Portland Architecture

The Elk statue is just fine

The Elk statue in storage (Brian Libby)

 

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Last Friday I visited an old friend. This friend has been the subject of controversy lately, not only because it has been temporarily removed from its home. Its absence has also been mistaken for the statue's destruction and permanent removal. So I decided to request a visit to to make sure that it's actually just fine.

I call this statue an old friend for a few reasons.

When I moved to Portland in 1997, Elk, as the statue is officially known, was one of a handful of sites that I associated with one of my heroes, filmmaker Gus Van Sant, and his magical Portland-set early films like Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho. A scene from the latter movie takes place at the base of the Elk statue, with Keanu Reeves cradling River Phoenix in his arms. But since 1998 I've been living in Southeast Portland and crossing the Hawthorne Bridge regularly to get to downtown, which soon afterward carries me on SW Main Street past the statue. I also like that this is one of the only statues in the city that is not devoted to a person. There's no hagiography to dispute here: just a tribute to one of the largest, most majestic animals to traditionally call rainy western Oregon home.

Dedicated in 1900, Elk is actually the second-oldest remaining work of public art in Portland. Only the Skidmore Fountain from 1888 predates it.

I was motivated to seek out and assure the statue's safety after reading a series of misinformed social media posts, particularly on Facebook. Several suggested that protesters had destroyed the Elk statue: those demonstrating against George Floyd's murder, the long legacy of police violence against Black citizens and eventually against the federal Homeland Security troops joining local police in attacking these protesters.

 

The Elk statue in storage (Brian Libby)

 

The suggestion was that an angry mob sought to destroy the statue as vengeance, when quite the opposite was actually true. Protesters clearly seemed to love the statue, and though it was a very bad idea to light fires at the base of it, those fires were essentially making the Elk a kind of shrine. In the statue's absence, protesters have used a succession of inflated and other temporary Elk homages in its place. But it is true that the granite at the base of the statue was at some point damaged, so the statue was preemptively removed.

This year is actually the 120th anniversary of the Elk statue's erection, a gift to the city by David P. Thompson, who had been mayor of Portland from 1879-82. Thompson also had served as governor of the Idaho territory from 1875-76, and U.S. Envoy to the Ottoman Empire under President Ulysses S. Grant, serving from 1892-93.

Born in Cadiz, Ohio in 1834, Thompson first came west while herding sheep across the Oregon trail. Apprenticed as a surveyor, he helped build the first railroad in Oregon, around Willamette Falls at Oregon City, which was then the largest settlement here. He then became deputy surveyor for the U.S. government, surveying public lands in both the Oregon and Washington territories. Thompson eventually became rich by investing in some of the land he surveyed: or, more specifically, the railroads that traveled them (particularly the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company) and the mines that were dug by the hundreds after discovery of gold in California. He also gained wealth from banking and manufacturing investments.

As if those achievements weren't enough, beginning in 1891 David Thompson also served as the first president of the Portland Library Association (the forerunner of today's Multnomah County Library), and as president of the Oregon Humane Society, the latter of which may indicate a love of animals that saw him commission this statue instead of one honoring a person.

 

David P. Thompson (Wikimedia Commons)

 

By the time Thompson hired renowned New York sculptor Roland Hinton Perry to design Elk he had reached retirement age. But this actually the first of two statues he commissioned and donated to the city. The other, located in Washington Park and completed in 1904, is called  Coming of the White Man and was designed by Herman Atkins MacNeil and depicts Chief Multnomah and another Native American witnessing the arrival of Lewis & Clark. (Strangely, the name of this statue, with its title inscribed in granite, was used as the fictional name of the Elk statue in Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho; the phrase can clearly be seen as Reeves holds Phoenix. In the film, Elk also has a rider.)

Yet Thompson never lived to see the second statue completed. In 1901, just a year after Elk was completed, Thompson fell ill just a few days into an around-the-world trip, returned to Portland and passed away.

Perry, the designer of the sculpture, is worth noting as well. Born in 1870 in New York, he was educated Paris's École des Beaux Arts. At just 24 years of age in 1894, he was commissioned to create a series of sculptures for the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, including the Court of Neptune Fountain in front of its main building. Perhaps this was the work that caught the attention of Thompson across the country in Portland.

Four years after Elk, in 1904, Perry designed two sculptures for the Gettysburg National Battlefield in Pennsylvania, and a year afterward the statue atop the Pennsylvania state capitol in Harrisburg.

 

Roland Hinton Perry (Wikimedia Commons)

 

Of course this statue on SW Main between Third Avenue and Fourth Avenue has seen a lot of change in 120 years.

Today this three-block strip of greenspace, including Chapman and Lownsdale Squares on either side of the statue as well as Shrunk Plaza to the south, is lined mostly with government buildings. The Mark Hatfield United States Courthouse stands just east of Elk, but only since 1997; from 1913-95 there was the Hamilton Hotel on that site. City Hall was completed on its current site, a block southwest of the statue, five years before Elk, in 1895. The Portland Building, nearest to the statue at SW Fourth and Main, dates to 1982. But perhaps just as significantly, before that there was a modest two-story building that was home to McElroy's Spanish Ballroom, a jazz club where Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and John Coltrane played.

And of course there are the three park blocks themselves. The U.S. government-owned Terry Shrunk Plaza to the south, which sits atop underground parking for the Edith Green Wendell Wyatt Federal Building, is where the Portland Trail Blazers' championship parade ended in 1977. It's where star center Bill Walton poured a can of beer over then-mayor Neil Goldschmidt's head.

Chapman Square and Lownsdale Square were donated to the city in 1869. The squares were initially divided by sexes: Lownsdale for men and Chapman for women and children. Chapman square even has all female ginkgo trees. But it also is the site of a small moment in technological history. In 1889, Chapman Square became the termination site for the first electric power transmission line in North America, operating at 4,000 volts of direct current coming from an electric generating station at Willamette Falls in Oregon City, 13 miles away.

For much of the city’s history, the two squares have drawn orators and political protests, including the Occupy Portland protests in 2011 and of course the Black Lives Matter protests of this year.

 

The statue as seen in My Own Private Idaho (Fine Line Features)

 

Visiting Elk at a storage facility last Friday with Keith Lachowicz, the Regional Arts & Culture Council's manager of public art, was a bit surreal at first. As I entered the room, I was surprised that it almost felt like an art museum or gallery with its white drywall and polished concrete floor; that is, if you disregard the Shop-Vac in the corner and a few other miscellaneous accoutrements. This was the only artwork of any kind in the space, standing in the corner and strapped to a wood palette.

I was surprised that the elk depicted in the statue wasn't as big as I expected. Lachowicz told me he believes it's slightly smaller than a real elk would be, but the effect in this case came especially from the fact that Elk was/is removed from its granite base, which itself stands five feet high.

The statue's bronze surface had a few specs of colored paint, which hit when the base was being tagged with graffiti during the protests, and Lachowicz believes there is a small bit of soot stain on parts of Elk as well. Yet the latter is hard to differentiate from the subtle patina taken on by the statue over time. Generally, I thought it seemed to be in very good condition, and Lachowicz agreed.

 

The Elk statue in storage (Brian Libby)

 

Exactly when the statue will be returned to its site on SW Main Street, Lachowicz and RACC do not know. After all, this is still a developing story. The protests have been going on for months at this point, and while in many cases the demonstrations have moved into Portland's neighborhoods, the Justice Center and to a lesser extent the Mark Hatfield US Courthouse have been targets of protesters' demonstrations. These have overwhelmingly been peaceful demonstrations, at least when gun-wielding right wing counter-protesters don't show up. Yet as hundreds of eyewitnesses and on-the-ground journalists will tell you, there is an inextricable relationship between violence used against protesters —tear gas, flash bombs and individual beatings—and the vandalism inflicted on these buildings. Time after time this summer, riots have been declared when the presence of a riot has been questionable.

One wonderful side effect of all this, though, is that in this divided nation, at a time when tensions between left and right are running so high as American democracy itself feels as under threat as any statue or building, everyone seems to love the Elk . Voters on opposing sides of the political fence may be offering different versions of what happened to the statue—facts and their opposite, which some now call alternative facts—but when it was removed, everybody suddenly was talking passionately. A silent majority revealed itself. We may not have talked about it much in the past, but we all love Elk.

 

The Elk statue in storage (Brian Libby)

 

Even aside from the damage to its base and the statue's preemptive removal, Elk is relevant to this summer's racial justice protests in another way: as part of a conversation about the future of public art and especially statues.

In several cities in America and even beyond, statues of Confederate Civil War generals and other leaders with racist histories have been removed and their names have been taken off buildings. If we remove, say, a statue of Robert E. Lee in Virginia, or of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford University, it ultimately becomes not just a conversation about the removal itself but what replaces it. I'm not the first one to suggest this, but what if it's not just racists whose statues we should consider removing? What if the very practice of venerating individuals, the hagiography itself, comes into question? It's not to say that we can no longer agree on any past leaders to honor in statuary, but instead to acknowledge that people, not persons, lead change.

What's interesting about Elk in this context is that it's a rare statue existing outside this conversation. It's not the only animal sculpture, even in Portland. Yet the practice is still relatively uncommon.

Of course there are animal statues, but not quite the same kind. I think of the lion sculptures outside certain famous buildings like the flagship New York Public Library branch on 42nd Street in Manhattan, or at the base of Trafalgar Square in London, or the bull sculpture near Wall Street in New York. Yet those sculptures are based on the ground, and they're meant to represent something specific: safety and security, or a bull market. I can't think of another animal sculpture that reaches quite this high up in the air, as a subject of veneration. Here the elk doesn't really represent something other than itself. Looking up at the sculpture, one is reminded not of some abstract idea or symbol, but the real elk that probably roamed this one-time clearing along the Willamette before it was settled.

As a result, Elk as a sculpture is partly about power and grace like a heroic-human sculpture usually is, but it's also about humility: our humility, before the natural world. The bronze elk statue in the middle of Oregon's biggest city is a kind of reminder, just like seeing Mt. Hood, that living here we are closer to the forests and beaches than most urban denizens. For a lot of us, it's a big part of why we live here.

I suspect that people on both sides of today's political dramas project ideas like these onto the Elk statue. Maybe for some traditionalists, nostalgists or masculine types, it conjures hunting and a time when life was freer, and Oregon was a real frontier. Maybe for social-justice protesters, seeing that statue is a reminder that Portland is just weird enough to erect statues to members of the deer family instead of just old white men; in other words, it's not drowning in its own history and corresponding misreadings of that history.

If so, that's all the more reason it will be great to have this fella back. It won't be tomorrow, or the next day, but we could say the same thing about a lot of current problems and their resolutions. Even so, the Elk has a rendezvous coming up with its old stomping grounds, and the City of Portland has a promise to keep.

 

 

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Designing delight: two architecture firms discuss their Winter Light Festival installations

"Lightfall" by Fieldwork Design & Architecture and Solus, Inc. (Brian Libby)

BRIAN LIBBY

I just love the Portland Winter Light Festival. Last weekend brought the third iteration of the event, and it was abundantly clear that I'm not alone in my affections. Note to self: don't go on Saturday night next year! There were so many thousands of people attending the fest, particularly the portions near OMSI, that it made filtering out of 60,000-seat Autzen Stadium on a college football Saturday seem like a ghost town by comparison. I've never seen the riverfront so packed in my 20 years in Portland.

As always, this year's Winter Light Festival was an eclectic mix of works by artists and designers, but since this is an architecture blog, I decided to talk with two architecture firms who designed installations I happen to visit: Hacker Architects and Fieldwork Design & Architecture.

Hacker's design, called "Actias Luna," was a curvy tent-like structure with the shape of what one attendee told Hacker's Jonah Cohen resembled a failed bundt cake. There was a fog machine in the middle and the installation was lit from within, so entering Actias Luna amounted to a brief blur of light and color. But describing the components doesn't do it justice. What's so lovely about the Portland Winter Light Festival is how the exhibits create a little bit of magic. Using a few rudimentary materials they create a brief experience that's all about delight.

"We talked in our first couple meetings about creating an immersive color experience," explains Hacker's Thomas Adamson. "We wanted you to be able to walk into the color blue. We tried to create a mysterious, whimsical experience of being immersed in color." At the same time, he added, the fabric structure curves downward to sort of force people to scrunch. "We wanted to make a challenging space," he said. "The lower side was intended to make people duck and explore it. What surprised me was people went straight to the low part."

"Actias Luna" by Hacker and GuildWorks (Brian Libby)

Adamson as well as his Hacker colleagues Jonah Cohen and Daniel Childs also enjoyed relaying some of the different reactions they witnessed. "This old couple came out and the husband said to his wife, 'We’re going to get rid of the canopy next to the RV and put up this,'" Cohen recalled. "But the kids were the best because they got into the delight. Especially the fog: how it ebbed and flowed. Sometimes you couldn’t see. You never knew as you went in."

Some adults, as Childs remembers, were harder to convince. "Some were saying, ‘There was nothing in there," he said. "But I also heard someone call it a magical cave. I remember watching this group of teenage girls in there for a half-hour, shooting each other with cameras. The inside was this ethereal, calming experience, like the backdrop of a music video. The colors would wash you from either side, and the fabric made this soft light. The fog sort of calmed everything, but the colors were so vibrant that it lit people’s faces in a neat way."

What's also part of the experience for participating architects and artists is the collaborations that ensue to make the installations and exhibits a reality. "When they got into the whole fabric tension structure, I got nervous. I know how complicated they are," Cohen confessed. "My daughter volunteers at Pickathon and knew the people at GuildWorks. They do these amazing tensile fabric structures. GuildWorks does stuff all over the world. I called up the owner and told him about what we were going to do. After listing to it, the owner, Marc Ricketts, said, 'I’m in.' We just collaborated. We had so much fun. We went out to their shop to look at computer models that look at the forces on the fabric. They could tell me what size PVC pipes we needed to bend properly."

Cohen is also a board member of the Willamette Light Brigade, the organization that now puts on the Winter Light Festival. (The original idea came from Portland State University associate professor Jeff Schnabel, and the artistic director is Chris Herring.) He made a good point about the ongoing funding challenge the event faces. "We’ve been patching this thing together for three years. It’s been a lot of passion and love. We’ve gotten some sponsorship but not nearly enough," he explained. "One thing I’m focused on with next year is to say, 'We’ve proven the viability of this—that people want it, that it will bring out huge crowds—but it’s at a critical point now in terms of viability and financial support.' We think the economic stimulus this brought was pretty big. Our exhibit alone I think we counted maybe 10,000 people who came through over three days. We’re working with Travel Portland and the city to say, ‘Okay, you’ve seen what we can do. We want to take it to a new level of financial viability.’"

"Actias Luna" (Hacker Architects)

In addition to Hacker, I also talked to Fieldwork Design & Architecture, which designed the interactive installation "Lightfall" in cooperation with Solus, Inc. "The hands-on experience is exciting: to actually make something we started drawing, and finding out all the crazy stuff about how it goes together," Fieldwork's Matthew Rusnac told me.

As it happens, the one other time I've interviewed Rusnac, back when he worked at Holst Architecture, it was also for the design of a tiny project lying outside the normal building industry: Rusnac and Holst designed my favorite of the Partners On Dwelling initiative (better known as PODs), which last year saw a host of local architects design and build a series of tiny dwellings for the homeless, which is now located in the Kenton neighborhood. I asked Rusnac if he saw any or many similarities between the POD project and creating for the Winter Light Festival. "The POD definitely demands a lot more in terms of usability, in details like making sure it’s insulated, fire resistant. In that way it’s quite a bit different," he explained. This installation was more flexible, more exciting in a different way."

"Lightfall" was similar to an exhibit or two I've visited at past Portland Winter Light Festivals, wherein people pass through a space that combines light and hanging streams of material. Lights are changing colors and music is blaring, but as with Hacker's "Actias Luna," the experience was greater than the sum of its parts.

"As we approached the problem, a lot of it with a light installation is how to make light itself tactile, and how to make this a sensory experience. A lot of installations can become too interactive and it begins to fail over a festival, or some other exhibits don’t have a lot of interactivity. We wanted to have a human experience, where people could interact with it, and something that wasn’t too technical," Fieldwork's Caleb Couch explained. "With the strings themselves, they almost have a water-like nature to them. There’s a mass that responds as you touch them. From there, it was just the simple component of placing the LEDs and programming those. That’s that secondary response: it’s a cool blue, this object in space. As you enter in and discover that center piece, it becomes alive. It’s a kind of discovery experience."

"Lightfall" by Fieldwork and Solus (Fieldwork Design & Architecture)

As for the hanging material itself, Couch explained that it's a product called Paracord. "It’s used with backpacking or camping. It was a bit of a search," he said. "At first we thought it would be a quarter-inch rope, and it was fairly expensive. We needed thousands of feet of it. We ended up with the Paracord and that wound up working well: the weight of it. It kind of swayed nice in the wind."

The installation was designed to change colors, offering a kind of rainbow experience on a loop. "There’s a base plate that sits in the middle. It’s designed to be concealed," Couch said. "But as you step onto it, it triggers a mother board on the roof structure. Solace helped us program the lights, the rainbow. It would switch from magenta to blue to all of the colors." There was just one problem. "Once there became a few lines, people weren’t stopping to let the program reset." I do confess that I did not experience a rainbow. But the installation did change colors a few times while I was waiting in line and during the 30 seconds or so spent passing through. Even that was more than enough to create that sense of delight. "Lightfall" was about passing through a bright space and the hanging material: becoming just slightly disoriented enough for it to feel like a kind of gentle sensory ride.

I asked Couch and Rusnac one thing I neglected to ask the gang from Hacker: how, if at all, participating in the Light Festival was helpful or educational as it relates to their everyday architecture work for their firms. "It’s kind of a good exercise: taking light, which is so primary in architecture, and seeing what we can do with it," Rusnac said.

Couch was even more specific. "I’m working on a project right now that uses the same acrylic material, for a neurology clinic. Being able to work on it for the Light Festival gave me a better understanding of the material than I had before," he explained. "It’s helping me a lot in terms of knowing how to detail it."

Even so, none of these architects and designers are participating in the Portland Winter Light Festival for practical experience, at least not first and foremost. Instead, I think it goes back to the notion that designers, while as creative as artists, are more focused on serving others, which this experience brings out. "In the modern era of architecture, it can become very ego driven rather than for people who occupy the space," Couch said. "To see little kids run through it and enjoy it, that’s what I found the most exciting."

Of course these were only two out of many, many fun exhibits at the Light Festival, which has now spread to numerous locations (or "hubs") across the city. I got a kick out of "Flamethrower Chandelier" by Ryan Ramage, which allowed one to (as its name suggests) pull a string and see a surprisingly large amount of fire burst out of what looked like a chandelier. Not far away I watched people enjoy "Light Chimes" by Sticky Co. + Little Hexes, which featured a series of circular light chimes activated by human movement. Downtown at a hub in the World Trade Center plaza I found the glowing light sculpture "Stoicheia" by Lilli Szafranski and Jesse Banks to be graphically compelling and beautiful. And that's to say nothing of the hubs on the Park Blocks, Cathedral Park and the Rose Quarter that I unfortunately missed.

Even so, what a wonderful little experience this festival is. During the darkest time of the year, and during a very dark time in our national history, this is a citywide experience that puts a smile on one's face and demonstrates how just a few simple design moves can illicit a feeling: one of kinetics, or surprise, or maybe even a bit of magic.

 

 

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Maya Lin discusses the Confluence Project

Maya Lin's "Celilo Arc" (rendering courtesy Confluence Project)

BY TAZ LOOMANS

Maya Lin  addressed the City Club at the Sentinel Hotel on November 21 about her Oregon and Washington-based Confluence Project, as well as her other recent work.

Best known for her brilliant design of the Vietnam Memorial in 1982 when she was just an undergraduate at Yale, Lin has gone on to design other important monuments like the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama and the Women's Table at Yale University.

As discussed in the City Club talk, she considers herself an artist just as much as an architect and she's done a series of stunning landscape art installations such as A Fold in the Field at Gibbs Farm in New Zealand, the Storm King Wave Field in Mountainville, New York and Flutter in Miami. She's also produced a slew of provocative sculptures including “Where the Land Meets the Sea” in San Francisco, “Above and Below” at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and “Systematic Landscapes” in Seattle.

The focus of her art, Lin told the City Club audience, is to give people a new way to look at everyday objects and places. She wants people to "look like a child looks", with curiosity and wonder of the way you look at something when it's the first time you've ever seen it. Another fundamental part of her artwork is the concept of time, trying to capture specific moments. She admits water and rivers play a big role in her art as does the concept of terrain. These concepts are particularly apparent in her "Wavefields" which capture a certain moment in a wavy ocean or river by manipulating the terrain.

Lin at a Confluence site in Long Beach, Washington (image courtesy Confluence Project)

Lin began by talking about her last memorial, “What is Missing?”, an innovative monument to the endangered species and landscapes that exist in the world today. "How can we protect something we don't even know is gone?" Lin asked. The project is meant to record the parts of nature we are losing on a daily basis. Instead of a single physical piece of art on a single site, “What is Missing?” is an ongoing series of projects at different sites and includes a website as an integral part of it, as well as a variety of digital media and sculptures and installations.

Lin also talked extensively about Confluence, her series of outdoor installations spanning over 400 miles of the Columbia River and Snake River inspired by the journey of Lewis and Clark and intertwined with the saga of Native Americans of this region. The project consists of six public art sites, five of which have been completed. She spent quite a bit of time talking about the sixth, at Celilo Park, 13 miles east of The Dalles at the site of the former Celilo Falls. Just before Lin’s talk, the Schnitzer family announced a $1 million donation to help facilitate completion of the installation, called the “Celilo Arch.”

She discussed how that site was a very sacred and important site to the indigenous peoples in the area as a fishing site and how when it was turned into a dam that all that was lost. She showed some heartbreaking before and after images of how the falls were a magnificent example of people existing in harmony with nature and later how the falls and an entire way of life were essentially destroyed when the water was dammed. She said that the people in the area told her to hold off on working on the site because it was too painful. They asked her not to touch it and that it would take seven generations before they could face it. But recently she got a call and she was told that they were ready to work on the site with her. “Celilo Arch” is a sweeping curved platform that ascends slowly from the ground to an elevated level from which people can see the water, and inspired by the fishing platforms used by generations of tribes there to catch migrating salmon.

"Confluence Project at Celilo Park" (video courtesy Confluence Project)

Lin's work has always spoken to the wounds that humankind has perpetrated to the planet and to each other. Though her memorials, landscape installation projects and sculptures are heavy with meaning and sorrow of what has gone past, they also embody hope for the future. "If we give it a chance, we can help restore nature," Lin declared. Her aim is not so much to dwell on the errors of the past, but for us to heal from our wounds, learn from our mistakes and do better in the future.

“The fact that we could have a conversation is part of what the Confluence Project stands for,” Lin added. “Sometimes it is not the physical building that counts. It’s about the ideas, dialogue and discussion that has taken place.”

Though Lin was in Portland to talk, her design work could be coming to the Rose City. Developer Jordan Schnitzer, whose family made the $1 million donation, has discussed with Lin the possibility of participating in the Centennial Mills redevelopment project, perhaps by designing a pedestrian bridge over Naito Parkway.

Taz Loomans is a Portland architect and writer who publishes the Blooming Rock blog.

 

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Art at the scale of architecture: talking with Lead Pencil Studio about "Inversion: Plus Minus"

"Inversion: Plus Minus" (photo by Rich Rano)

BY RICH RANO

The Central Eastside resides as one of Portland’s industrial sanctuaries with an established goal to evolve its uses while maintaining the close-in manufacturing core for the many makers, producers, and creators who make up much of the city’s identity. But while the zoning hasn't changed, the Central Eastside always has continued to do so. Now, with a new streetcar line at the district's eastern edge on Grand Avenue and MLK Boulevard, the Central Eastside is changing again. And in a public art project constructed as part of the new streetcar line, that slow transformation can be palpably felt.

"Inversion: Plus Minus" by Seattle's Lead Pencil Studio, located at the east end of the Hawthorne Bridge ramp (with an companion installation set to be constructed a few blocks north at the Morrison bridgehead) has been called a "ghost building" for how it evokes a long-gone warehouse on the site. But just as compelling as this large-scale artwork is the process Lead Pencil Studio used to design and construct it, which combined state-of-the-art digital means with traditional fabrication techniques. "Inversion: Plus Minus" is a conversation piece between industrial authenticity and the vision of a growing urban core through a contemporary lens.

Recently Lead Pencil Studio's Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo answered a series of questions about how they put it together, and what they think the impact of the artwork has been thus far. 

Portland Architecture: The piece's welded Cor-Ten steel members are of a traditional analog process, yet "Inversion" yields a quite digital-age aesthetic. Were there any special tools or technologies in the design or assembly of the piece? 

Lead Pencil Studio: We looked at several techniques for developing a fabrication method including one version that involved digitally tracking every stick of steel with Revit and using bolted connections that would have required an absurd level of accuracy. In the end however, we opted for a manually performed assembly methods. The only use of the digital methods were for ordinary drafting, rendering tests and material estimation.

"Inversion: Plus Minus" (photo by Rich Rano)

It seems that no matter the method of drawing or modeling during conceptualization, there is always an uncertainty on whether or not the project will successfully scale-up during the interpretive process of fabrication. On this point, this project was a larger challenge than most because we were not able to see the final assembly until it was craned onto the site. The digital renderings that we worked on were never really able to accurately predict the appearance and density of material and inevitably there is a good amount of finesse performed on site.

In all that finesse, were there strict rules to the placement of each member to maintain your desired aesthetic?

We definitely had a system of techniques that we've developed over the years to keep things from getting away from us. More than half of the individual members had a structural role to play which dictated their connection points, welds and precise placement. The remainder of the material had an aesthetic role and therefore had to be generally located to maintain consistent density and gradation across the overall piece. There were daily checks with all involved to discuss consistency in the layout. The most vexing problem was to avoid the development of recognizable geometric patterns that tend to naturally occur anytime you have highly repetitive work.

"Inversion: Plus Minus" (photos by Rich Rano)

Ghosted images of the former buildings aside, how do you think the assembly methods and design choices relate to and spawn a dialogue with the industrial and manufacturing roots of the site?

From a material point of view, Cor-Ten steel has a leathery brown appearance that is nearly indistinguishable from the cast iron that was produced on the site. The utilitarian nature of industrial methods and materials figured large in our choices as we were looking to lend the project a good fit to the history of the neighborhood. Above everything though, we were challenged to create to a visually compelling piece that could compete on equal terms with the scale, velocity and deafening volume of cars and semi-trucks along Grand Avenue. When we look at it now, the work seems to be at peace within the violence of the context, rising above the crush of traffic and resilient in the face of change. In the end the work is a direct response to the 1950's planning decisions that shaped the site during the intervening 60 years since the demolition of the nascent urban fabric in favor of vehicle throughput.

On the theme of planning and zoned use revision, how have you witnessed the visual impact of Inversion informing the evolution of the area’s experience?

Most of Portland Oregon passes through this neighborhood on route to somewhere else. While many work there during the day, the evening is largely a ghost town - but the seeds of change are clearly in the works. As real estate pressures continues to rise, there will undoubtedly be increasing economic and political leverage applied to loosen the zoning protection of the Industrial Sanctuary. As those demolitions occur, the history of the activities that took place evaporate as well. Do this enough and a neighborhood and the people are forgotten. Our project is a response to this deleterious effect.

For those who are just passing through, we hope that they are able to discern our dialogue with the neighborhood forms, textures and materials and read our project as sketches of buildings that once existed or perhaps ones that might rise again.

Screen capture from "Inversion: Plus Minus" design (courtesy Lead Pencil Studio)

So your project aims to maintain the industrial identity of the area?

Our artwork operates less definitively, but on a personal level we do appreciate authenticity of place and are generally skeptical of developments that alter the built/natural environment one opportunistic project at a time. In the case of the Industrial Sanctuary, we're under no illusion that the area should be reborn with gritty belching shipyard smokestacks. We also feel that it is vital for a city that prides itself on making, such as Portland, that there be affordable, near-in places to get everything you need - hardware, materials, process expertise, basic industrial methods and equipment. Few cities have been able to maintain this and it would be a shame to see it quietly displaced by a completely different identity.

 

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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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Tradition and eccentricity: City undergoes acupuncture treatment as part of Portland Plan

Needle installation at Mt. Tabor, image courtesy The Portland Acupuncture Project 

Over the past several years, I've received acupuncture treatment for a variety of ailments: headaches, bronchitis, a pinched nerve, even stress. Sometimes it has worked, and sometimes it hasn't. But if a person is in a lot of pain, it's worth a try. And it'd be a disservice to dismiss acupuncture's effectiveness just because it's different from, or unprovable by, standards of Western medicine.

Chinese acupuncture, which Wikipedia defines as "the procedure of inserting and manipulating needles into various points on the body to relieve pain or for therapeutic purposes" has been around since at least the second century BC. Yet there is no factual evidence proving the central idea, of placing these needles at body points situated on meridians along which qi (or "life energy") flows.

I describe this tension behind acupuncture practice in the West after thinking about the symbolism of the Portland Acupuncture Project, which is actually not medicinal but an outdoor sculptural installation by Portland artist Adam Kuby. The work, consisting of 35-foot-high steel poles made to resemble acupuncture needles, was commissioned in accordance with the current process of formulating the Portland Plan through a series of workshops. The Portland Plan just entered Phase II with a workshop on April 26, and the next one is scheduled for April 29 at Beaumont Middle School. 

Needle installation at Waterfront Park, image courtesy The Portland Acupuncture Project 

Kuby's needles are being installed - literally pricked into the ground as if it's our collective skin - at sites throughout the city such as Waterfront Park, Kelly Point Park and Mt. Tabor.

"This project explores the interface between art, regional planning, traditional Chinese medicine and the health of a city," his Portland Acupuncture Project's website explains. "Unfolding over the course of 2010, this 6-month art installation will coincide with a series of public workshops to help steer the Portland Plan, a guide for the city's growth over the next 25 years.  Needles appearing across the city will bring attention to the some of the city's most challenging problems, greatest assets, as well as places with enormous potential."

“Using the body as a metaphor for the entire city, Kuby hopes to identify those places in the landscape that are important to us as a community," added Susan Anderson, director of the Portland Bureau of Planning & Sustainability, "drawing attention not only to the significance of each focal point but also to the interconnectedness of them to each other as well as to ourselves.”

Portland has a strong Chinese medicine community for an American city, with two schools of Chinese medicine and more than 500 acupuncturists in the three-county area. As a result, the project has gained not only public donations from the Regional Arts & Culture Council and the Oregon Arts Commission, but also several dozen individual and business donors and the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine. Yet the $40,000 fund raising goal to install the large poles/needles for six months, has not been reached. Kuby, a Mount Tabor-area artist with a background in landscape architecture and public art installations, told Keri Brenner in The Oregonian that he still needs to raise about $12,000 to $15,000 more if the project is to be able to be installed in all quadrants of the city.

Acupuncture chart from Hua Shou (1340s), image via Wikipedia

Each series of up to five needles/poles will remain in place for eight weeks before being moved to new meridian-like "points" in the city for another eight-week installation, continuing the rotation one more time after that. Brenner also reports Kuby worked with city planners to dovetail the placement of needle sculptures with strategies and initiatives identified in the Portland Plan, the city's roadmap for the next 25 years. Some of the needles/poles will be placed at sites to represent focus on transportation issues, for example, while others might stimulate discussions on housing problems or jobs creation. 

I mentioned at the outset of this post the tension between acupuncture's thousands of years of tradition and its lack of complete acceptance from Western medicine. That's because along with the general metaphor of acupuncture needles healing the city, or contributing to higher energy levels or flow between different parts of the topography, perhaps acupuncture itself may be a fitting metaphor for the current moment Portland is experiencing amongst the broader American zeitgeist as the potential model for how other American cities might look in the future. A recent article by English political magazine, for example, explored Portland as and "The new model" for "elite cities", asking, "Is Oregon’s metropolis a leader among American cities or just strange?"

Portland is building on thousands of years of tradition too, continuing compact pedestrian oriented city building of Europe and most of Western civilization. We are the descendant, urbanistically speaking, of cities like Amsterdam, Barcelona, Glasgow and Kyoto. And yet people in other places, even progressive urban-minded ones, still look at the city as quirky and off-kilter. But hey, what does it matter? Like the local slogan goes, Portland is, despite all its inevitable missteps, the City that Works. Or maybe it's the other, unofficial slogan, urging us to keep weird.

Incidentally, I think some of Kuby's needles are very much needed along Southeast Grand and Martin Luther King Boulevards while this streetcar construction is in progress. Traffic is a black hole there these days. Either Kuby needs to place some needles there, or I need some in my forehead and toes while slowly inching by the orange cones.

Down by the water: visiting Fort Vancouver, the Confluence Project, and the Columbia riverfront

Although I was born and raised in Oregon and have spent all but about six years of my life here, I can't think of a single past instance when I've visited the banks of the Columbia River on the Vancouver side. Before last Sunday, that is, when I went there as part of an excursion to see the Vancouver Land Bridge that's part of the seven-project Confluence Project overseen by legendary designer Maya Lin of Vietnam Memorial fame.

It turns out that Vancouver has a lovely little strip of pebbled beach there, as well as lovely if frustratingly short tree-lined walking path that extends east from the Interstate 5 bridge. I've been missing a nice place all these years, although I think the built landscape and infrastructure here has something to do with it.

To access the riverfront, I started at Fort Vancouver, walking past an assortment of military barracks and other offices (such as those of Congressman Brian Baird). Some of the buildings date to the early 20th century or earlier.

Without having brought a guidebook, I'd have had difficulty finding which way it was to the Vancouver Land Bridge over State Route 14. Eventually I moved down a curving pathway, past barbed wire-enclosed fencing and a couple of windowless storage structures, passing the log-festooned historic Fort Vancouver structure, and twisting again past a vacant un-landscaped grassy field to the land bridge. It could be a pretty route to the bridge, but it's not at all.

Although the rest of the Confluence project is Lin's, the Vancouver Land Bridge was designed by Seattle architect Johnpaul Jones. On the project's website a quote from Jones reads, "The land bridge is a real link connecting back to the Klickitat Trail, Lewis and Clark, and the development of the Northwest. It completes a circle that's been broken."

The 40-foot-wide pedestrian bridge is lined with indigenous plants and Native basket weavings. There is also to be what's called a 'treaty table' designed by Maya Lin, although I did not see it there yet.

The Confluence Project website also explains:

"European and Native American cultures once converged at this Columbia River site, where the Hudson’s Bay Company stood as the first European trading post in the Pacific Northwest. Lewis and Clark camped here, and Fort Vancouver was built here 20 years later. Today, the site features an earth-covered pedestrian bridge that arcs over State Route 14, reconnecting historic Fort Vancouver with the Columbia River, which helped extend the fort’s influence from Mexico to Alaska and across the Pacific Ocean."

Entering from the south, you can also access the land bridge by walking under the land bridge’s Welcome Gate, designed by Native American artist Lillian Pitt. Two cedar canoe panels, each adorned with a cast-glass sculpture of a Chinook woman’s face, evoke the site’s role as a historic tribal crossroads as well as a point of contact between European and Native people.

It's great that Vancouver has a pedestrian connection between the Fort and the riverfront again. That there is a freeway-like state highway running so close to the water, as well as a train track, makes it difficult for the city to establish a strong tie to the Columbia's edge. When I was on the Land Bridge, a stopped freight train was blocking the river view entirely. That shouldn't be. Vancouver could be so much more enticing and beautiful city if there were people and buildings and life along the water there like there is in downtown Portland along the Willamette (although if you look at our east bank, we still have a long way to go too with the I-5 freeway along the water).

This new pedestrian bridge, especially such an artful and historically-minded one, will be a step toward Vancouver becoming a much more appealing city. And it's worth taking some steps, because there is truly a lovely resource in the riverfront here (the decaying Cisco & Pancho's and Joe's Crab Shack by said banks notwithstanding).

Considering that Jones' Vancouver Land Bridge is the closest of the seven Confluence Project sites, I'd have liked to see either Lin, Jones or both of them be given a site along the river itself, with a pedestrian bridge over SR-14 being built in tandem with the Confluence effort. I mean, at the end of the day, Jones's bridge is a bridge, one that looks out at four lanes of asphalt and a series of freight trains. It's about as picturesque a setting as one of the I-405 bridge crossings downtown, where the smell of carbon monoxide competes for your attention with the Mt. Hood view.

(Incidentally, the couple in the above photo, who I photographed randomly, turned out to be the parents of architect Darin Dougherty, who's SIPs House I just wrote about last week.)

And while the overall Fort Vancouver site, including both the military barracks and the other facilities there, is undoubtedly overall a resource and a treasure for the city, walking around there I couldn't help but feel that this land so close to the river was being under-utilized.

Again, there's no doubt most of the historic buildings there need to be preserved, and no one is trying to kick out the military - they're part of the history of Fort Vancouver. One might even argue that the Army is being kind even allowing public access here without much restriction. 

Even so, when you get a taste of the good parts of there being a beautiful Columbia waterfront, and this thoughtful Confluence project being rooted there, as well as the character of the Fort and barracks buidings, it makes one wonder what it would be like if this were a denser, more pedestrian and public-oriented place along the Vancouver side of the Columbia banks, with housing and retail and parks part of the mix. If the city were to grow dense along the river, Vancouver could some day in a generation or two become a more equal urban sister to Portland.

There has been significant progress nearby this stretch of Vancouver riverfront. To the east there is Columbia Shores with a hotel, waterfront restaurants office buildings, condominiums and apartments. To the west there are 26 acres adjoining downtown from the former Boise Cascade site; this is planned to become a more dense urban waterfront. This adjoins to the regular part of downtown Vancouver where Esther Short Park and several new mixed use projects have given the area more vitality.

Of course when we're talking about Fort Vancouver on the other side of I-5 from downtown, the other major presence in these parts is the historic Pearson air field, from which an occasional small-engine Cessna plane was taking off on the Sunday when I visited. Portland has a functioning airport that includes service for smaller planes, and the proximity of Pearson is seriously compromising the design of the Columbia Crossing. I mean, it's downright absurd to me. But that's another conversation for another time. Right now, I'd be happy to see Vancouver continue moving towards a closer relationship with the riverfront. If nothing else, Johnpaul Jones' bridge is just that.

Portland Center Stage Removes James Harrison Light Sculpture

Portland Center Stage, occupant of the renovated Portland Armory (now known as the Gerding Theater), has removed the sculptural marquee it commissioned from acclaimed local artist James M. Harrison for its 2006 opening.

The piece is called "Aiorema" after the Greek word for "God in the Machine". On his website, Harrison explains, "Originally this was a more literal concept- a crane used in ancient Greek theater for flying in the gods.  I thought this was an appropriate way to link old and new.  New Theater, Old Concept- Old Building, New Marquee, etc."

The sculpture is made from stacked layers of light diffusing acrylic pieces. It's shaped like a cloud at the base, and shaped like a star against the sky.  The layers gradually transition from the one shape to the other shape.

Harrison first gained notice in Portland as part of the art-architecture collective Rigga. He's done sculpture for the Eastbank Esplanade as well as projects in Seattle, London and elsewhere. Those 'beehive' booths at the Gotham Building Tavern were also his, designed in partnership with the restaurant's co-owner, Michael Hebb, who has since moved on to Seattle (with tail betwen his legs).

Harrison was also the initial choice for the public art commission in Old Town/Chinatown that ultimately went to that dragon sculpture that was removed for offending locals, particularly Chinese-Americans. The light sculpture James made would have been a vastly better choice, but to the selection committee it apparently wasn't enough of a tchotchke, which ironically turned out to be the problem with the sculpture they did choose.

In the Aiorema light sculpture's place outside the Armory is a new sign that acts more as a traditional marquee. I spoke with a few people from Portland Center Stage about this, including artistic director Chris Coleman. What I sympathize with the most is their assertion that Portland Center Stage needed a sign that does more to draw people inside. It's perfectly reasonable for them to want a marquee that advertises the plays being put on and so forth.

However, it also seems that a major driving force in the removal of Harrison's sculpture besides the need for more explicit signage is that Portland Center Stage's leadership simply wasn't crazy about Aiorema. The message I heard from PCS was that they were big fans of Harrison's work before and after this one, but that they were disappointed by Aiorema. It wasn't tall enough. It had a funny shape. It was hard to clean.

I'd wondered if a compromise could be found in which the new marquee could stay at the entrance, but Harrison's light sculpture could be moved elsewhere, such as to the other side of the Gerding Theater along 10th Avenue. So far, though, my understanding is that Aiorema will not be relocated. Depending on whom you talk to, it seems to be a board member who doesn't like Aiorema, or a member of PCS in-house leadership. But for whatever reason, they're just not into it.

This brings up an important question. PCS paid Harrison $45,000 for the sculpture (not a lot for that kind of piece but still a large chunk of change), and they own it. They can do whatever they want with Aiorema, including remove it or even destroy it. PCS hasn't done the latter; the sculpture is in storage at the theater. But in the year or two that the sculpture has been standing and glowing on 11th Street, I and many others have developed a fondness for it. What recourse do fans of public artwork have when the client decides they don't like a piece that we do? I also wondered if somehow the sculpture could be altered to remove the name 'Portland Center Stage'. Heck, why not move it to Chinatown where the remains of that removed dragon sculpture sit pitifully?

I also think PCS's need for a bigger, more obvious sign speaks to the architecture of the Gerding Theater. Historic preservation laws would have prevented a major alteration of the Armory, and we might not have wanted that anyway. But in transitioning from an armory to a welcoming public theater, I don't think the architects or client solved the issue of what a massive barrier exists there. One of the exciting aspects of the Gerding Theater was supposed to be that it acted as a people magnet and as a place to congregate even when there wasn't theater showing: a viable public space. I don't the theater does that at all. It's a very nice theater inside, but it still feels like an armory on the outside. And armories were explicitly built to forcefully keep people out.

On top of that, the building's entrance was switched from the 10th Avenue side, where there's a big curving architectural entryway, to the 11th Avenue side. That means they're swimming against the current, so to speak, in directing people into the building. When you make a move like that, you need big obvious, airport-like signage to show people the way.

Harrison's piece isn't right for that mission. But however justified PCS is removing Aiorema, either legally or morally, I think they ought to bring Harrison's fine work back into the public realm where it belongs.