See-through skylines
Thursday, April 27, 2006
DYLAN RIVERA
The Oregonian
T he thicket of buildings beginning to emerge along Portland's South Waterfront will soon include some of the tallest towers in the state. Yet developers and city planners hope they won't entirely block the Mount Hood and river views for residents and passers-by on the west side of Interstate 5.
It's a seemingly contradictory goal to build taller buildings yet make them less visible on the skyline. But Portland isn't the first to attempt a see-through, high-rise district, and it hopes to learn lessons from projects elsewhere.
The watchword tossed around by planners, architects and activists is "permeability" -- an ability to see through the development, even if only intermittently, said Troy Doss, with the Planning Bureau.
Permeability doesn't just mean protecting the view from a single lookout, such as a particular view of Mount Hood, Doss said. It's about trying to avoid uniform rows or "canyons" of buildings, instead allowing sunlight, wind and a variety of view angles between towers, he said.
"The permeability is trying to get at thinner buildings, buildings that aren't occupying an entire block."
But can the city build a multi-billion-dollar group of high-rises and still allow bystanders on Marquam Hill to see that there's a river on the other side of the neighborhood? Will runners and walkers along a new waterside trail be able to see Marquam Hill to the west?
"Maybe" and "sometimes" might be the answers, at least for now. Like a row of dominoes, the buildings may seem like an impermeable wall from some vantage points, but there should be gaps visible between the towers from other angles, Doss said.
"The fact is, these buildings are going to be visible," Doss said. "People are going to see them. But have we taken a strong stab at making them thinner, trying to establish view corridors? Yes."
Efforts to protect views and avoid the "wall of buildings" effect date at least to early 20th century Manhattan, said Ethan Seltzer, director of the Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University. In the 1970s, Portland was a pioneer in protecting corridors for landmark views, such as the vista of Mount Hood from Washington Park.
The issue of permeability focuses on ways to build with the same amount of square footage, but with a thinner profile, Seltzer said. The Montgomery Park office building, for example, hulks over Northwest Portland with nine floors each measuring 78,000 square feet -- almost equal to two downtown city blocks.
The Unico U.S. Bancorp Tower, by contrast, stands much thinner, rising 43 stories with about 19,000 square feet per floor, according to a guide published by the Building Owners and Managers Association.
Both buildings contain about 750,000 total square feet.
"It's all about the idea that it's better to go up thin and higher, rather than squat and somewhat lower," Seltzer said.
The thin "point towers" of Vancouver, B.C., first inspired discussion of the permeability concept, Seltzer said.
Like Portland, Vancouver has some protected view corridors from public points around the city, said Larry Beasley, planning director for the city of Vancouver. In its waterfront high-rise neighborhoods, the city has banned development at the end of streets that terminate by the water, he said.
"In many cities, there will be a building at the end of the street," Beasley said. "In our case, we like to have the street ends open and we try to set the buildings back a little from the street ends."
In Portland's South Waterfront, planners extended the city's historic street grid pattern through the development's first phase, all the way to the Willamette River. That is intended to make sure the "street ends," to borrow Beasley's phrase, offer clear views from Marquam Hill, down the city streets, to the river.
The good and bad
Permeability was praised last week at a Portland Design Commission meeting, which was reviewing the waterfront's second condo tower that's supposed to reach the area's maximum 325-foot height. Block 38, as it is known, will rise just south of the elliptical-shaped John Ross condominiums rising in the area.
"The way this whole assemblage is coming together is going to be a very livable place," said Lloyd Lindley, a landscape architect and member of the commission.
A representative of the Corbett-Terwilliger Lair Hill Neighborhood Association vehemently disagreed. The east-west view corridors follow streets and sidewalks, so anyone whose house in Lair Hill sits back from the street would see nothing but buildings, said Jim Davis, land-use chairman for the association.
"If you're 15 degrees off of 90, what you see is a solid wall of buildings," Davis said. "This is going to be an inhumane development."
As far as urban neighborhoods go, the South Waterfront will have more light and air than many places, Design Commission members said. Even a 75-foot tall building casts shadows across a street, one commissioner noted.
With almost 250 feet separating the tallest sections of Block 38 from the John Ross, commission members said they felt confident residents will be able to see through the two, and the coterie of buildings growing up in the area. Both offer slender towers above retail-and-courtyard oriented pedestals, which commissioners said would offer plenty of human-scale, street-level activity.
Beasley, the Vancouver planner, said that natural features peeking through a high-rise neighborhood give people a sense of place.
"Even if it's a glimpse, even if it's only for a moment, you're always going to have a memory and an experience of the city which is in its setting," he said, "as opposed to a city that becomes completely closed off from its setting."
Dylan Rivera: 503-221-8532;
dylanrivera@news.oregonian.com
http://www.oregonlive.com/business/o...580.xml&coll=7
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Now I have to figure out if they have public stock.
you never go anywhere without your camera do you? 
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