Since 2008, Portland Playhouse had been operating out of a historic, 1904-era church in the King neighborhood of Portland, making-do with sofa seating and make-shift solutions in a building long-in-need of updates. Opportunity arose in 2012 when the city officially granted use of the structure as a theater. With a secure home in hand, the Playhouse undertook a plan to transform the outdated building into a fully dedicated theater. SERA partnered with the Playhouse on a multi-phased project that identified programmatic requirements, functional needs, aesthetic preferences, and growth strategies for the organization. The results of that planning included a substantial renovation of the existing building, the addition of a 1,200-square-foot dedicated rehearsal and community space, and concept design for an outdoor component to be added at a later date.
B76 was designed as a working-class building aimed at public transportation connectivity, pedestrian openness, and bicycle priority access. It is positioned centrally in the new eastside community envisioned by the Burnside Bridgehead Framework plan. The ground floor will be activated by storefronts along third avenue and a work space above. This new building program will also reintegrate a pedestrian stair down from the Burnside Bridge level to third avenue akin to the original stairs that previously existed.
The AC Hotel by Marriott in downtown Portland puts culture at the center of the guest experience—merging the European-inspired brand with local art and craft. Located at the busy corner of SW 3rd and SW Taylor Avenue, and adjacent to the Yamhill historic neighborhood, the hotel is one of the first AC-branded hotels in the United States. With 204 guest rooms, the new thirteen-story, 120,000-square-foot hotel serves as a dynamic addition to the city.
The hotel engages the city through its vibrant street-level design: lobby, restaurant, and bar are wrapped with windows as a visual marriage of inside and outside spaces to make guests feel a part of the city and vice versa. The design pays homage to its historic context while playing with its sense of materiality, eschewing the ubiquitous red brick of the district, instead using an off-white brick. Silver-toned metal spandrel panels are set against the strong vertical, brick frame, resulting in a building that emphasizes its stature with a flash of elan. The building’s prominent corner, where the two busy street facades meet, is clipped and appears to have an inset vertical ribbon of windows that run the full height of the building, providing each floor with a perch from which to view the activity of the city.
Located on the expanding edge of Portland’s Pearl District, the Modera Pearl is a high-rise housing development—the first of its type to be approved and built within the city since 2007. The nine-story, 340,000-gross-square-foot building features 290 market-rate apartments, 219 parking stalls arranged on two underground levels, and over 400 bicycle parking spaces. The goal was to create a responsible and engaging urban building that is also an exceptional place to live.
The new Tillamook Creamery is the latest addition to Tillamook’s Oregon coast campus, which has seen many phases of development since the original factory building opened in 1947. Through architecture, interactive exhibits, landscape design, and custom furnishings, the new Tillamook Creamery visitor experience is designed to illustrate the story of Tillamook’s mission and origins – a history founded as much on high-quality dairy products as the member families who make up Tillamook’s farmer-owned cooperative. Located adjacent to the company’s flagship manufacturing facility and headquarters, the new 42,800-square-foot facility contains exhibits, a retail shop, a restaurant and ice cream counter, allowing Tillamook to share their traditions, processes and products with 1.3 million visitors every year.
Article source: Behnisch Architekten with SRG Partnership, Inc.
Located in downtown Portland, the new Karl Miller Center is uniquely integrated with the city’s rich network of public open spaces and diverse urban uses. Questioning the full-block archetype that dominates the typical 200' x 200' city block of Portland, the building design appears as two distinct structures sharing a city block – the renovated existing building, a 100,000sf 1970's structure retrofitted with a metal panel facade system broken up by an irregular composition of punched windows, and a new dynamic, shifting 45,000sf addition, clad in regionally sourced Alaskan Yellow Cedar. This approach, coupled with a series of terracing external green spaces and new circulation pathways linking the urban center, local parks, transportation stops, and nearby campus buildings, enhances the public realm by providing a more diverse streetscape. A one-story grade differential between 6th Avenue and Broadway, populated with public oriented spaces, creates two ground levels, further activating the exterior plazas and the atrium and heightening the activity within and around the building.
Located at the geographic center of the city of Portland, YARD is a 21 story mixed-use building that combines residential, commercial, retail, office and parking.
Positioned in the rapidly changing central east side of downtown Portland, at the base of the iconic Burnside Bridge and skate park, the site presented a multitude of challenges, both at an infrastructure and cultural level.
Milwaukie Way reconsiders the potential for an urban infill development to respond to its context, creating a lively public space while also preserving the existing built fabric.
Sited on a central commercial avenue in a Southeast Portland, the clients saw potential to add leasable space in the form of retail, cafes and office to their corner lot. The biggest challenge was how to integrate the existing 1929 Spanish Colonial style building that was to stay. Housing a restaurant below and office space above, the historic building sat squarely at the center of the lot, greatly limiting available street frontage and the opportunity to engage passing shoppers.
The Panavista Hill House is perched on a steep up-slope lot in Portland’s west hills. The design solution for organizing the house and keeping costs in check was to stack uses vertically up 3-stories. The footprint of the first 2-stories is kept to a minimum and the majority of the living space is located on the top floor where the site flattens out more and the views to the coast range mountains are the best.
Portland Japanese Garden’s new Cultural Village is a modest, human-scaled set of buildings arranged around a courtyard plaza, whose fourth side is the existing, untouched gardens from the 1960s. The project is a village positioned along a journey from the city to the top of the hill, a form of modern monzenmachi wherein the pilgrimage pays homage to the spirit of nature.
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