What I would suggest is walking through the plazas and IMAGINING what those old empty Modernist buildings might be filled with that would animate these spaces. The transparencies, proportions, elevations, etc are really quite lovely. For instance, wouldn’t it be amazing to fill them with Jordan Schnitzer’s print collection? I simply feel there has been an absence of imagination — indeed, absence of any effort at all — to reinvision them. But woe is the space that does not conform to stock pro formae!

OK. “Atrocious.” I would defend it with one image: The back of the pedestrian stucco condo unit (I suppose they are condos and I use “pedestrian” instead of some firmer and more negative adjective just because I’m making a case for “atrocious” and don’t want to defend something like “butt-ugly”) that faces the upper reaches of Lovejoy, quite close to the fountain, with the first couple of floors of its parking garage, which would be bad enough, except they reach a whole new level of awful by virtue of their metal bars over the windows. So you sit in Lovejoy Park and have the experience of “prison.” Nothing else is quite that bad, though I’d argue that “diffidence” isn’t quite it. The building owners/designers totally disregarded the fountains.

I plead not guilty to the sin of New Urbanism (I’ve criticized Leon Krier on the blog before, for example, specifically the post after your interview with Fregonese), though the movement has done one important thing: encouraged human scale. In the case of South Auditorium, I would have been just fine with 6 towers arranged just so in the superblocks around the fountains. That WOULD have been diffident, each giving the other space, and it might have been possible to encourage more interaction with the parks from the rest of the city. Surrounding them with townhouses, I agree, creates exactly the same problem that we have now — limited access/visibility. So I suppose I’m coming down on the side of the SOM/Le Corbusier vision after all, minus the all clutter. In your presentation, you (or maybe Professor Abbott) projected a photograph of the original plan, and though I have serious reservations about it (”sterile”), as just one piece in the multifarious city, it would have been interesting and the fountains/parks/plazas would have had room to breathe and invite more performance.

But, before we get lost in argument, let me get a little more personal: your Halprin journey has been an incredibly interesting one to watch for me, from your first stories int he paper to this event, and it’s opened my eyes to so many facets of Portland history, American culture, urban and landscape design, and much more. So any differences of interpretation we may have for me are cushioned by gratitude for the ride.

I actually disagree that the spaces are “atrocious.” Too many people today want to overlay New Urbanism fashions of florists and bank machines on every corner. I find the landscape and buildings’ mutual diffidence toward one another to be one of the more charming aspects of the district. The trick would be finding a use or a delicate intervention to animate them with a few more people. But the recent and current owners so far have shown little creativity. I have no idea what kinds of returns they’re seeking, but imagine if their proformae could be served by small creative firms or studio spaces not reliant on traffic. Before bulldozing and surrounding the plazas in townhouses, why not at least TRY to imagine how they could remain pleasant diversions rather than somebody’s front yards.