IN 1983 A PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE at Columbia University, Kenneth Frampton, published a groundbreaking essay called "Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance" which reacted to the Postmodern architecture of the time (think of our own Portland Building by architect Michael Graves from 1982) and encroaching urban sprawl. Instead of deriding new buildings that unwittingly mocked native or foreign building traditions by their superficial quotation of these original forms, the essay provided a vision for architecture and cities that eschewed the phenomenon of cultural universalization, superficiality, mediocrity, consumer society, and sentimentality by arguing that site, geographic location, topography, and structure (amended by Frampton in 2003 to include sustainability) should only drive architectural design.
Needless to say, we are in a world more complicated and yet similar to the one Frampton wrote about in 1983. Portland is a veritable laboratory in building design strategies of the early twenty-first century, displaying both a desire in its new buildings to reflect the local history and traditions and the competing desire to be relevant in the world at large (see Field Guide spread below). Portland is at a fascinating point in its history - evincing the tension between national and regional, trendy and provincial, progressive and reactionary, modern and traditional, impersonal and personal, contextual and extraordinary. There is little doubt that Portland can be regarded as a city with more of a future than a past. We are told that the twenty-first century will likely be the century of Portland. As the city grows (projected to go from today's roughly half a million to 842,000 in 2042 by the Oregon Office for Economic Analysis), there will be new development, taller buildings, and densification in all of the city's quarters and neighborhoods, per the existing zoning laws girded by the Urban Growth Boundary.
There is a question on a lot of minds though: will this slightly sleepy, hippie, trendy, (arts and) crafty, "weird," tatooed, alternative, drizzly, bikeable, laid back, still overwhelmingly racially white, secluded, frugal, sustainably-focused, young city survive in any form that will be recognizable in 50 years? And yet can one be nostalgic for a place that has as modest a past as Portland's? And while the city has been placed in the spotlight in the press of late for its progressive tendencies, if we were to put Portland on the couch for a second, are Portlanders the ones most afraid of what the city will become in order to densify?
Whatever your answer, here's a followup: are Portlanders happy with what they've got in their city architecturally, or do they want to distinguish their city via its architecture, as it has as a center for food, wine, sustainable industry, and all the other design fields? Or, is architectural distinction actually against what Portland is about in terms of democracy, livability, and most pointedly, adaptive reuse? How important is it to Portlanders that their city has an international profile based on progressive ideals for architectural design? Do they or do they not believe that architecture itself has a bearing on the livability of a city, beyond the street facade? Right now perhaps the answer has yet to be decided definitively.
Correspondingly, in terms of the recent built image of Portland, one can ask whether curator-developers like Randy Rappaport, builder of the Belmont Street Lofts and the Clinton Condominiums, are a bellwether of the future, or an aberration, taking momentary advantage of a brief economic upswell and cultural homogeneity to place well-behaved architectural modernism into an urban context (with designs overwhelmingly dominated by one architectural firm, Holst Architecture). And on the other extreme, are developers who, in the name of the market, make "contextual" buildings that they think others want to live in, instead of buildings that are interesting and bold (see "The Trads," in Field Guide spread below), dominating the future of "the city that plans?" Frampton's view in the essay disapproves of the re-use of forms peculiar to their location, the "context;" ie. the building next door to you has a cornice, therefore, the new building you are building must have one also; or the first log cabin in the pacific northwest had a pitched roof, therefore we must use a pitched roof on this new building.
It's clear Frampton would argue that quoting these traditional forms out of context or outright copying of existing vernacular forms is a fatal flaw and reflects an overly "sentimental," (perhaps even fraudulent) way of addressing our place in history, our layer of activity in the city, and our technological sophistication. But there's no doubt that we are all very emotionally linked to the city and its fabric. In line with Frampton's recommendations, couldn't the climate here could be an incredible generator of built form? Where are the houses that dramatize how they channel rainwater to bioswales? And the techniques of sustainability haven't impacted buildings on an urban level yet - what if a new building's method of energy creation became its defining visual feature - the angle and number of solar panels defining the shape of a new office or residential building, oxygen and vegetable-generating vertical gardens creating a tower's form? The regional has the potential to be Portland's salvation, if boldness is something desirable, and we're willing to take Kenneth Frampton's recommendations on how to be 'critically' regional.
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