A.E. Doyle and tearing down Portland’s past
Over at the valuable Portland Architecture blog, which helps keep the city’s designers and planners on their toes, Brian Libby has started a fascinating conversation that’s well worth checking out. It’s about the flap in little upscale Dunthorpe over its school board’s desire to tear down the 1920 Riverdale Grade School and replace it with something fresh and contemporary. Libby and a long string of commenters have created a stimulating conversation on just what historic preservation means — on why it’s important, how old buildings can be transformed for new purposes, when it might be OK to replace a good old building, what a historical presence in architecture means to a community. So far, the consensus seems to be: Keep the building, remodel it for modern needs, make it green, add on if necessary. Well, that’s the consensus on the Portland Architecture blog. It still doesn’t seem to be the consensus on the school board.
Beyond the general interest that Art Scatter has in architecture and planning, I find this conversation interesting because the school was designed by A.E. Doyle, Portland’s most significant architect of the early 20th century, and the subject of a good new historical biography by Philip Niles, Beauty of the City, which I happen to have reviewed for The Oregonian: You can read the review, due for print publication this Sunday, here, on Oregon Live. Central Library, the Benson Hotel (and the Benson Bubblers), the Meier & Frank department store (now Macy’s), the Reed College campus, Multnomah Falls Lodge — Doyle’s stamp is all around the city and its environs, and Niles’ book helps explain both how that came to be and why it’s a good thing.
So, save the Riverdale School? My gut says yes, even though I’ve never been inside it, and, frankly, I don’t know in what ways the school board thinks it inadequate. Maybe its members know something none of the rest of us do. But from its pictures it looks like a classic old building, with great light and a simple layout that would seem easy to reconfigure — and even add on to, if necessary. Yes, it might need seismic upgrading, but hundreds of buildings have gone through that: Drive through the little Oregon wine country town of Dundee, on the way to McMinnville, and you’ll see a school that’s been successfully and sensitively earthquake-proofed in the recent past.
I’m aware that a community is a dynamic thing and that preservation, wrongly applied, can be romantic mummification. I can understand the frustration that Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe must have felt over the weight of history pressing down on design in Europe, shackling it to the past. But that’s hardly the case in the United States, and especially not in a region as young and still raw-boned as the Pacific Northwest. We’re building all sorts of new stuff (far too much of it, unfortunately, in the sprawling subdivision cookie-cutter style of the rest of the nation) and we don’t have a lot of history to give away.
So weigh in on this thing. Check out Libby’s link at Portland Architecture: It’s a lively example of what can happen at the intersection of design, politics, money and community involvement. And give Niles’ book about Doyle a spin. For anyone interested in how cities grow (and this city in particular), it’s a good read.
November 28th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
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November 29th, 2008 at 10:09 am
Your post coincides with an article in today’s NY Times about developers circumventing historic preservation designation by preemptively stripping buildings of their distinctive features.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/arts/design/29landmarks.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper
On an evening tour of The Nines shortly after the hotel opened, I gazed across Pioneer Courthouse square to A.E. Doyle’s Pacific Building. From that perch on the eighth floor of the Meier & Frank Building (another Doyle design), I saw the Italianate structure from a new angle (literally) and was struck by the perfection of its proportions, which I hadn’t paid much attention to from ground level.
November 29th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Thanks, MTC, for the pointer to the Times piece, which I actually read (after your tip) on dead trees. It’s good journalism, and I hope it does some good. The case in Dunthorpe seems similar but a little different: It’s the school board, not a developer, that wants to tear down and build fresh. Seems like there’s ample room to rethink this process here. That means preservationists are going to have to sit down and honestly listen to the school board on why it thinks the students’ needs can’t be met in the Doyle building. And it means the school board is going to have to honestly listen to preservationists’ suggestions on how those needs can be met while maintaining the structure, or at least the shell, of the current building. And this is one of those rare cases where money isn’t the primary issue or obstacle. Dunthorpe, even in today’s economic climate, is sitting pretty, and the district actually has the money at hand.
(Although I usually side with the preservation argument, by the way, my voting record, as the politician-trackers like to say, isn’t 100 per cent. I’ve been known to declare that the Portland Art Museum should have blown up its Masonic Temple annex and started fresh: The gallery spaces carved out of it are a huge disappointment. Probably better, though, to have gutted the building and built a completely new interior contained by those graciously fortress-like exterior walls. Of course that would have cost more, and the museum would have given up its cash-cow ballrooms.)
November 30th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Bob, I just read your review of Niles’ book, not online, but actually in the hard copy of the newspaper (I know I’m just so yesterday about wanting to get ink on my fingers). I was struck by this graf: “On that 1906 European tour Doyle admired the classical verities of Wren and Palladio and simple craftsman cottages, and LOOKED IRRITABLY ON OVERLY ELABORATE STYLES [emph mine]. This was of course Balanchine’s view of classical ballet and it’s significant that in the new world, rather than the old, he was able to strip classical technique of mannerism and artificiality and make it functional for a contemporary point of view in a society younger by 200 years than the art form.
The review was illustrated with the central library, a wonderful shot of that beautifully proportioned reading room–if there is any architectural site that demands a sense of proportion for its users, surely it is a library.
December 4th, 2008 at 12:23 am
Wasn’t it in Japan where they would rebuild their important buildings every twenty years, basically replacing them with replicas of themselves? Maybe that’s the solution for the Dunthorpe folk, thereby allowing something to be brand new and the same…
December 7th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
I’ve always been intrigued by the sheer volume of Doyle’s output (or at least his office’s) and the swiftness with which he changed the face of Portland (in so few years): here’s a little musing on that: http://www.portlandspaces.net/blog/the-burnside-blog/2008/10/8/design-by-benevolent-dictation
As far as Dunthorpe building goes, I’d have to say even as a minor piece in the Doyle-sphere why not leave it? This is a case where Form should support Function—how’s about some adaptive reuse? Bob, you’re right, serviceable plan and generous light make this a very workable building. Not to mention the carbon footprint and credit and heaven one might save if that very sustainable brick were preserved.
T
December 19th, 2008 at 12:29 am
[...] it just bulled ahead and did what it wanted to do. Noblesse, you might say, without the oblige. We wrote about this a while back. Now, we can’t think of any response better than those from Scatter friends Tim [...]