May 12, 2005

(Updated) Influence-Free Public Views Fire Station 1 Presentations

Jury Scoring Already Completed Prior To Thursday's Event

Note: This post has been updated. Any and all updates appear at the end of the original post.

"The design jury will then decide Monday which of the three teams will reshape Old Town/Chinatown along the Willamette." So said a report in today's Daily Journal of Commerce regarding the design competition for Portland Fire & Rescue's Station 1 & Administration Building Project.

Unfortunately for the rather sizable crowd which showed up for tonight's public presentations of the three proposals, perhaps rather understandably thinking that this was their chance to offer their input towards the jury's deliberations, it turns out not to be true.

According to Connie Johnson of the Bureau of General Services, the jury had already completed scoring the three proposals before tonight's public meeting. It's not that they will make a decision on Monday -- it's that their existing decision will be announced.

Meanwhile, the three proposals indeed are not posted online anywhere, despite Portland's rather useful penchant for making design and development material available in that fashion. Johnson said it never occurred to her. In response to our bringing it up, Amy Miller-Dowell of the Portland Development Commission said she could work to make sure they found their way online, but Johnson indicated it would happen in something like a week.

A little too long a wait, given that the designer has already been chosen and will be announced in four days.

So, in some sense, then, we suppose it doesn't matter that we can't share the design proposals with our readers in the course of making our own final pick amongst the three options. What use would it be to show you all the alternatives when neither my opinion, your opinion, or that of those in attendance at tonight's presentations don't actually factor in anywhere?

(For what it's worth, it's likely that you'll see more about that particular aspect of all of this from Randy Gragg at some point.)

That said, for us the upshot of the three presentations is that it reconfirmed our original sense, but moreso. While we continue to rank the proposals in the same order -- Thomas Hacker Architects, Allied Works, Hennebery Eddy/Emmons -- the first two no longer are nearly tied. In fact, now we place the latter two more or less tied for the bottom.

For us, it's Thomas Hacker Architects' proposal, hands down.

We really do wish we could show our readers the designs, because we're really not all that inclined to try for a methodical transcription of the evening's proceedings. So what follows are more or less (and for lack of a better term) capsule reactions to the three presentations, working backwards, because we want to go into the Hacker proposal last.

Allied Works

Allied Works stressed that their presentation was in part intended to give a sense of how they think about the project. So we found it curious (and, ultimately, more than a little telling) that they spent perhaps the least amount of time amongst the three teams saying anything about the actual functional operations of running a fire station.

Part of the Allied proposal (which, they made sure to explain, was more of a "diagram" than a "design") is leaving the southeast corner of Block 8 (touching Naito Parkway and NW Couch) alone for possible future residential development. One of the impacts of which is a peculiar absence of any substantial training area for the station's fire fighters, an aspect which is heavily present in the proposals from the other two competing design teams.

We're also rather unsatisfied with the apparatus bays (read: the place where the fire engines exit the building) facing onto NW Davis instead of out onto Naito Parkway. It should be noted, however, that Allied pointed out that their design could be rotated, placing the fire station along Naito (rather than along Davis), and the for-the-future residential quarter-block on the northwest corner along First and Davis (rather than at Naito and Couch).

Mostly, we came away from the Allied design -- excuse us, diagram -- feeling as if they were being so conceptual they had lost at least a little of their grip on the functional purpose of the site.

Hennebery Eddy/Emmons

In some sense, it's too bad that the Hennebery Eddy/Emmons proposal is the one we have some of the greatest difficulty with, design-wise. As we said in our previous item, we have a problem with the monolithic and blocky upper floors of the station. It's too bad because this team had some interesting approaches to trying to mimic some of the artifacts of urban design (planned or happenstantial) that already exist throughout the Old Town Chinatown neighborhood.

What put us off during their presentation was an over-reliance on words like "whimsy" and "playful" in a manner that seemed to us a little disconnected from the intent of the site. Some of what they referred to as whimsical or playful seemed to us more like simply cartoonish (we're thinking of some bubble-like windows in particular here).

Maybe this is the point: Hennebery Eddy/Emmons has some really interesting understandings of trying to relate new urban design into the existing fabric. We just didn't feel they translated those ideas, worthy of exploration in and of themselves, into the building.

Thomas Hacker Architects

We went into these presentations favoring this proposal, although with an open mind because the inability to find any of the proposals online made it difficult to make any informed judgments simply from media reports. Nonetheless, we came out of these presentations with the same opinion.

This team stated at the very beginning that they took their design as far as they could for this stage of the game, and that the "next, best step" is the process of engaging the public.

While we suspect that such a thing likely is a requirement for the project no matter who is chosen, only Hacker's presentation make it an explicit point -- one all the more important given the impotence of offering presentations to the public after the jury has already scored the designs.

Of all the teams, only Thomas Hacker Architects spent a substantial time discussing the fact that this will be a functional headquarters fire station, which after all is the single most important aspect of the entire endeavor.

Whatever else one can do with the site, even important considerations such as integrating it into the surrounding neighborhood, nothing about the project makes any sense until and unless you know the place works in the most literal sense.

Neither of the other two teams came anywhere close to the Thomas Hacker team in explaining how their design accomplishes this.

Their explication of how the buildings function as a set of three tools (the toolbox, the house, and the headquarters) perfectly captures what the building needs to do. And, as we said previously, we like the planned connections to the Japanese-American Historical Plaza, and we adore the Hacker people's work on the Urban Center at PSU.

In the end, both Allied Works and Hennebery Eddy/Emmons gave us the impression of having engaged in a kind of exercise in intellectual curiosity. And while we found much of that exercise interesting on that level, only Thomas Hacker Architects make us feel as if someone had sat down to first figure out how to make the place work as a fire station and only then figure out how to make it work as design.

Somewhere out there, the end result of the jury having already scored the proposals exists. In four days time, we'll learn what that end result turned out to be. Unless the jury learned something dramatically different than we learned this evening, the Station 1 & Administration Building Project should go to Thomas Hacker Architects, hands down.

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