By: Beverly Corbell in Scrolling Box October 16, 2015 2:59 pm
The brains behind the designs of three very different developments planned at the east end of the Burnside Bridge revealed their motivations – and even exchanged a few barbs – during a panel discussion in Northwest Portland on Monday night.
Randy Gragg, executive director of the John Yeon Center for Architectural Studies at the University of Oregon, served as moderator. Panelists included Works Partnership Architecture principals Carrie Strickland and Bill Neburka, Skylab Architecture principal Jeff Kovel and Guerrilla Development principal Kevin Cavenaugh.
Each, in turn, talked about the motivations and thought processes behind their designs.
Kovel’s firm is behind the design of a $58 million, 21-story tower under construction on Block 67. The building will hold 20,000 square feet of commercial space and 284 apartments. A lower adjoining structure on lot 76 will have a parking garage for 200 vehicles and be topped with a green, cascading park.
“The two things at the core for me are abstraction and improvisation,” Kovel said. “There is a big musical influence in my life and my work, as well as a real fondness for abstraction, to try to look for different ways, even in the same project, to express an idea.”
Kovel said that inspired the decision to put a park atop the underground parking lot.
“We had a parking lot and thought why not make it a park and lift it up to the bridge level,” he said. “It’s a conceptual link to the wild river bank that existed before the city was formed. We used that as an amphitheater for viewing the city, for stormwater treatment and put our parking below it.”
The Works Partnership project at the Burnside bridgehead, a 10-story mixed-use building on Block 75, also is under construction. Retail space is planned for the ground floor, but Strickland said the upper floors could be used for either apartments or offices.
“It’s a 10-story building with 1,500-square-foot spaces,” Strickland said. “They are cellular spaces and anything can happen at any level.”
Neburka said his team traveled to Chicago to get ideas for the project.
“At the corner of Dearborn (Street) and Jackson (Boulevard) is the city’s tallest masonry building where the bottom walls are eight feet thick, and right across the street is Federal Plaza, the essence of free space, with ephemeral buildings above,” he said. “Our building is about these ideas, and the idea of permanence and history and modernity began to take shape.”
The project talked about most during the night was Cavenaugh’s Fair-Haired Dumbbell. All panelists agreed that it will be the centerpiece of the bridgehead projects because of its conspicuous location. The project is due to receive its final design review this week.
“You got stuck in the throne site, the island in the middle of a traffic pattern in the middle of a development,” Neburka said. “You’re on the main stage and I wonder how that affected your design.”
Cavenaugh’s original design for two six-story, cantilevered buildings joined by elevated walkways raised concerns because it called for an exterior resembling brightly-colored Florentine wallpaper. That plan changed, and now the Regional Arts and Culture Council is working with Cavenaugh to find an artist to create an original design.
But Cavenaugh said he wants the building, the smallest of the three developments at the bridgehead, to pop out to passersby. The exterior design will be “a crazy color,” he said.
“I don’t want people to die, but I do want people to get in little, small fender benders driving by,” he said.
Cavenaugh said his best creativity comes when his thought processes are balanced.
“I had my ass handed to me after the recession and now I want to make sure I balance between right brain work and left brain work and, ideally, the result is something quirky,” he said.
Quirkiness is what Cavenaugh hopes will help him promote the building to design firms, which he’d like to have as tenants.
“Each floor plate is only 4,000 square feet, so it’s ideal for a 10- to 15-person office,” he said. “If my client ends up being design firms, those are design firms who shouldn’t be on the 20th floor of Big Pink, eighth door to the left. They should be in a building like this.”
All of the Burnside bridgehead designs are very different, Neburka said, because there was no master planning process as there was for the South Waterfront District.
But Strickland said that not planning ahead was the point.
“The danger is in developing a multi-block at the same time and there being too much consistency,” she said. “Breaking it down with different developers and different programs – that’s how real cities develop over time.”
After about two hours of discussion, Gragg asked the panelists how they would work together moving forward and what the neighborhood will look like.
“I think you’ll see a lot of people taking pictures of these buildings for a long time to come,” Cavenaugh said.
Gragg also asked panelists to critique each other’s designs, and Strickland obliged.
“We all really do like each other, but before we even started the building we had done so much work on the east side, and I don’t think your building is authentic east side,” Strickland said of Kovel’s design.
Kovel smiled.
“I actually like the view of your building from my building,” he replied.
Strickland also criticized Cavenaugh’s design.
“Maybe you’re putting up a building that is not as important as everyone is expecting it to be,” she said.
The Fair-Haired Dumbbell’s standing as the centerpiece is “the elephant in the room,” Kovel said. Neburka added that the location is “a very, very loaded site.”
But Neburka said organic growth is continually occurring in the Central Eastside and that the Fair-Haired Dumbbell may become something entirely different in 50 or 75 years.
Cavenaugh said that’s OK with him.
“We tend to take ourselves too seriously,” he said. “I think amazing ideas will follow me, and I don’t think I am the pinnacle of ideas.”
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