What is that?" Christine Madrid-French asked enthusiastically as she pointed to the Wells Fargo Center.
The director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Modernism + Recent Past program, Madrid-French was in Portland last week for Saturday's daylong panel at the Architectural Heritage Center, "Mid-Century Modern and the Recent Past: Documentation and Preservation", and on Friday I took her for a brief tour of downtown and Memorial Coliseum. She loved a building in town many don't.
Over the last 10 years or so I've been writing about architecture in Portland, the Wells Fargo building has been one of the downtown towers I have heard most derided. In a 2006 Portland Tribune survey of local architects, it was voted the city's most despised building, even beating out the much-maligned Portland Building.
In a 2009 piece from the same paper, architect Paddy Tillett of ZGF said the Wells Fargo Center was "designed as an anti-personnel building. There’s a moat all the way around it and an inoperable drawbridge. “Everything about that tower talks about corporate ego, and it pays no respect whatsoever to its surroundings.”
Located at 1300 Southwest Fifth Avenue between Columbia and Jefferson Streets, the Wells Fargo Center was originally known as the First National Bank Tower when it opened in 1972, and later the First Interstate Bank Tower. At 544 feet tall, it is the tallest building in both the city and the state. As Bart King notes in his Architectural Guidebook to Portland, "this tower's construction provided Portland with the political impetus to change its city zoning laws. So the good news is that height restrictions prevented future downtown behemoths from crashing the party. But unfortunately, this one had already snuck in the door, and it's been clogging up the buffet line ever since."
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Wells Fargo Center (left) with Portland Building, Standard Insurance Center. Photo by Brian Libby
The building is often seen as harsh and unfriendly by the usual local standards of evaluating design. There are no setbacks, so the sidewalk is right up against the building, yet as Tillett notes, there is also a sunken area at the entrance that requires one to pass through a small bridge-like walkway.
Personally, though, I've never felt the same animosity for this building. While one wouldn't want every Portland building to be so big and compromisingly hard-lined in its "Brutalist" forms, I have a fondness for the Wells Fargo as an expression of mid-20th Century modernism and its desire to remake the world.
As Christine Madrid-French and other speakers noted in last Saturday's discussion of mid-century modernism at the Architectural Heritage Center, buildings from the initial boom years after World War II are just reaching the 50-year mark, which is the default measurement for architecture to be considered historic. Besides midcentury modern, this genre sometimes goes by the term "international style", but that can be misleading, because it has become a bit clearer with historical perspective, Madrid-French argues, that modern architecture differs in subtle ways from city to city.
Portland's downtown core happens to have a well-preserved collection of esteemed midcentury modern buildings, most notably the Pietro Belluschi-designed Equitable Building (now known as the Commonwealth) from 1946, credited as the world's first building with a completely sealed aluminum-glass curtain wall and predating better known landmarks of this period such as Lever House by the legendary Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and the United Nations headquarters, both in New York. There is also the earlier Portland Art Museum by Belluschi, his Oregonian headquarters on Broadway, and the recently-renovated federal building from 1949 (now home to Jive software) near Burnside.
But SOM also has a strong legacy in downtown Portland in this period with the Standard Plaza, the Standard Insurance Center, as well as Memorial Coliseum across the river. And in the history of architecture, SOM occupies a rarefied air with the great masters of this era: Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Eero Saarinen, Oscar Niemeyer, Richard Neutra, and Belluschi himself, among others. (Incidentally, many of these names are Europeans who immigrated to America, to the country's huge benefit. Would we let them in today?)
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Standard Plaza, photo by Brian Libby
I spoke as part of a panel discussion during the same AHC event on Saturday, along with Bo Sullivan of Rejuvenation, Anthea Hartig, Director of the National Trust’s Western Regional Office, Haley and Steve Lewis of the Midcentury Modern League. Answering a question by Hartig (who moderated) I talked then about how the economic boom years after World War II produced a huge amount of buildings, more than could ever be preserved. What's more, many were made with then experimental materials that haven't aged well, from aluminum to plywood. And because the aesthetic style was one of minimal simplicity, eschewing the ornamentation of the past, sometimes these buildings can be among the ugliest because there is no architectural detail to hide behind.
Yet the more time goes by, the more that these often austere, rigidly clean-lined buildings are being seen as beautiful architecture worth preserving. The formation of the Midcentury Modern League here in Portland in the last two years is a testament to that, for its leaders are (like myself) Generation X members or younger, people who see the wide array of cultural, historical and stylistic touchstones midcentury modern represents. It's pliable enough to represent roadside motels and restaurants, melamine plates, and at the other spectrum mammoth buildings like Boston's city hall or, here in the Rose City, the Wells Fargo.
This particular building, coming in '72, is at the tail end of midcentury modern. By this time, architects had moved to masonry, particularly concrete (giving way to the term "Brutalism") and richer materials (both monetarily and physically speaking) like marble, the latter of which is one of the primary materials covering the exterior of the Wells Fargo and contrasting strikingly with the black-coated metal.
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Charles Luckman on Time cover, June 10, 1946
The architect of the Wells Fargo Building is Charles Luckman & Associates. Charles Luckman himself is a major figure of the 20th century, but not specifically as an architect. Twice pictured on the cover of Time magazine, he first became famous as the "Boy Wonder of American Business" when he was named president of the Pepsodent toothpaste company in 1939 at the age of thirty. Through acquisition, he later became president of Lever Brothers, the firm that commissioned SOM's greatest architectural masterpiece, Lever House in New York. As noted on his Wikipedia page, after Lever House was constructed, he made a bold move away from being the Boy Wonder to become an aging entry-level architect, but with almost equal success:
Reminded of his architectural roots, Luckman resigned the presidency of Lever Brothers, moved to Los Angeles and began practicing architecture with fellow University of Illinois graduate William Pereira. Their partnership led to works such as the CBS Television City in 1952 and master redesign of Los Angeles International Airport in 1960, but the two went separate ways a year before. Luckman's firm went on to design the Prudential Tower in Boston, the new Madison Square Garden in New York City, Aloha Stadium in Honolulu, Aon Center in Los Angeles, and the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.
It's a little funny when you think about it: Considering Luckman's place in both American business and architectural history of the 20th century, the Wells Fargo has as strong a pedigree as the works here by Belluschi, SOM or any other architect. In that way, it's like the Portland building, despite the fact that the latter's postmodern style was a direct reaction against the former's cold modernism: all the name recognition for its architect, and plenty of talent behind it, yet looked at with scorn. But given as that's changing for midcentury modernism, perhaps Christine Madrid-French's appreciation for the Wells Fargo won't always seem locally contrarian.
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Wells Fargo Center, photo by Brian Libby
Growing up in McMinnville, the Wells Fargo building made a strong impression on me, even though I never actually visited. As one approached the city on Interstate 5, its height would make it the first glimpse one caught of downtown. As a kid from a small town who yearned for the thrill of big cities, the Wells Fargo represented for me that dynamism and aspiration. It was the only building in Portland during the 1970s that one could call a skyscraper. Even today, as both the building and I are 38 years old, that's practically still the case. And I, for one, do not find an expression of corporate ego or inhumane design. I see a building with all the bold aspirations of the time that brought us rocket ships and television.