[der Reisender]

for those who haven't checked out Portland Architecture recently, it sounds like the Mississippi Ave Lofts are finally gonna start up. Brian Libby did a write-up on them:

Mississippi Avenue Lofts Set To Break Ground

I have meant to write about the Mississippi Avenue Lofts for awhile, both because it's a significant mixed-use project in a burgeoning close-in Portland neighborhood and because the project has seen a fair amount of controversy.

The project, designed by the Portland office of San Francisco firm Michael WIllis Architects (which also partnered with Thomas Hacker Architects on the ill-fated Fire Station 1), is poised to earn a prestigous 'Gold' LEED rating from the US Green Building Council. The first LEED-rated residential project on the east side, It consists of 32 residential units and will occupy a site just north of the commercial district along Mississippi Avenue that includes The Rebuilding Center, Gravy restaurant, Video Verite, Fresh Pot coffee and other establishments. There will reportedly be a Pastaworks store on the ground floor. The MAL project replaces an old cinder-block warehouse.

The controversy, as many know, came in December of 2005 when the Boise Neighborhood Association voted to deny support for the project. Some believe the association was hijacked by a few neighbors objecting to the height and gentrification, but that's an argument we've already had here about the neighborhood's objection to another project, the Kurisu family's residential building designed by Holst. Besides, the Historic Mississippi Business Association gave the MAL project a strong endorsement.

Courtyard In the case of the Mississippi Avenue Lofts project, the original design was more of a continuous horizontal form, the idea being that it would de-emphasize the four-story height. But a revised plan for the building, breaks up its mass by emphasizing a series of smaller individual box-like forms emanating out of the larger whole.

I like how the building has turned out. One of its real strengths is the use of wood, which will help integrate the MAL project with the existing fabric of single-family homes off Mississippi Avenue while also celebrating Oregon's native materials and adding warmth to the overall sense of the building. It also features a tilt-up concrete construction method by general contractor Gray Purcell common in commercial projects but rare in residential that will help reduce construction time by 2-3 months. Additionally, the design features a coutyard plan that will provide ample natural light. And that 4th floor that seems to always freak out neighbors with these projects is set back significantly, not only giving the building a more modest presence on the street but creating a terrific rooftop deck for some lucky penthouse owners.

Developed by the trio of Bill Jackson, Peter Wilcox and David Yoho, this is a project that has had more than its fair share of hurdles to clear, but I'm told groundbreaking could come as soon as February. More and more, the land in North Portland between Interstate Avenue and Williams Street seems poised to explode with lots of new mixed-use housing projects, and many of them are turning out very handsome, such as the aforementioned Kurisu project, the and two projects developed by the Kaiser Group: Backbridge Station and the Backbridge Lofts.