Portland Architecture

Ode to a glass box: the new downtown Apple store

Apple store (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

For the past several years, Apple's flagship Portland store has been located in the lower depths of downtown's Pioneer Place mall. Despite the refined palette of natural wood and white walls, it could sometimes feel a bit claustraphobic there with large crowds cramped into a small, windowless space.

For a new Portland flagship store, Apple initially planned a store in Northwest Portland on 23rd Avenue in the mid-2000s before abandoning the proposed development after disagreements with the city's Historic Landmarks Commission over its design.

But now, however, the juggernaut from Cupertino has a home big enough to accommodate its hordes of shoppers, as well as a far more prominent presence on the street and, more broadly, an architectural setting that befits its beautifully designed devices.

The new Apple store, located downtown at SW Yamill and Fourth (across from its old location in Pioneer Place), has a striking presence, albeit one created after an unsettling and unsustainable precursor. The company tore down an existing two-story building on this site, which had been occupied by luxury retailer Saks and was less than 15 years old. But if there has to be such waste, at least we're getting more attractive architecture in its place. The old building was new enough to have been of use for many decades more, but it was basically a banal two-story concrete box with a cornice and some storefront windows.

Apple store (photos by Brian Libby)

The design of the new Apple store, by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, is very simple, and that's what makes it powerful. It's basically a big glass box, set back from the street and raised a few feet up so as to include a small concrete plaza. There is also a large roof overhang that appears to float over the glass box. The main glass-enclosed space is quite tall—it feels like a story and a half at least—giving a sense of volume inside even when the store is packed with customers and blue-shirted Apple employees. The surrounding plaza also feels like an extension of the interior space. The flooring inside and out is identical, and one’s eye almost forgets the glass is there.

In fact, as I stood inside the store on a visit last week, I was reminded of one of the guiding truths about my own love of architecture.

Much as I adore all kinds of historic styles, from the symmetry and proportion of classical architecture to the humble welcoming quality of a Craftsman bungalow, there is nothing I find more compelling than modern architecture when it has a generous amount of volume and transparency. When you're inside a pristine glass box, it feels like being inside and outside at once. It touches upon and mines the most basic human biophilic needs of what's called prospect and refuge: to see out and get a sense of the exterior even as one feels shelter and protection from the elements.

A love of volume and transparency is why I got involved five years ago with trying to save another glass box: Memorial Coliseum. I'd never in my life, whether on travels in Europe and Asia or here in the United States, ever experienced such wide-open volumes and transparency as one gets in the Coliseum, where a 12,000-seat arena stands on just four columns, and one can enjoy (on those rare occasions when the curtain is open) a 360-degree view to the outside, including the entire downtown Portland skyline.

Apple store (photos by Brian Libby )

At the Apple store, one doesn't have the same panoramic view, but the glass curtain wall is rendered so crisply and without clutter that it's easy to stand at one of the wood tables, gazing at a Mac or an iPad on display, and wonder why there is a roof but no walls. The Apple store glass brings that phrase - curtain wall - more resonantly to mind. Particularly with the roof hanging over, it feels as if the building is not a building at all but just a roof suspended from the concrete wall of the adjacent building. Even the corners of the building are just glass on glass.

Apple stores are already the most successful retail spaces in America, making over $4,500 per square foot. And anecdotally it seems like the subterranean Apple store in Pioneer Place most likely was already at that sales level. But the company has been making an effort to increase the volume of its stores to make them feel less cramped and more like an emporium for not just sales but tutorials and even hanging out. Apple is also hoping it can increase the share of iPhones and other devices sold in its stores versus online. And certainly in all these ways, the new downtown Apple store has exponentially increased the company's presence as well as elevated the experience of being in one of its stores. Standing inside the new Apple store last week, I didn't have that same urge to flee from the hordes of people and the lightless environment.

Much as its light, transparency and volume make the new Apple store a successful piece of architecture, or at least an aesthetically pleasing one, what takes away from the experience for me is knowing the store is not unique. The Portland Apple store seems nearly identical in look to the Apple store Bohlin Cywinski Jackson designed for Palo Alto, and, in the years ahead, plans to unroll in several locations. BCJ, with offices in Seattle, San Francisco and Pennsylvania, has won a lot of major design awards, and they possess a rigor and an eye for detail that makes these stores so pristine. But in retail design, where the vastness of America in particular means a company has to plan for scores of stores across the map, it's inevitable that architects and clients take a cookie-cutter approach. Portland's Apple store is a beautiful piece of architecture, but it's still cookie-cutter.

Apple store (photos by Brian Libby)

That said, I'm still happy to have the new Apple store here. After all, Apple and I go way back. In the early 1980s, my dad became the first and, for many years, the only retailer of Apple computers in my hometown of McMinnville. I remember the pride of being the only kid in my elementary school class to have an Apple II-Plus. Nevermind that no useful software beyond a couple of video games had yet been invented. You could tell the company was special even then.

For most of its history, Apple has been overseen by the great business and tech genius of our time, Steve Jobs. Now that we're in a post-Jobs world, it will be interesting to see where Apple goes: whether it becomes just like any other corporation, or whether the design acumen showed in generations of computers and devices will continue. To that end, Portland's Apple store reinforces its greatness as designer, but it also reminds us that a corporation this big often finds it difficult to bring a personal touch to each of its customers and locations.

 

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More groceries, major eyesore at Southeast Hawthorne Safeway

East facade of Hawthorne Safeway (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Eight years ago the Safeway supermarket chain built an exemplary urban store in downtown Portland. With housing above the store for density (a first for the company), a LEED rating showing its sustainability and a simple, elegant design by GBD Architects, it showed a nationwide corporation with the smarts and nimbleness to not simply build a cookie-cutter store but adapt to Portland.

“We wanted an urban store with a vibrant streetscape,” Safeway public affairs director Bridget Flanagan told me for a Metropolis magazine story back in 2004, “a store that worked for the community.”

Apparently that was a one-time thing, for the new Safeway on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard, whatever new amenities it may have, is a much diferent story.

Living just off Hawthorne Boulevard for the past 14 years, I shopped countless times at the old, circa-1966 Safeway at 2800 SE Hawthorne. Chances are I'll shop there many times in the future.

But when those shopping trips happen, I'll always be holding my nose. There's just no other way to put it: this is one seriously ugly monstrosity of a grocery store.

Hawthorne Safeway (photo by Brian Libby)

This Safeway offers a lot more space and grocery/food offerings. By burying the old front parking lot underground and building a bigger building all the way up to the street, the store is going from about 33,000 square feet to over 55,000. You can be sure the old Safeway never had a sushi bar, but this one does. The old deli counter with fried chicken and stale Chinese food has been replace by a much more expansive offering of prepared foods. The old Starbucks kiosk inside has become a full-fledged Starbucks with seating and even a fireplace.

But even from blocks away, the Safeway feels needlessly oversized for the neighborhood with its prison-like pair of towers bracketing the front edges of the buiding. The building is just a concrete box, yet a neo-historic facade has been affixed to the front with about as much authenticity as an Old West movie town made in Hollywood. For goodness sake, while visiting recently I even encountered one portion of the northern facade in which an awning extended over windowless concrete block (as you can see in the photo at the top of this post).

Theoretically, it's a more urban store because the parking is underground. But it could not feel much more suburban in its bland stylistic ubiquity, especially given how the added density only led to a bigger store, not a mixed-use building with offices or housing above. Admittedly the zoning didn't allow the latter, but that might have led Safeway to build something less outsized from the single-family homes in the surrounding neighborhood. It's as if the company had two small parking spots and parked one huge SUV there.

The store is officially designed by Lake Oswego firm Benner Stange Strange (lead architect) and supported by the Portland office of Bellevue firm Mulvanny G2 (architect of record). But I consider Safeway to be the culprit here, for the Hawthorne Safeway is just another unit in its assembly line of "Lifestyle Stores" being built around the country that feature added prepared foods and earth-toned interiors. It's true there isn't the same feeling of oppressive fluorescent lights, but there's also less natural light coming into the store. How could you in 2012, in Portland - a sustainable capitol and a largely overcast climate - tear down one store and build another with less natural light?

And by the way, this Safeway will not, unlike the one downtown, apply for LEED certification. So you can't even say this ugly duckling possess an inner swan. It's apparently as bloated as it looks.

Safeway exit door at center-front (photo by Brian Libby)

At the front of the store, as with the back entrance of the renovated Fred Meyer just up Hawthorne, wayfinding is a comedy of errors. Just when one reaches a giant set of glass double doors, it becomes apparent this is only the exit. To enter the store via the official entrance can take one on a winding, counter-intuitive path. Who says a wide glass door has to be only an entry or exit point? At the corner of the building's front, just where the architecture leads you to a door, there's a concrete wall. It all makes you feel like a rat in a maze.

It wouldn't have taken Safeway much effort to create a more nuanced design that better fits the Hawthorne district. All they would have had to do was work with the neighborhood and listen to what shoppers want, then to hire a local Portland firm and give them the freedom to truly engage in the act of design: not to simply put lipstick on a pig by affixing neo-historic faux facades to the front of the concrete box but to truly design a store from the inside out and outside in. Chances are the architects at Benner Strange and Mulvanny G2 did as much as they could given Safeways parameters. Just make our spaceship fit the landing pad.

Safeway could easily have looked at Portland and learned from a local chain exploding with growth by doing things the right way: New Seasons Market. Maybe this isn't a direct comparison, for New Seasons caters to higher-income shoppers for whom things like organic produce are a baseline, not a luxury. Yet beyond the groceries or the demographics, New Seasons builds stores teeming with natural light that, in most cases, feel effortlessly urban even without having any housing or offices above their stores. It's all about having designers and clients who listen to the needs of customers and communities.

Interior of Hawthorne Safeway (photos by Brian Libby)

Like I said, I'll probably still shop at the Hawthorne Safeway. The cost of food, even basic items, has increased substantially over the past decade. Safeway, as with chains like Costco or even Fred Meyer, can offer more competitive pricess on most groceries than New Seasons, Zupans or other local higher-end supermarkets. Yet that's no reason the chain had to scrimp on design or act so heavy-handed and distant. Whether it's the company's refusal to sign a neighborhood agreement with residents living near the store or how this Hawthorne Safeway is basically the same as any in its chain, the company is epitomizing the kind of ham-fisted, tone-deaf behavior that has coalesced much of America against giant corporations.

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A bigger, more prominent downtown Apple store? [Sshh!]

Drawings for an alleged downtown Apple store proposal (courtesy ifoApplestore.com)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Perhaps I should begin with an apology. I'd like to write about Apple's proposed new downtown store on Yamhill Street, across from the Pioneer Place mall. And here's hoping it happens.

After all, not only is Apple a refreshing institution of great design in their computer hardware and electronics--I love my two current Apple computers, just as I loved my Apple II Plus when it became my first computer in the early 1980s, and my partner loves her iPhone--but their stores arguably lead the nation in handsome, smart retail design.

So why the apology? Well, Apple is sensitive and secretive sometimes, so much so that those at the city and the private sector involved with the project not only won't talk about it, but won't even acknowledge Apple is involved for fear of the Cupertino, California juggernaut pulling out of the project. So hopefully any speculation or criticisms I or others offer won't doom it.

Perhaps Apple has reason to be wary. In 2005, the company proposed a flagship store along the retail row of NW 23rd Avenue. But that neighborhood is an official historic district, triggering Historic Landmarks Commission review of the design. As Fred Leeson's Monday post indicated, there is an ongoing debate about whether new architecture should conform in scale, materials and other design facets to surrounding older buidings or whether it has license to be itself. Many, myself included, feel the Commission was being a bit silly to insist on tweaks to awnings or other aspects of the proposed design on 23rd, but Apple also pulled out of the project entirely rather than enter anything resembling compromise - which, in many cases, is what good design is all about. I'd say both the Landmarks Commission and Apple itself could have done better.

Maybe now is the chance to right that wrong. Apple seems to be proposing a new store on the site of the Saks building on SW Yamhill between Fourth and Fifth Avenues. Rather than renovating the two-story Saks structure, the proposal is to demolish it in favor of a single-story, glass-fronted Apple store set back from the sidewalk to include a small plaza.

The design, by Seattle/Pennsylvania firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson (designer of numerous previous Apple stores, including a prominent one in Manhattan), was submitted to the city on February 17 as a formal Design Advice Request, and the Design Review board will consider the plans on March 15. According to the Design Advice Request, the Apple store would have a 165-foot-wide storefront (the largest of any Apple store) and a 17.5-foot-tall interior, with 9,000 square feet of public space.

Entrance to New York Apple store (photo by Brian Libby)

The demolition or partial demolition of the Saks building seems curious. The structure obviously has a prominent location across from Pioneer Place mall, where Apple's current store exists in the underground portion. But it's not a very old building at all; Pioneer Place II, of which the building is a part, was completed in 2000. Would Apple consider replacing a 12-year-old building to be a sustainable move? Why not renovate another building closer to what it wants? Why not build from the ground up? Both options exist downtown, including a vacant city-owned lot less than three blocks away at SW Third and Taylor. If the company really wanted to get creative, it could occupy an under-utilized but grand work of architecture like the US Customs House, or at least a former warehouse in need of a rescue.

Steve Jobs himself coined the phrase, "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." In this case, the how-it-works of design would seem to include concern for using materials wisely, and how renovation is more sustainable than demolition and rebuilding.

Don't get me wrong: I am unequivocally on the side of Apple coming to Portland and building a great store, one with more size and architectural presence than its basement lair. There were a lot of disgruntled Apple supporters in 2005 who felt the city flubbed a great opportunity to bring the company's flagship to Northwest 23rd, of which I was included. Even so, Apple would be less of a company if it couldn't stand a little criticism, be it for their gargantuan Norman Foster-designed glass donut of a headquarters planned for Cupertino, or tearing down a building with decades of life just because it's across from the downtown mall. We hold Apple to this kind of standard more than perhaps any other American corporation becuase they have stood for great design and for more than the bottom line. And as great as this store may be, and as much as the company deserves an open invitation, Apple wouldn't be Apple unless we expect them to, as the company's adverb-avoiding former slogan used to go, "Think different."

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Targeting the Galleria for a smaller urban big-box store

The Galleria (photo by Fred Leeson)

BY FRED LEESON

It would be entirely understandable if Art DeMuro, chairman of the Portland Historic Landmarks Commission, feels like he has a big red target on his chest.  Make that a Target.

The mega-retailing firm based in Minneapolis, best known for its suburban big box stores, hopes to open a smaller, urban outlet in downtown Portland on the second floor of the Galleria Building at 921 SW Morrison. But to achieve that goal, it needs approval for exterior changes to the 101-year old landmark retail building.

DeMuro and other members of the landmarks commission can’t help but feel the pressure on this one. The downtown retail community badly wants Target, presumably for spillover business from shoppers Target might attract. It would be a coup for downtown, where vacant storefronts are common as a result of the poor economy.

And the landmarks commission is perceived by some – rightly or wrongly – as an obstacle to developers hoping to renovate in the urban core. The commission, now approximately 40 years old, is charged with approving exterior changes to designated landmarks and buildings in historic districts. Decisions of the commission can be appealed to the City Council. Earlier in June, Greg Goodman, an outspoken member of the prominent Goodman family of downtown property owners, criticized the commission in DeMuro’s presence at a meeting about the role of historic preservation in the evolving 2035 Central City Plan.

Galleria facade intended for Target loading dock (photo by Fred Leeson)

Goodman declared that developers see the landmarks commission as a costly obstacle in the way of progress. He said some developers won’t take on projects if the commission’s approval is necessary. He suggested, in essence, that the commission was too picky in trying to preserve the fabric of historic buildings, and that public hearings and design changes the commission sometimes recommends comprise unwelcome additional costs.

Then, surprisingly perhaps, Goodman said his own company had never had any problems in dealing with the landmarks commission.

Target representatives and their Portland design team at Fletcher Farr Ayotte accepted a suggestion that they meet with the landmarks commission for an advisory meeting on June 27. The key changes they seek are a new entrance at the west end of the Morrison Street frontage near S.W. 10th Avenue, and the removal of two window bays on the Alder Street frontage to create loading docks.

On the plus side, the design team plans to restore wood windows to some openings that were replaced with louvers over the years, and to recreate a canopy, long since removed, over the central entrance on SW 10th.  The central entrance on 10th would be the main entrance for other tenants in the building, not the primary entrance to Target.

The loading bays appear to be the biggest hurdle. The original loading facilities were on the SW Ninth Avenue side of the full-block building, but modern trucks are too big to negotiate that narrow street. Even on the wider Alder Street,  Target plans to use 28-foot vehicles to serve the proposed store, considerably smaller than the 53 and 60-foot rigs that haul goods to its big-box stores.

Roll-up doors would replace the two big display windows, but the designers said the doors could duplicate the bulkhead and transom dimensions of the adjacent bays. The doors would be opened only to allow entry and egress; they would be lowered while trucks are inside.

The building, completed in 1910 for the pioneer retail firm of Olds Wortman & King, was designed by Charles R. Aldrich, who designed some major commissions in Minneapolis before moving to Seattle in 1905. He worked for an investment firm that erected buildings in Seattle, Spokane, Portland and Los Angeles. The building was the first full-block retail structure built in downtown.  Its steel frame with terra cotta exterior and wide bays is somewhat reminiscent of Louis Sullivan’s famed Carson Pirie Scott store finished in Chicago in 1899, which set the standard for new large-scale retail stores.  (Coincidentally, Target is planning to open a store in the former Carson Pirie Scott building late next year.)  

Although its full-block footprint has been unchanged, the building has been altered many times over the years.  The interior was substantially remodeled in the 1940s, and again in the 1960s when the building bore the Rhodes nameplate.  After Rhodes closed in 1973, the building was purchased by Bill and Sam Naito for $565,000, even then a “fire sale” price for what was considered a terra cotta white elephant. The innovative Naito team reopened the central transom and rebuilt a central stairway, making the first three floors into retail shops and the upper two stories into offices. They converted the basement to parking, with an entry off Alder Street.

The Galleria, as the Naitos renamed it, was a major retail success and helped re-establish downtown Portland as an interesting retail venue. But the opening of Pioneer Place in 1990 pulled the retail core westward, and the Galleria lost its retail charm. The central stairway was pulled out and Brooks Brothers leased approximately half of the first floor in 2007. Private cooking and  medical training schools occupy the upper floors.

DeMuro, the landmarks chairman, is not an architect. But as the principal of Venerable Properties, a firm that concentrates on restoring old buildings, he has vast knowledge of historic building styles and details. It was no surprise, then, that when Target showed up for the advisory hearing DeMuro grilled the design team about details of original doors, windows, canopies and other elements.   He already was aware that the four sides of the building show a “mish-mash” of original and often-changed parts.

“The more restoration of the façade, the better,” he said at one point.  “That helps the case for other changes.”

And that will be the key to matter when Target submits its formal renovation application in coming weeks.  As Judy VanAlstyne, a property manager for The Bill Naito Company said in opening remarks, the Olds building was a retail structure from the start.  It still is a retail building and can continue to be a key retail asset in the future.  It just needs a few accommodations.  DeMuro and other restoration professionals on the commission don’t need to be told that adaptive re-use is the key to most restoration projects.

The commission’s goal will be to restore and preserve as much original fabric as possible, to minimize damage and to encourage sensitive design of new elements.  In the end, that will be the best result for Target, for downtown Portland and for the landmark building.

Fred Leeson is a Portland journalist and president of the Bosco-Milligan Foundation and its Architectrual Heritage Center.

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MulvannyG2 imagines a shopping mall of the future

Future Image Architecture Competition entry, courtesy MulvannyG2 Architecture 

Several years ago I flew to Los Angeles to report for the New York Times on a competition called “Dead Malls”. This wasn’t a competition for an actual brick-and-mortar commission, but instead what is sometimes called an “ideas competition”.

The idea behind that competition was to generate new ideas for the growing amount of abandoned suburban shopping malls across America. There were all kinds of proposals, from arts facilities to prisons. But the idea I didn’t see in that competition was the sole one that made any sense: simply stitching malls into city fabric by making them mixed use with a variety of housing and other private and public spaces, a variety of scales (both for the architecture and the businesses there), and better access for pedestrians and mass transit.

All this time later, MulvannyG2 Architecture  has been named a winner in a similar ideas competition, held by the International Council of Shopping Centers. The  ICSC’s Future Image Architecture Competition asked firms to address a potential “big box” store design built 50 years from now. MulvannyG2 won in the “Green” category for an entry that offers a six-step sustainable strategy for adapting abandoned large format stores into new uses.

MulvannyG2’s winning entry, “ReStart, ReConnect, ReVive, ReTurn, ReClaim, ReEnvision” works on the premise that by 2060 large format stores’ current suburban locations will become urban as density spreads and escalates. Global warming, presumably, would have wrought substantial climate change by that time, and fossil fuel resources would have dwindled far past peak-oil. This, the architects reasoned, would in turn provide greater incentive for large format stores’ adaptive reuse; they will become too valuable a resource to lie abandoned as many do today, or even to be functioning with that low level of density and seas of asphalt parking lots.

Sitting down with a quartet of architects from the firm recently, they discussed additional impetus behind the winning design.

“The crux of it really was stitching everything together so it would be a living entity again,” MulvannyG2’s Jonathan Dunn said.

Future Image Architecture Competition entry, courtesy MulvannyG2 Architecture 

The competition entry used an actual outer-Portland site, at 122nd and Glisan, as its starting point. “With sustainability, especially, site is so important,” said Dunn, who also co-chairs the AIA/Portland chapter’s Committee on the Environment. It’s the crux of how you take a building and shape it to the site.”

“We had a lot of conversations about the right approach,” MG2's Darren Schroeder said. “We wanted something that links everything together and is mixed use but has the financial underpinnings to work. We tried to look at this from a developer’s perspective. That part of it said, there’s no reason why these sites can’t evolve the same way the other fabric of the city has developed historically: slowly, in phases, and with multiple users.”

The design splices what was one large mass into multiple levels, cutting courtyards and skylights into the building and creating a succession of different kinds of indoor and outdoor spaces with multiple tenants and many points of entry. The program integrates housing, libraries, markets, restaurants,  an amphitheater, open space, and even farming.

The design also presumes that fewer people would be driving cars in 50 years, so there is less than half the amount of parking spaces allotted. That’s the part of this process that may have been the most fun for the architects.  Not only did they cut the amount of spaces, but also made them less obtrusive. Do shopping mall developers have any idea how ugly parking lots are? Burying them underground is more expensive, but you also get what you pay for.

“Those are the pressures of the trade,” Schroeder said. You have to be able to understand how important parking is to your client, but you also have to be able to show your client the value in wrapping it in.”

Developers of suburban shopping malls typically have looked for as much as five parking spots for every thousand square feet of spaces. With all that reclaimed space, the design added more greenspace.

MulvannyG2 also sought to bring a more local focus to a format that is usually dominated by chains. “Small local businesses was a huge focus. This used to be the big box chain and this is a complete opposite. Maybe that’s where we’re moving,” said MG2's Kelly Stewart.

Certainly a mall would start to feel different if it had lots of open greenspace and was oriented around micro-sized retail such as food carts or individual retailers. In fact, it makes me think of Saturday Market, which consists of just such a mix today.

But the reason many of us hate shopping malls is not just the chains or the ugly parking lots, but also the antiseptic feel of the interiors. Some of that bad feeling comes from the lack of natural light and air, but it’s something more, too: the failure of interior design to feel vibrant and varied. “We fight that all over the country,” adds Schroeder, whose firm designs retail facilities for many clients. “We even see it in Times Square.”

Ultimately, though, I can’t help but wonder if it’s not the design of shopping malls that needs to change but the approach of the developer, or even the fact that there is a single developer. “What used to be one big box from a tax lot perspective, a huge multi acre parcel that belongs to one holding company, we’d like to give it more like the function of a city,” Schroeder said. “How many tax lots does the city of Portland have for one block downtown? Why can’t we have 25 tax lots here? That’s where our discussion got excited. We didn’t want it to just be a site plan exercise. The idea about this is it’s supposed to work across economic boundaries. Not just a place to go and party and shop, and not a place to squat in your expensive condo. Just a mixture of demographics.”

It’s impossible to predict the future, but the future of the shopping mall can change before 2060, especially when architects and developers needn’t reinvent the wheel to find what works and what is viable for shoppers and residents. “We can grab a lot of cues from our present and say, ‘What’s important to us now?’ Light and space,” Schroeder concludes. “That’s been the guiding force, for example, in what’s made the pearl successful. Maybe it’s not diverse, but they’ve made it work by just extending the grid.”

“This isn’t a one size fits all solution. You can’t just put an urban farm in the middle of a shopping mall site. But these are under-utilized properties with real estate value. How do we get a return on that value again? Back in the day it was sufficient to do forgettable construction and call it good. Now there’s a greater obligation.”

As it happens, I was in a retail space designed by MulvannyG2 over the weekend: the renovated Fred Meyer store at SE 39th and Hawthorne. It is a big improvement over the old store, with more glass along the perimeter and more greenery in the parking lot. But there is still a lot of windowless concrete wall along Hawthorne, and a convoluted entry-exit area. If you're going to pull off a transformative retail design, it takes a willing client, too.

Cascade Station: urban or suburban?

Cascade Station map, courtesy Portland Development Commission 

Anna Griffin had an interesting column in Wednesday's Oregonian about the strip mall at Cascade Station along Airport Way and how it calls into question the ways we gauge how developments succeed or fail.

Cascade Station is a 120 acre parcel of property that is owned by the Port of Portland. When it was first pitched in about 1999, this was supposed to be a pedestrian oriented mixed-use development. Instead, it has become a hive of big-box chain stores. But in the middle of a terrible economy, Cascade Station has thrived, at least in terms of sales and revenue. For example, Griffin reports that the Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant there is the 16th busiest of the chain's 600 franchises. 96 percent of the commercial side has been leased. And Ikea is, while certainly a big-box to end all big-boxes, very popular.

In other words, Portland failed at the goal of making Cascade Station an urban development, but it has succeeded  - economically speaking - as a suburban one.

"This village thing was a great vision, but not there," shopping center developer Fred Bruning told Griffin. "If we hadn't built this, the entire place would probably still be vacant."

Indeed, there were quite a few years when, if you were riding the MAX to the airport, it would routinely stop at Cascade Station and nobody would get on or off. Now 6,000 people get on or off a MAX train at Cascade Station each week.

Cascade Station also probably succeeds in large part because of its ease of access and lack of sales tax for nearby Washington residents in Clark County, which already is mostly a suburban-feeling place anyway.

Here's an explanation from the Portland Development Commission of what happened with Cascade Station morphing from its original intended look and makeup:

"Unfortunately, following the execution of the agreement in 1999, development stalled due to the events of September 11, 2001 and because the site’s zoning precluded any retail larger than 60,000 square feet in size. This effectively precluded any anchor retail stores from locating there, and the small stores would not sign on."

"On February 17, 2005, the 1999 Plan District was amended with the intention of reviving development interest at Cascade Station.  Development rights for the property were modified to allow, among other uses, up to three larger-format retailers.  These anchor tenants are expected to provide the necessary customer draw that would spur the rest of the smaller retail to move forward, as well as the office and hotel uses." 

PDC was perhaps between a rock and a hard place: seed the development with cheap plants that grow fast, or better fruit trees that might not bare any.

Griffin also ties her look at Cascade Station to Mayor Sam Adams' easing off of his refusal to support Walmart stores being established anywhere in Portland. Not long ago, Adams began talking with Walmart about an economic impact study for a store at Hayden Island, where he previously tried to keep the chain away. Some of this stems from the fact, as Griffin notes, that Walmart has spent many millions to buffet its image and appear more friendly to sustainability and smart city building. But a lot of it also has to do with the economy, and the fact that we can't be as picky about what kind of development we want when we really need development of any kind.

Advertisement taken from Cascade Station website  

As for Cascade Station, I have to agree that it was probably never in the cards for this to be a pedestrian-oriented development, even with its MAX stops. But I suspect the people behind the development never had their hearts into the idea of urbanity.

When it was pitched as an idea in 1999, I attended a presentation on Cascade Station, and I specifically remember the would-be developers from Trammel Crow saying it would "look urban, work suburban". In other words, the office and stores might come all the way up to the sidewalk along Airport Way, but they would still have massive parking lots in back. And while MAX was a nice extra amenity, it was almost a non-factor, because the overwhelming majority of shoppers at Ikea and elsewhere would be coming and going in their cars.

In general, light rail and streetcars are seen as a development tool, particularly for creating mixed-use environments where people walk, bike and take mass transit as much as they drive - or more. However, this particular MAX line was really meant to connect people in downtown and other parts of Portland to the airport, not for creating this kind of compact, urban environment. Had Cascade Station's developers really wanted an urban place, they'd have needed to introduce a mix of housing with commercial and retail space, and created a grid or other street system with a scale of small blocks meant for pedestrians.

Cascade Station in all its asphalt glory, photo courtesy Daily Journal of Commerce 

I think is the underlying truth in Griffin's column is that urban and suburban areas will always, to some extent, need each other. And we must remain flexible to both options.

To that end, Griffin's story ends with a quote from Bruning, the shopping mall developer. "When you travel to Europe, you leave the airport, and you immediately see industrial and commercial development," he says. "The first thing you see in some of the great cities of the world is Ikea."

I still consider it an open-ended question more than something I've completely figured out. Are big cities meant to have auto-oriented industrial and commercial developments on their outskirts, or could Cascade Station really have been something more than football field-sized parking lots and stores the size of the airplane hangars next door at the airport?

Meanwhile, the Portland Development Commission has moved toward shrinking the Airport Way urban renewal area. That's in part because law stipulates no more than 15 percent of the city's land can be an urban renewal area, and we're near the ceiling. But I wonder if somebody at PDC said to himself or herself, "I didn't get into the urban renewal profession so we could give breaks to Dress Barn and Staples."

I'll tell you this: Except for maybe the once-every-two-years sojourn to Ikea, I wouldn't take a single step towards the rest of the eyesore that is Cascade Station - not at Dress Barn, Marshall's, Ross Dress For Less, Red Robin, Jamba Juice, Kay Jewelers, Bath & Body Works, or even the International House of Pancakes. It says a lot that Cascade Station's website prominently features the phrase "tax free shopping" - all but an explicit admittance that the target market is more about big savings than a pleasant environment. But I wouldn't shop at these chains' outposts in Beaverton, Tigard or Gresham either. Yet lots of people do, and one can't pretend to know all their needs and motivations.

Broadway as retail core

The new edition of Portland State University’s Real Estate Quarterly is hot off the presses, and this issue has a piece by PSU professor William Macht arguing that Portland is suffering from a downtown retail conundrum:

“We have too much ground floor area seeking too much retail space from too few retailers, who seek to sell too many non-essential goods to too few customers, who increasingly have too little money to buy them and too little space in which to store them.” Other than that, though, everything is great.

Macht cites recent efforts by the mayor’s office and the Portland Development Commission focusing on the downtown retail core, “branding it and putting gateways onto it.” But rather than one retail core for all of downtown, we instead have many smaller retail cores that are too fragmented:

• The downtown retail core, currently defined as SW 2nd to SW 12th Avenues, Washington to Salmon Streets;

• The Brewery Blocks, the retail heart of the 45 blocks of the South Pearl district, from West Burnside to NW Glisan, Broadway to I-405;

• A growing retail corridor on NW Lovejoy from I-405 to NW 9th serving the 45 blocks of the central Pearl district;

• The Museum Place Safeway at SW 10th and Jefferson, acting as the seed for a retail core for the 40 blocks of southwest end of downtown.

• The 48 blocks east of the South Park Blocks between SW Salmon and SW Market that are built around a line of four full-block parks between SW 3rd and 4th Avenues

• The 48 blocks south of Market Street, east of the South Park Blocks, plus the four blocks of University Place

• The 16 blocks at RiverPlace, which comprose a small but isolated retail core.

That's not even mentioning all the retail aggregating on the east side on principal arterial streets like Burnside, Hawthorne, Alberta, Belmont, Fremont, Mississippi and Division.

Rather than a marketing or advertising solution for downtown Portland, what the city instead needs is a consolidation strategy to move retailers to a Broadway corridor.

“It is unrealistic to think that retail space can ever be the public activator that many planners and civic boosters have hoped,” Macht goes on. “Furthermore, we have spent too little time thinking about other ways to activate and use ground level space."

Why make Broadway the connecting retail thread for Portland and focus retail development there?

“Broadway is the most accessible street in the center of downtown with three lanes of through traffic plus continuous parking lanes on both sides of the street,” Macht says. “Stores are very visible and accessible through its entire length. And it is the only downtown street that connects to two major freeways at each end making access to shoppers more convenient than any other. Broadway is also the natural link between the Pearl district and Old Town/Chinatown and it is the terminus of the growing Lovejoy retail corridor.”

Macht also sees the the 12 blocks of the old downtown Post Office as ideal for a major retail space. The post office intersects the Lovejoy corridor and terminates at the North Park Blocks. The size of the Post Office site, he says, could anchor larger diversified anchor retailers not represented downtown. Although that could mean a big chain store. Do we want that?

“The Broadway strategy is really one that builds on history,” the professor adds. “It is clear that Broadway was conceived as the Main Street of Portland. It is the only street in the center of the long rectangle of the city that connects across its own bridge to the east side of Portland, where it changes its course from north/south to east west. It is the street on which the main Post Office and Union Station were built, where the Federal Customs House was located, where the Benson Hotel and other main hotels were built, where the elaborate U.S. Bank and other major banks were sited, where the iconic Jackson Tower stands in the precise center of Broadway between PSU and the Post Office Blocks, and where every major theater was built.”

You can read a PDF file of the entire Real Estate Quarterly here.

Bestseller or return for refund? Powell's unveils design for new entrance to flagship store

As reported by the Daily Journal of Commerce and the Portland Mercury recently, Powell's Books has submitted its plans by local architect Ernest Munch to the Design Commission for review. That doesn't mean the project will begin anytime soon, for Powells may wait until the economy recovers. Even so, based on past postings I've written about the store, Powells is a good listener and it would be helpful to give them public feedback.

The new design would encompass about 28,000 square feet and three stories, essentially replacing the store's southeast corner at 10th and Burnside. A signature element would be a large revolving 15-by-18-foot cube as part of the facade that would display art.

"We consider (the current) building as a vanilla wrapper and when you open it you find something delightful," Miriam Sontz, Powell's CEO of strategic development, told the DJC. "This is a more exhibitionist building. As a business, we're excited about it."

Munch has designed two other stores for Powells, at Cedar Hills Crossing and at the Portland International Airport. I believe he's also done previous design work on the Burnside store. Looking at his portfolio, though, Munch's got a lot more experience designing houses and wineries. There are no other commercial projects listed in his portfolio. For all I know, Munch is a brilliant architect. But if Powells really wants to create more of an "exhibitionist" building as Sontz described, I wonder if a more experienced, acclaimed architect might have been considered, at least as a collaborator with Munch. What might other talented architects with bigger, more acclaimed portfolios like Brad Cloepfil, Works Partnership, Skylab, Holst, or Thomas Hacker done here? And is it too late for Powell's to consider bringing one of them on to work with Munch?

I love Powells, and I hesitate to say anything bad about the proposed design rendering. It's hard to tell definitively from a couple small computer renderings how the store would turn out. But I also have to be honest about being underwhelmed in what I've seen so far. I'd have preferred a new entrance with more elegance. The cube seems like a gimmick to me, but worse yet the rest of the facade design seems clunky.  I don't want to vilify this architect, or say he's not up to the job. But because this is Powells, the stakes are higher. So many of us consider this store a kind of second home. Is this design up to snuff?

Here's one more idea to leave you with, or perhaps Powell's if they're listening: how about some type of grassroots design competition to determine the look of a new store?

Doorknobs and Stained Glass:Visiting Old Portland

Several years ago (back when he was on NBC) I remember David Letterman reading a Top 10 list of rejected Jeopardy! categories. Along with titles like "Things That Ooze" and "Things That Only I Know", I remember one of the fake categories was "Doorknob Lore".

Bret Hodgert would probably do well at that last category. He's the proprietor of a new architectural hardware and salvage shop on Southeast Division and 41st I visited a few days ago. Like vintage clothing, Portland has long been a place where you could find lots of fun old architectural items, whether it's at The Rebuilding Center, Rejuvenation, or even some of the older hardware stores. Hodgert's place isn't nearly as big as some, but it's a fun place to browse - almost like a museum of century-old lamps, doors, chandeliers, windows and, yes, doorknobs.

Hodgert has a secret he won't tell: where he gets all these pristine Victorian and other old home hardware and housewares. His one tip-off is that he regularly visits towns in the Midwest, where there are sadly countless old homes in disrepair with valuable old parts most likely to end up at the dump, unless somebody like him rides in to the rescue.

One of my favorites in the shop is a stained glass piece with grapes in the center. Surely it's a religious thing more than a drink thing - water into wine and such. But some winery really ought to shell out the bucks for this piece - it's gorgeous, and would make an ideal centerpiece at somebody's tasting room.