Picking Paint

Back when I got my hands dirty (I worked briefly as a painting contractor), the other tradespeople always joked about their mistakes “don’t worry, the painters will deal with it.”  These days I am often in the business of choosing paint colors for projects, always an interesting exercise if only because it often happens near the end.

In Medford, where I still function as the designer for the Medford Urban Renewal Agency’s Façade Improvement Program, I’ve chosen paint schemes for dozens of buildings over the years.  Sometimes I am accused of being overly consistent (i.e “boring”) and of picking colors from a limited range.  That’s probably true.  Painting a building, particularly a commercial building, requires a certain amount of restraint.  I tend to strike Neon Yellow off the palette without much thought.  Plus, when you are painting a building, a little color goes a long way.  Which isn’t to say everything has to be tan or grey, but hey, bright colors are why they invented accent strips.  So yes, I tend toward various shades of tan, and cream, and brown, and green, with the occasional red, yellow or even orange (and once violet) highlights.  I will admit it, I don’t like blue, at least for buildings.  I just don’t.   And when a client insists on painting their building the wrong color (sea-foam teal, or the proverbial diarrhea brown), I just cringe every time I go past.  But yes, Virginia,  there are even buildings out there with blue trim that I’ve spec’d, sometimes because that was part of the corporate logo, or what the customer wanted, or who knows why.  There is no accounting for taste and after all is IS just paint...it'll wear off and be re-done in ten years anyway.  But blue?  Ick.

Picking colors usually starts with the limited option items; the awnings, the tile, the metal elements (if there are any).  Those products don’t come in a wide range of tones and so you build your palette around the fixed elements first.  PAINT is easy.  Heck, you can bring in Aunt Sally’s favorite vase and match that if you really want too.  Look at those fan books…there is a color that is right for almost every project (and usually more than one).  In fact I think all those colors are exactly why so many people get paralyzed when they have to decide (and why they are so grateful that I just pick the colors for them).  There are too many choices.  Besides, if I pick the colors they can always blame me if they don’t like them!

I don’t always get it right.  Sometimes the building limits my choices or forces a certain decision that I wouldn’t otherwise make.  Mostly, at least to MY eye, the colors come out pretty well and, every once in awhile, at least I think they come out great.

Today I am picking the exterior colors (or, in truth, more of the exterior colors) for the Holly Theatre.  The painter is nibbling at my heels for a decision.  Perhaps the sun will actually break through to make my life a little easier.

Bridges, bridges, and more bridges

This Friday the State Advisory Committee on Historic Preservation will review the Willamette River Highway Bridges multiple property submittal.  This is a document on the significance of the ten major spans across the river in Multnomah County and includes the formal nomination of four bridges; Hawthorne, Morrison, Burnside and Broadway.  I started working on this project almost two years ago and in the process found a new appreciation for each of these amazing spans.  Almost every Oregonian knows the bridges in downtown Portland, from the “erector set” Marquam, to the soaring Fremont and most of us, I like to think, have our favorites.  They are an amazing group of spans, probably unmatched anywhere in the country, certainly on the West Coast, if only for their diversity.  From the Hawthorne, which is the oldest vertical lift bridge in the nation, to the St. Johns, the longest suspension bridge in the world when it was completed, to the Morrison, the first bascule bridge designed with open  piers to allow water to flow directly through them, Portland does bridges with panache.  It was fun to study these works, and honor to be able to document them for much-deserved recognition on the National Register of Historic Places.

If the Willamette Bridges are the pinnacle of bridge technology in the middle of Oregon (vying with McCullough’s coastal bridges for State-wide honors as a group), they surely are not the only spectacular spans in Oregon.  As I wrote many years ago, getting around the state Oregon, a state replete with creeks, rivers and crevices, without bridges would be darn near impossible.  And Oregon has always taken its roads, and its bridges, seriously.  We still do.  Covered Bridges, those comfortable, quaint, roofs over rivers were a popular form in Oregon where wood, just like rivers, can be easily found.  For years I have worked on the rehabilitation of numerous covered bridges, usually as a part of a team headed by the great guys at OBEC Consulting Engineers.  Together we’ve been involved with the rehab of award-winning projects like the Lowell Covered Bridge or, more recently, the Chambers Covered Railroad Bridge.

This week, on my way up to Portland, I will swing through north central Lane County, where the Deadwood Covered Bridge is soon to get a new shake roof and some other minor but much needed attention.  Deadwood, like so many of Oregon’s 50+ surviving covered bridges, has been bypassed by a typical slab, beam and girder (i.e. pretty boring) concrete span.  Thankfully the good people of Lane County had the vision, and the continued willingness, to retain the Deadwood, and a bunch of other covered bridges, for their history and charm.  Lane County has the largest collection of covered spans in Oregon, which as the largest collection of such spans in America west of the Mississippi River. 

Holly Theatre, Entry Tile Design

Awhile back I reported on the “thrill” of discovered ceramic tile in the exterior foyer of Medford’s Holly Theatre.  We found ceramic tiles, buried underneath a thin layer of concrete, that had been hidden by indoor-outdoor carpets (Really, you have to wonder what people were thinking in the 1970s sometimes).

Anyway, as might have been expected, the tile was pretty chewed up and beyond salvage but gave us plenty of information to design something appropriate to replace it with.  The foyer originally had a small outdoor ticket booth, sort of coffin-shaped according to the footprint, and a series of speckled brown and green octagonal field tiles.  

The Holly, operated by a non-profit (the JPR Foundation) needs, in addition to a nifty, historically appropriate, entry way, a mechanism to recognize major donors.  After coming up with a simple design and the materials for the field tiles (the octagons) we used the shape and location of the ticket booth as the inspiration for a donor medallion, to be made of the same tile materials with an etched brass “H”, the building logo, that was taken from the top of the original marquee.

All of this will be water-jet cut to create precision joints that can be easily installed.  The tile is in production now.  It should be installed sometime in late March or early April if all goes according to plan.  There is more tile too, vertical work to protect the sidewalls.  If you are in southern Oregon in early Spring, watch the news for a dedication ceremony and the “Grand Relighting” of the neon sign!

"Wonderful Things"- Coos Bay's Egyptian Theatre

In 1922, as the story goes, Howard Carter stuck his head through a hole in a wall in Egypt and saw “Wonderful Things,” the largely un-looted tomb of Egypt’s now famed boy King Tutankhamen, King Tut.  Carter’s find set off a sudden rage for all things Egyptian, from jewelry and ceramics, to art and even furniture, but is it is Tut’s influence upon architecture, the Egyptian Revival of the 1920s and 1930s, that we are interested in here.  Egyptian Revival found expression in storefronts (like Klamath Falls’ famed Stribling Motors), and funerary structures (like Eugene’s’ famed Hope Abbey Mausoleum) but its most exuberant use, without a doubt, was in the movie palace.

With the advent of motion pictures, theatres had quickly evolved from simple storefronts into what were almost always the most elaborate flights of fancy most communities had ever seen.  Egyptian was the ultimate “Show Starts on the Sidewalk,” as mentioned in an earlier blog.  By the 1920s, with hundreds of new “talky” theatres under construction, virtually every type of stylistic flourish, from Art Deco to Spanish Revival, Hopi, Aztecan, Moroccan, Chinese and every other design vocabulary was eventually the focus of some Main Street showplace.  Architects of varying skills, some of whom even specialized in movie theatre designs, mined and harvested themes for elaborate concepts that would create a vibrant experience to compete with the flickering images of the silver screen and keep the folks coming back again and again.

The great visuals of Egypt were a natural, and “Egyptian Theatres,” cropped up in Seattle, Portland, Boise and Ogden, among others.  Sid Grauman, of Grauman’s Chinese in Los Angeles, also built Grauman’s Egyptian just down the road.  That Egyptian was the recent focus of a $15 million restoration.  But of the 95 Egyptian Revival Theatres identified by the website Cinema Treasures (www.cinematreasures.org), only 29 remain open as of this writing.  Oregon had two.  Portland’s, on Union Street, was demolished sometime after it closed in 1962.  The site is now an equipment lot.  The other, in Coos Bay, survives and was showing movies as recently as February 2011.

The Egyptian, built in 1925, is a gem that occupies a somewhat non-descript mid-block site in the heart of downtown.  But when you open the door and enter the lobby you can appreciate what Howard Carter saw in 1922.  Larger than life statues flank the stairwells leading to the balcony.  Polychrome detail and papyrus-bundle columns highlight the doors and lobby cornice.  And the auditorium?  Well, let’s just say it hasn’t been changed too much since the interior designer, Charles R. Berg (the same designer responsible for the Holly Theatre, in Medford) first sketched out his own version of Egyptian exuberance. 

Even closed, Coos Bay’s Egyptian Theatre has many friends and fans, joined under the umbrella of the Egyptian Theatre Preservation Association (ETPA) and the City of Coos Bay Urban Renewal Agency (who purchased the building several years ago).  They are working hard to assure it a future.  Unfortunately the first step in that process, a structural analysis that detailed the building’s condition, was perhaps not as well conceived as it could have been, resulting in the sudden closure of the theatre last March.  The Egyptian Theatre was included in HPLO’s first “Most Endangered List” last year and out of that several grants and renewed dedication to creating a successful future have developed.  At the city’s request I went to Coos Bay a few months ago to review the building and meet the community to give them some ideas of how to proceed.  And that is exactly what we will do...the Egyptian Theatre is clearly a “Wonderful Thing.”  Far too wonderful for Coos Bay, and Oregon, to lose.  Coos Bay's school children agree.

Loring Wood and the Log Portal of Sutherlin

I buy lots of postcards on the internet.  They provide a great source of graphics and with the new search sites, it’s pretty easy to pick up images that can guide restoration or rehabilitation projects.  Sometimes, oft-times actually, I find images of long-gone structures that pique my curiosity.  The amazing log gate at Oregon Woods Camp, near Sutherlin, would be in that category.

I picked this card up recently, which shows the 100’ long, 40’ tall log structure built from 32,000 logs taken from 464 trees, according to the sign.  Illuminated by colored lights, visitors were encouraged to “buy a postal” or picture “if interested in nature.”  Wow.  Roadside quirk at its finest, and right here in southern Oregon.  

The sign continues that the gate was built by Loring A. Wood, working alone, from a design that came to him in a dream.  A quick bit of research on Mr. Wood (I absolutely LOVE the internet), finds that he was born in Nebraska in 1891, served in the US Army during WWI, and after a stint in Idaho arrived in Oregon and set up a roadside camp, Oregon Woods Camp, with his wife Amy just south of Sutherlin.  The Arcadia book on Sutherlin, by Tricia Dias, describes Wood as a visionary.  “He had a series of five dreams, from their details he constructed his fabulous archway [and] it became the entrance to his Oregon Woods Camp, which was Oregon’s first motel.” (Dias, 2011:109).  Now, I don’t know if “first motel” is accurate, but clearly Mr. Woods had imagination.  In addition to the gate, he built log models of boats (Dias reports that these included the U.S.S. Constitution and the Mayflower), and toured them around the nation.  In May 1935, according to the Oregonian, Mr. Wood and the Constitution model, reported as being built from 18,000 pieces of wood,”  were on exhibit in Portland, in a “tent on SW Broadway and Columbia” but the city council shut it down as a fire hazard.

I have gone through all my collection of Oregon motels and roadside camps on the Pacific Highway and can’t find any mention of Wood or his Sutherlin campground.  Although Wood died in 1945 (and is buried at the Roseburg National Cemetery), I’ve yet to find his obituary or figure out what happened to fantastic creations in Sutherlin.  Clearly it doesn't survive.  Does anybody know?

As a side note, there is a gentleman named Loring Woods living in New Hampshire who operates a log home construction business, Log Restoration Worldwide LLC, that has a website called The American DREAM ( http://fixlogs.com/am_dream.htm).  When I stumbled across this, between the name, the occupation and the dream bit, I was sure that there had to be some connection.  There wasn’t.  Mr. Wood, of Sutherlin, remains something of mystery.  I’d like to think that his log ship models, at least, survive somewhere.

Beautility- Beauty and Function Combined at BPA

“Beautility” is a word that appears to have been coined sometime in the 1950s, recognizing the productive marriage that was possible when things were both  attractive and functional.  I first came across the term doing work for the Bonneville Power Administration, BPA.  In the early 1960s BPA, having come to the realization that not everybody saw their transmission lines and substations as works of art, hired a noted Portland, Oregon architectural firm to help them come up with a better design model that would be, well, be-utiliful.  “Beautility" is what Stanton, Boles, Maguire and Church called their approach, published in that summer-blockbuster A Report on Appearance Planning for BPA, released in May 1966.  This is a sketch from that hard to find report.  I found mine at Powell's (and for just $5 too!)

BPA’s Beautility actually made waves in the electric utility world and there were numerous requests for the report during the late 1960s and early 1970s.  BPA took the advice to heart and looking at their control houses, and transmission lines, and substations, the educated eye can easily discern the impact the report had.  Today, as most of those 1960s-1970s era buildings near five decades of service, they are all potentially historic, despite their sometimes space-age design.  “Beautility,” like other works of so-called Mid-Century Modern design, is just now coming into its own.  I think some, like BPA's buildings at the Ceilio Converter Station, show below, already have.

Beautility isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, nor is it frequently what the average person conjures to mind as historic.  We’ll leave alone that electric transmission infrastructure isn’t what the average person often conjures to mind as historic either, other than to mention that you might try to imagine the Pacific Northwest (or anywhere) without it.  "Historic" and stunning architecture aren't synonyms and never were.

I am starting to work on a late Beautility period project for BPA…one clad in colorful panels that surely screams late 1960s.  While I am somewhat disappointed to learn that Stanton et al simply borrowed the term from somebody else, I am pleased to see the use of the word continues (though mostly for hair salons and grooming, according to Google.  Even Nike has a line of clothes under that term).  Still it seems there are few places where "Beautility" could be more appropriate than at BPA which is, after all, what most people consider to be a “Utility.”  One that during the 1960s made an effort toward beauty wherever it could.

Facades are Improving

Medford’s Façade Improvement Grant Program keeps moving forward and transforming downtown buildings one storefront after another.  These past few weeks I’ve been working on the eastern portion of the Hamlin Building, one of the oldest structures in downtown.  Built in 1888 it was originally a vernacular Italianate form, with exposed red brick, arched windows and central stairwell that divided the façade into two symmetrical bays.  

Fast forward to the 1930s, the second generation of the Hamlin family split the property after a legal dispute and the west half was modernized.  Not to be outdone the Miles family, the heirs that owned the eastern half, covered the old brick with a mixture of stucco and panels in the latest Art Moderne styling in the late 1930s, probably with the assistance of local architect Frank Chamberlain Clark.  Clark’s offices were on the second floor for many years.  

The east half of the building was again remodeled in the 1960s and 1980s and by early October was in need of some TLC.  The heavy metal awning, mounted on what turned out to be panels of Masonite loosely attached to the lower façade, was failing and threatening to collapse.  Once the awning was removed, the Masonite came down, exposing the series of remodelings, and even including a glimpse of the original brick exterior.

We’re working with the owners, a great-grandson of Mr. Hamlin himself, on a new façade treatment that will try to create a more unified, and durable, lower façade, while painting the upper to accentuate its fine detailing.  A new awning, and new signage, will help support the success of the current occupant, a restaurant, or any subsequent tenants.

The façade projects in Medford aren’t always strictly by-the-book preservation in the normal sense, but we certainly take the lessons of preservation and use them to create what are hopefully more attractive members of the streetscape.  The program has been incredibly successful, addressing more than 90 buildings in the past 8 years and winning the James C. Howland Gold Medal from the National League of Cities for excellence in “Urban Enrichment.”