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Robert Thompson, called by a colleague “the leading architect of his generation, relative to putting his thumbprint on the city in a very positive way,” has designed Portland-area landmarks including the Fox Tower, Nike Inc.’s Beaverton campus, the newly constructed John Ross condominiums (the city’s tallest residential structure since the 1984 KOIN Center) and the upcoming Park Avenue West.
Robert Thompson’s street smarts
Portland architect’s ideas are recasting not just the cityscape, but how we move through it
By Randall Barton
The Portland Tribune, Jul 31, 2007
Robert Thompson is shaping this city as few have the opportunity to do.
The architect’s heroic glass towers grace the Portland skyline, beginning with the sleek Fox Tower, the elliptical, 31-story John Ross condominium on the South Waterfront and – commencing construction this fall – the 35-story, mixed-use Park Avenue West downtown, behind Nordstrom.
The firm he founded, TVA Architects Inc., was hired by Portland Parks & Recreation to design the street-level pavilions for the underground parking facility being built behind the Fox Tower. TVA also is designing new structures to house Saturday Market; the portion currently housed beneath the Burnside Bridge is being displaced by the University of Oregon’s expansion.
The market will jump Naito Parkway, extending east to the Willamette River and north to the Burnside Bridge. TVA’s work will include a main structure in Gov. Tom McCall Waterfront Park, a renovation to the MAX station under the Burnside Bridge and accompanying restroom facilities.
As lead design principal in the firm of about 40 employees, Thompson establishes the overall concept for how a building will look and feel, usually selecting finishes and materials. He ruminates on a new project for weeks or months, sketching out ideas and concepts with color pencils, pen and ink.
“I’m kind of a dinosaur in the firm in that I still like to draw by hand,” he says. “I take those sketches and work with younger architects who start inputting those ideas into computers and collectively – as teams – we start evolving those visions.”
A modernist at heart, Thompson grew up in Portland admiring Pietro Belluschi’s Equitable Building and the work of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill on Memorial Coliseum.
“My primary interest is in the sculpture of architecture,” he says. “I love playing with the geometries and developing simple, elegant ‘partis’ that speak to the sculptural aspect of buildings.”
The term “parti” refers to the central idea of a work of architecture, the big vision for how all of the parts fit together.
“There has to be clarity,” he says, “and at the same time it’s resolving complex programs into some very simple moves, if you will.”
Architect Robert Frasca, the partner in charge of design for the partnership Zimmer Gunsul Frasca, says Thompson’s work in Portland has been profound.
“He’s a generation younger than I am,” Frasca says, “and he’s the leading architect of his generation, relative to putting his thumbprint on the city in a very positive way.
“It isn’t how many buildings you build, it’s how good the buildings you build are. Bob’s first one downtown, the Fox Tower, was a great success.”
After graduating from the University of Oregon in 1977, Thompson, 54, started his own firm in 1984, at age 30, and developed a clientele at a fairly young age.
“I won the competition to design the Nike world headquarters at a point in time when Nike was a relatively small, young company,” he says.
That year, 1987, Nike signed basketball star Michael Jordan as a spokesman and the company’s growth, as Thompson puts it, “was off the charts.”
“We were fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. For us that’s been a 20-year ride, unparalleled to almost any opportunity that any architect could hope for. We have completed probably 30 buildings for Nike, two campuses and over 3 million square feet of space, and we continue to be heavily involved in Nike’s growth.”
In the years that followed, TVA was selected to create headquarters for clients such as Proctor & Gamble in Cincinnati and Sony Ericsson.
This year, Nike Inc. co-founder Phil Knight, also owner and chairman of the board of Laika animation studio, selected TVA Architects to design a campus to house Laika’s entertainment division. It will be built in phases on 30 acres of land in Tualatin; four buildings are scheduled to open in late 2009.
Great architecture begins with great clients, Thompson says, and whether it’s Tom Moyer of the Fox Tower and Park Avenue West, Homer Williams and Mark Edlen of the John Ross Tower, or Knight at Nike, these people have a vision of where they want to go.
“Architecture is, above anything, the art of creatively solving problems,” Thompson says. “There’s nothing more exciting than to engage with somebody, not in our profession, who is truly passionate or that has a different idea about how a particular problem might be solved.”
TVA is currently working with the developers Edlen and Williams on two condominium projects in downtown Los Angeles.
“Homer and Mark are in the pursuit of developing a district very much like the Pearl District, with high-level ground-floor retail, and high-end housing,” Thompson says. “The city of Los Angeles is a big supporter of bringing people back into the city. If there’s one thing Los Angeles has always lacked, its enough downtown housing. At 5:30 or 6 o’clock at night, it’s like the downtown rolls up and everybody leaves.”
What Portland does right
Thompson is in the early stages of designing a twin condo and office tower project in the South Waterfront neighborhood for an out-of-state developer and is in his element.
“The development team in South Waterfront has been focused on creating a community of very modern buildings,” he says, “in contrast to the Pearl District, which is much more focused on re-creating this kind of warehouse district that’s earthier, with more textured types of seven- and eight-story buildings.”
The intimate, almost European scale of the street life in Portland, he says, is a byproduct of the smaller blocks as well as the effort – mandated by the city – to make buildings lively and engaging at the sidewalk level.
“If you look at buildings that were done 20 years ago, like the First Interstate Tower or the old Georgia-Pacific, which is now the Standard Insurance Building – all of these towers came down on these monolithic bases that had virtually no windows,” Thompson says. “The plazas and all the things that activate the building are sitting probably 15 to 20 feet above the sidewalk, so it’s a very sterile kind of engagement that the pedestrian experiences with the building itself.”
Feet on the ground
With both the John Ross and Fox towers, there was a conscious effort to develop a strong pedestrian base, or podium, with the tower rising as an object that relates to the podium.
“The level of transparency, energy and activity that we try to detail into the bases is very different than the more simplistic level of development that the tower might suggest, because you’re looking at the tower from quite a distance,” he says. “The podium is where we try to create as much energy at the street level as possible, so the building actually engages the pedestrian in a different way than if you’re looking at it from across the river.”
The J-shaped podium of the John Ross Tower wraps around three sides of the building and contains retail outlets. By negotiating with the city to transfer height from the podium to the tower, TVA was able to develop a pocket park on the site.
“Our goal there is to allow retail to spill out in the form of restaurants, coffee shops,” Thompson says. “We’ve designed the park in a fashion that will allow people to move diagonally through the block, rather than always moving around the edges of these buildings. … We’ve got 20-foot floor-to-floor heights on that lower retail level, giving us a tremendous level of transparency. We want people to be walking along the sidewalks or walking through the park and be able to see all the way through these retail spaces.
“I think the success of any neighborhood is usually within the first four or five stories of any building and how the bases of those buildings engage the pedestrians.”
China builds upward
TVA is at work on two projects in China, a country Thompson says is currently the most progressive in the advancement and development of modern architecture.
“There’s probably more development going on in the city of Beijing than in half of the United States,” he says. “It’s an incredible level of growth.”
Where countries like Dubai are developing exuberant structures that would be at home on the Las Vegas strip, the architecture in China is simpler, he says, more refined.
“Most of the new architecture being developed over there is being designed by Western architects,” he says, “be it European or American.”
It’s a good time for architecture. The decorated, postmodern buildings of the 1980s have given way to architecture that is simpler, more timeless and more humane.
“From a humanistic standpoint, the Portland Building is such a brutal building,” Thompson says by way of example. “It focuses almost exclusively on its own style, and its own message architecturally. … It’s devoid of any kind of quality related to what it’s like to actually work in and engage that building on a daily basis.”
The postmodern experiment, he acknowledges, liberated architects from the constraint of rules, allowing them to be more playful, less serious.
“In the 1960s architecture was more of an engineering art,” he says. “It has evolved and will continue to evolve into much more of a fine art.”
randallbarton@portlandtribune.com
http://www.portlandtribune.com/featu...66782290698600
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