no Portland architect shaped early Portland so widely as Albert E. Doyle, who designed much of the city's emerging financial district; our trademark white terra-cotta buildings such as the Meier & Frank Building and Lipman's (now Hotel Monaco); the earliest buildings of Reed College; and our most-visited civic building, the Multnomah County Central Library."

The Cobb House earns accolades for how it unites indoor and outdoor spaces on a steep site, especially the rounded breakfast room overlooking the gardens. It's in the Jacobethan style, which, as juror William Hawkins notes in his book Classic Houses of Portland: 1850-1950, was popular a the time around the country for lavish estates and summer homes.

"In Portland, Doyle's Cobbs mansion incorporated the best of select details within a masterfully balanced framework of gable-ended forms," Hawkins writes. "The lavishly appointed house is of masonry construction (mostly brick with dressed-stone trim) and incorporates appropriate Classical details, which define it as Jacobethan. Tudor elements are also found in the house, with half-timbering in the garden room extension and rough-cast stocco work on the engaged tower and kitchen/garage wing." Jacobethan style died a quick death in America with the oncoming of the Great Depression - perhaps not unlike what the Great Recession did to local condo towers.

"The entire ensemble," Hawkins concludes, "including the circular drive at the entrance court, the gabled entry with its oriel windows, and the balustrated gardens, make the Cobbs House one of Portland's most exceptionally designed homes." Needless to say, this was one that Hawkins the juror strongly advocated.

Saul Zaik House (photos by Brian Libby)

The #8 entry on Portland Monthly's houses list is one I had the good fortune to spend some time in: architect Saul Zaik's own home on NW Saint Helens Avenue. In talking with Zaik for a 2009 profile, he described the way he he and early Portland modernists like Belluschi, Yeon, Van Evera Bailey and Walter Gordon "were into a lot of big roofs and adaptation to site. William Fletcher, by comparison was always trying to do international architecture and build it out of wood," Zaik explained. "But Square boxes with cedar siding and no overhangs require a lot of maintenance."

Belluschi and Yeon helped show Zaik's generation that followed what the Northwest modern style could and maybe should be. "The work we liked to do came right out of our time at University of Oregon: that sheltering aspect. It was done around Eugene by Jim Morton, Bruce Chase, Denorval Unthank. But how many times would I drive clients around the Watzek house? There was also the Sutor house across the street, and the other one up the street Yeon did. We were ooing and aahing."

At heart, Randy Gragg writes in the Portland Monthly article accompanying the houses list, "Zaik relishes interpreting warm, clean forms of modernism for the Northwest landscape in the mlocal material of wood - and in this pursuit, the home he designed for his family stands as the finest example. The house is really a series of three separate pavilions - living spaces, bedrooms, and the carport - all connected by bridges and pathways. Each room is little more than columns, beams, and planes of glass-and-wood paneling. As simple as a Native American longhouse, but as delicate as a leaf, Zaik's home seems to almost hover above its wooded, hillside site."

Maegly House (image courtesy Portland Monthly/Oregon Historical Society)

The 9th-ranked house on the list represents the prairie style that was popularized by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright but never saw a boom in the Northwest. The Maegley House, completed in 1914 from a design by John Virginius Bennes. Although he also designed Portland's landmark Hollywood Theater and many buildings in Corvallis for Oregon State University, the architect was a Chicago native, explaining the Sullivan/Wright influence.

But it's not simply strict prairie style, for the Maegley has a Meditterranean tile roof, molded stucco and bay windows. Inside, each of the major public rooms are connected directly to each other and to the outdoors. This is a kind of modernism forerunner, exhibiting the simplicity of detailing and inside-out consideration that would inform generations of contemporary homes. For that reason, prairie style has also, as Gragg notes, become popular with today's era of faux-historic McMansions.

Rockwood House (photo by Richard Strode)

The #10 house on the list was the biggest surprise for yours truly. I've been covering architecture in Portland for over a decade, but am somewhat embarrassed to say I was not familiar with the Rockwood House until Randy Gragg suggested it to the rest of the jury. But now I want to become the Rockwoods' pro-bono housesitter.

We'd decided to include a house from the past 30 years on the list, and had been considering two recent houses in North Portland, PATH Architecture's Park Box and Atelier Waechter's Z Haus, as well as the Hoke Residence by Skylab Architecture. Yet the Rockwood House, which architect and professor David Rockwood designed for his parents at a site on the north shore of Hayden Island, was irresistibly magnificent.

Rockwood House (photo by Richard Stode)

"Rockwood's design channels Yeon's uncompromising craftsmanship by way of the celebrated prefab aesthetic of Charles and Ray Eames," Gragg writes. "Standing as commandingly as a Venetian palazzo on the Columbia River, the Rockwood House features an exposed stell structural system based on a near-perfect 11-foot, 6-inch grid. Panels of lightweight pumice concrete sandwiching foam insulation (a system Rockwood invented well before "sustainable" wall panels became mainstream) attach to the steel grid to form the exterior walls and roof." The house, Gragg adds, "creates the peaceful sense of floating in some much larger whole with every view and space framed by the grid."

Each of the jurors also selected a series of honorable-mention selections, and I will feature those in a post to follow.

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Yeon's Watzek leads Portland Monthly's greatest houses list

Watzek House (image courtesy Portland Monthly)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

"Unassumingly clad in clear fir tongue-and-groove siding, Portland’s most internationally exhibited and published house might easily be mistaken for a humble barn," writes Randy Gragg of the Watzek House, the top selection in Portland Monthly magazine's recently released "10 Greatest Houses" list. "But whether you zoom in on details like the beautifully stacked fieldstone foundation and the crisply minimal eave line or enjoy a full tour of the interiors, paneled in a symphony of finely crafted Oregon noble fir, western hemlock, and Oregon oak, a close look at the Watzek House leaves little doubt why [the] jury took mere minutes to put it at the top of their list."

Several weeks ago I had the honor of joining four other judges in comprising this list, of the best architecture amongst Portland's single-family residences. Joining me were architect Rick Potestio, Architectural Heritage Center executive director Cathy Galbraith, architect-historian William J. Hawkins III, historic preservation expert Jack Bookwalter, and Mr. Gragg himself.

Although during jury deliberations I don't remember settling on any rankings for the 10 houses, as they've been presented in the magazine, it was indeed clear that the Watzek House was our top choice. The jury was a combination: lovers of historic architecture, and those passionate about modern and contemporary design. The Watzek was where we all came together.

As Randy notes in his accompanying article, the Museum of Modern Art has twice exhibited Yeon's house, noting how "the quiet sweep of simple forms harmoniously complements the fine Western landscape."

Watzek House (image courtesy University of Oregon)

Yeon "emerged at the age of 26 a near-Mozartian wunderkind," Gragg writes. "His first built design, for the lumber baron Aubrey Watzek, became the defining early work of our only true architectural movement, the Northwest Regional style of modernism. Yet it also stood far apart from all the period’s fads. As European and American architects of the time were abandoning interior walls and mouldings for the cool, clean lines and open plans of the International style, Yeon fearlessly turned the Watzek House into a “sequence of revelations”—each hallway and room imbued with deeply sophisticated and often playful interpretations of Venetian, English, and even Asian styles."

Yeon has had differing views about the fate of his buidings over the years. He actually once said his Portland Oregon Visitors Center along the waterfront should be torn down. But he felt strongly enough about the Watzek that he actually bought the house in the 1970s in order to prevent it from future alterations. After his death in 1994, the house was donated to the University of Oregon.

On April 30 and May 1, Portland Monthly is hosting a tour of the Watzek House. I've never before come across a Watzek tour, so this is a rare opportunity: a kind of über Street of Eames tour.

Although the jury was surprisingly in sync given our different points of view and expertise, we did disagree about whether a demolished house should be included in the list. Some were concerned we would be sending too dour a message, or opening Pandora's box to a host of long-gone houses that could then be considered. Luckily, one such demolished residence, the circa 1882 Knapp House, was included in the #2 slot.

Knapp House (image courtesy Oregon Historical Society)

Designed by Justus Krumbein, this was just one of many Victorian houses constructed in the late 19th Century as Portland experienced a wave of growth. It featured a cone-topped tower reaching more than three stories high, and a trio of chimneys that actually wrapped around the houses's windows. Have you ever, in your life, seen a chimney with a window?

Unfortunately, the so-called "Greatest Generation" that won World War II was also horrifically adept at tearing down historic architecture, and often without even buildings to erect in their places. In the 1950s, the Archdiocese of Portland bought the Knapp House and tore it down in order to build a parking lot. It's a folly reminiscent of First Christian Church's tearing down the Rosefriend Apartments in 2008 to build underground parking and a mostly-empty apartment tower on the eve of the Great Recession.

It was practically a given that Pietro Belluschi would find his way onto the list. Not only is he Portland's architectural patron saint, but Belluschi's portfolio included a host of beautiful midcentury houses. The jury didn't immediately find unanimity on which Belluschi house to include. It could have been the Burkes House, his prototype Life Magazine house, or numerous others. But we chose the Sutor House from 1938, which actually is situated on NW Skyline Boulevard just across the street from the Watzek. The two houses were even built concurrently, with Belluschi's Sutor finishing just months after Yeon's.

Sutor House (image courtesy Portland Monthly)

Juror William Hawkins called the Sutor a house that "launched a thousand ships" for Belluschi and the movement that followed. It features a more open plan than the Watzek, and more fully achieves a Japanese-like minimalism. It came on the heels of Belluschi's Portland Art Museum in 1932 and preceded his iconic Equitable building downtown, helping to launch his career to new heights.

The Sutor House was, as Gragg writes, "far more influential than the more idiosyncratic Watzek," and "established an iconic, but simpler, less expensive standard for other architects to follow in the blossoming of Northwest Regional style."

William Temple House (image courtesy PejorativeJinx)

The #4 residence on the list, the William Temple House (originally called the Mackenzie House) was built in 1892 by the great firm Whidden & Lewis, which also designed Portland City Hall. This house was designed for the co-founder of Oregon Health & Science University, Dr. Kenneth A. J. Mackenzie, and comes in the Richardsonian Romanesque style: medieval stone arches, a cone-topped turret, and lots of wrought iron. Inside there is sumptuous oak paneling, tile mosaics, tin-embossed ceilings, and even a gaslight designed with a bat and serpent: the Scottish symbol for medicine triumphing over witchcraft.

#5 is another iconic old home now open to the public: the Pittock Mansion. There was actually a jury discussion about leaving the Pittock off the list, a kind of contrarian decision given there is no other more well-known old home in the city. Yet it would have been wrong to omit the circa-1914 house designed by San Francisco architect Edward T. Foulkes for Henry Pittock, publisher of The Oregonian and a paper-mill magnate.

Pittock Mansion (photo by Brian Libby)

"Nearing the end of his life," Gragg writes, "Pittock spared no expense." The house, he adds, "leaves its most lasting impressions in two features: a curving, floating baroque staircase that channels both the elegance of Michelangelo and the melodrama of Scarlett O'Hara' and Pittock's personal bathroom, situated in a windowed turret offering one of the city's most commanding views." Throne room indeed!

We'll look at entries 6 through 10 of Portland Monthly's top houses list (including the M. Lloyd Frank estate, the Cobb House, the Zaik House, the Maegley House, and the Rockwood House) in the next post.

 

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Conversations about criticism

 
L-R: DK Row, Lisa Radon, Jeff Jahn

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Yesterday, on artist Eva Lake's KBOO radio show, I was a part of a panel discussion about art criticism in Portland (which you can listen to here) along with writer/critics Lisa Radon of Ultra, Barry Johnson (formerly a longtime editor and critic at The Oregonian) and Jeff Jahn, critic-editor at PORT. The occasion for the talk was the recent announcement that longtime Oregonian art critic DK Row will be stepping down to take on a different reporting beat at the paper (on philanthropy). That means the only daily newspaper staff art critic in the Pacific Northwest is now gone.

But as architecture afficionados know, this is a slippery slope that The Oregonian and other newspapers have already been sliding down for years. Ever since the departure of Randy Gragg, for example, the paper has been without an architecture critic. Where will it all end, and how will the important issues and ideas and people in Portland's visual art and design worlds be given the attention they deserve?

One topic discussed on the show was the changing nature of a critic's role. Is it judgment, or something else? And how has the Internet and social networking changed things?

As Barry Johnson pointed out on the radio and Radon noted in her follow up post, Simone Weil has called culture “the formation of attention,” while John Dewey described the job of the critic being to "explain and explain some more". Perhaps today criticism isn't about giving a thumbs up or down to the general quality of something - passing an overall judgment on quality - but instead about sharing ideas and points of connection. It's not to say making a case and an argument for something isn't important - it is. But published criticism is today less of a final judgement than a conversation starter: a beginning, not an end.

Today newspapers are shrinking yet content online from other sources is exploding. More is being produced by blogs and social networking in terms of dialogue and conversation. One is also freer to write online in blog posts or on Facebook without any vetting or editing. Yet there is an important rigor that goes into actual journalistic criticism which is lacking from blogs. So in some respects it's a trade off: more volume of content for a smaller audience and less vetted editorial writing. It's not to say an unedited blog post can't be as good a piece of writing as an edited newspaper or magazine opinion piece; a lot of that depends on the talents of the writer. Yet it would be a shame if local and regional art and architecture coverage completely lost its generalist audience via daily newspapers and lost the opportunity to provide edited criticism and coverage.

On Lake's show, we also discussed the importance (or lack thereof) of a critic's training and involvement in what they're reviewing. Should an art critic be an artist, or collecting art? Must or should an architecture critic be an architect?

DK Row (who, in full disclosure, was formerly my editor at the paper) made a particular and deliberate point not to do become enmeshed in the art world. He possesses a strict personal code with regard to preventing conflicts of interest. It was a point of pride that he wasn't biased. Yet some found Row to be too far removed from the community he was covering. What is the right balance? Certainly the same question can apply to architectural criticism. Neither Randy Gragg nor I are trained as architects, for example, although certain acclaimed critics like the Boston Globe's Robert Campbell are. My sense is that we need both: writers and critics who's vision is shaped from being makers, and writers and critics who are more strictly observing writers. There should be no prerequisite written in stone, and if there was, it would reduce the diversity and spectrum of voices and ideas.

And besides, sometimes knowledge isn't everything. As I mentioned on Lake's radio show, just before I started writing criticism in the late 1990s as a movie reviewer for Willamette Week, of the paper's two existing critics, Kim Morgan had the much wider cinema knowledge but Dale Basye was the writer whose prose I liked best. (That said, I also liked Kim's writing better than any other critic in Portland not named Dale.) Which would you have rather read? Or should one have had to ever make that choice?

Although I'm not an objective voice on this, having previously written art reviews for the paper, if we're talking about criticism and arts coverage prompted by DK Row's exit as art critic, it's all but impossible not to talk about The Oregonian and arts coverage in general. Although daily city newspapers in America have all faced decline amongst dwindling advertising and subscription rates, I believe The Oregonian, despite having many individual talents on its roster, has been hurt as much by its approach as the challenges themselves.

Today any newspaper must have strength in its website, considering online coverage to be not a separate entity or animal, but an intrinsic part. If you go to OregonLive.com, however, it is not at all an online extension of The Oregonian. The site is broken down into sections differently than in the paper, so if you read something and print and go looking for the story online, it's not easy. And speaking of consolidation, I'd also like to see The Oregonian rid itself of the myriad names for arts coverage and simply have a section called "Arts". They could take away the names "How We Live", "O!" and "A&E" and move lifestyle and health stories to sections of their own. 

A final topic of the radio show, and one addressed by panelists like Jahn on PORT, is how criticism differs, if at all, from other journalism. This continued online via the panelists.

"Overall, journalism and criticism have some overlap but they are different creatures," Jahn wrote in his follow-up blog post. "A strong critic has a strong internal compass so that friends, influential curators, gallerists and collectors have only marginal influence on them... Criticism is not so self-serving; it's a form of sharing why things do and so not work well. It's ultimately a civic undertaking. "

Lisa Radon took up the question as well. "What do we do when we write about art? We inform, introduce, invite the reader to consider something we’ve noticed. We notice. We describe so that you can see through our words and photos what we’ve seen. We question. We ask what is this trying to do and how well does it do what it sets out to do? We ask why is it trying to do that, and can the argument be made that it is a worthwhile thing to do? We provide context, engaging history and the contemporary with a kind of conceptual peripheral vision. We engage in a discourse that contributes to the meaning-making around the work by bringing whatever considerations of theory, of philosophy, that the work raises for us. And of course, let’s admit that we also misinterpret, misrepresent, miss the point, graft our own ideas and concerns onto a consideration of the work, etcetera."

Yet I like Lisa's conclusion later, which I could say speaks for me as well: "I can answer for myself that writing is a way of thinking. That writing is a way of working through to understanding. And that writing about work is a continuation of the conversation that begins when the artist hangs her work on the wall in invitation of response. It’s a conversation I want to have with you."

Seeking a monument to Claire Phillips, Portland's forgotten spy-hero

Claire Phillips (photo courtesy Sig Unander & Portland Monthly)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In the new issue of Portland Monthly magazine, I had the opportunity to write about one of the more compelling personal stories that I've come across in my roughly 14 years as a journalist.

Claire Phillips ought to be one of the most beloved citizens this city has ever produced. And for a time in the 1940s and '50s, she was just that. But this woman, who was known alternately as "High Pockets" (for the secret messages stashed in her bra) or "Manila Mata Hari" for her daring exploits, has been forgotten by 99 percent of our citizenry.

Now, Cornelius, Oregon writer Sig Unander and a few others, including local architect and honorary Philippine Consulate Richard Woodling, have embarked on a quest to honor the memory of a woman who risked her life in World War II to spy on the Japanese. Someday, if things go well, there should be a statue to Claire in a prominent Portland locale. She is for all intents and purposes a war veteran and war hero, but because she never officially belonged to the American military, there has been no promotional machine or wave of historians to tell her story.

Poster for the 1951 film about Claire

But this was not always the case. Claire Phillips was the subject of a 1951 Hollywood film called I Was An American Spy, starring Scarface moll Ann Dvorjak. She is the only woman from Oregon to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her memoir, Manila Espionage, was briefly a national sensation. The popular radio show "This Is Your Life" devoted an episode to her, which included Claire being given a free home in Beaverton and a new Packard. But within a decade, Claire Phillips would be dead from alcoholism-related meningitis.

Back during the war, Claire Phillips owned a nightclub in Manilla while the country was occupied by the Japanese. She had created Club Tsubaki specifically for the purpose of luring Japanese officers there, to be pampered and liquored up in hopes they might divulge their secrets. Claire was beautiful and charming, but her husband had also been killed by the Japanese in a prison camp. She  possessed the bravery of someone half-naive and half lusting for revenge. And her plans worked. An entire Japanese submarine squadron was once wiped out in the Pacific because of Claire's tip to American soldiers.

Here's a passage from the story, about the time when, as a cocktail lounge singer in another Manila club, a tortuous moment prompts Claire to come out swinging:

The party at Ana Fey’s nightclub starts to get wild. A Japanese civilian, surrounded by cronies at a corner table, all drunk on cocktails and a self-confidence born of conquering half the Pacific, decides he wants special attention.

He beckons the club’s Italian singer: the tall brunette with the sultry voice, high heels, and shimmering gown, who’s been entertaining Japan’s forces with romantic songs in English from Ana Fey’s tiny, spotlit stage. The patron wants the singer to bring him ice for his drinks personally. The singer demurs. The patron insists—even grasps the woman’s backside. She slaps him across the face.

No one did that to one of Emperor Hirohito’s subjects in occupied Manila. The men take the singer into the club’s back room and beat her; the orchestra plays more loudly to cover her cries. But even as the drunken soldiers teach the nightclub girl “a lesson,” their blows fail to dislodge wartime’s most valuable commodity: the truth.

The singer wasn’t Italian, but American, from a small city across the Pacific Ocean. And she was no mere club beauty, but a budding spy, working to eclipse the Rising Sun. Her real name was Claire Phillips. Her code name was High Pockets—in honor of secret messages she stashed in her bra. She was fighting in the fierce shadow-contest over a city that played a key role in the Pacific theater’s brutal chess match. So the beating Phillips suffered that night—not her worst ordeal, by a long shot—was just part of the job.

Claire had been raised in Southeast Portland and attended Franklin High School. But the city she knew was different from today: There weren't young people flocking here to create a kind of hipster Utopia. Portland was a quiet city of shipyards and saw mills. Claire Philips was a thrill seeker, and she left the city to join a traveling song-and-dance troupe before even finishing high school. As a result, I can't help but wonder if, somehow, the city failed her.

Claire receiving the Medal of Freedom in 1948 (photo courtesy Sig Unander & Portland Monthly)

For generations, talented and ambitious people from painter Mark Rothko to foodie James Beard have had to leave if they sought fame and fortune. Today that drain of our best minds is not so large. But local history here has entire genre of such people who became expatriates. To honor Claire with a public memorial wouldn't just be a way of honoring a war hero and sexy spy, but a chance to acknowledge all those who have departed Portland to find adventure elsewhere.

Speaking of which, if a Claire Phillips monument does get built, where might it go? My first thought is the Rose Quarter. Of course Memorial Coliseum is already an architectural memorial to veterans. Why not put a statue of Claire Phillips, the woman Douglas MacArthur personally recommended for the Medal of Freedom, within a few feet of Oregon's biggest war memorial? A Claire statue could anchor a new riverfront esplanade beside the Broadway Bridge - a space currently used as a parking lot for Rose Garden employees. Or it could be part of a newly landscaped and activated space between the arenas. Either way, I think honoring one of the most dramatic and heroic of Portland stories dovetails seamlessly with our new reborn east side Mecca.

After all, Claire would class up the place, as this passage may indicate:

The Tsubaki Club enjoyed a view of Manila’s docks, which, in 1943, teemed with Japanese naval and merchant marine ships. It was the hot new place, opened by the Italian-born Filipino gal known as Madam Tsubaki, who used to sing at Ana Fey’s. Tsubaki also boasted Ana Fey’s former head dancer, Fely Corcuera, who was fluent in Japanese. (Meanwhile, an affluent Chinese businessman, along with Madam Tsubaki’s pawned diamond rings and watch, supplied the club’s initial stake.) Corcuera dressed in a kimono and regaled Imperial Navy boys with traditional Japanese songs. Afterward the floor show—with dancers wearing little more than gold satin G-strings, coconut shells, and headdresses fashioned with turkey feathers—went deep into the night.

And then there was Madam Tsubaki herself.

Six decades later, the writer Hampton Sides described the Tsubaki Club’s proprietress in his book Ghost Soldiers: “She … dressed in a white evening gown with a plunging neckline and a slit halfway up her thigh …. Her olive skin would glitter with jewels.” Each night, Madam Tsubaki greeted patrons and escorted them, as Sides tells it, “through the cream-colored bar, past the dancing stage with its curtains of lavender satin, to the rattan settees along the back wall.” There, Madam Tsubaki cuddled up with her club’s most prominent guests and asked questions in a pidgin of Spanish, Japanese, Tagalog, and English: When do you leave Manila? Where will you go next?

A saucy dance revue. Doting waitresses. Cocktails. What war-weary sailor wouldn’t relax and let a few details slip?

Claire's story wasn't all glamourous dance numbers and cocktail evenings, though.

Phillips spent her days—and her club’s profits—on another mission: smuggling food, notes, and medicine to American POWs held at the Cabanatuan prison camp outside Manila. For these men—sick, starving, prone to maltreatment and random execution—she was both a practical and emotional tether to the world. One imprisoned soldier wrote to Phillips: “You’ve done more for the boys’ morale in here than you’ll ever know … You deserve more gold medals than all of us.”

For her part, Phillips always signed her dispatches: “Yours in war, High Pockets.”

Eventually, the Japanese caught Phillips. Interrogators shot water into her mouth from a hose. “Guards held my head so that I could not move,” she wrote. “I held my breath. A Nip noticed this and hit me in the abdomen. I gulped the water down … drowning on dry land … then oblivion.” Captors burned her skin with cigars until she awakened. By the time American troops liberated her prison on February 10, 1945, she had lost 55 pounds.

If you'd like to get involved in the campaign to build a memorial and monument to Claire "High Pockets" Phillips, or if you or someone you know came into contact with Claire before her passing, please contact Sig Unander, the primary keeper of her flame, at [email protected].

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Oregonian's Manning on Thompson and Knight Arena

Matthew Knight Arena (photo courtesy TVA Architects)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In Wednesday's Oregonian, real estate reporter Jeff Manning profiles Robert Thompson, head of TVA Architects and designer of landmarks like the Nike World Campus, the Fox Tower, and now Eugene's Matthew Knight Arena.

Manning received some very flattering testimonials about Thompson.

"Bob is among a very small group of architects I've worked with that I'd put in the genius category," Bart Eberwein of Hoffman Construction told Manning. Hoffman built Knight Arena, the Fox (in which the contractor is headquartered), and numerous other TVA designs. "He sees the building in his mind. Things come to him like a poem would to William Blake."

 

Alan Beard, a retired founding principal from GBD Architects, called Thompson "an architect's architect. Were I going to design a home and my wife would go for a real modernistic look, it would be Bob that I pick. The attention to detail, the crispness of the design, is just outstanding." 

 

Kurt Schultz of SERA Architects, a former partner of Thompson's, told Manning of how the architect "...could go home over a weekend and come back to work and have a building all figured out. He's the most naturally talented designer I've ever known."

Nike World Campus, Lance Armstrong Building (image courtesy FP Inc.)

Thompson is quoted telling Manning that the Nike Campus remains his proudest achievement, "due to the staggering complexity of literally designing a city from the ground up. We designed everything from the buildings to the furniture, the light fixtures right down to the napkins used in the restaurants."

I was also quoted in the story regarding the Nike campus, saying it "has this pristine white modernism with a tiny touch of Disneyland to it." When you're there, the comparison to great 1980s, Richard Meier-esque modern architecture is easy to make. At the same time, because the campus is so isolated from the rest of Beaverton, it feels a little synthetic. Still, that's a reflection of the urban planning, not the architecture. Thompson's designs for these Campus buildings would have looked even better if they were sprinkled amidst an urban fabric.

Yesterday, in an email exchange with Jeff Manning, he mentioned that there were a few narrative threads and historical details that didn't make it into the story because of space. So I invited Jeff to comment on a few topics regarding TVA and Thompson.

 

On the split between Thompson and the firm's co-founding partner, Ned Vaivoda, Manning wrote, that it "stunned many of their contemporaries. The two had worked together for more than 25 years. After quizzing them both about the breakup, it really does seem like it was more of slow, gradual realization that it was time to part ways rather than one specific incident. Both said they remain good friends.

Fox Tower (photo by Brian Libby)

Thompson told Manning, "First and foremost, I have the highest level of respect for Ned. Like anything, over the years we developed different ideas about where we might want to carry the firm. It was nothing personal. It was a mutual understanding."

Said Vaivoda: "Bob Thompson is a good guy. he’s a masterful modernist architect. We collectively did a lot of good work together over the years. People change. Values change. I’d say that’s as far as I would care to go." 

Manning added, "I quoted Vaivoda in my story about Nike being a really demanding customer. He went back to that topic when pressed for more explanation on why he split with Thompson. 'Nike was the ultimate client that anyone could ask for,' Vaivoda said. 'With that comes a sacrifice, a personal sacrifice.'

There is also a quietly evolving competition between TVA Architects and ZGF Architects for Nike and the UO athletic department's future business. "As the tuition-paying parent of a University of Oregon freshman, I find the idea of a new campus building mostly off limits to the bulk of students to be completely objectionable. I don't care who paid for it. But I have to admit, it's a very cool building. And it's not a Bob Thompson building. ZGF (the Jaqua designer) also designed the Athletic Medicine Center in the university's Casanova Center, completed in 2007 and it may have gotten the work for additional expansion of the Casanova Center, though I wasn't able to confirm that." (Note: I can confirm that.)

 

"Some have speculated that ZGF has successfully broken Thompson's lock on Knight/UO design work," Manning continues. "The fact is, Thompson never had a lock on that work. Thompson says he was too busy working on the arena to get involved in the Jaqua Center. It's an interesting topic, not the least of which because of Thompson's close personal relationship with Bob Frasca. Thompson considers Frasca a mentor. It was Frasca who nominated Thompson to become a Architecture Institute of America Fellow when Thompson was 39."

Regarding the issue of professional jealousy given Thompson's golden-goose client in Knight, Manning said by email, "I fully expected to run into some resentment from local architects regarding Thompson. Let's face, he's enjoyed multiple commissions over the years any one of which would be the project of a lifetime for many of his peers. But either Portland architects are a really gracious bunch or I wasn't very thorough in my reporting. Every person I talked to considers Thompson the real deal who's earned all the business and accolades.

"Having gotten to know Knight early on, he was in the right place at the right time," John Holmes of Holst Architecture told manning. "He was really quite fortunate. But you can't resent that. Everyone's got the cards they were dealt. All in all, you have to give the work high marks."

 

I asked Manning, "Who are some of the other key decision makers or contributors from Nike that you came across as it related to Knight Arena? Anything to tell there?"

 Matthew Knight Arena (photo by Brian Libby)

"Thompson didn't say much on this front. Officially, he was hired by the university. He reported to Jim Bartko, of the UO athletic department. But clearly, Knight and others also played a big role. It was Knight's $100 million pledge that jumpstarted construction in the first place (though the bulk of the funding came from $200 million in state bond sale proceeds.) As I pointed out in the story, Todd Van Horne, a Nike designer, was in charge of the design of the arena's hardwood floor. Thompson said he likes the floor, saying "it's iconic and intimidating."

As I said in a previous post, however, only Nike would paint fake trees onto real wood. And only people very thankful to Knight would write the name "Matt" at center court in a bigger font than it used to say "Oregon" in the same place at MacArthur Court. 

Finally, Manning had this to say about the way Thompson views the industry and the profession in light of the economy: "The toll of the economic crash is clearly something that Thompson has thought a lot about. The panic of 2008, the bank failures and sudden cutoff of credit all combined to slam the developers, which had a devastating impact on architects. He had to cut TVA's staff by 8, a 20 percent reduction. 'This recession was unlike any I've ever seen,' he said. 'I think it's fair to say that it was unlike anything any architect has ever seen. There's probably a whole generation of young architects who are not practicing right now. There's a huge amount of talent out there sitting on the sidelines.' But he's convinced that the economy is healing. He sees more confidence amongst developers. He expects TVA to enjoy a "fantastic" 2011. Drawings of TMT Development's Park Avenue West tower were all over Thompson's office. I asked him if the recovering economy meant that TMT would resume work on the stalled downtown Portland building. He would say only that he hopes the Park Avenue West will come to "symbolize" the recovery.

 

 

 

10 years of architecture journalism (part two: 2006-2010)

Tanner Springs Park (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Continuing last week's look back at 10 years of freelance architecture journalism - for the purpose, hopefully, of painting a picture of Portland design rather than navel gazing or self promotion - we move now into the second half of the decade.

By this time, the September 11 attacks had faded a bit from memory and the national sense of fear and Patriot Act infiltrations of civil liberties had died down. The economy was booming, and I mean really booming: like a runaway train about to shoot off the rails, as it turned out. But even if the growth was unsustainable, Portland saw a lot of new construction.

In the second half of the decade, two neighborhoods began particularly favoring taller, more contemporary architecture: the northern Pearl District and South Waterfront. Whereas the southern portion of the Pearl closer to Burnside Street had taken its stylistic cue from the existing fabric of industrial buildings, and new structures exhibiting comparable palettes of brick with not much height, the northern Pearl, built on rail yards and field rather than amidst warehouses, became more about glass and steel.

Here is a year by year account of some of my favorite articles from this five year period.

2006

Earlier in the decade, the Peter Walker-designed Tanner Springs Park had become a Pearl District sensation with a water feature for kids to play in and tables for parents to congregate, flanked by a vintage wood boardwalk. And in 2006, I had the opportunity to interview German landscape architect Herbert Dreiseitl about Tanner's companion if very different feeling space, Tanner Springs Park.

"Before the west bank of the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, was settled in the 1840s, the unfettered natural landscape consisted of several creeks, marshes, and ponds," I wrote in Metropolis magazine. "But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries these wetlands were filled to become downtown Portland to the south and a busy port and rail yard to the north." Tanner Springs "was conceived as a pulling back of the urban fabric to restore the buried wetlands. The space is returning to its roots both figuratively and literally...A small grove of native oak trees gives way to tall grass and reeds before sloping downward to a marsh. 'It’s a key idea for the park,” Dreiseitl says, “going from dry to wet, from hill to valley or forest to open fields...You find the same systems and patterns on a large scale in the landscape as you do in one little seed.'”

Jay House (photo by Brian Libby)

That same year, 2006, brought a collaboration across the generations between Portland's two most acclaimed architects: Pietro Belluschi and Brad Cloepfil. As I wrote about for Metropolitan Home magazine, a Belluschi home in the West Hills owned by Wieden + Kennedy executive creative director John Jay was expanded from a Cloepfil design.

"Brad is spectacular in his ability to articulate the idea, to be able to talk you through it,” Jay told me. “You sit down and you have a conversation about space and concepts of the usage of space: What are we about, what are our values and how does space help to express those values? The joke I always use with him is that he’s great at nothing. He has a tremendous feel for negative space—the site lines and the feeling of spatial relationships.'” 

Among his improvements, Cloepfil added floor-to-ceiling glass and horizontal overhangs in an extension of the U-shaped floor plan, deferring to but never aping Belluschi’s original. “It turns the courtyard into a kind of garden pavilion,” Cloepfil said in the article. “Before, it made for a dark, dead spot in the back of the house. We wanted a kind of glass pavilion where the light would go all the way through.”

2007

In an article for Portland Monthly, I had the opportunity to write about one of my favorite residential projects of the past decade: the Lair Condominiums, designed by Rick Potestio and developed and built by master builder Don Tankersley.

Lair Condos (photo by Brian Libby)

Although just across Interstate 405 from downtown, "this steeply inclined residential enclave in Southwest Portland is as quiet and diminutively scaled as a medieval village," I wrote. The Lair Condos "reflects its neighborhood’s appealing duality, gracefully entwining a sophisticated, urban sense of style with a deeply traditional respect for place. 

The lot had remained vacant for years because it sloped steeply downhill a few feet from the sidewalk. "The design team embraced the situation, however, by integrating five levels of living space with the hillside in a graceful cascade," I wrote. "With only three of those floors rising above street grade, the building’s low profile respects the scale of the historic Victorian and Craftsman single-family homes just down the street. Inspired by hill towns in Tuscany, where residences are commonly organized around terraced courtyards, Potestio placed a sunken driveway, lined with private garages, atop the lowest level. Open to the sky, it doubles as a community gathering space."

Belmont Lofts (photo by John Clark for Dwell)

Another all-time favorite project was the Belmont Lofts by Holst Architecture, which I wrote about for Dwell in 2007, saying, "The 27-unit project is credited with ushering in a new wave of boutique multifamily housing projects nestled into Portland’s historic neighborhoods...The contemporary, clean-lined rectangular exterior of the Belmont Street Lofts might at first seem to be at odds with its context, but the façade, an interwoven matrix of permeable wire-mesh balconies, wood cladding, and floor-to-ceiling windows, gives the building the warmth and texture of an established Northwest landmark, blending with existing Craftsman bungalows while recalling the designs of local midcentury architects like Pietro Belluschi."

The Belmont Lofts were co-developed by Randy Rapaport, who over the decade became a special kind of presence on the local design scene. He lacked the resources of major development companies like Gerding Edlen, Opus or Hoyt Street, but also was more personally committed to first-rate architecture by the city's top architects. “Derivative architecture doesn’t hold its spirit very well, but I think true quality and design stand out in the market,” Rapaport said about the Belmont. “It can be scary to take on risks as a developer, but the way to get great architecture is to support creativity.”

2008

For the A&E section of The Oregonian two years ago I got the chance to name the top 10 players on the local architecture + design scene. (Note: If you click on the link, it erroneously lists Doug Perry as the author.) The ten I chose were (in no particular order): William Neburka and Carrie Schilling of Works Partnership Architecture; Eugene Sandoval of ZGF Architects; John Holmes of Holst Architecture; Sohrab Vossoughi of Ziba Design; Heinz Rudolf of BOORA; Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works; Thomas Hacker of THA Architecture; Tiffany Sweitzer of Hoyt Street Properties; Jeff Kovel of Skylab Architecture; and Robert Thompson of TVA Architects. 

ZGF's Gene Sandoval (photo by Motoya Nakamura for The Oregonian)

The list is a mixture of architects (Neburka/Schilling, Sandoval, Holmes, Rudolf, Cloepfil, Hacker, Kovel) with one developer (Sweitzer) and one industrial designer (Vossoughi). In retrospect (and even at the time, honestly), it feels rather absurd to not have Mark Edlen of Gerding Edlen on the list. Surely I could have selected other talented architects as well. But there were also practical considerations like not having an all-male list or a list of all young talents. Regardless, lists such as these are not meant to be definitive rulings but conversation starters.

If I missed the chance to profile Edlen in the Oregonian list, I did speak with him for a Metropolis magazine Q&A that same year called "Follow the LEEDer", about Gerding Edlen's pioneering work as a green developer (in collaboration with GBD Architects, ZGF, SERA Architects and other firms):

Me: How did your development company become focused on sustainability early on, in the days before LEED ratings?

Edlen: "We both grew up here, my partner Bob [Gerding] and I. We both have a big love of the outdoors. I’m a big fan of Yvonne Chounard, the founder of Patagonia. The first thing we give any of our employees to read is his book, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman. So we kind of morphed from doing a lot of energy-saving things in the early 1990s to, when the USGBC came around, going toward a broader, more full fledged sustainability with The Natural Step and all that."

Brewery Blocks with Powell's Books (photo by Brian Libby)

Me: But you’ve also got to make a profit.

Edlen: "Our priorities as a developer are the same as everybody’s. But a viable product comes from place making. How do you create great places that people want to come to live, work, and play in? Then you also have to look ahead. I personally believe we’ve got a broken national energy policy. I think it’s a national security issue. It’s about speed and scale, and we don’t have a lot of time. As a company, we have an objective over the next five years to figure out how to build buildings that produce more energy than they consume." 

Me: How has the building industry changed over time about green products and practices?

Edlen: "In the ’90s, you kind of had to drag the contractors along, the engineers a little bit, and the architects less so. Today they’re just all coming. Here in Portland, we also happened to have a pretty progressive governing body—not that we haven’t run into some challenges, such as trying to change the code to re-use rainwater for our toilets. They embraced it here earlier than other cities we’re working in." 

"Five years ago, most of our commercial tenants didn’t care much about green. Now I’m hearing anecdotes of other firms calling our tenants and saying, “Is it really working as well as it appears to be? Because we’re losing too many new hires to you.” I think we’ve seen the commercial tenants gravitate more toward it over the last couple of years."

Also in 2008 came the opportunity to write about two more wonderful houses for Metropolitan Home, one a '60s home remodeled by its owner, restaurateur Bruce Carey, and the other a small cottage expanded by its architect owners, Claudine and Giorgio Lostao.

Bruce Carey (photo by John Granen for Metropolitan Home)

"The late '60s were such a great time for design," Carey told me. "The house reminded me of where I grew up in Salem, which was a little more Brady Bunch but about the same vintage of ranch, with the reaching eaves and the muscularity of that vaulted ceiling."

As I wrote in the Carey Metropolitan Home article, "The owners happily retained the original hemlock paneling, but gave it a darker stain for an elegant appearance that's more old-school men's club than knotty cabin. An open floor plan with expansive glass admits ample but atmospheric natural light, enlivening a variety of natural textures and materials, from mohair-velvet chairs to a tree stump used as a coffee table."

The Lostao home was very different but equally inspired. "He's from Peru; she's from Jamaica," the article (now listed under the Elle Decor banner following Met Home's demise) began. "They met in Miami while working for Arquitectonica, the boundary-pushing, color-loving modern architecture firm. Working together led Claudine and Giorgio Lostao to love and then to marriage, children (Luca, now 5, and Mila, 3), six renovated homes, a cross-country move and now their own firm, Ridiculous Design -- as in something that is so cool-looking it's ridiculous!"

Lostao House (photo by Erik Johnson for Metropolitan Home)

"Besides the bright-yellow accent walls and through line of industrial materials, the Lostaos' home is defined by transparency. In the master bath, the couple created a series of glass-walled partitions demarking their clothes closet, shower and commode (there are curtains, too, for privacy). 'It's ridiculous,' says Claudine (invoking the name of her firm), 'to expose something people keep behind closed doors. But we thought it would be fun.'"

"The house also is full of quotes from favorite films painted on the walls and glass partitions. They're not the cozy adages you might expect but are of a generally edgier, appropriately off-kilter variety, like the bathroom's selection from Zoolander, which asks, 'Have you ever wondered if there was more to life, other than being really, really ridiculously good-looking?'"

2009

The year began with profiles of two firms heading in different directions. First for The Oregonian I was tasked with deconstructing the demise of Sienna Architecture Company. The firm, first founded in 1951, had been a forerunner of mixed-use, high-density development in the late '90s and early '00s, but the economy and mismanagement both took their toll.

Hotel Modera (photo by Brian Libby)

That same month in The Oregonian I was able to profile Holst Architecture on the eve of a step up in scale for the firm. Holst had already spent most of the 2000s designing mixed-use residential projects like the Belmont Lofts and Clinton Condominiums, but as the decade reached its end the firm headed by John Holmes and Jeff Stuhr saw projects like 937 and the Ziba Design headquarters in the Pearl and downtown's Hotel Modera completed, and with it hopes of branching out to work in other cities like that other most acclaimed local firm, Allied Works.

"I love coming over the Fremont Bridge into the Pearl," said Stuhr, who is also a member of the city's design commission. "Not just because of our buildings. But the expansion there has finally made our downtown feel like a downtown and not just a collection of a few tall buildings. We just went through a phenomenally historic period of growth in this city like you haven't seen since the Lewis and Clark Exposition."

"The firm is 16 years old now," he addeds, "and I think we've kind of matured to the point of being able to say, 'This is what we want to do. This is our voice.'"

Three other stories I wrote in 2008 offered the opportunity to examine the top residential architects at either end of the age and career spectrum.

1310 Condominiums (photo by Brian Libby)

For Dwell, I wrote about the 11xDesign tour, a bellwether of young talent and DIY culture: "As the city has become infused with new talent, a small group of promising and accomplished designer-developers have banded together in a hybrid of traditional architectural or development practice. Small firms and sole practitioners here like Path Architecture, Atelier Waechter, SUM Design Studio, Webster Wilson, William Kaven Architecture, Brett Crawford (designer of the 1310 Condos pictured above), Design Department, and Building Arts Workshop still operate as individual businesses, and even compete for buyers. But they share research, marketing and design ideas; they’ve become a community. The 11xDesign tour is just one of several shared efforts. Of course they still want to succeed badly, and they’re not without ego. That’s why these tiny firms are going forward with houses, condos and row homes during the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, when the city’s larger developers have long since ended their building boom."

Also for Dwell, I wrote about a former ranch house in the Alberta district of Northeast Portland that was transformed by Architecture W. It's kind of funny: in this decade there were so many thousands of new homes added to the metropolitan area at its suburban fringe, but the overwhelming majority were cookie-cutter McMansions. At the same time, a trend of creative renovations and expansions also took hold, a hybrid architecture that Architecture W's Stump House (a collaboration with builder Daryll Erlandson) symbolized.

Stump House (photo by John Clark for Dwell)

"Though the clouds and rain can often make days a little dreary in Portland, the Boglis’ house stays bright most of the time," I wrote. "Erlandson removed two fireplaces in the original house, so to create a similar sense of a hearth he replaced them with a light well extending from a rooftop skylight through 
the second floor down to the ground. 
The well is clad in handmade ceramic 
tiles that make it resemble a chimney. 
“It really is kind of like our fireplace,” 
Jess says, laughing. “I asked Jered, ‘Where do we hang the stockings?’”

In a Portland Modern profile, I also had the good fortune to meet and get to know Saul Zaik, the dean of local residential architects and a contemporary of legendary local designers like Pietro Belluschi and John Yeon who forged the style of Northwest Modernism.

Zaik residence (photo by Brian Libby)

When I asked Zaik if Northwest was a distinct, valid style, he replied, "Asked if he thinks northwest regional is a valid style, Zaik’s response comes without hesitation. "It is absolutely valid. It is site-oriented in terms of sun and weather. It respects the vegetation of the site. Our attitude was that the best thing you can do is something nobody can see as they drive down the street. Well, I shouldn't say that. Maybe it is better to say that it is something discreet. I think it has to do with a northwest lifestyle. Our clients were outdoor people, who appreciated the landscape and wanted to be connected to it and to preserve it."

One of the truly spectacular building projects in Portland during the 2000s decade was Holst's Ziba Design headquarters, which I wrote about for Metropolis"

"Ziba’s Spartan allotment of individual workstations—including the president and creative director’s desks—is arranged into long, communal tables. The workstations are situated amid an interlocking sequence of podlike meeting rooms connected by sliding doors. It’s in these rooms that teams spend most of the workday, pinning their inspirations and ideas to the walls. 'At first they were looking at one big room for everything,” says Jeff Stuhr, one of Holst’s two founders. 'But we suggested a sequence of intimate spaces that you could journey through.'”

Ziba World Headquarters (image courtesy Holst Architecture)

"Playing counterpoint to and helping organize these labyrinthine work areas is the 'street,' an open corridor stretching the length of the two-story glass curtain wall on the north facade. Left free of furniture, it bathes the entire space in natural light. 'Ziba’s old office was full of chaos,' says Stuhr’s partner, John Holmes. 'By having these larger scaled elements, it creates a strong spatial rhythm—it orders everything. You can still have all that chaos, but it’s grounded.'"

The most important writing I did in 2009, however, was devoted to Memorial Coliseum, the landmark midcentury-modern masterpiece that was almost lost to cataclysmic folly: demolition to make way for a minor-league baseball park. Thankfully Mayor Sam Adams listened to the chorus of people who called for the Coliseum's preservation, including veterans groups (for whom the building is a memorial), the National Trust for Historic Preservation (which recognized the value of the world's only major arena with a 360-degree glass view), and the US Green Building Council.

Today, all indications point to Memorial Coliseum being saved. But along the way, I tried to help with a flurry of writing, not only on this blog but in articles such as this one for The Architect's Newspaper:

"Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and dedicated on January 8, 1961, the Memorial Coliseum was shaped in part by Gordon Bunshaft, the firm’s best-known architect, famous for landmarks such as Lever House in New York. It is one of the more unique arenas in the United States, if not the world, because of its high level of transparency. The 12,000-seat seating bowl is structurally independent from the surrounding glass box, which, in spite of its massive four-block expanse, stands on only four columns. When the bowl’s encompassing curtains are drawn open (something that hasn’t happened in many years), the arena can be flooded with natural light."

Memorial Coliseum (photo by Brian Libby)

Or this article about the Coliseum for Architecture Week:

"'We were thinking, you've got this oval bowl that is going to sit in a glass box,' explained Bill Rouzie, an architect who worked on the building for SOM. 'When you're in the bowl looking at something happening, you can either have light or not with the control of the curtain. To get out of there, instead of being in some blind corridor, you come out and you've got glass and you can see the city. You know where you are, and whether it's day or night. That was the whole point of the design, to keep it clear or open.'"

2010

For whatever reason, in the last year of the decade I wound up writing more about projects outside of Portland: the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, for The Architect's Newspaper a LEED-rated house in Eugene for Sierra, a vintage rotating house in Connecticut for AOL Housing Watch. But I did look at issues like the green performance gap in LEED rated buildings, some located in Portland, for Sustainable Industries magazine. And I wrote an essay called "The Portland Way" for the photography book Above Portland, a portion of which I'll close with here"

"Since it was founded in 1845 from a small clearing along the Willamette River, Portland has grown into one of the world’s most admired urban locales: a model for America’s more sustainable urban future as well a destination for ever-more visitors and new residents."

"Although its larger Pacific Northwest neighbor, Seattle, may have more buildings by famous designers, Portland is hailed for its urban fabric and livability. Architecture is thoughtfully interwoven with parks, transit, sidewalks and riverbanks. Unlike in most other large metropolises of the western United States, Portland’s pioneering urban growth boundary curbs sprawl and preserves surrounding farmland while utilizing density to forge a lively setting of bookstores, community gardens, espresso bars and bike shops. The city’s design DNA may be best exemplified not by a building but the MAX light rail line, begun in the 1980s using federal funds intended for a freeway. Or from Pioneer Courthouse Square, the city’s 'living room', claimed that same decade from a parking lot. Portland’s currency is connection."

"Although firms working today such as Allied Works and Zimmer Gunsul Frasca have garnered international reputations, Portland collectively distinguishes itself with green architecture. There are more buildings per capita here certified by the US Green Building Council’s LEED rating system than any American city. Many of these projects arrived during the 2000s, when the city skyline also changed significantly with a boom of highrise condominium construction, particularly in former industrial zones turned neighborhoods such as the Pearl District and South Waterfront." 

"No matter whether one prefers the local government’s official slogan, “The city that works,” or a local bumper sticker urging, “Keep Portland weird,” this Pacific Northwest metropolis is closer than most at finding that coveted alchemy between built and natural environments. Today Portland’s not just a clearing, but a way of life."

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10 years of architecture journalism (part one: 2001-2005)

Frank Lloyd Wright's Gordon House (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In late December of 2000, about a week before Christmas, my boss informed me that my job was being eliminated. "But I actually think you're going to thank me," she said. After all, it was clear that what I really wanted to do more than work in an office was to be a full-time freelance journalist. And so in January of 2001, after a few years of part-time writing, I took the plunge to try and make a living off journalism.

I'd started writing in the mid-1990s with the goal of being a film critic. Cinema, after four years at New York University, was my greatest passion, and I held writers like Roger Ebert, Wesley Morris, Anthony Lane and even locals like Willamette Week's Dale Basye in great esteem. For seven years, it was a great privilege and joy to write about movies for WW, but toward the end the glitter had worn off a bit - probably while visiting a suburban multiplex for a preview screening of, say, Patch Adams or Freddy Got Fingered, with local pop-station DJs on the microphone, revving up a packed audience with free t-shirts.

The last day job I had before going to work for myself as a freelance journalist had been in the architecture industry, and that planted the seed which would transform my career to writing much more about architecture and design than film or the other myriad topics I was covering in those early years: food, business, science, sports, travel, breaking news. Architecture was, like film, interesting as a collaborative art form. It could be the result of a single artistic vision, with the architect like a film director, but buildings, also like feature films, require big budgets and many collaborators. Thus, we have a blend of artfulness and pragmatism, a discipline where some create basic, rote worlds and some create vivid, imaginative works, and where there are successes and failures in each approach - depending on the execution.

Although blogging here at Portland Architecture has been part of my job since 2006, I'd like to talk here about some of the articles I wrote for other publications in the last ten years. (A more complete list can be found here.) Hopefully this doesn't come across as self promotion or navel gazing, but rather a kind of thirty thousand foot view of the decade in design. That said, it's a long enough conversation that I've decided to break this up into two posts, starting with the first half of the decade.

2001

The first major project I wrote about (and for three publications - Architectural Record, Architecture Week and Willamette Week) was the Gordon House, the lone building in Oregon designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The house was situated along the Willamette River in suburban Charbonneau, oriented to the water and a postcard view of Mount Hood. But it became threatened with demolition when a new set of owners, completely unaware of Wright or the house's pedigree, bought it solely for the purpose of tearing down and building a larger new home. Ultimately a compromise was reached: the house was moved about 20 miles south to the Oregon Garden near Silverton. The Gordon House isn't the same without the site it was designed for, but today more people are able to see it than ever before; and despite being cut into pieces and reassembled, the house is also arguably in its best condition since original construction.

Another article, for Metropolis, profiled a pair of Portland based location scouts for movies and commercials. What stuck with me was the fact that modernism is all over our various screens, especially in TV commercials; watch for it and you'll see. But to the general public, or at least the builders who supply them, neo-historic designs are much more popular.

adidas Village (photo by Brian Libby)

Comparing the suburban new construction of the Nike World Campus and inner-city urban renovation (from a hospital) of the adidas America corporate headquarters was the subject of another Metropolis article. I came away impressed with both places for different reasons. The Thompson-Vaivoda (now TVA Architects) design for Nike's headquarters is exceptionally impressive as from-scratch place making, all pristine whiteness and a man made lake, even if it seems to isolate itself too much from the surrounding urban fabric (Nike even went to court to prove it's not officially in Beaverton). I can no longer write about adidas objectively, because my partner works for the company now, but BOORA Architects' transformation of the old Kaiser hospital into a colorful set of buildings has always seemed successfully executed in my mind, particularly the multi-toned facades, an engaging embodiment of an athletic company.

2002

Apparently my skills as soothsayer are mixed. When given the enticing opportunity by the Daily Journal of Commerce to choose a group of "All-Star Architects of Tomorrow", I chose some great minds but not necessarily people destined to dominate the profession - not if you measure it in completed buildings, anyway.

The future stars I chose were Randy Higgins, Stuart Emmons, Mark Engberg, Michael Czysz, and Jeff Lamb. Higgins began at the now much-acclaimed Holst Architecture, but is now working in retail design. It's really Holst that has taken off in terms of buildings. Emmons and his firm, Emmons Architects, contributed over the decade some successful projects like an affordable housing complex in Vancouver and master planning for South Waterfront (much of which, had the developers followed, would have made for a better neighborhood), but the economy has taken its toll and not a lot of large scale work has followed. Emmons also co-led (in full disclosure, with yours truly and a few others) the seemingly now successful effort to save Memorial Coliseum.

Czsyz is becoming best known not as an architect (although his firm, Architropolis, did design Lenny Kravitz's house) but as a motorcycle (or "MotoCzsyz") designer. Engberg's firm, Colab, is still kicking, most notably as a recent local partner with Charles Rose Architects on the Oregon College of Art & Craft expansion. Lamb has bounced from BOORA to Sienna Architecture to his own firm, then back to BOORA and back to Sienna and, after Sienna closed, its successor: V3 Studio. Lamb almost saw a tower in Goose Hollow of his design (with Sienna) constructed, before the economy and design commission leanings contributed to its cancelation and the firm's demise. But Lamb did have a guiding design hand in BOORA's excellent Metropolitan Condos.

This was also the first full year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I wrote one story for a now defunct construction magazine for an issue just a few months afterward that actually asked if the era of tall buildings was over. And in an interview with architect César Pelli for Salon, he made the then almost sacrilege (given that Ground Zero was practically still smoldering) argument that lower Manhattan's skyline actually looked better without the World Trade Center towers.

2003

My favorite article of this year was a profile of Allied Works founding principal and guiding architect Brad Cloepfil for the New York Times. At that point in his career, Cloepfil was particularly being considered a rising star on the national scene, winning design competitions over international "starchitects" like Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas. He'd designed the acclaimed Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and was getting ready for two even higher-profile commissions: the Museum of Art & Design on New York's high profile Columbus Circle (at the southwest corner of Central Park in midtown Manhattan) and a major expansion to the Seattle Art Museum.

Allied Works' Wieden + Kennedy building (photo by Brian Libby)

"Born and reared in a Portland suburb, Mr. Cloepfil was educated at the University of Oregon in Eugene, where he fell under the spell of the legendary architect Louis Kahn while studying under a professor who had worked with Kahn," I wrote. "Mr. Cloepfil himself worked for the Swiss architect Mario Botta, whose designs Allied Works' projects also recall. But Mr. Cloepfil said his greatest influence was the picturesque Oregon landscape. 'It's a very romantic perception of space,' he explained. 'I think it frees you up, and allows you to think of architecture as something more than objects.'"

Also that year for the New York Times I was able to write about the operators of the Seattle and Portland BetterBricks daylighting labs. (More full disclosure: BetterBricks is now a sponsor of this blog.) Particularly in the case of the Portland and Eugene lab's operator, G.Z. "Charlie" Brown, it was incredibly illuminating (pun intended) learning just how much natural light affects our body chemistry. As other studies have shown, schoolchildren earn higher average test scores in naturally lit classrooms. Office employees working near windows take less break time and call in sick less often than their counterparts in windowless spaces. Even checkstands under skylights were found to register higher sales.

Continuing the green design and daylighting theme, I also wrote for Metropolis about a trio of sustainable schools BOORA designed in three Oregon small towns: The Dalles, Independence, and Clackamas.

Heinz Rudolf at Portland's daylighting lab (photo courtesy Architectural Lighting)

In a Metropolis story, I wrote about a Willamette Vallery winery, Sokol Blosser, that hired SERA Architects to design a building built into a hillside for storing wine, taking advantage of the ground's more moderate temperature fluctuations to keep the bottles cool naturally. It was one of many projects that found SERA, once known for historic renovations, becoming one of the city's top sustainable design firms.

2004

Perhaps it's because I used to live with a punk rock band. But I've always been a fan of architects who develop their own projects. My Metropolis feature on this topic was called, "Architects: How to Find the Perfect Developer - Hire Yourself!" In addition to designers from Miami, San Diego and New York, I profiled designer Kevin Cavenaugh, who has won local AIA awards for neighborhood mixed-use projects like the Ode To Rose's building and the Box + One Lofts.

Also that year, I wrote for Metropolis about the Museum Place building in the West End and, more specifically, the Safeway occupying its ground floor. It doesn't sound so revolutionary now, but Museum Place was the Safeway chain's first foray into this type of mixed-use urban building program with housing located above. Because Museum Place was also LEED-rated development, the editors chose a cheeky title referring to how the chain was "Redefining the term 'Green' Grocer".

2005

Things were particularly busy halfway through the decade as the economy boomed. One favorite story of mine was a sort of informal jury review of the Portland Art Museum's renovated Mark Building for The Oregonian, featuring architects Michael Tingley, Marcy McInelly, and Paul Falsetto (experts in arts facilities, planning and historic preservation, respectively). The verdict to Ann Beha Architects' design was a mostly positive one, particularly in reaction to the ample new exhibit space for the museum and the renovation of the former Masonic temple's mural-clad grand ballroom. That said, the trio and I all felt that the underground entry route was convoluted, there could have been more done to embrace the outside view, and that the new glass form protruding from the south facade was somehow too jarring and not bold enough.

Inside PAM's Mark Building (photo by Brian Libby)

Also for The Oregonian, I spoke to volunteers from Architects Without Borders (Cynthia Bankey and John Perry) who had visited the Mississippi coast after Hurricane Katrina to help homeowners assess damage and, in many cases, just listen.

"I remember when we started, the volunteer coordinator told us, 'The assessments of the homes are important, but it's also really important to just hear people's stories and talk to them," Bankey told me. "So every hour we'd listen to a new story from different people. It was very personal, a lot of social work really. And it took its toll on us."

"In terms of the psychological health of the people that have been through this, I think this period, about three months afterward, is in some ways the hardest," Perry added. "The adrenaline has worn off...and these people find themselves without a house and a job, but they still have house payments to make."

In another story for Metropolis, I covered a fiendishly clever exterior paint job for the Pacific Northwest College of Art created by Randy Higgins. A poem by Arthur Rimbaud was translated into a language of differently sized and colored rectangles painted onto the side of the building.

Pacific NW College of Art (photo by Brian Libby)

And for Architecture Week I talked with a local legend, architect Thomas Hacker, about the Hillsdale Branch Library, one of many award winning libraries that his firm, THA Architecture, designed for Multnomah County. What a lovely little modest jewel this and Hacker's other libraries of the '90s and '00s turned out to be, a union of modern and classical architectural sensibilities, festooned in wood, concrete and glass with a bounty of natural light.

In 2005 I wrote an article for Architecture Week about the Brewery Blocks, the five-building development beside Burnside Street and Powell's Books. It probably would not be hyperbole to call this GBD Architects-designed, Gerding Edlen-developed project the most successful green mixed use project in Portland of this decade.

About this time, I also began writing more for home magazines. Two homes of note from 2005 were the Watson-Tschopp House, a renovated mid-century modern house originally constructed in the 1970s, which I wrote about for Dwell, and Architecture W principal Brian White's design for expanding his own home in the West Hills, which I covered for Western Interiors + Design.

I'll save 2005-2010 for a separate post to follow, but I can already say this: my boss, whom I still think of fondly, was definitely right. Being a freelance journalist isn't for everyone. It's not especially lucrative, and future business is always relatively uncertain. That said, I feel almost as though I've been on vacation for the last decade, not because I don't work hard, but because it's a rare case of getting paid to explore what one enjoys.

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Seeking nominations for Portland Monthly's top 20th century houses list

Pittock Mansion (photo by charlieetoona via Flickr)

For an upcoming issue in 2011, Portland Monthly magazine and its editor, former Oregonian architecture critic Randy Gragg, are planning to compose a list of the top 10 houses of the 20th century in Portland.

Selections for the list will be decided by a jury comprised of Classic Houses of Portland author William Hawkins, architect Rick Potestio, Architectural Heritage Center director Cathy Galbraith, and yours truly. But before that, the public is invited to make suggestions and arguments.

When I heard about the list, the first house that came to mind was the Watzek House, designed by the great John Yeon.

Watzek House (image courtesy University of Oregon)

In 1935, Portland lumber magnate Aubrey Watzek looked to build a house for himself and his mother, with his friend Yeon getting the job. But Watzek initially did not like the modern, non-traditional design. Instead of trying to change his mind, Yeon suggested Watzek contact Pietro Belluschi, who was then directing the AE Doyle architectural firm, the city's most accomplished at that time. But Belluschi’s design didn't impress Watzek either, so he returned to Yeon's original proposal.

Which was a good thing, because even if the design wasn't initially to the lumber baron's taste, the house would turn out an influential masterpiece of early American modernism. And all this from an architect who was just 26 years old when he finished the construction drawings in early 1937.

As Leland Roth writes in the book American Architecture, Yeon "decided to create a thoroughly modern residence, but one designed in response to the local climate rather than adhering to abstract international formulas, and he decided to exploit wood as a building material rather than steel or concrete," which had been de rigeur in most all other iterations of early 20th century modernism, a la Frank Lloyd Wright or the Bauhaus.

Watzek House (images courtesy University of Oregon)

"The result," Roth continues, "was a clustering of rooms around a central court," drawing from Asian and early ranch styles, "with low pitched roofs carried on wood supports protecting the large expanses of glass from winter rains. The house was featured in several exhibitions and publications produced by the Museum of Modern Art."

After the Watzek, John Yeon only pursued architecture in fits and starts, producing a few other houses and the Portland Oregon Visitors Center that still stands in Waterfront Park. But he largely turned to regional planning and landscape preservation, while Yeon's contemporary, Pietro Belluschi, aggressively pursued his career and went on to become a far bigger name in international architectural history.

Belluschi ought to have a few houses up for consideration on the list as well, not just because he is Portland's most acclaimed architect in history but because a couple of the houses are magnificent. Two years ago I had the good fortune to visit the circa-1948 Burkes House, where Belluschi's own family lived for many years.

Belluschi's Burkes House (photo by Brian Libby)

As Meredith Clausen writes of the Burkes in her book, Pietro Belluschi, the project "was long in gestation. The clients just before the war had decided to sell their old colonial house and build a new one; aware of the fame of the recently completed De Graaff house by the celebrated Los Angeles architect Richard Neutra in the hills south west of Portland, they decided that theirs too should be modern. The house was designed like his others to take advantage of the view while preserving privacy. facing outwards to the expansive view of the city on one side, it opened out to a secluded garden notched out of the hillside on the other. The living and dining areas were combined into one long continuous space paralelling the view, with a kitchen area set off to one side by a large brick masonry core."

"The sense of an open expansive space was enhanced by continuous cork floors throughout," Clausen adds, "and by the lush boards of the fir ceiling which continued uninterrupted through the glazing of the walls to form protective porticoes for terraces on both city and garden sides. Exteriors were of unpainted cedar, witrh smooth, flush surfaces only lightly stained and oiled. The roofline was virtually flat, with a deep fascia and wide overhangs. Mrs Burkes had much to do with this. a woman of independent mind and sophisticated in the arts, she had brought in photographs and tear sheets indicating what she wanted. It was she, according to Belluschi, who, aware of the International Style and the acclaim the Neutra house was receiving, insisted on the flat roof."

In the handful of years before and after World War II, architects based in Southern California like Richard Neutra, A. Quincy Jones and Rudolf Schindler gained wide notoriety for their modern, glassy, open-planned homes, particularly the "Case Study" houses. This vernacular, while clearly a sister of the Northwest modernism Belluschi and Yeon practiced, was less dependent on wood and instead usually favored steel and masonry. Yet both Neutra and Jones designed homes in Portland, too, and some are worth consideration for this list, particularly Neutra's Jan De Graaff House from 1940.

Neutra's Jan De Graaff House (images courtesy Triangle Modernist Houses)

"The owners were avid admirers of contemporary architecture, and they sought out Neutra, who enjoyed an international reputation," Hawkins writes. "He would design for them Portland's first residence in the style, which would house the impressive De Graaff collection of modern art and furnishings. The design that Neutra presented," in association with local architect Van Evera Bailey, has all the International style characteristics. Its flat roof, smooth walls, and continuous banks of windows are completely shorn of ornament. Detail is simplified to the extreme to obtain the tight-skinned, box-like appearance that was a quality of the style. The exterior emphasizes long horizontal bands of windows and similar expanses of vertical tongue-and-groove siding. House design had become an abstract art, relying on floating planes of varying irregularity to achieve the assymetrical balance."

Unfortunately, though, this masterful house was in the ensuing years remodeled so extensively that it has become all but unrecognizable from the original. This house hasn't been demolished, but it's no longer Neutra's design.

 Pittock Mansion (photo by Squid Viscious via Flickr)

Of course the modernism exhibited in these houses from the first half of the 20th Century is just one of many styles and idioms expressed in residential architecture. Here in Portland, like any major city, there are Victorian houses, craftsmans, Queen Annes, colonial revival, bungalows, Tudors, and much more. If we're talking about classic houses of the past, in Portland that of course starts with the Pittock Mansion.

The 22-room house, now open to the public, was designed by architect Edward Foulkes and completed in 1914. The mansion sits on 46 acres with a view of five Cascade peaks. The design includes fine plasterwork, cut and polished marbles, cast bronze, and superbly crafted hardwoods and paneling. Its progressive features included a central vacuum system, intercoms, and indirect lighting hidden in alcoves above the walls.

"It typifies the success of the nineteenth-century American entrepreneurial spirit, which, with talent and enormous energy, was able to express itself in the construction of a mighty residence," writes William Hawkins in Classic Houses of Portland: 1850-1950.

"Foulkes, a San Francisco architect, planned two symmetrical angled wins toward the views, the intersections market by twin engaged turrets with conical roofs... A massive, red-tiled, hipped roof with prominent attic dormers sits above the central volume of the house. The axially placed central fireplaces and chimneys peak at the ridge. The house is constructed of dressed Bellingham sandstone, adorned with scrolled and modillioned cornices, a Greek meander entablature, pedimented garden doorways, and balustrated balconies."

Gustav Freiwald House (image courtesy Wikipedia Commons)

Another house Hawkins writes about, and one that received a degree of notoriety in recent years when its owners protested a condo next door that would have dwarfed it, is the Gustav Feeiwald House in Irvington. It is now the Lion & Rose Bed and Breakfast

"At first glance, the house could be of the Queene Anne style, particularly with its corner polygonal three-story turret and wrap-around covered porch. However, if roofs are the determining factor, the house would be of a more Craftsman style....The Freiwald House has the more square proportions, the wider windows, and the curved eave of the Craftsman period, despite the addition of Colonial Revival detailing at porch columns, corner pilasters, and pediments."

The Freiwald House was built in 1906 as a private residence for Gustav E. Freiwald, a 42-year-old German beer brewer who operated breweries and taverns in towns along the Columbia River from Hood River to Astoria. A year earlier, he had hired Emil Schacht, a well-known German-born Portland architect, to design a grand house for him  in Irvington. Schacht had already designed a number of brewery buildings and other commercial structures for Freiwald, but the client rejected the house design and hired HH Menges to redesign the house. It is believed that Menges took Schacht's design and added the Queen Anne exterior elements: an octagonal turret, a wide wrap-around porch with Ionic columns, and a large dormer with an arched window and balcony.

One mustn't forget seminal Portland architect AE Doyle when discussing 20th Century houses, even if Doyle is better known for larger-scale projects like Central Library, the Benson Hotel, and the recently demolished Riverdale School. Among Doyle's best may have been the Edward Harmon House from 1908, still standing at NW 26th and Lovejoy.

Doyle's Harmon House (image courtesy Wikipedia Commons)

Doyle, Hawkins writes, "had just established his practice in the city - the beginning of a long and distinguished career - when he designed the house with the solid, wide proportions then in vogue. The segmental-arched and transomed windows, the solid porch columns, and the shed dormer were Craftsman elements, as is the wrap-around hip at the gable ends - an inventive, almost Japanese form...Combined with these details are the Classical brick quoins at the corners of the house, the flat modillions at the eaves, and the non-fluted Doric columns that support the covered entry pergola."

Most every house I've written about so far, be it contemporary or historically styled, was built in the first half of the 20th century. So what about the second half?

One house that immediately comes to mind actually might not be eligible, for two reasons: it's in Vancouver, Washington and its architect, Rick Potestio, is part of the jury picking Portland Monthly's list. That said, the Burch House from 1999, which won Potestio the top local AIA award, is exceptional.

 
Potestio's Birch House (image courtesy Portland Modern)

“This house to date is still the most sophisticated and completely executed project I’ve done,” Potestio told me in an interview last year for Portland Modern. “It was truly an inspired client who as a businessman was very specific about budget and what he wanted. He wanted it to be evocative of an Asian aesthetic and to be able to bring people from around the world to see it was a work of art.”

Potestio said he conceived the house to play with the Venetian notion of a plaza on the water. But on the side it becomes more of a sculptural fragmented piece in order to frame different views. “This is a 50x80 subdivision lot located on the banks of the Columbia River and surrounded by park space as well as very mediocre tract houses,” he explained, “so the question was how to grab hold of something physically in this landscape when we couldn’t actually touch it. How can we get it to relate only to the sky, the water, and the trees? So we designed it from the inside out, manipulating the view to see trees and sky. That’s what explains the cutouts and the recesses.”

Most of all, the house is designed to capture views of the Columbia River, and to make it feel even closer than it appears. “We used proportion and modulation of space to create optical illusions,” he adds. “When you’re approaching the house through a very narrow space to an entry court at the center of the house, you see this wall of blue at the other end. The layering of screens and other grids of windows create the optical illusion of flattening out the space. By the time you get out to the deck, you’re so encompassed in the space, you don’t want to leave.”

Zaik's Zidell House (collage courtesy Portland Modern)

One other candidate from the latter 20th century I also think is worth considering for the houses list: architect Saul Zaik's Zidell House.

In 1970, shipyard magnate Arnold Zidell asked Zaik to design a house on a ship's mast. "I said 'That sounds like a lot of fun,'" Zaik told The Oregonian's Jeff Kuechle in a 2009 story about the house. "I get odd requests all the time - I never have an easy job."

Zidell had salvaged a mast 36 inches in diameter and nearly 100 feet long from a decommissioned ship and wanted to use it to support a circular rotating house high above Portland's West Hills. Such rotating houses had already been built in Southern California and Connecticut. Zaik, after consulting with a structural engineer, he concluded it would be imprudent to make the house rotate like some of those predecessors. But the octagonal two-story home offered sweeping views and a ground floor 47 feet in the air.

Zaik's Zidell House (photo by Motoya Nakamura, courtesy The Oregonian)

"Steelworkers from Zidell's shipyard descended on the site, off Fairmount Drive in the West Hills, drove a foundation deep into bedrock and set to work bolting on the cantilevered trusses that would support the house," Kuechle wrote. Zaik said he chose cedar shingles because "it's 40 feet in the air - you don't want to have to paint it every few years."

"It's just one of those places," says current owner Lance Crosier. "It's perfect - even on miserable days, it's bright and sunny. You can see the whole city. I can watch the fireworks on the river, I can see Vancouver Lake and Camas; if I stand on my tiptoes, I can see halfway to Alabama."

Portland Monthly's issue with the top 10 local houses of the 20th Century will be published this spring, and our jury will be convening in January. Before we get together and start making our list, what other houses might we consider? What are the best 20th Century houses in Portland to your eyes?

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Notes on the end of "starchitecture"

Seattle Central Library, Seattle, Rem Koolhaas/OMA, photo by Brian Libby 

In the latest issue of Newsweek, Cathleen McGuigan declares that "starchitecture", the era of ambitious architectural projects meant to call attention to themselves with wild shapes and futuristic materials, is all but dead.

The era that began in 1997 with architect Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain—one of ambitious, often wildly sculptural buildings that screamed "look at me" but were also held up as kick starters of urban revitalization—came to an end with the economic collapse of 2008, McGuigan argues.

Or, as Rosalie Genevro, director of the Architectural League in New York, says in the Newsweek article, "The spectacle building is kind of a dinosaur."

Part of me was a little skeptical reading this. I thought of how after the September 11, 2001 attacks there was actually an open question of whether the era of tall buildings was over. Which of course seems ridiculous now. I wonder if starchitecture is just another name for the ambitious building designs that are part of any era or society’s economic boom time.

Here in Portland, we never had much of any starchitecture. Commissions for world-renowned architects are all but non-existent here, and when they do come, the commissions usually haven’t led to completed buildings. The likes of Gehry, Richard Meier and Cesar Pelli can attest to that. Portland does have a kind of second-tier starchitect in Brad Cloepfil, but even his firm, Allied Works, has designed exactly one new non-house building in Portland in the last decade: the modest but exquisitely elegant 2281 Glisan buiding.

Some of the landmark architectural works that came in the era of starchitects were wonderful, McGuigan correctly argues. Buildings like Guggenheim Bilbao aren't just empty bombast; legendary architect Philip Johnson was famously brought to tears visiting Gehry's museum for the first time, on a July 2001 "Charlie Rose" episode; he compared the building to the great Chartres Cathedral in France. Personally, I like Gehry's Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. There were also public buildings like Rem Koolhaas's Seattle Central Library and Herzog & DeMeuron's National Stadium (the "Bird's Nest") in Beijing.

Walt Disney Concert Hall (under construction), Los Angeles, Frank Gehry, photo by Brian Libby 

Starchitecture was seemingly only enhanced by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that came a few months after the Rose-Gehry episode; all that patriotism needed big bold expression.

"Yet innovation as mere style is nothing to prize," McGuigan writes. "No one is going to miss the second-rate excesses of the era. Pointlessly pointy architecture is so over. And we can hope that what comes next will be thoughtful design that responsibly reflects the complexities of contemporary life."

Much of the signature architecture of the 2000s was akin to the massive tail-finned automobiles turned out by Detroit in the 1950s. Both came from periods of expansive, sustained economic prosperity and technological advancement. Cars of the "Leave It to Beaver" era celebrated newfound freedom of America's new interstate highway system and advancements in auto technology that made them faster and sleeker than ever before. Buildings in the time of the "Bilbao effect" came alive with the notion first birthed by postmodernism: that architecture can really have any shape on the outside, making it irresistible as multimillion-dollar sculpture. And, both the era of the tail-finned car and the swoopy titanium Gehry buildings of the '90s and '00s gave way to decades seemingly more about social transformation: civil rights in the '60s, sustainability in the '10s, making the old behemoths seem just that.

The signature starchitect building of the 2000s was the art museum. Besides Bilbao, there were projects like Santiago Calatrava's Milwaukee Art Museum with its soaring arches; Herzog & DeMeuron's Tate Modern in London, re-imagining the gargantuan Bankside power station; Richard Meier's Getty Museum in greater Los Angeles, a mountaintop temple to art; Libeskind's Denver Art Museum with the architect's trademark crystalline forms; as well as Zaha Hadid's Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Brad Cloepfil's Museum of Art & Design in New York and countless more.

Yet in Portland we did something very different, and something very much in the same spirit of the more modest art museum projects happening in other cities: we renovated the building next door with typical Portland pragmatism and understatedness.

Portland Art Museum/Mark Building renovation, Ann Beha Architects, photo by Brian Libby 

Ultimately these most famous of world architects turned their attention to housing as well, in the form of high-profile hotel and condominium projects. The high-rise condo, after all, was the principal addition to big-city skylines across America during the 2000s, because the decade's economic boom was driven largely by a dangerously deregulated housing and mortgage market.

This is a trend Portland was much more a part of. If you look at the past decade in terms of how the skyline was transformed, it was almost solely about condos, rising in South Waterfront and the Pearl District.

McGuigan's Newsweek piece argues correctly that in the place of empty-calorie architectural candy is coming a more nutritious brand of design that has over the last decade established itself as the truer transformation in architecture: sustainability. The cost of energy has continues to escalate, not just in monetary terms but human and ecological ones: fighting wars in the unstable Middle East countries, or risking the kind of full-scale disaster now happening with the Gulf of Mexico oil-rig disaster.

But more than that, sustainability is a kind of generational correction. When air conditioning was invented in the early 20th century, two or three generations of building designers stopped paying attention to one of the most fundamental aspects of architecture, one dating back to the beginning of humans building: mindfulness of topography, climate and other natural conditions affecting our homes, schools and offices. You could visit a thousand-year-old Buddhist temple in Japan, a rustic villa in Italy or a mosque in Turkey, and they'd all show an effort to stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer by a combination of building orientation, insulation and natural light.

Today, McGuigan says, architecture is becoming more of a collaborative affair than the old stereotypical notion of a primadonna architect who dictates to a builder, engineer and other subcontractors. In order to deliver green buildings that use less energy, water and other resources, there must be an integrated design process involving all building team members. Achieving an ultra green building comes not through one smoking-gun material or product like a solar panel, but instead is the summation of lots of little efficiencies.

But again, it’s funny how Portland was embracing sustainability even as much of the rest of the world was still seeking out swoopy Gehry titanium curves or angular Libeskind crystal forms.

South Waterfront district, Portland, photo by Brian Libby 

One curious aspect of sustainability is that, unlike most architectural movements of past centuries, it's not an expression of a particular style. But in tough economic times such as the past two years, that results-oriented pragmatism is a kind of vitamin shot for a profession sometimes too concerned with empty bombast in the past. "There's a certain healthiness when the profession has to cut back, re-grow, and re-imagine what it is we're all supposed to do," says Rob Rogers, a partner at Rogers Marvel in New York, in the Newsweek story, "which is creative problem solving."

"A viable product comes from place making," Mark Eden  of Gerding Edlen Development told me in a Metropolis Magazine interview in 2008. "How do you create great places that people want to come to live, work, and play in? Then you also have to look ahead. I personally believe we've got a broken national energy policy. I think it's a national security issue. It's about speed and scale, and we don't have a lot of time."

Imagining a Pearl gateway...and a contemporary art museum?

Image courtesy Portland State University via Daily Journal of Commerce 

Nathalie Weinstein had an interesting report in Thursday's Daily Journal of Commerce about a proposal from a group of Portland State University graduate students to raze two small mixed-use buildings near the Brewery Blocks for two larger mixed-use projects to create what they call a Pearl District gateway (pictured above).

The grad students spent their winter term developing a proposal for the site, consisting of two parcels between West Burnside and Northwest Davis streets and Northwest 13th and 14th avenues. The class was advised by members of the Oregon chapter of the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties.

The students propose demolishing the existing buildings on the site, which presently hold businesses like Everyday Music and Storables, and constructing two mixed-use buildings. One of the structures is proposed as 23 stories. 

Equally noteworthy, perhaps, is the proposed occupancy: a combination of workforce housing, a chain store as the anchor tenant, a boutique hotel, and possibly even an art museum based around the collection of leading local art patron Jordan Schnitzer, who is president of the company that owns the two parcels, Harsch Investment Properties.

Tom Heinicke, one of the grad students from PSU, told Weinstein that height is essential for the development to be a gateway presence. “If and when the Burnside-Couch couplet comes along, we want to emphasize the height of the development because a fair amount of traffic will be coming past there,” he said.

Harsch senior vice president Steve Roselli told Weinstein there should be a more prominent gateway leading from downtown Portland into the Pearl District. “We’ve looked at redevelopment conceptually and have had a number of developers inquire about it,” he said. “When we started to get semi-serious about it, the market cooled off. But it’s a fantastic site for mixed use, and any number of things could work there.”

Roselli admitted that Harsch has no serious plans to redevelop the property anytime soon, but that now is the time to dream big. Getting PSU students to do that dreaming, and to get press like the DJC and myself to write about it, also helps market the idea.

“We have to get beyond the fact that nobody is building now,” Heinicke added. “It’s smart to develop something big rather than go halfway with it because things are tough. Three to five years from now, there will be a return to growth.”

There is an aspect of this proposal that feels a bit too uncomfortably close to the 2000s-decade boom. Do we really see a 23-story tower as a necessity for this site? Isn't that just a tad unrealistic? At the same time, if the city (or the nation) is ever going to climb out of the Great Recession, it will take developers looking to capitalize even when the current times don't necessarily call for it.

It's also a little difficult to imagine a pair of blocks immediately to the north of Burnside acting as a "gateway" to the Pearl. A true gateway would be along Burnside Street, which is the dividing line between Northwest and Southwest Portland. It's true that a couplet on the West Side making Couch and Burnside both one-way streets would change that configuration, but this is also the reason I have always been against the idea of a West-side couplet. Burnside occupies a special role in the city as the only street touching NW, SW, SE and NE Portland. It needs to retain its role as the border, as the unifying street in the city.

To my eyes, the most intriguing aspect of this entire proposal is not the architecture but the notion of having a new contemporary art museum in Portland based around Jordan Schnitzer's art collection.

In a 2007 story about Jordan Schnitzer, DK Row of The Oregonian summed up his large role in the local art world:

Think of the words "Schnitzer" and "art," and you likely think about Arlene Schnitzer, the patron who founded one of the city's first serious commercial galleries, the Fountain Gallery, as well as being the Portland Art Museum's most important booster and donor of the past two decades.

But for years, Arlene Schnitzer's son, Jordan, has been creating a Schnitzer legacy of his own.

Aside from serving as president of the family's business -- Harsch Investment Properties, founded by his father, Harold J. Schnitzer -- Jordan Schnitzer also has served prominently on the boards of several arts organizations, including the University of Oregon's museum. The school even renamed the museum after the Oregon alumnus in 2004.

Above all, Schnitzer, like his mother, has been collecting art, particularly prints. Right now, he has more than 5,000 prints. One of the most comprehensive collections of its kind in the country, Schnitzer's trove is deep enough to produce major retrospectives on several significant artists, including Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Bruce Nauman.

If there were a Schnitzer Collection, would the top few floors of a Pearl District mixed use building be the right place? Honestly, I'd accept a contemporary art museum in a Parkrose basement if it meant Portland were finally getting such a venue. Having it stem from Jordan Schnitzer would make sense, too. I think of a great museum like the Menil Collection in Houston as an indicator of what a space organized around Schnitzer's collection could be: small compared to a major art institution like the Portland Art Museum or the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, but all the more focused and thrilling because of it.

Bruce Nauman, "Human/Need/Desire" (1983) 

In that same Oregonian interview, DK Row also asked Schnitzer more point-blank about what might someday happen to his collection:

Q. You are still young and have a lot of collecting yet to do. But you must be thinking about the disposition of the collection and where it will end up.

A. Certainly I'm building a public collection. Again, I collect to share. As to who will eventually share in that partnership, I don't know. The intent is to have the collection stay here in the Northwest, which has been my home and my family's home for a hundred years.

Q. Have you talked to the Portland Art Museum about your collection?

A. Not in regards to the long term, ultimate home for the work. But I do know that I want it to be . . . (pauses). An analogy would be this: What if someone wrote a book and you bought all of the copies and stored it in a warehouse? I guess if I were the author I'd be depressed. I'd want that book out there, to be read. Someone might say: "You sold the copies, though." But what's the point of selling them if no one sees them? So in terms of my work, I want it to be in a public collection.

Q. What it sounds like to me is that the museum has not reached out enough to ensure that this collection stays here.

A. I think that John and Lucy Buchanan (the museum's former executive and development directors) knew that I wasn't going anywhere. If they had stayed in Portland, we'd have had some discussions by now. Brian Ferriso (the new director) has already come in and asked questions. He's talked a lot about the fact that he sees this collection as a public resource, as are other collections in the public.

Were such a move to happen to take his collection public in an institution of its own rather than at PAM, I'd rather see a new Jordan Schnitzer museum get an architectural space befitting the mastery of the artists in the collection: a building designed by a world class architect. Would Harsch Investment Properties be willing to go the extra step and hire a Brad Cloepfil, for example, or another world class architect with museum experience from out of town like Renzo Piano, Rem Koolhaas or Tadao Ando? Except for maybe Cloepfil, it seems doubtful. It also seems doubtful that this museum would actually happen anytime soon.

But given how organizations like the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art have shied away from their role as visual art exhibitor, or how others like the Portland Art Center have shut down altogether, it's enticing to imagine, however unrealistically, a true contemporary art museum in Portland. That would be a greater "gateway" for the city than virtually anything made of brick and mortar or steel and glass.

Sifting Portland and metro area population data

Last Thursday's Portland Tribune had an interesting feature by Peter Korn that displayed some common myths about migration here.

Among Korn's findings, based on IRS data, are that about as many Multnomah County residents have left for California as have left the Golden State for here in the last several years. Portland also does not, Korn found, attract an unusual amount of people from other states. "Many other states and most western cities have higher rates of migration than Oregon and Portland," he added. Seattle, for instance, gets much more Californians and people moving there overall. 

In fact, for most of the past decade, more people actually left Multnomah County to live elsewhere than moved here. The reality is different in suburban Washington and Clackamas Counties: they've gone up in population.

But Korn notes that trend has changed: "Tax returns for 2006-07 (the IRS groups the migration data in two-year segments) show 3,601 more people moving into Multnomah County than leaving. 

Another finding: "Portland residents aren't moving to the suburbs anymore, but out-of-staters have taken up the slack." For much of the last several years, the article says, the demographic trend has been for out-of-state residents to move first to Portland and then, after a few years, to move to the suburbs of Clackamas, Washington and Clark counties. Now, however, the number of people moving into Washington County versus a decade ago, while roughly the same overall, is made up 19.6 percent Portlanders versus 24 percent ten years ago.

What should we make of some of this data?

It's hard to draw concrete conclusions because there are a lot of complicating factors. Sometimes we may tend to see population increases as indications of which places people like best, and what cities are therefore the most pleasant to be in and experience. In reality, though, it may be more of an economic indicator, or maybe even climate.

After reading Korn's article, my Google search of fastest-growing US metro areas found this CNN article from a year ago listing the Dallas, Atlanta, Phoenix and Houston. Notice a theme here? Sprawl. Having an urban growth boundary like Portland does, and combining it other statewide anti-sprawl measures, means the added quality of life is (perhaps inevitably) tied to increases in the cost of living. Take away those restrictions, and you have cheaper land. The divide between rich and poor has become greater in America over the last decade, and over a broader period, central cities and suburbs have to some degree traded places as coveted and cheap destinations, respectively.

I'm probably just being too sensitive or seeing mirages, but I wondered if the paper had a bit of an agenda . The headline for the story, in big bold type on the cover, asked, "Nirvana? Possibly Not." Is it possible the Tribune's owner, the conservative Doctor Robert Pamplin Junior, might get a little extra satisfaction in taking Little Beirut down a peg?

Even if so, however, the numbers are there in plain sight. The tidal wave of Portland immigrants may indeed be a myth. But ultimately if there is a competition between Portland and its suburbs, or between the Portland metro area and those in other regions, our strength lies not in quantity but quality.

New Yorker on Belluschi, NY Times on Alberta Street

Two bits of New York press (arguably the nation's best magazine and easily the best daily newspaper) have turned their sights on two very different pieces of Portland design.

First, New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger looks at the renovated Alice Tully Hall and the Juilliard School it's part of at Lincoln Center. The original design by Pietro Belluschi has been renovated by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, one of the country's best contemporary firms. (The image below is a rendering of DS+R's renovation.)

 

"Amid the tepid classicism of so much of Lincoln Center," Goldberger writes, "Juilliard stood out as something totally nineteen-sixties, all cantilevers and boxy geometries. Granted, it was covered in travertine, to match its genteel neighbors, but that served only to make the building seem ill at ease, like a wrestler dressed in a Sunday suit."

 

Goldberger goes on to call Belluschi's building (co-designed with Eduardo Catalano) "a misfit" and decry its "half hidden" entrance, as well as to take issue with a rectangular building on a trapezoidal site.

 

I agree that Pietro Belluschi's work from the 1960s and 70s is not necessarily his best, particularly the larger institutional work. When the architect traded wood and glass for limestone and travertine, something was lost. What's more, the Juilliard and Alice Tully definitely qualify for the "brutalism" tag that is often given to buildings from this period. At the same time, I still feel Goldberger is too dismissive of Belluschi's work at Lincoln Center and of so-called Brutalist architecture in general. The Diller Scofidio design unquestionably breathes new life into Belluschi's building, making it more humane with added transparency. At the same time, this is hybrid architecture of old and new, so whatever Goldberger praises about the renovation would, for all intents and purposes, not be possible without Belluschi's original. And while Brutalism certainly invites criticism in general, I'd hate to think of Goldberger being too dismissive of the original without really giving it thought.

 

Meanwhile, the travel section of the Times declares in its headline for a story on Alberta Street that the neighborhood was "saved by design". The story briefly profiles a key developer in this history, Rosalyn Hill. She bought numerous downtrodden properties on Alberta in the early 1990s and "laid down new rules": no metal bars on windows and no locked doors during business hours." (The photo at right, which appeared in the story, is by the excellent Portland photographer Basil Childers. I took the one below.)

 

This is an extension of the "broken window" theory that helped transform the feel of a lot of central cities in the 1990s, particularly New York (I saw it happen first-hand), by improving the cosmetics of place to not look like environments for crime. Turns out criminals are often looking for those places, if you believe the statistics. "I told my renters, 'You have to interact with the community," Hill told writer Jane Hodges. And sure enough, if you look at places Rosalyn renovated, they are teeming with street-front glass. Urbanity needs transparency. If you look at the blighted, graffiti covered places in any city, they're often the places with the least amount of glass.

 

I happened to meet Rosalyn Hill about a year ago as we visited some of the properties she renovated, where the Random Order coffee house and the tin Shed Garden Cafe are now located. On the day I visited, Rosalyn was watering the plants around both buildings and seemed to know almost everyone who walked by. And it's also worth noting that, given how Alberta Street has heard cries of gentrification and accusations of the diverse African American and Latino populations driven out by middle class whites, Rosalyn Hill is a black business owner who has stayed and thrived.

 

This article wasn't really about design, at least not in the sense of paying much attention to the architecture of the properties Hill renovated. But there's definitely reason to celebrate the unique sense of place that exists on Alberta Street, one that has emerged from years of crime and poverty to prosper, yet has also done so without a single Starbucks, Blockbuster Video, Old Navy or McDonald's. The piece also celebrates some local business that we Portlanders would do well to support in these tough economic times: Guardino Gallery, Office PDX, and Helser's restaurant.

John Jay and Old Town/Chinatown

In Sunday's Oregonian D.K. Row interviewed John Jay, who is not only executive creative director at Wieden + Kennedy (more or less the #2 guy to Dan Wieden), but also is playing an increasing role as a developer - particularly in the Old Town/Chinatown neighborhood.

Jay and his wife, Janet, have teamed with Andy Ricker Richter, owner of Pok Pok (purveyor of some of the tastiest food I've ever tasted), to create a new restaurant called Ping in the old Hung Far Low lounge site at 4th and Couch. But Jay also has his hands in numerous other efforts. He hired Brad Cloepfil to renovate his Pietro Belluschi house two years ago, and then wound up collaborating with Cloepfil on the spec Macleay View House in the West Hills. Jay has also been supporting and following efforts to bring the Uwajimaya grocery store to Old Town Chinatown.

I've written about John Jay a few times in the past and find him an incredible personality. The guy never seems to sleep. If he emails you, chances are the message was sent in the middle of the night. He flies back and forth constantly between Portland, Tokyo, Shanghai, Amsterdam and New Dehli to Wieden's offices, and even at 60 has vastly more energy than I do at 36. Plus he can tell you anything about the most obscure graffiti artist, an early-80s hip hop group, high fashion trends in New York and Milan, and a vast array of contemporary art.

Here are some questions and answers between DK and Jay that I found interesting:

Row: Why should Chinatown be important?

Jay: Chinatown represents both the past and the future. It may well be potentially the most interesting and influential neighborhood in the city waiting for reinvention. It sits on the edge of Broadway, an area of creative energy with the Museum of Contemporary Craft and other galleries in the DeSoto Building. Then there's the 511 building owned by the Pacific Northwest College of Art that's poised to be the new incubator of artists and designers. From the Pearl, Chinatown leads to Old Town, which will evolve with the emergence of a rejuvenated White Stag building and its focus on architecture and design.

So, Chinatown sits in the middle of an emerging creative corridor.

What group of people will decide the fate of this area?

I wish I knew. I don't know. I hope the city will have a vision. I hope people at the Portland Development Commission understand that there are wonderful things happening in Old Town -- the White Stag building, for example, and much more. But that's not Chinatown.

What will Chinatown look like in the future? 

The growing prominence of Asian creatives in the world at large is huge right now. That's intersecting with the fact that there is this place called Old Town/Chinatown on the verge of being remade by someone -- by the city, by ground forces. And what does that future look like? The future may be a very contemporary expression of what used to be a Chinatown that is a multi-Asian ethnic neighborhood that includes a lot of creative forces. When you think about the early days of the Pearl, about TriBeCa and SoHo, it was always the arts that drove them. But this opportunity here is based on Asian culture, the importance of Asian culture and China and Tokyo. (Note: the above photo is by Michael Rubenstein.)

How do you keep this part of town distinct from the Pearl District?

This is wishful thinking but I would like to keep the area a little more affordable and younger. It's hard and difficult, of course: I can't blame developers because for them to make things work financially, they have to build luxury condos. We need the city's help. I remember talking to Sam Adams before he was elected. We were talking about the enthusiasm in Chinatown. He was very positive and supportive of the creative businesses in this town. I think he understands how important this area is.

Historically, what held the area from progress?

Well, the 900-pound gorilla is the presence of social services. I think those who live here have to embrace that because it's the authentic DNA. But whether or not the area can absorb more or not is up to the city. It's an area that's been down on its luck for a while -- businesses open, then close, and some people haven't felt entirely safe. Young people, however, don't fear that. I go back to my business and think about an encounter with Jay Chiat, who opened the advertising firm Chiat/Day. I saw him one time on Fifth Avenue in New York. He had just moved his offices there in the 1980s. I said, "Congratulations." He said, "Yeah, yeah, but we should be over on 10th and 11th avenues, where it's more shady and dangerous. This is a creative company. We shouldn't be that comfortable."

Portland Spaces Magazine Announces 'Root Awards'

Portland Spaces magazine has announced a new set of design and architecture awards, called the "Root Awards: Portland Design from the Ground Up." Awards will be given out in more than 20 categories, including single family homes, individual rooms, commercial offices and restaurant interiors. The winners will be featured in the magazine's November/December issue this fall.

Root Awards nicely conveys a sense of permanence and ties to the past for a brand new magazine's brand new awards. Perhaps they could give individual names to awards like The Carrot for Lifetime Achievement, or the Turnip for Best New Architect.

Editor Randy Gragg and company have put together an accomplished four-person jury: Karrie Jacobs, founder of Dwell magazine and architecture/urban planning critic for New York magazine, the New York Times, and Metropolis; Katherine Lambert - leading advocate of ecological design, founding principal of Metropolitan Architectural Practice, and chair of interior design and professor of visual studies at the California College of the Arts; and Iris Harrell - president and founder of Harrell Remodeling in San Francisco. I would imagine Randy having some say as well, although that's only conjecture; however I do like the idea of one juror in the quartet (or quintet) being from here and having a strong sense of Portland. But perhaps there's also more integrity in having a jury entirely from outof towners looking at it fresh. That's how the AIA has always done their annual design awards.

The competition is open for submissions now to July 14, 2008. Submitting is easy: send Portland Spaces a 500-word description of the project, up to eight high-resolution images, and a $50 fee per entry (with discounts for early and/or multiple submissions). The entry form and complete instructions are available at www.portlandspaces.net/designawards.

Nominations also will be accepted in four special categories: The Masters; Rising Stars; Portland, World (for exported design); and Sustainability. I think these are particularly interesting and fun. Who do people naturally see as Portland's masters, rising stars, and sustainability gurus? I of course have my own preferences and opinions, but I'd be curious to here somebody else's out there. Maybe some of my own ideas about people in these categories is knee-jerk stuff. Design a cool retro diner and you're a rising star, an impressive big public building and you're a master. Add oil, vinegar and salt to taste. It'll be interesting to see another set of awards articulate the successes out there, and possibly in a slightly different pecking order. Hopefully there will be room for both this and the AIA awards. Why shouldn't there be?

In addition to celebrating the incredible design work being produced in the Portland metro area, the Root Awards will benefit a new college scholarship fund that will provide cash awards to top local students in the fields of design and construction. That may be the best part of this whole thing.

"Dreamers + Builders" In The Oregonian

Today in The Oregonian's A&E section is a story package I wrote called "Dreamers + Builders", highlighting the key players on Portland's architecture/design scene.

The piece has two principal components: an overall feature story about how the local scene has changed over the last decade, and a list (with portraits by Motoya Nakamura) of 11 people making it happen. It's actually a list of 10, but one entry on the list consists of two people: Bill Neburka and Carrie Schilling (at left) of Works Partnership Architecture.

The other 9 people on the list, in no particular order, are:

• Brad Cloepfil, Allied Works Architecture
• John Homes, Holst Architecture
• Eugene Sandoval, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca
• Tiffany Sweitzer, Hoyt Street Properties
• Sohrab Vossoughi, Ziba Design
• Jeff Kovel, Skylab Design Group
• Heinz Rudolf, BOORA Architects
• Robert Thompson, TVA Architects
• Thomas Hacker, Thomas Hacker Architects

The list was intentionally made up almost entirely of architects. If it had been a list of the most important building industry people, of course it would have been very different.

I decided to choose one developer for the list, and that was probably the hardest part. To me Mark Edlen of Gerding Edlen Development is arguably the most significant developer in town, and I want to make it very clear that I'm a fan of Mark, his firm and the work they do. Not having Mark on there is probably the most glaring omission. But in making these lists, one has to make a couple of contrarian or at least somewhat surprising choices. Originally I wanted to have a three-person developer entry with Tiffany Sweitzer, Mark Edlen and Randy Rapaport, but the list was getting too big. I chose Sweitzer instead of Edlen for a few reasons. One, it's been fascinating watching Hoyt Street, the Pearl's most prolific developer, evolve in their designs as they go north. Does Hoyt Street build better buildings today than Gerding Edlen? Not necessarily, and certainly not in the past. However, I like Hoyt's latest, The Metropolitan, better than about any big condo in the city.

There are also, of course, several other architects and firms I could have chosen as the city's most significant. The first two coming to mind are GBD Architects and SERA Architects. The Brewery Blocks, which GBD designed, are a wonderful success, particularly as neighborhood placemaking. SERA has also been a real leader in sustainable design and I think their design quality is only going up. If the list were based solely on design talent, I might also have chosen Rick Potestio. But he's in between firms and being under-utilized lately. Would some firm please reach out to this superb architect, like, yesterday?

In terms of the feature story that accompanies the portraits by Motoya Nakamura, I tried to compare Portland's architecture/design environment to how it was in the late 1990s. Back then it was the age of Bilbao, and lots of cities were investing in signature architecture - particularly museums, but also courthouses and other public buildings. I worked at the AIA at the time, and I remember during Architecture Week there was a panel discussion hosted by Jonathan Nicholas of The Oregonian about whether Portland suffered from a design malaise.

It's not that we have much of any individual great buildings today, but I sure don't hear any talk of malaise. In the article I tried to make the point that a combination of factors has made Portland much more of a design city: the rise of sustainability, the economic boom bringing condos and lots of other work, the influx of young creatives to the city, etc.

What do the rest of you think, by the way: Is Portland a better place for creating and building quality architecture than it was a decade ago? Who should have been on the list who wasn't, or who is on the list who shouldn't be?

Kenton and Town Centers

Do you ever have that moment where you recall a conversation you’ve had in the past day or so, and then think about an idea or question never expressed? I’m having one of those with the inaugural ‘Designs On Portland’ conversation from last night with newly minted Portland Spaces editor Randy Gragg.

As it happens, Stephen Beaven’s cover story from the InPortland section of Thursday’s Oregonian connects with it. Or it least I think it does.

In the talk at Design Within Reach last night, we were discussing Metro’s 2040 plan of trying to create certain regional town centers, I believe they’re called—basically clusters of higher-density development (mixed used, multi-story, condos, etc.) centered around key MAX light rail stops and, eventually by extension, the Washington County commuter rail line.

What we seemed to agree on was that there seemed to be a mixed-bag of measurable success on that front, with struggling but in some ways very laudable developments like The Round in Beaverton emblematic of the growing pains happening in suburban areas trying to go high-density with both financial success for the developer and an urban success for the neighborhood.

In last night’s conversation and now, as I write this, I also remember (or remembered, as it were) a past interview with award-winning planner George Crandall of Crandall Arambula, whose plans have helped revitalized a number of medium-sized American cities and was also involved in Portland’s earlier downtown revival during the 1970s. Crandall believes (or at least he did when I interviewed him a couple years ago) that Metro has been much more successful at macro-level planning for the Portland Metro area than micro-level. Which, I guess you might say, means the idea of the high-density, MAX-oriented clusters is a good idea, but the seeds are sprouting only with middling success. Two totally different challenges, guess.

Stephen Beaven’s article talks about the Kenton neighborhood in North Portland, traditionally a sleepy blue-collar enclave, that’s the latest of many close-in neighborhoods to experience gentrification (rising housing prices, other social and demographic changes brought on with generational ownership turnover). It’s in some ways an apples/oranges comparison to look at Kenton versus locales in, say, Beaverton. But even so, they’re both fruit, ya know?

I thought Beaven, interviewing Portland State urban studies professor Ethan Seltzer, summed up the ingredients in an urban Portland’s neighborhood’s makeover.

• “High housing prices in the core and surrounding neighborhoods force young people to buy further out. This is why Kenton and St. Johns are getting trendy.
• These outlying neighborhoods usually have good bones: mature trees, parks, well-tended streets and commercial buildings that can be easily renovated.
• Public investment—whether it’s a light-rail line or the sale of city-owned land—sparks retail and residential development.
• New residents throw themselves into neighborhood, reinvigorating community organizations or starting new businesses."

What are the ingredients that exist in Kenton that could are missing in some of the Metro town center locations, but could realistically be grown over time? You can't rush the trees growing, but I wonder what needs to change to eventually, over the coming decade beyond any particular recession or boom, to see clusters in Beaverton, Hillsboro, Gresham or Gateway flourish as environments where you can walk for a lot of your basic services, where there's a built environment that doesn't feel synthetic, bland or Disneyland -like (or Edward Scissorhands) but is affordable as well.

Then again, when your neighborhood has a gigantic Paul Bunyan statue -- a not completely un-Disney-like presence (if I you'll forgive me for pretzel-like phrasing) -- you always have a built-in advantage.

But I think Kenton is also just entering a particularly fun moment: that sense of betweenness, where the old hasn't disappeared. There's a quintessentially Portland blue-collar grittiness like you might see in a Gus Van Sant film that hasn't disappeared. Some some senior citizens living across the street from the tattooed young folks. And a place on a reasonably nearby corner to get a decent cup of coffee.

Portland Spaces Debut Party NearlyRuns Out of It

Last night the anticipated new magazine Portland Spaces, edited by former Oregonian architecture critic Randy Gragg and published by Portland Monthly, arrived on the scene with a party in a decked-out warehouse over in the Northwest industrial area near Pyramid Brewing.

If the turnout for this shindig was any indication, the magazine ought to do well. When it came time for Randy to speak shortly after 8PM, the room he spoke from (there were two adjoining spaces for the party) actually reached its limit and some of us wound up watching from closed-circuit flat screen TVs in the overflow room. It felt a little surreal, but thanks to the genius stroke of having free hors d'oeuvre from Burgerville in the form of little cheeseburgers, cups of fries and shakes (plus free booze at the bar), the big-brother effect went down a whole lot easier.

The jam-packed gathering also was somewhat of an odd mix. On one hand, you had lots of art and architecture people, most all of whom know Randy. And on the other hand, there was also, if you'll forgive the stereotyping, a cleavage and Range Rover contingent. A cynic might say this represents the marriage of Randy and Portland Monthly's demographic (which, in full disclosure, I've freelanced for). But in the end it doesn't matter. It's about the product, the magazine itself, which was handed out in little goody bags with jars of Burgerville spread (or what I still think of as "special sauce"). And that could wind up being an interesting pairing--Randy and the magazine, that is, not the magazine and the fry goo.

I've only made a first run-through of the magazine, but it was fun seeing the successful brisk and well-designed graphics of Portland Monthly applied solely to homes and architecture, underscored by Randy's erudition about local planning, preservation, and architects. (Two writers from Willamette Week I like a lot, Zach Dundas and Mike Thelin, also contributed to the first issue.) For example, there's a spread of four pages tracing the lineage of housing design in Portland that includes pictures and small bits of text on everyone from Van Evra Bailey, Pietro Belluschi and John Storrs to Brad Cloepfil, Bob Oshatz and Rick Potestio.

In addition, there are more in-depth looks at individual projects in smart ways, like the under-construction 2121 Belmont project seen through the eyes of three people: an architect from Ankrom Moisan involved in the design, someone from the neighborhood organization, and an architect previously part of the design commission. The cover-story is a house by Jeff Kovel and his superlative firm, Skylab. That's probably a good example of a cool modern project you'd be less likely to find in, say, Oregon Home. (Although I do remember seeing a few cool Rick Potestio projects there from time to time in years past.)

Regardless, it's always great to have more voices and resources devoted to covering design and architecture in Portland.

And speaking of Randy Gragg, if you didn't get a big enough dose from the magazine, or would like to hear more about the making of it--and more about architecture in Portland--next Wednesday, January 16 at 6:30, I will be interviewing Randy as the debut in a new discussion series that I'm doing in partnership with Design Within Reach called "Designs On Portland". The event is free and will be held at DWR's studio in the Wieden + Kennedy building. We'll be doing one about every other month. More to come on the discussion in the days ahead.

Randal O'Toole vs. Smart Growth (or, Houston? They Have a Problem)

As Portland State University professor said in Anna Griffin's Oregonian profile, maybe we shouldn't even be giving Randal O'Toole any attention. After all, the guy actually thinks Houston is a far better model for urban growth than planning.

O'Toole, who lives in Bandon but is a Portland native, says Portland's emphasis on government planning has led to higher housing prices, a shrinking population of families, and increasingly bad congestion. Within his argument are kernels of truth: We are indeed facing all of those challenges here. It's O'Toole's conclusions, though, that push him towards what one might call "Dumb Growth".

"They're actually building roads in Houston," O'Toole says in the article. "They know something in Houston that we haven't figured out here. You can build your way out of a traffic problem." In fact, I think they could soon simply link up the freeways of Houston, Dallas and Phoenix so they become one continuous sprawled out megalopolis. In fact, you probably wouldn't have a traffic problem, or at least not an automobile-based one. People would just fly everywhere. Daughter's got a dance recital at school? Hop in the Cessna, everybody!

I've been to Houston. It is far, far, far from any kind of Utopia. In fact, visiting there a couple years ago confirmed for me the direction Portland is going: away from giant freeways, big houses with big lots, and the rest of the unsustainable post-World War II model. If O'Toole has somewhat of a point about what Portland's challenges are--housing costs, etc.--he completely mischaracterizes them.

For example, if there were a Mt. Hood Freeway like they almost built here in the 1960s, it'd be easier to go east quickly - at least when it's not rush hour. But what would we be driving to? And through? The apartment I live in in Southeast Portland might not even be here. It could be in the freeway's path. Meanwhile, I'm about to walk to the grocery store this morning, Mr. O'Toole. A Houstonian would more likely encounter a drive to get there - or anywhere. Those families O'Toole so valiantly defends? That'd cost them more in gas money in Houston.

Actually, though, Houston is no longer the Dumb Growth poster child that O'Toole wants it to be. That's right, even in deep in the heart of Texas they've decided to build light rail. Be sure to check the inside of those cars for residual manure and tobacco juice.

Nevertheless, as Griffin and her editors seem to feel, we can't ignore the Randal O'Tooles out there. Even here in Portland there are countless Libertarian true believers like him, who worship at the altar of free markets with endless faith, as if organizing and imagining and working toward the kind of community we want is some kind of folly. By that rationale, you'd think the freeway--loving O'Toole would like it better if the road ahead no longer was paved with asphalt, and instead we all made different grooves through the grass and dirt. Yet to merely ridicule them isn't very helpful. Just as countless people even a few years ago didn't believe in the reality of global warming, but now have come around to the inevitable, we need to seek out and engage these contrarians chasing windmills and all who would listen to them.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to look to European cities for Portland's inspiration, not the nation's most disastrously laid out urban wastelands. O'Toole's right that it costs more this way. But Randal, keep this in mind: you get what you pay for.

Neighbors vs. Developers vs. City, and Properly Framing The Debate

The cover-story headline from today's In Portland section of The Oregonian is a provocative one: "Score One For The Neighbors."

"Tired of infil that doesn't fit," Erin Hoover Barnett's story goes, "residents are fighting back -- and winning."

There are definitely reasons to cheer for the neighborhood in this particular case. The focus of Barnett's story is a project in the Foster-Powell neighborhood near SE 74th Avenue. Developers wanted to put 19 row houses on a site near many single-family homes. On September 13, residents succeeded in winning a City Council vote that rejected developer Jeremy Osterholm's plans. Osterholm had even met with neighbors there about the plan. But, in Barnett's words, "he failed the earnestness test." It's not enough to just pay a lip service to neigbhors, listening and conceding little. In a way, that's very good. But it also can be very dangerous.

Barnett's story (or at least the big-font headline and subhead) casts this largely as a classic David-Goliath story, with the neighborhoods as good-guy crusaders and the developers as bad-guy wreckers of Livable Portland. In reality, of course, every project is different.

It's not at all wrong to look at this case as an indicator of the city council's increasing willingness to side with neighborhoods. There's more urban infill happening all the time, and some of it seems out of scale with nearby houses. And the neighbors have their community's health as motivation, while many developers are swooping into these neighborhoods for a short time driven by financial gain.

However, I also don't think the system is blameless here, nor are the intentions of the neighborhood organizations. First, we have to look to zoning for cues about what's allowable and what's not. That's what developers do. Who wants to gamble on a project that might get rejected? But there's also a lot of wiggle room about height and scale, so more and more often it seems to come down to some kind of fight. I'm not saying I want to cozy up with developers, especially the ones who build ugly, cheap stuff. But this is the same profession that empowers designers. It's a two-way street.

In many cases, it isn't David and Goliath. Instead, it's often a local small business person, maybe a builder or an architect, trying their hand at a small project in order to meet with the city's explicitly stated density goal by filling a market need, and doing so with very little if any profit margin. And with a lot of the people I talk to, like Sum Design Studio, the goal is to express and demonstrate their design talents, which happen to be impressive. But then their project gets stuck in limbo for weeks or months, sometimes even when the neighborhood association favors the design when a few dissenting voices file an appeal that stretches out the process some more.

What I'm saying, I guess, is it's great that neighborhood organizations and various design review mechanisms in Portland are strong, and it's an entirely proper use of their collective power to stop oversized, cheap and ugly developments from happening. But good design can also be undermined by those same efforts, and that's why I read a story like Barnett's and feel a sense of unfairness in the characterization. I felt this same way when Fred Leeson wrote in the In Portland section a few weeks ago about a neighbor's weeping at a hearing when her appeal of William Kaven's fine but modern and flat-roofed design was rejected.

I'm all for power to the people, but they have to earn the moral high ground, which can't be taken by shooting down good projects along with bad ones. We need to fine tune this process to ensure that good design is sorted out from bad. And no neighborhood organization should be entitled to change the design of a project simply for its own sake. With due respect to all involved, it can be a treacherously fine line between the collective little guy fighting for their voice to be heard and ensuingly becoming a localized mob.

I'm thinking now of another story I read in the paper recently, about a suburban resident's battle with her neigbors over her right to hang laundry outside to dry. I'm just sayin', let's not let ourselves do the same with buildings.

YGH's Revised PSU Rec Center Design, and a New Leeson Life

As Fred Leeson reported in Thursday's Oregonian, Yost Grube Hall returned with a revised design for Portland State University's recreation center building on the plaza across from the school's very nice Thomas Hacker-designed Urban Center.

YGH won the job a few months ago after beating out both Hacker and Opsis Architecture. At the time, I liked their proposal the third best out of the three finalists. I was particularly keen on the visually much bolder-looking Opsis design with its ribbons of curvy metal. But it's not as if the YGH design was bad or anything. I'll bet if I hadn't seen the other two designs, I'd have liked it more from the start. Besides, as Randy Gragg argued in a January Oregonian column, the university may have been going about this in a "bargain basement" kind of way (as Randy put it), regardless of what designer was chosen.

As it happens, though it seems PSU may wind up getting a pretty nice building, for the rendering YGH unveiled (above) seems much more unified and coherent. It's still not a blow-you-away kind of design, but it's the kind of timeless modernism that figures to age well over the generations. It's Portland for better and worse: a nice fabric building, nothing truly great but quality stuff and a good neighbor - kind of like a lot of the old turn of the 20th century buildings surrounding Courthouse Square that many of us love today, a hundred years later.

One small point of contention Leeson reported from the Design Commission hearing (at which the design was shown) I actually found myself tentatively agreeing with the architect over the commission. It involved the upper portion of the building, from which a metal-clad top floor rises (but set back from the perimeter) from a larger brick-clad portion. In the article, one of the commissioners suggested there should be more done to stitch these two materials together transitionally in the facade. Nells Hall of YGH seemed to resist this idea. And I think he may have a point. I think these are visually a couple of cubes resting against each other; they don't need stitching, I say.

Meanwhile, what do the rest of you make of the revised PSU rec center design? And having had a few months to reflect on the competition, in which comments here got somewhat heated about the university's handling of the selection process, how do we feel about things now?

One other note, about Fred Leeson, who reported on the story for the paper. Leeson recently retired from being a full-time staff writer. It happened with no fanfare, but Leeson leaving was, considering his frequent articles about architecture in the InPortland section, a loss for the architecture community here comparable to Randy Gragg's more talked-about departure for the same paper. But luckily, Leeson has now returned to somewhat regularly contribute as a freelancer. Which design enthusiasts should be happy to see.  I know I am; I steal all my best ideas from Fred's articles.

An Arts Award and A Cover Story

Two more accolades to report on this week: First, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca has received a 2007 Governor's Arts Award from the Oregon Arts Commission. Here's the blurb from the press release:

"The firm has a long history of to integrating artists into its design teams, not just because a percent for art program mandates it, but also because the ZGF architects truly appreciate what artists bring to their projects. It has worked with the Regional Arts & Culture Council on numerous public art projects and often hired artists without any public art requirement. ZGF has also taken a leadership position with RACC's new Work for Art workplace giving program. ZGF was an early adopter of the program and consistently raises the most money each year out of the dozens of workplaces large and small that participate in Work for Art."

The award seems only peripherally related to design itself, specifically as it relates to art, but as it happens ZGF also seems to be doing good work, brought about by a nice balance of old principals like Bob Frasca with an influx of young designers. However, take the honor as you will; a fellow honoree was Oregon Art Beat, which has the sensibility (in my biased opinion) of a well meaning but out of slightly touch yokel.

Meanwhile, Portland's own Brad Cloepfil has his name on the cover of this month's Metropolis magazine as one of "4 Emerging Stars" (the others being Piero Lissoni, Bernard Khoury and Kieran Timberlake). The title of Andrew Blum's piece is "The Elementalist" and the subheading crows, "Brad Cloepfil's emerging body of work may symbolize a shift away from glib shape-making toward a more timeless and lasting architecture."

I'll bet that is music to Brad's ears. I first interviewed him five years ago for Architecture Week magazine, and I remember in that piece him talking firmly about how postmodernism was "an aberration" in the otherwise continuing history of modern architecture. He very much saw Allied Works as a continuation of what people like Louis Kahn and Mario Botta (for whom Brad worked) were already long since doing. When I profiled him for the NY Times a couple years later, the message was all the more about using a language that is elemental and timeless.

Blum also delves into past/current projects of Allied's like the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Arts & Design, and our own Wieden + Kennedy building.

Speaking of W+K, if you get a copy of the magazine, make sure to check out the full-page photo of its interior by Sally Schoolmaster. (I believe Allied used Sally for a few different projects, and I have long thought her work is first-rate.) In my copy, the photo was mistakenly placed after another article, isolated by itself. But it's a gorgeous shot that shows a panoramic view of the building's remilled timbers, angular concrete and natural light.

One of Allied Works' upcoming projects is an office building for Disney. Coincidentally, there was also an article in today's Oregonian about how the Portland office market is heating up. Apparently, a new crop of office building projects from a variety of developers could eventually be in the works. How about an Allied office building in Portland to carry on the tradition of the Standard Plaza and Big Pink?

Not likely, though, of course. These are mostly conservative business people putting these projects together, people thinking real estate and profit margin more than timeless architecture. I'm afraid they probably wouldn't be anywhere near aware enough of architecture to understand the opportunity that exists design-wise; they'll surely go with a service-oriented firm and an on-time, on-budget focus. The best you can hope for is that it'll be sustainable; at least green design the mainstream is starting to get.

You Win Some, You Lose Some

Recently some Portland projects and the city overall have received some more accolades:

The Bob and Diana Gerding Theater at the Portland Armory has been selected by the Urban Land Institute as a winner of the 2007 Award for Excellence for the Americas region. The theater, developed by Gerding Edlen Development for Portland Center Stage with design by GBD Architects, was chosen from among 23 finalists selected from 167 submissions.

The Portland Aerial Tram, designed by Angelil/Graham (hey--that rhymes!), was a co-winner of the 2007 Presidential Award of Excellence by the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) in recognition of the distinguished structural engineering. The tram's co-winner is the angular Denver Art Museum expansion designed by Daniel Libeskind, currently causing much talk (some love, some hate) in architecture circles. Not bad for a supposed boondoggle, eh?

In its annual 'Design 100', Metropolitan Home magazine has christened Portland "The Greenest City in America", going on to say, "In this park-filled urban oasis, everyone thinks green...And then there are the 226 miles of bike lanes, part of a bike-and-urban-outdoors culture that has led to numerous best-cycling-city awards. From controlling sprawl to transforming highways into parkland, Portland truly deserves its greenest city title."

  But there's also a bit of sad news: Randy Gragg, longtime architecture critic for The Oregonian, announced recently he is leaving the paper after 17 years and about 2,500 stories. "I leave as somebody who tried a lot of different ways of writing about Portland's culture, urban form and growth," he writes. "I hope I was successful occasionally. I know I was not, sometimes. But the opportunity was a privilege..." No word yet on what that means for the paper, but Randy says in the article he'll be staying in town. There are any number of ways he could be engaged, and Portland will be better for it.

Meanwhile, Randy's parting shot asserts Portland is "Running On Empty" when it comes to a comprehensive vision for the metropolitan area. The city, he writes, "seems trapped in its own mythology, as though our 200-foot blocks plus one more light-rail line will assure our continued nirvana. There's no other way to put it: We think small when we need to think bigger, way bigger. We built a lovely metropolitan area of two million. But we've not ventured the question, much less developed a vision, of what a metropolis of three million or four million really looks like." He cites cities like Denver, Houston and Phoenix all having billion-dollar mass transit initiatives in the works after overwhelming voter approval. And those cities are not exactly the most progressive ones on the map when it comes to mass transit.

So that begs the question: exactly who sets about the task of advocating for and putting together a big, long-term vision for housing and moving an extra two million people? We have a regional metropolitan government - should it be them? Is this something Tom Potter's visioning process should encompass?

One way or the other, hopefully Portland will stay ahead of the game when it comes to growing the right way.

Weston the Height Away

Sunday’s Oregonian included a Randy Gragg profile of developer Joe Weston in the Opinion section. Weston has spent decades of developing small apartments and other projects around the city in established neighborhoods. He’s now one of the city’s major players in the boom of larger high-density residential projects.

Weston took over as developer of the Benson Tower in the West End for the late Eric van Doorninck of Vancouver, who originally spearheaded the project. The Benson, which is now nearing completion, will be the first point tower – a condo with 8,000 square feet or less, as compared to the more standard (for Portland) slab tower of 12,000-20,000 square feet.

More recently, Weston has taken the Benson model here and will break ground soon on The Manhattan, a 31-story condo at 14th and Alder. And as Randy reports, there is also a Weston project coming to the Lloyd District: The Cosmopolitan at Grand and Multnomah, which hopefully finally invigorate residential activity there to balance out the shopping, offices, the Rose Garden, and the overall suburban-esque environment.

But what caught my eye most in Randy’s profile was Weston’s campaign to have the city change the building code to remove height limits for buildings with 8,000 square feet or less per floor. With the Central City Plan update coming from city planners, it’s not out of the question. I think it’s unlikely, but an idea worth discussing.

Randy's article calls the emergence of point towers "era-shifting".What do the rest of you think of Weston's proposal? I don't know about allowing unlimited height, but I certainly favor skinnier buildings. This could favor more quarter-block developments as well, which would be great to see. I'm really tired of big condos that take up entire blocks or even half-blocks.

Downtown's Retail Challenge(and Opportunity)

In two articles in today's Oregonian, one in the Business section and one from In Portland, Fred Leeson looks at downtown's retail challenge. "Facing competition on all fronts," the In Portland sub headline goes, "business leaders bank on the city center's biggest transformation since World War II to win back shoppers."

In the other article, Leeson summarizes things nicely:

"No fewer than 112 blocks will face a new transit mall set for completion in 2009. Condo towers are putting hundreds of customers steps from shops. Business leaders have a $15.3 million plan to help downtown stores compete with malls, including the new "lifestyle" centers that cater to the regions most affluent shoppers."

These lifestyle centers are just malls with pedestrian areas outdoors instead of indoors, which is supposed to be more like a city but feels a lot more synthetic. However, they've been on an upswing in popularity. With more of a true melting pot downtown (including some destitute, begging and/or hackey-sack playing people) as well as no free parking like most of their mall competitors, retailers downtown have (or at least perceive) more challenges in being reached by their customers.

However, I also think of examples like REI's Pearl District store. In one article I wrote recently, the manager there told me how business had been way up since they relocated from Jantzen Beach Center. Customers told them the store was so much easier to access than before, because they didn't get sucked into the Interstate 5 bottleneck at the nearby Columbia River bridge crossing.

Regardless, I think downtown will fare well in the long run. The biggest asset is housing. However pedestrian friendly lifestyle centers may be once you get there, they usually have to be accessed by car. That means dealing with terrible traffic in places like Tualatin, Tigard and Clackamas. It's probably worth it if you live in those areas already, but I think in the long run downtown Portland businesses needn't worry about Portlanders disappearing to Bridgeport Village.

Downtown may present more practical, logistical and social headaches, but it presents the chance to have shoppers living above you or within a few blocks' walk or just a quick streetcar ride away. In other words, housing is the key to Portland's retail fortunes, as well as the central city's larger health.

I also think that at least from a retail perspective one has to think of downtown and the Pearl District as one place. When I go shopping downtown, I inevitably continue on to the Brewery Blocks and beyond, usually with shops, food/drink and art galleries all part of the same trip. Or vice versa. The notion of two neighborhoods is an imaginary one. If there's both a downtown business association and Pearl District business association in this city, they ought to be having a lot of shared meetings and strategy sessions.

At the same time, I don't think retail concerns should be the biggest driver in urban development. Business and retail are important - we want them to be successful. But they're only part of a larger picture. The needs and desires of homeowners, students, non-profits and numerous other groups should be just as importantly considered in planning the city. Retail in downtown will benefit most from a healthy and balanced downtown, embracing its most distinct asset compared to suburban malls: that they are welcoming of and easily accessible to all--not a Lifestyle Center but a center of life.

Stadler Mines Beauty in Beaverton

Matthew Stadler is the author of four novels and the editor of local publishing house Clear Cut Press. He also is active in the visual arts world (he co-curated last fall’s Portland Modern group show at Disjecta), organizes a popular dinner-speaker series for visiting authors called The Back Room, and writes for magazines like Dwell and Artforum. He also is a frequent speaker.

In addition to all this, Stadler has developed an enduring fascination with Beaverton, both its individual history and offerings as well as the wider suburban American transformation going on today. Stadler calls Beaverton “…a cul de sac of ghosts amidst rivers of traffic.” But he also believes fervently in this suburb’s ability—like any place or work of architecture—to reinvent itself as something beautiful.

Stadler spoke of this and other related topics in a recent speech in Seattle now available to watch and listen to online, which I heartily recommend.

“We need beauty to compel our resourcefulness,” he says early in the lecture, “even if it is only as a political tool so that we can solve the landscape’s many deficiencies. Because beauty is an instrument of persuasion. Without it we become dispirited and cynical and we let valuable resources go to waste.”

At the same time, Stadler cautions, “This not a criticism of architects who make ugly buildings. Nor it is a call for them to make more beautiful ones. Beauty is made by us, not by the object. This is a call for the culture that uses buildings to work harder to engage them and to in essence generate their beauty.”

Stadler’s lecture was full of Beaverton beautiful photos by Shawn Records, some of which were also included in the Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum. (I profiled Records in The Oregonian as well.) Records’ photos often document places of historical significance, such as the site of the first trading post in the area. At first, I thought the photographs were ironic, because in many cases Records profiles with great beauty the parking lots, bland suburban boulevards, and decaying freeway overpasses which collectively represent quintessential suburban sprawl. But when I heard Stadler’s words about mining beauty from unexpected places, the sincerity of the images clicked even more. (All the enclosed images in this post are Records'.)

Stadler says reinventing yesterday’s ugly building as tomorrow’s gem is what societies have done for thousands of years. “I can marvel at how the poisonous castles of Europe became beautiful,” he says. “Art and writing made them that way. Similarly, huge imaginative resourcefulness turned centuries of hostility toward the woods into a broad secular worship of wilderness. The chronicles of early naturalists, and the art and writing that followed have shaped the logic and beauty of wilderness.”

I don’t quite agree that art and writing conferred upon any architecture a beauty people had not bequeathed in the past. I believe this is a more gradual, ephemeral process. Still, the identification of beauty in unexpected or under-appreciated places is precisely what art and literature are all about—at least to me.

“Cities like Beaverton,” Stadler adds, “are now seeing the first naturalists of sprawl: intrepid urbanists who make the trek out into the wasteland, saddled with a polemical agenda to either decry the ugliness…or declare the beauty…of this landscape. But I don’t count myself among them. Beauty and ugliness do not inhere in landscapes. They are dynamic, perpetually reinvented aspects of use.”

There are probably a lot of counter-arguments one could make about finding and re-affirming beauty in a place like Beaverton. It’s the patterns of use that are ugly, the terrible traffic and auto-everything patterns at the expense of the pedestrian. And there is the oppressive ubiquity of chain stores as well. But I love that Stadler and, by extension, Records, are engaging a place right in their back yard that most of us fellow urbanites don’t travel to without ample practical reason—like the need for a new CD player, or to visit an old relative. I also love to see people from artistic backgrounds get thoroughly involved in the ongoing public discourse and dialog about our local built environment. We need the architects and builders to get the buildings actually made. Yet if more novelists and photographers were thinking about Beaverton or Portland, not only how to improve urban and suburban places alike but also how to see them anew, we’d all be better for it.

Rose Slams Cloepfil andPortland LEED Projects

Randy Gragg's Q&A with architect Charles Rose in Saturday's Oregonian was for the most part an interesting, measured, thoughtful conversation. But by the end I came away wincing at a couple of half-cocked displays of disrespect and bad form.

Rose, the Boston-area architect selected by the Oregon College of Art and Craft to design a new library and studio building, talked to Gragg of the "perfect fit" he felt with the project. "My work is all about the relationship between site and architecture. [And] these are great people who care deeply about craft and architecture."

And indeed, his firm's work is deservedly well regarded for, as Randy put it, "deep sensitivity to landscape and an ecological awareness honed well before green became a global cause celebre." I'm excited Charles Rose is coming to Portland to design buildings.

But on a couple of occasions, it was shocking just how blunt Rose was willing to be. First there was his response to a question about sustainable design:

"We always chuckle about Portland, Oregon. Everyone is so proud of all the LEED-certified (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) buildings they've created. But the fact is, because the temperature differential is so mild, it's really not that hard compared to, say, Vermont, New Hampshire or even down South, where people want air conditioning."

"Chuckle"? Maybe Rose has a valid technical point. But did he really intend to show such an arrogant, dismissive attitude?  It's one thing to say, "We have a more difficult challenge on the East Coast and in the South with energy efficiency because of greater temperature fluctuations." It's another thing to basically say, "Portland LEED projects? Give me a break."

But that LEED comment was nothing to what Rose had to say about celebrated Portland architect Brad Cloepfil:

"Brad's work is looking backward. I'm not interested in this high modernist approach. It's boxy and boring. It doesn't challenge me.

Kanye West hired us to do his house in New York. He basically wanted a Giorgio Armani showroom -- the type of architecture Brad does, very orthogonal, minimalist stuff. We decided to go find the guy who did all the Armani showrooms -- Claudio Silvestrin. It's beautiful minimalism. He's the designer; we're the architects. I thought it would be good for the firm.

But I can now tell you that having worked with the best minimalist architect today, it's so boring."

Usually I find such candor refreshing. But if I were Rose's marketing guru, I'd be lying on the floor in a fetal position right now. I mean, who's next for comeuppance: Pietro Belluschi? I'm not saying either Cloepfil or Belluschi or their modernist style can't be subject of criticism - far from it. But I think it should be prefaced with a certain expression of respect.

To rattle off Brad Cloepfil's accomplishments in defense against Rose's jibe would to give it more dignity than it deserves. I also still want to give Rose the benefit of the doubt, because he's an excellent architect and shouldn't be judged on two comments. But if Gragg's interview is an accurate indication, it's a good thing Rose went into architecture instead of engineering, because he certainly doesn't appear to be a bridge builder. Either that, or he's suffering right now from a case of athlete's tongue.

You Can't Go Rome Again

In the Opinion section of today’s Oregonian, local freelance writer and former Conservative Digest editor Richard F. LaMountain writes about the proposed Oak Tower project, but not about the handling of its land parcel by the Portland Development Commission, as has been a frequent and controversial topic as of late.

Instead, LaMountain indicts the Oak Tower’s design as a symbol of today’s cold modern architecture proliferating rapidly throughout the city amidst a condo-building boom. “How do the Oak Street tower and the ever-growing number of these look-alike glass highrises," he asks, "affect downtown’s character and livability?”

LaMountain then describes with suspicion how today’s modern buildings are born from the Bauhaus tradition:

"Influenced by Marxist theory, they designed buildings that were rigorously utilitarian…In the decades that followed, in Portland and elsewhere, the Bauhaus ethic cospawned countless of these sheerly functional buildings…But is functional all a building should be? Look at these structures. They’re sterile, bland, impersonal and – in their geometric cookie-cutter uniformity—utterly forgettable."

I appreciate how passionate LaMountain seems to be. He rightfully believes that, as his essay concludes, “…buildings must seek to impart the nobility, the complexity and the beauty of mankind.”

Yet I couldn’t help but notice that LaMountain’s background at Conservative Digest seems in tune with a conservative attitude about building design and style that’s conducive to creating architectural Disneylands. I also think that linking modern architecture to Marxism is a laughable cheap shot. To my ears LaMountain's implication seems to be that the Commies are ruining America with their newfangled glass boxes. Didn't he get the memo that we bait the yokels with terrorism now?

LaMountain’s premise is rooted in the assumption that all modern buildings are inherently lifeless and lacking in beauty. But of course that’s a highly subjective opinion. I and a lot of other architectural enthusiasts see tremendous beauty in modern architecture. Ever heard of Mies van der Rohe, buddy?

I do acknowledge there’s a kernel of truth to what LaMountain is saying, in that an ordinary, run-of-the-mill building of yesteryear very well may be more attractive than a run-of-the-mill work of modern architecture. Embellishment can act as camouflage, and bad modernism has nowhere to hide, except perhaps in its materials.

Nevertheless, LaMountain in this op-ed reminds me of an art fan who thinks painting went downhill for good after the Impressionists. To some extent, it merely is a difference of personal preference. I happen to love Mondrian, and I’d guess he prefers Thomas Kinkaide.

What we ought to have, and always will have, is a variety of styles to our architecture. But at the same time, the current generation of working architects share access to the same technologies and materials that give shape to today's buildings, and all we can ask them to do is to make architecture that is of its time.

I also think there is a variety to today’s contemporary architecture that LaMountain apparently isn’t able to see. Buildings allude to and incorporate historic styles all the time, but they do so within an appropriately modern context. Otherwise, that’s when you get the Disneyland, Colonial Williamsburg or Las Vegas affect. Should Portland’s modern buildings be better? Absolutely. But they should get better by favoring the creative talents of the city’s best architects and creating a system better equipped to sponsor architectural excellence of any appropriate and relevant style.

Jacobs on Portland: Big Towersand Skinny Houses

Last month esteemed architecture critic and Dwell magazine founder Karrie Jacobs swung through Portland (along with Seattle and Vancouver, BC) to promote her new book and make a couple appearances. Now that visit is described in her Metropolis magazine column.

Jacobs credits the three Pacific Northwest cities for being places where "the progressive power of urban planning is taken very seriously, and concepts like livability and sustainability dominate the local civic culture to such an extent that to visit all three in rapid succession...is to drop in on another country. It's not the United States or Canada, but more highly evolved combination of the two." Dude, thanks eh!

In describing Portland, Jacobs first touches briefly on the South Waterfront neighborhood and the "spectacular aerial tramway" as an ideal example of a major urban development "that promised to refresh the urban landscape in conspicuous ways." But interestingly, a greater portion of Jacobs' attention is devoted to the Living Smart program for narrow-lot homes.

Living Smart, for those who don't remember, began with a design competition a couple of years ago to address the problem of hideous housing on lots less than 36 feet wide. The city was almost prepared to ban them, because builders were tearing down existing homes to build two in their spots. But the creation of homes through Living Smart is aiding density by allowing the homes (along with a corresponding ban on developments for five years on lots where a single-family home has been torn down) but encouraging better design through a streamlined permit process associated with winning designs.

The only problem, Jacobs contends (as I and others also have) is that the first two permit-ready houses "are traditional even though the catalog of winners contains a range of styles." Project manager Anne Hill told Jacobs, as she's previously said, that the first two plans were chosen for "mass appeal", and that one of the next two will be contemporary.

Jacobs also offers her critique of the first two Living Smart permit-ready homes. "One, a steeply gabled 1,779-square-foot existing house by local architect Bryan Higgins, is essentially a shotgun house that grew two extra stories. The other, designed by Berkeley, California architect Roxana Vargas-Greenan with a side-facing gable and fussy detailing would put it squarely in the tradition of Seaside [the Disney-sponsored new urbanist development with lots of neo-historic flourishes]." In Higgins' case, though, I think he deserves some credit for being a pioneer and making his house happen before Living Smart even started.

Jacobs closes by revisiting the age-old question of whether restrictions inhibit good design as much as they encourage it. "I take it as a reminder," she says, "that while careful vetting may keep out the bad, it can also suppress the good." That's certainly true, but it's a dilemma that could go on forever, and I don't blame the city of Portland for taking a stand and using the power of law to encourage good design. Will that prevent some good ideas? Of course. But like the old Hollywood production code, those restrictions can also foster an all the more subtle brand of creativity in the right hands.

Familiar Modern/Historic Debates in Tribune Architecture Survey, and A Personal Musing on Favorites

A few weeks ago the Portland Tribune surveyed local architects for a list of the five best and worst buildings in Portland. In an article by Peter Korn on October 24, the winners were listed: the 2281 Glisan Building by Brad Cloepfil's Allied Works, the Belmont Lofts by Holst, the Portland Art Museum by Pietro Belluschi, the US Bancorp Tower by Skidmore, Owings, Merrill (with Belluschi), and the Mark O. Hatfield US Courthouse by Kohn Pederson Fox and BOORA.

I'd certainly agree with the first three. While I definitely like the US Bancorp building (a.k.a. 'Big Pink') a lot, I'm not so sure it would be singled out in larger cities. And I have mixed feelings about the Hatfield. That curving roof is so mid-90s, and the building is pretty bulky. Would it be handsome without the expensive materials?

The larger argument, though, has turned out to be a modern versus historic architecture debate, which already is playing out here very often as modern condos begin to occupy old neighborhoods. The Tribune received so many angry letters about the top 5 list of best local buildings, Korn wound up writing a follow-up article on November 16 about it. (The paper also published several letters that are worth a look.)

A data processor and architectural enthusiast named Matthew Slick was quoted in Korn's latter article saying, "What planet are these architects on? I was appalled to find that I hated almost everything that these architects said that they admired.”

It's a hyperbolic quote, which journalists often have a hard time resisting (myself included). Does Slick really hate the Glisan and Belmont buildings? Or Pietro Belluschi's Portland Art Museum? Come on.

However, the larger thrust of the article made a valid point, that 4 out of the 5 buildings that architects chose for the list were modern ones. But some of the city's most treasured architecture is its historic buildings. Arguably the heart of the city is Central Library, the warm, elegant work of Georgian-styled architecture by the great A.E. Doyle. There is also the Jackson Tower (pictured) overlooking Pioneer Courthouse Square with its signature clock. The city also has lots of great old churches and single-family homes.

And Matthew Slick even rings in later to make a more thoughtful point about modernism's lack of ornamentation. "A lot of times you’re eliminating, eliminating, eliminating," he says of contemporary design. "And then you get this thing that is not very interesting. I can deal with unremarkable. The Pearl District is totally unremarkable to me, with a few exceptions, and the few exceptions actually have ornamentation on them.”

Done right, modern architecture is sublimely simple and poetic. But the opposite side of that coin is plain and boring, which a lot of contemporary buildings are.

Still, when today's buildings add ornamentation it often feels ham-fisted to me, like the ye-olde English style railings on the otherwise modern Elizabeth Lofts. Oy, fancy some eel pie, guv-nah? But some people love that stuff. A lot of this debate comes down to personal preference.

One reader emailed me to ask for my top 5 list of favorite buildings. It's a hard question, becuase probably the best thing about Portland design-wise is the city itself. And in terms of iconic structures, Mt. Hood is really our Eiffel Tower, so to speak, and Mt. St. Helens the Arc de Triumphe. But the leading candidates for my faves list would probably be the very ones previously mentioned on each side of the debate.

I love Central Library, so much so that I wouldn't even trade it for the famous Rem Koolhaas designed library in Seattle. But I also love the 2281 Glisan building for its gorgeous sculptural simplicity. I continue to marvel at the interior of the Wieden + Kennedy building, but so much so I find the exterior warehouse to be a bore.

Of course there's Pietro Belluschi's Equitable Building (now called the Commonwealth), which was exceptionally innovative for its time (1946) and has a timeless elegant geometric look that still inspires.

And in a completely different way, I've also more recently come to love The Rebuilding Center (pictured) and its facade of used windows and planks. I also love the Gilbert Building downtown, a humble little brick job on SW Second. I love the vacant multicolored checkerboard facade building on 10th mentioned in previous posts. I really like the two Brewery Blocks along Burnside. The Jackson Tower and various old white brick AE Doyle buildings are great, and I even am fond of the Portland Plaza apartments.

This summer I also visited the Pietro Belluschi-designed church at the University of Portland and was astounded by its beauty. Look for a separate post about that buidling down the road.

After the controversy surrounding the pending demolition of the Rosefriend Apartments, that buidling has become a favorite. Luckily we have a similar building, the Ambassador Apartments (pictured), nearby, which is another favorite, as is the empty Solomon federal courthouse it sits around the corner from. Oh, and Thomas Hacker's libraries are very nice, particularly the Woodstock and Hillsdale branches.

But I think my current favorite among Portland buildings would have to be the Standard Plaza (a.k.a. Standard Insurance Building), one of two buildings called the 'Standard' within a couple blocks of each other. I'm talking about the one with lots of glass, and curtains in all the windows. It was built in 1963 by S.O.M.

Incidentally, one of the most reviled buildings in Portland, the Union Bank of California building (downtown on broadway), is the subject of a new short film by my filmmaker friend Andy Blubaugh, whose last film played at the Sundance Film Festival. Andy's got an interesting take on the building, and you can watch the film online, complete with commentary by yours truly.