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This commentary was in today's Oregonian:


PORTLAND ARCHITECTURE
Wednesday, January 03, 2007

A rising question of character and livability

N ews about the proposed condominium tower on Oak Street in downtown Portland has focused on the Portland Development Commission's questionable appraisal dealings with developer Trammell Crow.

But long after that controversy is forgotten, the tower itself -- a stark, right-angled behemoth -- will live on. So Portlanders must look beyond transitory financing concerns and ask themselves a question: How do the Oak Street tower and the ever-growing number of these look-alike glass high-rises affect downtown's character and livability?

First, some history. In the 1930s, leaders of Germany's architectural Bauhaus movement immigrated to the United States. Influenced by Marxist theory, they designed buildings that were rigorously utilitarian. Via "the flat roof and the sheer facade" walls that were "thin skins of glass or stucco," and exteriors that were "completely free of applied decoration," wrote critic Tom Wolfe, Bauhaus structures sought to "reject all things bourgeois" and obliterate any "manifestation of exuberance, power, empire, grandeur, or even high spirits and playfulness."

In the decades that followed, in Portland and elsewhere, the Bauhaus ethic spawned countless of these sheerly functional buildings. Our downtown teems with them: the Fifth Avenue Building, Standard Plaza, Portland Medical Center, Harrison Square, even the heralded 200 Market Building.

At the dawn of the 21st century -- as proved by Oak, Benson and Eliot Towers and other new downtown high-rises -- architects still render obeisance to Bauhaus' rigidly mechanical functionality.

But is functional all a building should be? Look at these structures. They're sterile, bland, impersonal and -- in their geometric, cookie-cutter uniformity -- utterly forgettable.

Before Bauhaus, architects regarded buildings not as mere shelters, but as art. Their work sought to convey the fundaments of a nation, culture or religion -- to transmit, as Leo Tolstoy wrote, "the highest and best feelings to which man has risen." To this end, architects employed imaginative, ornamental features like pilasters, cornices, balustrades, friezes and cartouches. At its best, their work forged a tasteful balance between rococo ostentation and stark utility.

Portland's downtown area boasts many such buildings. The Ambassador Condominiums feature a stately brick exterior, bay windows and recurring decorative motifs. Two old hotels -- the Governor and Benson -- have glazed terra-cotta facades and ornately designed roofs. The Art Deco-style Charles F. Berg building, colored in black, aqua and a smattering of actual gold, teems with metal scrollwork and spiraled engravings. The Italian Renaissance-style Pioneer Courthouse and U.S. Custom House manifest structural gravitas and seriousness of civic purpose. And the Pearl District's Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center -- a restored warehouse with gracefully arched windows -- marries simple elegance to Industrial Age solidity and easily outclasses the antiseptic towers that dominate that neighborhood today.

The bottom line: Buildings define much of a city's character. Those that are sheerly functional beggar the human spirit. Those that convey charm, beauty and uniqueness enrich it.

For Portland to be a great city, its buildings must be more than ascetic glass boxes. In the future -- as in architectural eras past -- those buildings must seek to impart the nobility, the complexity and the beauty of mankind.


Richard F. LaMountain, a former editor at Conservative Digest magazine, is a Portland freelance writer.