The OHSU Knight Cancer Research Building by SRG Partnership
The Portland Business Journal reported that Zoom+ will move its headquarters from Hillsboro into the Pearl West office building.
The Willamette Week asked “Has Portland City Hall Learned Its Lesson About Parking Spaces Raising Rents?”, in light of a proposal by the Bureau of Planning & Sustainability to add minimum parking requirement in the Northwest District.
The Oregonian wrote about Seattle Mayor Ed Murray’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda, which “may provide Portland a blueprint“.
After an Early Assistance request for a “proposed 5-story apartment building with underground parking” at 1332 N Skidmore, the Portland Mercury looked into whether the Overlook Restaurant might make way for redevelopment. According to the newspaper the development would include “248 units and 75 underground parking spaces, and [be] ‘anchored by a corner restaurant.'”
Writing in the Business Tribune, architecture journalist Brian Libby revealed that Multnomah County had failed to shortlist Pritzker Prize winning architect Rem Koolhaas for the Multnomah County Courthouse.
The Portland Business Journal published new images of the OHSU Knight Cancer Research Building. The university expects to break ground on the project in mid-June.
The 25,000 sq ft New Seasons University Park opened on Wednesday.
Having walked in and around Rem Koohaas’ Seattle Public Library several times and visited the environs of the Central China TV headquarters in Beijing (aka “the big underpants” by the Chinese) I was struck by the sterile environment they created for pedestrians and users. (Tour the base of the Seattle Public Library on Google Earth street view.) They are giant sculptures, monuments to their designer’s aesthetics. Yes, much of Portland’s architecture is bland but the designers of its buildings, public spaces and landscapes have created a pleasant ground-level urban environment in the central city. Visitors from China, the home of much of the world’s most famous starchitecture, have often remarked to me how much they like the street level urban design of Portland.
Robert I agree with you regarding Koolhaas and other monumental designers. Portland is fine grained and we attempt to put the pedestrian above all else–and we should even more so with such a public building as a courthouse. We need to resist the peer pressure to have a “starchitect” building to get us “on the map”. We should quietly go about being a place a values not monuments. Look around, we seem to be attracting quite a bit of attention without one of these buildings. Moreover, Government is under a very hostile microscope on how it spends money these days. Can you imagine the attacks if the new courthouse leaked water, for instance, as Koolhaas’ Seattle Library did? Yes we should incent and strive for great design but only if it responds to the Portland context. And we should be supporting local firms who employ the very people paying taxes that will pay for this building. I still am dismayed Portland hired Seattle artists to do the installations along the new streetcar line on the eastside. We have much talent here in our city–many other cities hire them. We should too.