Design advocates: Rec center leaves something to be desired
Daily Journal of Commerce
by Alison Ryan
04/09/2007
The north façade of Yost Grube Hall’s design for Portland State University’s rec center drew praise from members of the Portland Design Commission during a design advice session last week, but commissioners said plans left the building’s other three sides neglected.
“I don’t see them as having as healthy a dialogue with the public street and the passersby,” commissioner Tim Eddy said Thursday.
The project, which YGH won the right to design in a fall competition, would bring a combination of a recreation center, classrooms, retail spaces and offices to the site of the existing Portland Center for Advanced Technology (PCAT) building at Fifth and Sixth avenues and Montgomery and Harrison streets. The rec center, which would sit at the southern edge of the Urban Center and Plaza, when completed would mark a final piece in making a fully active public plaza.
Thursday, students stretched across the plaza’s low brick walls to read, sip coffee at outdoor bistro tables or charge to classes in the neighboring College of Urban and Public Affairs and Distance Learning Center. Once every 15 minutes or so, the streetcar chugged through. Bus stops dotted neighboring streets; a light-rail line eventually will shuttle along Southwest Fifth and Sixth avenues, too.
The space, on one of the city’s first sunny days, was vibrant, active. But the blank blue wall of the PCAT building was the one real void in the buzz.
The rec center, its designers expect, would put action where there’s none. Expansive use of glass, framed by brick and concrete, would let people in the urban plaza peek at what’s happening above. Recreational features – like the pool, a rock wall and basketball courts – would mean a seven-day-a-week building for the plaza.
“This building,” design commission chairman Lloyd Lindley said, “is going to be hugely active and kinetic.”
But three of the four sides, commissioners said, have work left to be done. Nels Hall of Yost Grube Hall told the commission that the design’s non-plaza sides – largely brick, with windows peeping through – make an effort to express the building’s wide range of uses and to create views in and out that express those uses.
While commissioners said they respected how the building’s many uses would have necessary effects on design, they said they’d like to see more of the activity-making of the north façade carried through to the other sides.
“It doesn’t really turn its back ... but it’s certainly a different attitude,” Eddy said of the design on the other sides.
Financial considerations also had an impact on the commission’s conversations. The project could be as many as six stories – but whether the two extra floors top the center depends on money.
With campus land at a premium, the commission urged the team to make the most of its site.
“This is a building that can spread its shoulders,” Eddy said. “This is a site that can support a lot of programming.”
It’s also a site that when developed would finish PSU’s long-planned gathering space. Completion of the plaza, said Will Dann, a principal at Thomas Hacker Architects, which designed the College of Urban and Public Affairs, was meant to be phased, with the recreation center as its completion.
Dann said he hadn’t seen and couldn’t react to the designs YGH presented last week. But success in creating an active space, he said, is tied to elements such as the ground-level permeability of the plaza buildings. The public, he said, should be able to walk right through the plaza and into the rec center and end up at the bus stop on Southwest Harrison Street.
“The interior of the building becomes part of the circulatory system of the entire campus,” Dann said, “and that opportunity is there at PSU.”
Extra-campus opportunities also exist. Gerding Edlen Development Co. is planning the 1700 SW Fourth, a 16-story mixed-use condo and retail building on Southwest Fourth Avenue that developers expect to be the beginning of big things in the areas surrounding PSU. Gerding Edlen also controls the nearby Jasmine Tree block, where a 17-story condominium tower and new urban plaza are planned. With the Gerding Edlen projects, the PSU rec center, the addition of new transit and existing pedestrian malls and pocket parks, Damin Tarlow, Gerding Edlen development manager, said, the area is ripe.
“In retrospect,” he said, “I think people are going to go, why the hell didn’t we (develop) here.”
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