[tworivers]

Patricia Gardner, I love you.

Art student dorm planned for North Park Blocks
POSTED: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 at 02:41 PM PT
BY: Lee Fehrenbacher, DJC

Sometime next year, the North Park Blocks corridor may see an influx of artistic students leisurely strolling to classes, lounging at cafés and displaying their work along Northwest Park Avenue.

The Pacific Northwest College of Art is teaming up with Powell’s Books and Project Ecological Development to replace Powell’s vacant technical bookstore building at 33 N.W. Park Ave. with a uniquely designed, seven-story dormitory structure. The site is near both the Museum of Contemporary Craft and the historic U.S. Post Office building, which is being converted into PNCA teaching space.

“Having this residence hall five blocks away from our flagship campus really anchors this creative corridor of the North Park Blocks,” said Kavin Buck, vice president of enrollment services for PNCA. “It’s going to really activate the blocks, but it’s going to really help us with both our recruitment of students – over half our students come from out of state – and will help with retention and bring this collegiate life into the art school.”

PNCA has slightly fewer than 600 students, but is the fastest-growing independent art school in the nation, Buck said. The 103-year-old college has added five graduate programs in the past five years and plans to increase enrollment to 1,000 students by 2018. The new dorm building will have 60 apartments and be able to house 144 students.

Construction of the $7 million building – which Powell’s will own and lease to the college – is an exciting prospect for PNCA, but design review may be a big hurdle.

On Tuesday, the development team and LEVER Architecture presented a somewhat radical building design to the Pearl District Neighborhood Association. The proposed 55,000-square-foot structure would have an angular shape with a non-reflective, metallic facade to accentuate light and shadow through irregularly deflected surfaces.

“It’s sort of shaped by light,” LEVER Architecture founder Thomas Robinson said during the presentation. “What we wanted to do is deflect the facades a little bit to open up the building to light. When it deflects it gets a different color because of the way the light hits it.”

The neighborhood association approved the design unanimously and enthusiastically, but Patricia Gardner, the association’s vice president, said the city’s Design Review Commission may not follow suit at its May 3 meeting.

“I am tired of seeing really nice buildings get ruined by the design commission,” she said. “I am going to this meeting to tell them if they ruin this building we will protest.”

Robinson said he tried to extend the use of natural light to the interior as well in order to turn the hallways on each floor into gallery space for students. He said he took cues from other historic buildings downtown, such as the Ace Hotel. A Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design gold rating will be sought for the project, which calls for installing an interior courtyard as well as rain gardens to capture stormwater.

The building also may activate the street corner with a café and two retail spaces.

“I think a lot of buildings along the Park Blocks … they’re right next to the park, but they don’t have that inside-outside relationship, and so (we are) really creating a transparent ground floor that activates the streetscape,” said Anyeley Hallová, partner at Project Ecological Development.

The project also requires demolition of Powell’s existing warehouse. Emily Powell, the company president and CEO, said that while the vacant building held sentimental value for her family, the proposed project was a much richer use for the property.

“I walk into our main store and to me it smells like my grandfather – no one else probably has that connection,” she said during the meeting. “We looked at options (for the warehouse) and this was the best. The technical store’s history is a little less romantic.”

She said the team was considering whether to preserve the “Powell’s Technical Books” sign and display it inside the building.

The group hopes to begin construction by mid-November and anticipates a move-in date of August 2013. A Design Review Commission hearing is scheduled for May 3 at 1:30 p.m. at the Portland Bureau of Development Services building at 1900 S.W. Fourth Ave.