Cocktailhag, the blog

Gilding the lily

I’ve lived on the South Park Blocks for a total of ten years, longer than anywhere I’ve lived in my adult life, and for good reason.  My front yard consists of a dozen blocks of parks, planted with neat rows of elms planted in the 1890′s, some so tall that they are higher than my 13th floor balcony.  As the City Beautiful movement took off after the turn of the century, the North end of the Park was lined with many stunning landmarks: Pietro Belluschi’s graceful 1933 Portland Art Museum, Frederick Fritch’s monumental 1926 Masonic Temple (now the North Wing of the museum), a half dozen churches from Gothic to Art Deco, and quietly dignified brick apartment buildings of the period.  The southern blocks remained lined with stately old (for here, anyway) houses on large lots up until after World War II; CHNN World Headquarters is in a 15-story apartment tower that was built in 1950 on the full-block site of four of them.

After the Vanport flood of 1949, which washed away the instant city of Vanport, built to house shipyard workers during the war, Vanport College began looking for a new location and ended up here, now named Portland State.  Of course, the 1950′s were, at least architecturally, kind of an unfortunate time to start building a new university.  Block after block of the neighborhood was leveled over the next couple of decades to be replaced with brown, squatting heaps, most of which contained a highly visible parking element, none of which had fronts, in the traditional sense of the term, and nearly all of which were built in that lovely riot-proof style that blighted so many campuses and downtowns during that era.  Did I mention the dreary concrete skybridges?  Did I need to?

Well, time marches on, and a new late 80′s wing of the Millar Library facing the park is both glassy and traditional, its concave facade elegantly encircling a heritage tree, and the Simon Benson house was moved here, bringing back a trace of the park’s once-residential character, but nowhere on this campus does one ever feel that they are in the midst of Oregon’s largest University.  The only buildings that convey any sense of permanence and traditional academia are the old Lincoln High School and a former grade school, Shattuck Hall, both built long before the college arrived.   The good news I thought was that, as 60′s and 70′s buildings are wont to do, many of them began falling apart; they were as leaky, dated, inaccessible, and earthquake-prone as they looked, and the state legislature a few years ago decided to do something about it.  (Those were the days…)

And they wonder why Americans shun science....

The bad news was that they decided to “preserve” buildings that ought to have been torn down, preferably at the expense of the “architects” who designed them.  The science building, which lacks any personalized moniker, probably not for lack of trying, is a case in point.  When fences went up around this grotesque monstrosity last summer, my heart leapt.  As hideous buildings go, this one had everything.  A loading dock far more impressive than its front entrance (which was not at the front, of course), a dark, spooky outdoor walkway along one side that boasted low, fibrous, stringy suspended ceilings and a plethora of cobweb-rich exhausts, and more brown than you’d expect to encounter at a sewage outfall…  the brick, the cheap sheet metal mansard roof-like things, even the glass, all the color of a skid mark.  Worse, its low profile was clearly an unconscionable waste of land in this high-density era, and I thought that the thing would surely be tipped over like a superannuated strip mall, with even less lament.  After all, just last year they tipped over a blue (!) tile tilt-up hellhole a few blocks away to replace it with something that, though not too cute, at least wasted less space and wasn’t, well, blue.  But it was not to be.

You see, architects today, or at least the ones that grabbed for this commission to avoid having to do more useful work at a burrito cart, decided that the historic beauty of the 70′s must not only be preserved for future generations, (as inspiration or warning, I can’t be sure…) and wanted to make sure the science building would endure, perhaps to make their work look better.   Why not add a bunch of erector-set looking steel all over the outside?  Couldn’t hurt.  Well, as the pictures show, yes it could.

Of course, maybe I’m jumping to conclusions; as the singularly untalented yet boundlessly arrogant Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture dismissively replied, “Wait ’till it’s finished, Pal,” among other things, when I wrote him a derisive letter about a cheesy and typical blob he was building in NW Portland (before he obtained much-deserved notoriety obliterating the “Lollipop Building” on Columbus Circle in New York…), but I doubt it.

Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.