Pioneering the Square Randy Gragg and Audrey Alverson
Contents Early History
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A Framework For Success
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Variations in Theme
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A Study of Context
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Paint the Town
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On Will Martin: A conversation with Cameron Hyde
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Early History
Left
Pioneer Courthouse in the foreground with Central School (on the site that would later be occupied by Pioneer Courthouse Square) pictured behind, circa 1875. Courtesy of Library of Congress Archives.
Pioneering the Square | Early History
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The land beneath Pioneer Courthouse Square began its urban life when Daniel Lownsdale, one of the city’s founders, bartered it to Elijah Hill for $25 and a pair of boots. Within a decade, it would become home to Portland’s first public schoolhouse, the largest west of the Mississippi. In 1868, the future square’s neighbor and namesake, Pioneer Courthouse, rose. And in 1883, the city relocated Central School so that renowned journalist, financier, and railroad tycoon Henry Villard could build Portland’s first luxury hotel on the site. Villard built only the foundations before his fortunes fell. What locals dubbed Villard’s Ruins sat untouched for five years until William Ladd, Henry Corbett, and Simeon Reed pledged to finish the building if others would match their contributions. And so began a 6
Pioneering the Square | Early History
tradition of community involvement with the block as 322 local citizens invested in the Portland Hotel Company. In 1890. The hotel’s 326 elegant guest rooms became a destination for posh travelers and Portland’s fashionable set. Gradually, the hotel fell into disrepair, exacerbated by World War II. In 1944, neighboring department store owners Julius Meier and Aaron Frank bought the property in a rumored attempt to prevent another investor from building a competing store. Seven years later, Frank announced the hotel would be razed and replaced with a two-level parking structure for Meier & Frank. Frustrated at the loss of a structure Portland’s citizenry had helped build, protesters called for the block to be reclaimed for public use.
Left
The completed Square, busy with visitors around the time of its opening. Courtesy the Project for Public Spaces.
Right The recently constructed Meier and Frank parking lot, circa 1955. Courtesy of City of
Portland Archives.
A Framework for Success
Left
Finalized plans for the Square. Courtesy Portland State University Library Ernie Bonner Collection.
Pioneering the Square | A Framework for Success
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In 1961, Mayor Terry Schrunk directed the Portland Planning Department to study the site as a focal point for downtown and a symbol of renewal. City planner Lloyd Keefe hired a young architect named Robert Frasca to draw three schemes for the courthouse and the adjacent parking lot. But the city’s private business interests had other ideas. In 1969, the Tacoma-based Briston Corporation banded with Meier and Frank to propose a solution: an 800-car parking garage on the park. In response to the Briston Corporation and Meier & Frank’s proposed garage, Keefe directed his staff to build a model of the garage for the Portland Planning Commission’s review of the proposal. Further armed with studies showing the garage’s impact on traffic and air quality, in January 1970, opponents convinced the commission not only to vote down the garage 10
Pioneering the Square
Top
A panoramic image of the square, circa 2007. Photo by Cacophony.
unanimously, but to endorse the idea that the block should become public space. The garage proposal—and the city planners’ model—can now be seen as a tipping point that led to the 1972 Downtown Plan and the beginning of Portland’s renaissance. The importance of the ‘72 Downtown Plan to the Portland we know now cannot be overstated. Portland’s general postwar suburbanization, the bifurcation of the central city by I-405, and Lloyd Center mall’s success were all triggering the same patterns of disinvestment in Portland’s downtown that were draining the social and economic life of most major American cities. Civic activists and business leaders each imagined potential fixes, but Portland’s downtown plan brought all parties to the table.
They wove simple, clear goals—provide a strong transit system, maintain a system of short-term parking, create a pleasant shopping environment, and encourage renovation of rundown facilities—into a framework of public investments that, in turn, triggered new private investments. For the heart of downtown—at the crossroads of a proposed new transit mall and an East Side light-rail line—the plan identified Goal J: Develop a major city square in the center of the Downtown retail core to provide breathing space, a focal point, and a gathering place.
A Framework for Success
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Variations on a Theme
Left
The opening ceremonies for the Pioneer Courthouse Square on April 7, 1984. Photo courtesy of City of Portland Archives (A2000-020.7).
Pioneering the Square | Variations on a Theme
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In 1975, Mayor Goldschmidt began negotiating deals with major retailers that hinged on city initiatives to build 1,300 parking spaces in two garages on the east and west edges of the newly defined retail core and turn the Meier & Frank parking lot into a major public square. Goldschmidt succeeded in netting a $1.2 million grant from the federal Bureau of Outdoor Recreation to help purchase the land and build the square. But soon a battle emerged over what the future square would be: open public space or a covered attraction with a ticketed entry? In 1978, the city hired local architect Donald Stastny to develop recommendations for the block’s design process. Stastny proposed—and eventually oversaw—Portland’s first national design competition. The 162 firms who applied included many then or soon-to-be internationally renowned designers (among them James Polshek, Michael Graves, Moshe Safdie, Robert Stern, Laurie Olin, and John Jerde). The jury—Pauline Anderson, a member of the Pioneer Courthouse Square Citizens Advisory Committee; Sumner Sharpe, a member of the American Planning Association; John Rian, a downtown restaurant owner; George McMath, AIA, a prominent local architect; and M. Paul Friedberg, a noted New York architect/landscape architect/urban designer—selected 10 finalists to interview, ultimately inviting five groups to submit proposals. Unable to resolve the competing hopes for the square’s future, the Portland Development Commission and competition manager Don Stastny left the competition’s guidelines open. The competing designers’ charge: create an all-weather, allseason complex to fulfill cultural, recreational, open space and shelter needs for downtown visitors. Competition, suffice to say, was fierce. The renowned Lawrence Halprin and Charles Moore—in many ways, the team to beat— sought to evoke a local town center with a collection of symbolic elements—a water garden, an arcade, several stages and performing areas, a clock tower, and a colossal, tent-like glowing glass structure. The multitude of interior spaces for cafes, restaurants, an information center, and a garden of native and exotic flowers was aimed at business interests.
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The proposal from New York designers Peter Eisenman and Jaquelin T. Robertson represented the fusion of garden and urban plaza—a dialogue between the natural and manmade—and was a perfect representation of the dichotomy between Eisenman’s allegiance to pure Modernist forms and Robertson’s devotion to traditional architecture. The team made of Argentinian architect-educators Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti with Harvard alums Warren Schwartz and Robert Silver intended to convey today’s equivalent of the ‘cathedral/city hall/marketplace’ of the medieval city, and featured a very open center square flanked by a glass greenhouse opposite of the courthouse. Garden and seating spaces on the north and south sides finished off the square. Philadelphia heavy hitter Robert Geddes led the fourth team, flowed from his three-pronged career as an architect, educator, and urban designer. Urban theater met place of retreat as an assembly area flanked by a covered garden and conservatory. The trellis and glass wall were illumined, and the space was peppered with smaller shelters: a glass-covered arcade, a canvas-covered arcade with removable awnings, and a pergola-covered terrace. Ultimately, the jury praised Halprin and Moore’s design for its courageousness, invention, and ability to attract people to the square, but they believed the design was inappropriate for the site and context and lacked flexibility. “This should be built,” said the jury, “but alas, not as our major public square.” Too, Members of the panel appreciated the physical simplicity and intellectual complexity of Eisenman and Robertson’s concept, but ultimately felt that the pavilions were more symbolic than functional and that the design in general did not encourage the informal activities in the square. The Machado/Silvetti and Schwartz/Silver joint venture was found its small-scale pieces to be inconsistent with the site requirement. Geddes and Kihn’s design was felt bythe jury to not succeed in achieving the kind of space and setting enjoyed by Portlanders. Left
3D Model of Pioneer Square and surrounding buildings.
Variations on a Theme
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A Study of Context
Left
Photo by Cam-Fu.
Pioneering the Square | A Study of Context
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For such an unusual space, it seems hardly a surprise that the winning entry ended up coming from a team intimately familiar with the quirks of Portland’s urban fabric. The unusual team, led by local architect Willard Will K. Martin, earned the nickname The Bowsers Club, supposedly after the famed card-playing dog painting for their cigarchomping brainstorming sessions. With 22 years of professional practice under his belt, Martin was best known for his quirky, colorful interpretations of Modernism, for his breathtaking drawings, and for the cultist silhouette he cut courtesy of a flat-brimmed hat and cigar. J. Douglas Macy had recently founded his own firm. Lee Kelly, a nationally recognized
sculptor, held many awards and prominent commissions, including work for the Portland transit mall and Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Terence O’Donnell, beneficiary of three Fulbright lectureships and an accomplished historian and writer, had been published in Smithsonian magazine and had co-authored a historical guide to Portland. Spencer Gill had written and edited books on Northwest indigenous basketry and Chinese gardening. Robert Reynolds had 30 years of experience in architectural graphics and publishing for clients from Portland to New York. Their concept? Inspired by Piazza del Campo, in Siena, Italy, and an amphitheater in Epidaurus, Greece, the Bowsers Club’s design sought to merge stage and audience, function and fun. The team proposed using the brick of the newly christened transit mall, but stretching across the surrounding streets to liberate the square from its property lines and give both pedestrians and cars a sense of being in the square. A row of monumental columns 18
Pioneering the Square | A Study of Context
along the south side provided a sense of shelter for departing light-rail riders while echoing the cornice line of the adjacent Jackson Tower. The salvaged wrought-iron gate fo the Portland Hotel, placed in the square exactly where it had been during the Hotel’s heyday, showed a reverence to history. A small amphitheater, two small glass pavilion teahouses (which ultimately ended up being one of the few features eliminated from the final design), and a keystone for public addresses offered theatrically functional pieces for all manner of uses, while a weather machine and programmable laser light show promised spontaneous entertainment. Wrote Terence O’Donnell in the group’s initial proposal to the committee: “Most of the worlds great public squares are simple in concept and complete in the in their design only when used by people: places to pass through or to linger in, to promenade or to sit, to wait for a friend or the LRT, to sniff at the flowers, to shop or eat, to listen to music or a politician, to pause at a painting, above all, places in which to gaze at the passing parade…ourselves. It is out of a desire for activities such as these that we have developed our design.” Art ran deep in the design, right down to the model the group used to propose the design. Instead of using typical materials, the team represented its scheme in hand-carved wood with images of the surrounding buildings’ lines etched into lithographic plates. The jury unanimously found the scheme to be the most appropriate for the site and the community courtesy of the diversity of uses offered by its many terraced levels and a combinator of formal and informal spaces. The jurors appreciated how the design’s humor and playfulness did not compromise dignity and elegance and commended the design team for its framing fo the square, and its subtle yet sensitive response to eh courthouse and local historical detail.
Top
The annual Festival of Flowers event in the Square. Courtesy of Soderstrom Architects.
Left
The impact area of the Pioneer Courthouse Square plan. Progressive Architecture (Vol. 1, Issue 81).
Right The milepost sign. Photo by Steve Morgan.
Paint the Town
Left
Once the Pioneer Courthouse Square design was selected in 1980, designer Will Martin and his team painted their design—all 40,000 square feet of it—on the empty Meier and Frank parking garage, which would be demolished to build the Square. Courtesy Pioneer Courthouse Square.
Pioneering the Square | Paint the Town
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“Let the space be ambiguous, fragmented, and eternally changing, rich in local symbols and metaphor reflecting Portland’s history as well and bring meaning to citizens of all categories. We hope to bring together many different meanings to be enjoyed and understood by varying tastes…” — Will Martin diary, 1980 22
Pioneering the Square
Top
Will Martin, Self Portrait. Courtesy Portland State University Library Ernie Bonner Collection.
Mid
The Pioneer Courthouse illuminated at dusk as viewed from the Square. Photo by Michael J. Fromholtz.
Bot
Architect Willard K. Martin, circa 1957. Courtesy of University of Oregon Libraries.
Right Pioneer Courthouse Square under construction in the summer of 1983. Photo by Will Martin, courtesy UO Libraries.
Paint the Town
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Soon after the jury selected the winning entry, the city endorsed the results. But the Association for Portland Progress, a 65-member downtown business group, quickly blasted the winning design and threaten to withhold all contributions towards the $1.7 million in private funding needed to build it. They even lobbied for rejecting $1.2 million from the federal government so the city could free itself from the grant’s requirement for open space. In the summer of 1980, Portland City Council met to consider the design. A three-vote majority teetered on the vote of Commissioner Mildred Schwab, who liked the square but remained skeptical about the funding. During a brief recess during the heated meeting,
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Pioneering the Square
competition juror Sumner Sharpe wrote a personal check for $100, gathered a dozen other checks, and when the meeting resumed, dramatically presented them to the council. As Schwab cast her vote for the square, she quipped, I’m holding Sumner Sharpe personally responsible for the rest of the $1.8 million. Sharpe recalls worrying that his check might bounce. Soon after, to further galvanize public support—and to oppose the continuing behind-the-scenes efforts to kill the square—designer Will Martin gathered his team and, with a donation from Miller Paint, painted their design across all 40,000 square feet of the empty parking lot.
Left
The east side of the square looking west towards Nordstrom. Photo by Glenn Scofield Williams.
Right
Model for the finalist proposal submitted to the PDC by Martin’s interdisciplinary team. From Portland Development Commission, “The Pioneer Courthouse Square Design Competition” booklet, circa late 1980.
Six months after the competition, longtime square opponent Bill Roberts become chairman of the Portland Development Commission and promptly called the project a dead letter. With another staunch opponent, Frank Ivancie, freshly elected as major, the winning design’s prospects seemed dire. But a series of rapid-fire events ensued: the design won a prestigious national award from Progressive Architecture magazine; the fledgling Friends of Pioneer Courthouse Square found a major ally in one of downtown’s most powerful developers, Melvin Pete Mark; and Karen Whitman, then director of the annual city festival Artquake, hatched the ingenious idea of selling bricks engraved with donors’ names to help fund the square. Former Governor Tom McCall helped silence calls to hold a new competition given the change of regime, saying that to do so would stigmatize Portland as a really sort of phony place.
In October 1981, the Association for Portland Progress Board finally came around, voting unanimously to support Martin’s design. And in the summer of 1982, Mayor Ivancie led city council to contribute the final $350,000 toward construction. In the end, more than a third of the cost of construction was paid for in private contributions, over 60,000 of them in the form of $15 and $30 bricks. More than two decades after the planning department’s first drawings of a major, new, centrally located public space, the city dedicated Pioneer Courthouse Square on April 6, 1984—auspiciously, the anniversary of the city’s founding, the Portland Hotel’s opening, and Will Martin’s birth.
Paint the Town
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On Will Martin: A conversation with Cameron Hyde
Left
Fountain Located at Pioneer Square. Featuring a man and his dog.
Pioneering the Square | On Will Martin
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Brian Libby: “Will Martin was no ordinary architect. Said by many to be a more talented artist than designer, he was a larger-than-life figure known for his flamboyant clothing (including a fedora and trademark cigar) and gregarious personality. But to win the Pioneer Courthouse Square design competition, Martin’s firm, Martin, Soderstrom and Matteson, had to beat out a number of renowned architects and landscape architects, including Peter Eisenman and the great Lawrence Halprin (the latter of whose firm designed the Ira Keller Fountain, which New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable had called the greatest open space since the Renaissance.) Martin’s team, which also included a group of advisors such as landscape architect Doug Macy (of Walker Macy), sculptor Lee Kelly, writer Spencer Gill and artist Robert Reynolds, was the sole local finalist. Born and raised in the Ozarks of rural Missouri, Martin headed west to attend the University of Oregon, where he earned a degree in 1957. Heading to Portland, he first worked for local firm Wolff & Zimmer (the forerunner of ZGF Architects) before starting his own practice in 1961. In 1966, he established the firm Martin and Soderstrom with David A. Soderstrom. In 1971, the firm became Martin, Soderstrom and Matteson, which dissolved in 1984. In 1985, just a year after Pioneer Courthouse Square’s completion Martin and his 25-year-old son Eric died after a plane the elder Martin was piloting crashed into a wall of the Grand Canyon. I spoke with Portland architect Cameron Hyde, a founding partner at Soderstrom Architects, the firm that emerged from Martin and Soderstrom after Martin’s death. Hyde joined Martin’s firm in 1978, two years before the Pioneer Courthouse Square design competition.”
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Pioneering the Square
Side profile portrait of Will Martin.
On Will Martin
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Brian Libby: How did you wind up joining Martin and Soderstrom originally?
Cameron Hyde: I graduated from college in 1976, and initially a friend of mine and I built passive solar houses. But eventually I had to get a job. I worked for a couple local firms, but then I had two friends that worked at Martin, Soderstrom, Matteson, and they suggested I come work there. That was in ‘78 or ‘79. At that time, I thought it was a real coup on my part, because this was a firm doing pretty significant buildings: a lot of schools, a lot of university work. They kind of ran their office as three different studios: Will’s work, Dave Soderstrom’s work and John Matteson’s work. They didn’t really comingle much. I did several projects with each of those principals. Will entered a few competitions in those days, but the square was the biggest one. What do you recall about the competition and beating out these better-known candidates?
Even though the submission was anonymous, it was so obvious that this was a Portland firm: the craftsmanship and the materials and the way it was put together. We built a fantastic model in the office basement at 10th and Everett, an old Buddhist temple. We employed a lot of un-architectural techniques. We had the surrounding buildings etched on a printing plate and glued on these exotic hardwoods and had a nice hard wood model of the proposal. It just knocked people’s socks off. It was a beautiful model. It was a work of art. Weren’t the renderings a bit cheeky, too?
Oh yes. He had these fantasy vignettes—cartoons almost—in his renderings. If you look closely in the Pioneer Courthouse Square rendering, he’s got a bank being robbed on the corner. Someone was coming out with the money. A couple was making love in the corner. Life is going on around the square. It’s just some fantastic little stuff. And he always had himself in there. His little black straight-brimmed hat. Or his truck was in there. The model of the square was falling down and breaking on the truck. You were the project manager once the project went forward. Could you talk a little bit about working with Martin day in and day out?
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Will was a big-picture guy. He really couldn’t design a detail to save his life. He had a naïve sense of materials. Like simple things that I would, as a practical farm boy, know better: not to put terracotta under water, for example. I had to talk Will out of using terracotta in the water features. Will was adamant that he wanted the thing to last 100 years. That was his mantra. He didn’t have the faintest idea how to do that, but he meant that. Every time we butted heads, I had to say, ‘Will, I think you wanted this to last 100 years. It’s not going to last 100 years if we do it this way.’” How would you describe his talents and what he was like as a person?
Will, he was a Renaissance man. He really was. I think he was a far better artist than he was an architect. Not even close. He did botanical color drawings of wild plants and flowers that were amazing. To be brutally honest, his ego got really enormous after the square finished, to the point that after the opening ceremony—I think 1984—I quit the next day. I said, ‘That’s it.’” But he also could be a lot of fun: very charismatic, and he really had style. I never once in my entire life saw Will Martin wear a tie. He had a wide-brimmed hat that he wore, and he always had a big cigar in his mouth. He
had a black turtleneck and a black velveteen sport coat that he wore. What about overcoming political opposition to the square, or to the idea of an open public space?
The square had political problems. Even before it was built, Bill Roberts and [Mayor] Frank Ivancie decided they didn’t want to have it built. Part of the business community wanted an enclosed structure where you paid to go into an aviary or a skating rink. Will said, ‘No, it needs to be open to everybody.’ He was very inclusive. He said, ‘Whomever is downtown needs to be able to walk through there.’ He kept holding up examples of European plazas. I went to Sienna, Italy to see the public square there, where they had the horse races. That was something Will was really taken with: having different things in the square as the seasons change. Different times of year different activities take over. It had to be open enough so the activities could be very flexible. I think it’s successful in that regard. And fundraising? Selling bricks with people’s names seems like a stroke of genius.
When there was a funding gap, they decided they were going to sell name bricks. So we invented a process for imprinting people’s names. The bricks were made in Klamath Falls. We made the slugs in lead for the printing press, and they pressed the names into the bricks before they fired them. They couldn’t kill the project because they had all these people personally invested. They didn’t get a lot of big donations but they got a lot of little ones.
Left
I’ve always found it interesting that although Pioneer Courthouse Square and the Portland Building were completed within just over a year of each other, the Portland Building’s postmodern style is often discussed, but not the similar postmodernism of PCS. How much did your team discuss the square as being postmodern?
We talked about it all the time. Will was intrigued by postmodernism. On the heels of Pioneer Courthouse Square, we were talking with PSU about redoing the Stott Center. Will’s design actually had arms and legs and feet scattered around: big giant feet and hands scattered around the periphery of the building. I thought, ‘That’s goofy. This is going to be dated in about five minutes.’ Could you talk about how some design aspects have been changed, like the purple tile on the fountain?
Will decided to put this purple tile in the fountain that wasn’t in the design competition entry. He got the idea in the shower: ‘We’re going to change this travertine to this purple tile.’ I said, ‘That’s just fucking ridiculous. It’s going to be hideous.’ You couldn’t talk him out of it. Bill Roberts and Frank Ivancie called it a purple piss pot. So three years after he was gone, Mark Bevens the project architect and I—the two of us who had sway on the square—we went to the people running the place. They were doing some renovations. We said, ‘Let’s get rid of that stuff.’ We did and it looks fantastic. It was purple checkerboard. It looks so much better now.
Some of Will Martin’s earliest exploratory sketches for the Square’s design, circa April 1980. Courtesy Portland State University Library Ernie Bonner Collection.
On Will Martin
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I’m no expert, but I actually preferred the purple tile. It seemed more in keeping with the irreverence of the design and that postmodern style. But what about one of my favorite parts of design: the way the curving stairway forms an amphitheater with a ramp moving through it?
He got that idea from Arthur Erickson’s Law Courts building in Vancouver, British Columbia, only that one is rectilinear while ours is curved. I used the largest beam compass to do that. Now it’s all done on computer. Everything is designed off that center of the square. What about the brick? Aside from the name inscriptions, could you talk about the patterning?
I spent quite a bit of time early on working out the brick patterns. Will wanted the pattern to look like a fine Persian carpet with intricacies that were subtle. We didn’t want to cut any brick. We figured it all out so the only thing we did was cut a brick in half. There are no pieces of brick at all. We spent quite a bit of time designing the field of that pattern. There are some subtleties. It was designed for trucks to drive over it. They’ve held up that way. It didn’t ever settle or crack. The brick’s just worn out. I don’t know where they’re going to find that color. Originally we were trying to blend that brick with the transit mall. The transit mall has since been replaced three or four times.
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Pioneering the Square
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Photo by brx0.
Mid
Photo by brx0.
Bot
Photo by Ian Sane.
R. Top The design area perspective of the Square. Progressive Architecture (Vol. 1, Issue 81). R. Bot An aerial view of the Meier and Frank parking lot (at center right) where Pioneer Courthouse Square would later be situated. Courtesy of City of
Portland Archives.
Next pg.
The design area perspective of the Square. Progressive Architecture (Vol. 1, Issue 81).
Brian Libby is a freelance journalist and critic living in Portland. Among the magazines and newspapers he has contributed to over the past 15 years are The New York Times, The Atlantic, Salon, Dwell, CityLab, Metropolis, The Oregonian, The Christian Science Monitor, and Architectural Record, and has published several books on the history of University of Oregon’s athletic programs. Libby has published articles about Portland’s development history and future on his blog Portland Architecture since 2005, which has been named one of the top 100 architecture blogs globally. On Will Martin
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On Will Martin
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