^That's so wrong on so many levels
Here's Gragg's take
Mellow design for Knight studio
Friday, March 09, 2007
RANDY GRAGG
The Oregonian
There are many things architect Robert Thompson would like the world to know about the new campus he's designing for Laika Inc., the animation company Nike founder Phil Knight is trying to build into one of the world's great film studios.
But high among them is a feature the campus won't have: a berm.
For the past 20 years, nearly every article written about the Nike World Headquarters he designed for Knight has prominently mentioned the grassy mound surrounding the campus, so Thompson can be excused for a little over-sensitivity.
Besides, there are plenty of other points of comparison between Nike and Laika. Like Nike, Laika is in the 'burbs. (After a quick sniff at Portland, Knight went to Tualatin.) It features Thompson's brand of classical, highly formal Modernism, a la Mies van der Rohe by way of Richard Meier. And it's well short of state-of-the-art sustainable design.
Yes, the Laika campus plans follow the Nike recipe, for sure. But that said, the Tualatin design also promises to be very, very different.
"It will be more intimate and a much smaller scale," Thompson says, leafing through early computer renderings. "Hopefully, it will be an elegant, neutral environment that allows highly creative people to do what they do with all the flexibility the industry demands."
Indeed, from the curving entry drive that drops 20 feet to the main entrance turnaround, to the ensemble of composite aluminum, ribbed metal, glass and woods layering the buildings and the interwoven formal gardens, Thompson's Laika campus is, in a word, more subtle.
That's because the biggest difference between Nike and Laika is intention. Thompson designed Nike's first phase so that it could be easily converted into generic, rentable office space. Back then, Knight knew failure, having endured a near company-busting business slump in the deep recession of the early '80s. In time, as the company and Knight's confidence grew, so did the campus architectural heroics as it grew to house more than 5,000 employees in a setting befitting the Olympics.
For Laika, Thompson is designing four buildings that are all about a projected 600 creative people making films.
The huge, stop-motion studio will be mostly a big box gridded with lights and heavy black velvet curtains so that it can be easily rearranged into shooting studios of anywhere from 10 to 40 feet square. The character-animation studio Thompson describes as "a lot like an architecture office," with a big open space and work modules. Also included are a fitness center, cafeteria, lounges and, of course, a theater.
But the most striking feature may be the gardens: a series -- or, as Thompson calls it, "a chain" -- of stark, highly formal plantings that align with the building's most prominent windows to create a grid of continuous-view corridors right through the buildings.
For a company whose employees will be focused in creating virtual realities, the actual reality of the work environment promises to be a small paradise.
Thompson is teaming on the project with the Dallas-based Mesa Design Group. After having worked with the firm on the Ericsson Inc. Headquarters in Plano, Texas, Thompson is happy to say, "We've finally found someone who gets what we do."
Much like the Nike campus, Laika will be a follower rather than a leader in eco-friendly design. Despite being in a region where even medical science buildings and a theater built inside a historic armory routinely earn top-of-the-ladder "Platinum" Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design ratings, Thompson says Laika will be shooting only for a second-from-bottom "Silver" rating. So far, passive solar design, alternative energy sources and stormwater management have not been drivers in the design.
But while Thompson chafes at quick comparisons between two Phil Knight (or "Phight" as the stamp on the drawings reads) campuses he sees as entirely different, he can take pride in the key similarity: his own recognizable style. In a city in which most architectural firms' buildings tend to blur together and into the background, Thompson's always stand out.
Indeed, had Nike's World Headquarters been any less architecturally demonstrative, no mention of the architecture would ever have been made in all the articles about the company. More subtle as it may be, Laika's campus will be similarly noted should Knight's vision for animation achieve the same success.
Randy Gragg: 503-221-8575;
randygragg@news.oregonian.com
http://www.oregonlive.com/living/ore...860.xml&coll=7
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