May 22, 2005

Fire Station 1 And The Story Of Architecture

Why One Proposal Worked And The Others Didn't

In today's Sunday Oregonian, architecture columnist Randy Gragg examines why Thomas Hacker architects won the design competition for the Station 1 & Administration Building Project.

But as one of the competition jurors, architect George "Bing" Sheldon put it in a post-vote interview, "Nobody fell over and said 'Hacker is the one.' " Hacker merely delivered the two bottom-line basics, Sheldon said: "a compelling program and a piece of architecture."

While that indicates that the design jury didn't zero in on the Hacker proposal as hearilty as we did, Sheldon's descriptions of the three proposals seem to be rather largely consistent with our own. He says of the Hacker proposal that it "presented a concept that served the firefighters well", of the Hennebery/Eddy and Emmons proposal that "the architecture highly unresolved", and of the Allied Works proposal that it didn't show "much understanding -- or much interest -- in the station's technical needs."

(That last quote, we should be clear, is Gragg describing what Sheldon said, whereas the previous two were Gragg directly quoting Sheldon.)

Also in Gragg's piece is a bit about the public process for the project, about which we said after the pubic presentations Gragg likely would have something to say. That was mainly because we were standing there when he was asking project manager Connie Johnson (of the Bureau of General Services) about that very subject.

The competition's manager, Connie Johnson, said a public vote wouldn't be meaningful given that the building's many technical demands extend far beyond public taste. True enough. But design competitions can be about far more than selecting designers for buildings: They can also create public excitement about architecture. You could feel the drama evaporate in City Hall when Johnson told the audience the winner had already been selected.

Which got us to thinking late last night about just how a layman's public connects to proposals for new architecture and design. Here's our own layman's take on how to judge such things: Before anything else, understand the story a proposed piece of architecture is telling.

Looking at the three proposals for this project as the examples, it's clear that each one told its own unique story. For us, the reason the choice was so starkly clear is that the story for this site needed to be non-fiction, and only Thomas Hacker Architects delivered a non-fiction story.

Using the approach of finding the story in a piece of architecture could help explain the mixed feelings the City has about the Portland Building, for example. We love the story told by the building's architecture, but arguably that story falls upon the spectrum running between fiction and non-fiction at the wrong point.

Which means it's not necessarily that anyone is saying that the fictional tales told by Allied Works and Hennebery/Eddy and Emmons didn't have clearly compelling elements to them. It's just that (as we argued, and apparently as the design jury recognized), the site first and foremost needed to be a functional headquarters fire station. That was the site's requisite non-fiction story.

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