Quote:
Originally Posted by soleri
I spent a lot of time talking to one of Skylab's architects, and the closest I can get to solving this mystery is that the Hood River developer misjudged the scope and cost of this project, mainly because this was their first high-rise. They ended up using cheaper materials along with fewer windows once the true costs became evident.
This isn't my least favorite new high-rise in Portland. That would be NV in the Pearl which not only looks cheap but is so uninspired that it looks like a '60s building reclad in the '90s.
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Overall, I more or less share the criticisms of the Yard here, especially with the rendering smacking me in the face again. Gee, how did that tasteful greenery on the balconies get replaced with
beige panels? Neither the architect nor the developer had the experience to pull off the proposal, which, given some of its more out-of-the-box attributes (the hexagonal shape, for example, which adds to the building's overwhelming bulk and general lack of grace), needed to be an absolute slam dunk to be successful. It's the sloppy, polar opposite approach to the sort of refined attention to detail and rigorous austerity that a firm like Hacker brings to their projects.
I don't share the optimism of some here about the effect of 5 MLK. Personally, I think we need more fine-grained, smaller-scale architecture in the vicinity --with less space devoted to car storage-- to make the bridgehead into a place people actually want to hang out, especially with all of the car congestion on the streets. I think a more holistic approach to that block would have been to save the old building on the corner and wrap something contemporary around it, similar to the approach Malsin is taking with WPA down the street. 5 MLK has the potential to be another hulking, monolithic highrise, especially when the value engineering sets in.
I do find it interesting that soleri brings up the NV because both it and the Yard are rotated off the grid, which makes them stand out even more. I agree with soleri that the NV is a deeper failure than the Yard, made much worse by the fact that it, unlike the Yard, sits in the middle of an existing grid surrounded by buildings that don't necessarily beg you to look at them. The gimmicky shingles only add to the unsightliness. The design commission, in hindsight, should have held them to a much higher materials standard or pushed back harder on the 45-degree angle. In this case, the 45-degree angle ended up being the equivalent of drawing a big red circle around the zit in the middle of your forehead.
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