One of the Portland Building’s less-beloved original features was a small underground parking garage, accessed via a garage door on Fourth Avenue. The garage opening, though it sloped down to the building’s basement, had to be large enough that it necessitated removing another aspect of Graves’ design: a large window providing views across the lobby, out past Fourth Avenue and to the park blocks beyond. During the redesign process, when the City of Portland committed to eliminating vehicle parking in the basement, it opened an opportunity to restore that original element, which should be a celebrated moment in the façade.
Indeed, because of the garage, the Portland Building was like a house without a view of its own backyard. When that happens, it’s not just the view that’s lost but the broader sense of connection—and, in this case, it showed. One of the biggest issues people had with the Portland Building was that walking into the lobby just seemed oppressive. It was a small space that was opaque on all sides. Now, however, a new wall of glass means that when entering the Portland Building, one looks through the ground floor to the park beyond. It’s the kind of axial connection that classical architecture is based on, and it was surprisingly fundamental to Graves’ ground floor.
In the renovated Portland Building, there is vastly more natural light penetrating the new interior. Removing the original drop ceilings raised the overall height of each floor space and, even more importantly, when given a fresh coat of white paint, helps bounce incoming sunlight around the room.
A SUSTAINABLE DIFFERENCE
To become the kind of people-friendly space that encourages collaboration, enables productivity and fosters employee retention, the Portland Building could not just add natural light, an expanded lobby and open offices. The design needed to meet the highest standards for sustainable design. It needed to be more energy- and resource-efficient than ever before and, more importantly, promote human health. That is why the design-construction team and the City of Portland pursued certification from WELL and LEED.
The WELL Building Standard is a performance-based system for measuring, certifying, and monitoring building- performance features, such as air, water and light, that impact human health and wellbeing. Administered by the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), a public benefit corporation, WELL is composed of more than 100 different design features applied to each certified building. The certification makes the Portland Building one of the largest WELL-certified public building renovation projects in history. The team worked closely with IWBI because it wanted to establish the building as a new basis for this kind of building focused on the human experience.
The reconstruction also achieved a Platinum rating from the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED program, which exceeded the City of Portland’s required minimum standard of meeting LEED Gold. The renovated Portland Building reached 36 percent more efficiency over State of Oregon energy-code standards and uses 50 percent less energy compared to the pre-renovated structure.
PHOTOS: JAMES EWING/JSBA unless otherwise noted
Retrofit Team
OWNER: City of Portland
ARCHITECT: DLR Group
GENERAL CONTRACTOR: Howard S. Wright, a Balfour Beatty company
OWNER’S REPRESENTATIVE: DayCPM/OTAK
STRUCTURAL ENGINEER: KPFF
MEP ENGINEER: PAE
Materials
CUSTOM UNITIZED CURTAINWALL: Benson Industries (MiTek)
TERRA-COTTA TILE: NBK Architectural Terracotta
GLAZING: Viracon
AIR-COOLED HEAT PUMPS/ HEAT-RECOVERY CHILLERS: Aermec
CEILINGS: Decoustics
CARPET: Interface
PAINT: Sherwin-Williams