PSU specs rec center as bargain basement
The university takes a cut-rate approach for a high-impact project
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
RANDY GRAGG
The Oregonian
Once upon a time, the campus quad was a university's calling card.
Think of John Harvard's statue presiding over Harvard Yard or Thomas Jefferson's domed library anchoring the commons of the University of Virginia.
But today, a university's most important building is its student recreation center. Everybody's gotta have one, from the simply big (the University of Nevada-Las Vegas' palatial, $50 million center now under way) to the architecturally stunning (the University of Cincinnati's newly opened center designed by Pritzker Prize winner Thom Mayne).
Bursting at the seams with new growth and needing to stay competitive in the higher-education marketplace, Portland State University badly needs a new student rec center. It needs to be great, not just for the students, but for the city as a whole. But, instead, PSU is choosing to build its new rec center really cheap and fast.
Last week, Yost Grube Hall Architecture won the preliminary nod for the commission. Maybe the building will be OK. But, frankly, there is little chance it will be great. PSU all but guaranteed it by basing its choice on everything but architecture.
The pressures on this project are great. After many attempts, PSU has only barely stitched the money together for the project, borrowing against a rise in student fees and future revenues from ground-floor retail. The building also is supposed to include classroom space, but that's still contingent on finding a $10 million local match to state higher-ed money. The block on which PSU plans to build the rec center sits between Southwest Fifth and Sixth avenues and Harrison and Montgomery streets at the southern end of the future extended transit mall. MAX tracks are going in soon. Once the new line's electrical system is in, the cost of working around the poles and lines could add as much as 20 percent to the rec center's cost.
To put the project in perspective, consider the building it stands next to, the Urban Center. Completed in 2000, it took three years to design and build. The rec center is twice the size and more complicated, but PSU wants to -- has to, because of the financing window -- build it in 21/2 years.
To do the job, PSU imported a new vice president, Lindsay Desrochers, from the University of California at Merced. With her came an increasingly popular process (in California and elsewhere) for commissioning buildings: design and build with a guaranteed maximum price. Instead of working with an architect to design the building and then soliciting contractors' bids, PSU invited contractors to team with architects to propose a building with a price tag.
The process in and of it itself isn't bad, if done extremely carefully. In the best versions, the client selects three finalists and gives them as much as $100,000 to produce a proposal. A selection jury made up of students and administrators (if the client is a university) plus top design experts from outside then bases its decision on the experience of the firms and equally on the quality of the designs.
That only three teams -- Thomas Hacker Architects, Opsis Architecture and the winning YGH, all from Portland -- bothered to apply for the rec center project tells you most of what you need to know about PSU's process. This in a city with a dozen architecture firms doing major university buildings all over the nation.
The three bids will be released in mid-February.
What was so bad about this process? First, PSU demanded lots of free work. Only the second-place winner gets money, $75,000. The winner gets the job; third place gets skunked. Keep in mind, architecture firms typically spend up to $200,000 of paid staff time going after these jobs.
With the exception of one Portland Development Commission staffer, the jury was made up of PSU administrators and one student. No independent design experts were included. Out of 150 potential points any team could win, 90 went to experience, 50 for the lowest bid, five for sustainable "green" design features and five for "design."
"We anticipated all the firms will give us a superb design," says Ernest Tipton, PSU's campus design and planning manager.
So, just how superb were they?
Thomas Hacker Architects designed PSU's Urban Center, a popular Portland postcard view because of the streetcar running through it. The rec center will share a plaza with the Urban Center. Hacker clearly envisioned it as a kissing cousin, but in a nod to 50 points for the low bid, this cousin came from the proverbial "other side of the tracks." Hacker cloaked the Urban Center in a stately coat of brick from which a body of steel and glass emerges. His rec center design reversed the ensemble with lots of glass and metal -- some of the cheapest metal on the market.
Nice try. He won second place and $75,000.
Opsis went for broke, clearly hoping that an inspiring, even wild design with ambitious green design goals would blow away the competition. Bad move: third place -- no job and no money.
Their design, however, is exciting: an elliptical rec center with the skylit swimming pool on the top floor and a glassed-in winter garden on the ground floor. With everything from on-site microturbine electrical generation to plantings on every roof surface, Opsis aimed for a top-of-the-line Platinum Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating.
YGH won, handily, playing it safe and cheap on every level. The massive building will be almost entirely clad in brick. Three sides will feature long, narrow, horizontal apertures to reduce cooling and heating costs and expensive glazing. The plaza side will be more gracious and open, turning the various sports activities inside into a nighttime theater. The building's sustainability rating will be second-from-bottom LEED silver. As YGH's Nels Hall puts it, "We didn't shoot at targets we can't achieve."
Indeed, YGH is the perfect match for the job: The firm has major experience building fast-track buildings for oil companies in developing nations. Hall and his team will deliver everything they can in this strikingly and unfortunately comparable situation.
PSU is not just a typical university, with a campus removed from the city. It's an urban neighborhood. When the 1948 flood displaced what was then known as the Vanport Extension Center from its original site, the Portland Development Commission quickly bought land to bring it downtown. Nearly 60 years later, with more than 25,000 students, PSU is our best hope to fill the yawning void long separating Portland from other major cities: a serious university.
In short, the new rec center is not just the new campus quad for PSU, it's a calling card for the city, symbolizing our goals ecologically and architecturally. The students and administration -- and the city -- need to take a hard look and ask:
Is this really good enough?
Randy Gragg: 503-221-8575;
randygragg@news.oregonian.com
©2007 The Oregonian
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