91视频

ZGF Architects principal Paddy Tillett has written a new book that articulates lessons learned from nearly 40 years helping improve livability in Portland.

鈥淪haping Portland: Anatomy of a Healthy City鈥� is about the values engendered by the city, and how those values have influenced growth. The book also presents a case study of a recognized urban infill success: the Pearl District.

Tillett is an architect, urban designer and city planner. He also is an adjunct professor at Portland State University. He grew up in rural Scotland, and obtained an architectural diploma from Oxford and then a master’s degree in civic design from the University of Liverpool. He then worked for consulting firms and public agencies in many parts of the world before settling in the Pacific Northwest.

Tillett recently spoke with the 91视频 about his new book.

91视频: What was the motivation behind writing 鈥淪haping Portland: Anatomy of a Healthy City?鈥�

Paddy Tillett: A New York publisher called me up and asked if I’d like to write a book about Portland. I was so flattered, I said yes, and then I had to figure out what it was going to be. I had written chapters of a book on planning previously and one of them had caught their eye. I had written about the Pearl District for a British publication, and they were very taken with that.

There may be some advantage in being a longtime foreigner. I moved here to live in 1982 so I’ve been here a long time and I’ve seen a huge amount of change, and I’ve been involved in a lot of it through my work at ZGF. That was the background. It seemed like an opportunity to state the obvious in what people don’t necessarily see 鈥� how downtown and the inner neighborhoods have grown and changed during that period, and why. The things that make Portland different from other cities play into that in a big way. This area was born of cataclysmic seismic events, and yet there is sort of a blight will to ignore 鈥� if you look at how we’ve built 鈥� it’s as if we don’t really think anything is going to happen.

The book is two things. It talks about why Portland is the way it is and gives great credit to the statewide and local values. But on the other hand, it rings a warning. We’ve got the information; use it and find a way to act intelligently with the information we’ve got.

91视频: What are the primary shifts in urban design you’ve seen over the course of your career?

Tillett: It’s not so much a shift; it’s a growing awareness of how important urban design is. For example, when the transit mall was built back in the ’70s, it was led by the engineers. The architects and the landscape architects had something to do with it, but basically the whole thing was led by the engineers, and they identified what worked and what the architects would do. When it was rebuilt in 2009, TriMet put the urban designers 鈥� the architects and the landscape architects 鈥� in charge, recognizing that the places created along the transit mall were of primary importance. The engineers can make anything work, basically, and they really shouldn’t be calling the shots.

So I think there’s a shift in attitude, and there’s an awareness of urban design that frankly wasn’t there before. I think we see that in the way that the Pearl District has emerged, for example, and the way that we treat the waterfront. The greenway trail was identified on the plans 30 or 40 years ago, but it was a line.

But now, if you look at what’s been done in South Waterfront, for example, it’s become much more elaborate. We think about circulation, we think about recreation, we think about habitat not only on the bank but on the river. We’re really trying to achieve many more things with what we do, and the same is true with the way we design streets and open spaces.

Director Park, for example, instead of just being an open space as O’Bryant Square was designed, provides a lot of different opportunities for different things to happen concurrently. It recognizes that it will be used by folks who work downtown during the day, and it also recognizes that more and more people are living downtown and it’s going to have a different sort of life in catering to their needs.

We’re just becoming more sophisticated in understanding what urban design is and how it affects our livability 鈥� the quality of urban life that we have as a result of how we build things.

91视频: From your perspective, what do you see for the future of city planning?

Tillett: It’s an opportunistic view, but what I see is a shift away from specialists and silo thinking, which is what dominated the 20th century, into a place where design professionals will be informed generalists 鈥� to think holistically about each problem.

With that holistic thinking by all the design professionals, we’ll have a much more collaborative approach to design and things will be yet more purposeful than they are at the moment. Silo thinking is our enemy.

A great example is why we have one-way streets downtown. It’s for one purpose only, and that’s to get vehicles around more quickly. It completely overlooked what it does to retail. If you think about the best positions for retail in the street is usually the corner for approaching traffic so everyone sees it.

Well, when you make the streets one-way, half of those retailers lose out because they’re no longer visible. In the banal days of silo thinking, we thought singularly about how to improve things for the automobile, and in the process screwed up a lot of other things that were working perfectly well.

It’s this broadened vision which is so important. When one sees the whole picture of what makes a good city work and how do we embrace that.

91视频: What is the primary message you hope others take away after reading your book?

Tillett: I think to recognize that successful design is based in a very broad understanding of all of the things that play into it. We can’t ignore any of those. Some of them are things like seismic threats and some are more subtle like the function of trees and microclimates.

But one needs to be aware of all of those and one needs to be aware of what one knows but also what one does not know, and go searching for that so we continue to get a better understanding what makes a good urban habitat for mankind.