Anybody who's taken a look at recent contemporary projects in Portland would find certain repeating stylistic themes based on designer education and groupthink. Now don't get me wrong here. I think there is a burgeoning architectural culture in Portland, with architects having more control over the finished results of projects than in other cities, especially if they are stakeholders and/or instigators of the projects. Larger cities tend to create more complex project delivery teams and scenarios, and purity of authorship, which (let's face it) produces better buildings, tends to become muddled. Luckily, not so in Portland, based on the lack of economy of scale and the high quality of construction in general (believe me, no irony here). In this essay I'm interested mostly in the contemporary infill loft building type, a host of which have been built in the past year. And which are not selling right now, based on a cursory look at all the real estate signs around town, but let's hope that doesn't say anything about the quality of the work. My criticisms to follow shouldn't detract from the hard work lavished on many of these projects by their architects and builders.
...So as I was leading up to, there is groupthink producing a certain kind of design language of which certain themes become fetishized. I'm calling attention here to one of these themes, commonly known as "slats," so that we can interrogate it and possibly understand why, culturally, designers are using these in such multitude.
Any material, used "on the flat" as an exterior facing like siding, or cladding, has a signifying effect in architecture. The material defines the building's relation to its surroundings, the natural world, and speaks about the owner's tastes and financial wherewithal.
With the advent in the twentieth century of the type of wall construction known as the rainscreen system, the facing material of a building was allowed to become an infinitesimally thin veneer over a mostly invisible (but very functional) waterproof membrane. Call the facing material cladding. In its most basic formulation, a rainscreen-type deployment of the cladding allows water behind the cladding itself through "dry" joints (as opposed to "wet" ones filled with caulking), and then allows the water to drain down a cavity between the cladding and the wall and to escape at the bottom of the wall outside again via metal flashing. This way, water doesn't get past the wall, but it does get past the cladding, hence taking the onus off the finish material to be watertight (and allowing it to be really thin, and hence cheaper). The veneer-cladding is [often invisibly] clipped to a non-aesthetic backup wall, consisting of a composite sandwich of sheathing and studs or masonry.
Veneers have been used since the beginning of building construction, but never before this was the wall, the most basic architectural element, so completely decoupled from the aesthetic affect of the building. In effect, our building construction now is "full of air," that is to say, the thick, solid, load-bearing masonry or concrete wall of historic architecture has been outmoded in favor of lighter, cheaper wall systems that have better thermal characteristics, and use metal studs, wood, or lightweight masonry that can be easily assembled. In this scenario the actual load-bearing structure that holds up the building ie. the floors and walls, becomes a third element, a superstructure to hang or clip the walls onto.
The rainscreen is the equivalent of veneering a functional piece of plywood with a high quality birch that is 0.5 mm thick, as is customary with cabinetry these days. None of us are exactly fooled by a veneered piece of furniture into thinking it's made of solid wood, but it does present a handsome, uniform appearance that's perfectly acceptable. The same is true of buildings. And thus the initial attempted affect with this technique was the creation of buildings that looked like prismatic solid objects of a certain material such as stone or metal (when in fact it is covered with a paper-thin-skin). Millions of square feet of corporate architecture from the 1980's through today reflect this technique (creator of many of these works would be my old employer, the brilliant Cesar Pelli).
The European architect Renzo Piano, who began practicing in the 1960's, among others, saw another design potential in the rainscreen. He and others realized that gaps or joints in the rainscreen did not need be denied as much as celebrated, since water was allowed behind anyway. Piano, in the IRCAM project adjacent to the Centre Pompidou in the mid '70's viewed the rainscreen as just a...wait for it... 'screen' that is applied to the exterior of a building, that can be taken off or used intermittently, without any huge effect on its watertightness. Once the realization of the rainscreen's (arguably) ornamental role made people realize that the facing material could be porous, the highlighting of gaps between cladding units could be used as another design technique to create visual interest on a facade. And a rainscreen could have a completely different geometry than the building it is applied onto, and could pull apart from the wall it was clipped to. Cladding truly became clothing that a building could conceivably discard at some point in the future for newer more fashionable vestments.
Which brings us to the Pacific Northwest, and the new clothes progressive architects are wrapping their buildings with, using this contemporary building technique, but arguably not to the fullest. If there were a school of thought in progressive Portland architectural practice, it would be defined by the use of alternating blank areas of facade (default = stucco) with areas of visual interest, most often wood slats, sometimes metal panel. Contemporary design in Portland owes a huge debt to the formal abstraction first brought into architecture by professors of the Bauhaus school in Germany in the early twentieth century during the Modernist revolution in the arts in 1913-1930. During this time architecture was reduced to essentials: pure geometric euclidean forms floating in space, unencumbered by gravity. These forms were related to program (ie. use) of a building and were then deployed (often) repetitively in a fashion that was described at the time as rational. Resulting compositions based on this technique were musical in their push-pull, repetitive, proportional, monochromatic nature. The abstraction of form gave rise to a new type of creativity in architecture, divorced from the learning of historical styles and instead dedicated to the solving of the functional, programmatic problem in a way that was clear, abstract and beautiful without the illogical trappings of the past. The dictates of modernism took a while to catch up with building technology - it's only now a hundred years later that we can build a flat roof that won't leak, make thin-profile metal-framed windows that have desirable thermal characteristics, and build a hovering, light cube that is composed with lightweight studs and sheathing of mostly air (instead of heavy masonry). These design techniques are still in our architecture schools and as an architect, I have to admit that it's more enjoyable to design a building using this vocabulary than thinking about shoehorning a building with a complex program into a historic skin. Also, modern architecture as developed through the latter twentieth century by such practitioners as Steven Holl and non-architects like Richard Serra was very much concerned about spatial perception and experience, phenomenological concerns. Robert Irwin experimented with spatial divisions using the most minimal means.
In Portland there are a bunch of talented, younger architects, some of whom I've met, who are designing using these precepts and concerns, and wood is obviously one material in a building palette (that tends to denote "dark" as opposed to "white"). An argument that I tend to make against a lot of contemporary American architecture as compared to its international brethren is that it's too fussy - there's usually too much going on, and there's needless decorative aesthetic complexity with no performative role. The veritable epidemic of 'slat'-ism following from this tendency that seems to have infected contemporary northwestern architecture of late has me concerned. Horizontal or vertical slats, of varying species of wood - cedar, ipe, etc. are often deployed with abondon. The Belmont Lofts, the 7th and Knott townhomes (by Holst Architecture), the B House and Stump House (by Architecture W), the Williams Five, the Butler Residence (Path Architecture), The Neal Creek Residence (Paul McKean), Lair Hill Condominiums (Rick Potestio), Sum-Thing New Condominiums (Sum Design Studio), Z-Haus (Ben Waechter) all wear their fashionable slats well. Sometimes, in some less skillful projects, repetition does not breed a favorable aesthetic response.
Many architects here will say: that's Portland, that's the Northwest by extension. It's what we do here. Does that mean that every project needs slats in order to be properly Northwestern? I ask, coming from the outside, what do these cladding choices signify? Hopefully something beyond the fact that wood is cheap! Admittedly, wood slats can be found on contemporary projects all over the world. There are some hot projects from South America and Europe that use wood cladding absolutely gorgeously and are able to create beautiful scrims and textures. Well used, repetitive slats have a phenomenological purpose and a indubitable modernist pedigree. And yet here, on your average contemporary project, it just seems to be deployed as a given, without critical use, usually in horizontal format, applied to a cubic shaped building in a format that is purely elevational, sometimes turning the corner, sometimes sheathing the entire building.
At a recent jury at University of Oregon (project for student center at the campus of the Oregon College of Art and Craft, critic David Gabriel, CoLab Architects), a student's project had a vertical wall that was composed of layered wood timbers laminated together (I'm assuming) wrapping around an elevated, levitating public space. It was like a giant glue-laminated beam, and had a heavy, monumental feel, and it was gorgeous. This was taken by some on the jury as a signifier of northwest. Yes, the northwest produces excellent trees for construction and the timber industry has a long history here. But should a student's project which uses layered wood or timber cladding somehow be judged "northwestern" enough? Was it the scale that was appealing, the sheer volume of wood?
Admittedly, there is a certain 'woodiness' to the existing historic buildings of the northwest, because wood is plentiful and affordable as a building material here, and trees are so visible in the landscape. In my office space, there are massive old growth timbers spanning the building, holding the roof up. Does using wood contain an idea of a building reflecting its surroundings back to itself, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery? Well, you have to make the conceptual leap between the dressed plank and the cedar tree adjacent; I'd argue that we can do that pretty easily.
But are materials a true indicator of region anymore? I'd argue not. Couldn't the project be just as pertinent in Maine, or Vermont? Or Switzerland? Or even New Zealand? I can tell you, nobody outside of the Northwest would have assumed that the project was regional to Portland or the Northwest. What I'm looking for is this: what can make Northwestern architecture tick and cool/relevant to the world at large, and yet not lose it soul? I think it boils down to making it performative - make your buildings work with weather and solar patterns. This is sustainability in essence; a building needs to have a certain formal composition to work well in this particular climate, which is very unique for the planet - half mediterranean, half northern forest. I must emphasize to architects here - what you do is on a stage much larger than you think, beyond Portland and its environs. Portland gets written up in the press constantly and people are training their eyes on this place as a leading-edge city. I'd humbly suggest that you push projects more spatially, don't rely on design conceits, and make your buildings take advantage of the kooky weather and solar patterns here.
I'd also argue to my fellow architects that in a rainscreen application, joints can be wide and vary in width too. The rainscreen 'skin' can travel across a building facade, wrapping a building volume that could be rather different (remember, the skin and the wall have been teased apart into separate systems). It can be performative in that it can prevent glare for its inhabitant and provide privacy while still admitting natural light. People need to be able to inhabit the space between the rainscreen and the wall.
I might bring up one project as a postscript that seems to critically interact with its materiality, albeit ironically, and only on its interior. At the Doug Fir Lounge (Jeff Kovel, Skylab) - the log ["from whence wood comes"] is used as an interior lining (non structurally, hence irony) and in one spectacular case the log is disassembled into planks and then re-assembled in one hanging ornamental solid element over the bar - wood slats return to their source material in a brilliant move. Graceful glue-laminated beams arch over our heads and reference perhaps an older modernist pop-aesthetic - I believe these were part of the original structure that Kovel renovated. The stylized, ironic aspect of the wood - referencing to the log cabin of yore, hits a fin-de-siecle note that we [still] respond to with a knowing wink. Along with the vestibule's high tech-shiny ceiling lattice, the space's tinted reflective glass, and chrome midcentury pendant fixtures provide a modern context to enjoy wood as a retro sign of regional proto-history, repurposed.
