The Portland Art Museum‘s Rothko Pavilion is ready for its public debut after a decade of conception and planning, and nearly three years of construction.

The $116 million project’s centerpiece is the pavilion, a thoroughly modern, four-story glass box that bridges two 20th-century museum buildings.

Perhaps most emblematic of the project: Signs in the museum refer to the Mark building, built in 1970, as the North Wing, while the original Pietro Belluschi museum building, built in 1932, is now the South Wing.

It’s all one Portland Art Museum.

“Connectivity was really the core architectural mission of the project,” said Tim Eddy, principal at Hennebery Eddy Architects. The local firm partnered with Vinci Hamp Architects of Chicago to design the project.

The major design problem was how to combine the two existing buildings. The solution, the architects decided, would be a glazed box. They added two elevators and a central staircase, and several subtle step-downs to help navigate at least 11 grade changes between the Mark and Belluschi buildings.

The result is a landmark civic project for Portland.

Inside, natural light floods the Rothko Pavilion. Designers used fritted glass to both reduce glare and avoid bird strikes. Heating and cooling run through the floors. Sound deadening was used extensively, and the building has only the quiet hum of the ventilation system bringing in fresh air.

“It was not intended to be a focal third building,” Eddy said. “It was really intended to connect the existing buildings.”

The project adds about 100,000 square feet of new and renovated interior space. Curators have filled that space with new exhibits of Mark Rothko paintings, Pacific Northwest and Native American art, an entire floor dedicated to contemporary Black artists, and a series of immersive digital works.

The connections between buildings should make it easier for visitors to navigate to the various galleries, museum officials and designers said.

“Everyone gets to see more of the art,” said Phillip Hamp, principal at Vinci Hamp Architects.

Outside, a gold-ring sculpture made of gilded timber — “The Sun” by Swiss-American artist Ugo Rondinone — dominates the west side along Southwest 10th Avenue, with views of the West Hills. To the east, visitors can look toward the Hawthorne Bridge and Mount Hood.

The pavilion “creates a new, welcoming central front door to the museum,” said Brian Ferriso, the art museum’s director.

Museum officials raised $116 million for the project itself and $30 million more for an endowment.

Designers took transparency seriously. Pedestrians can look inside the museum, viewing art from a passageway or the sidewalks. Museumgoers can see the city outside the structure.

Outdoor terraces on the fourth floor provide views and resting spots, and space for events. On the ground floor, Providore Fine Foods has opened Coquelico, a café serving sandwiches, salads and pizza.

Vinci Hamp leaned on Hennebery Eddy’s local expertise with Portland’s design review and historic resource processes, Hamp said.

“One of the real benefits of hooking up with Hennebery is they knew this system,” Hamp said. “We had a head start, and they were able to run interference.”

Mortenson served as general contractor, handling unusual materials and a unique project site. KPFF was the structural engineer.

“This vision started over a decade ago and continued through COVID and tariffs and everything else,” said Carolyn Sizemore, Mortenson’s director for the Portland market. “This proves hard, complex things can be completed in Portland — and should be.”

The museum will open to the public on Nov. 20 with a schedule of events and free admission.

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ATLANTA — A popular museum in Atlanta is expanding at a critical moment in the United States. And unlike the Smithsonian Institution, the privately funded National Center for Civil and Human Rights is beyond the immediate reach of Trump administration efforts to control what Americans learn about their history.

The monthslong renovation, which cost nearly $60 million, is adding six new galleries as well as classrooms and interactive experiences, changing a relatively static museum into a dynamic place where people are encouraged to support civil and human rights, racial justice and the future of democracy, said Jill Savitt, the center’s president and CEO.

The center will reopen Nov. 8. During construction, officials have worked on K-12 education programs that include more than 300 online lesson plans; an LGBTQ+ Institute; training in diversity, equity and inclusion; human rights training for law enforcement; and its Truth & Transformation Initiative to spread awareness about forced labor, racial terror and other historic injustices. These are the same aspects of American history, culture and society that the Trump administration has sought to dismantle.

Inspiring future ‘change agents’

Dreamed up by civil rights icons Evelyn Lowery and Andrew Young, the center opened in 2014 on land donated by the Coca-Cola Company, next to the Georgia Aquarium and The World of Coca-Cola. The museum became a major tourist attraction, but ticket sales declined after the pandemic.

Now the center hopes to attract more repeat visitors with immersive experiences like “Change Agent Adventure,” which is geared toward children under 12. These “change agents” will be asked to pledge to do something — no matter how small — that “reflects the responsibility of each of us to play a role in the world: To have empathy. To call for justice. To be fair, be kind. And that’s the ethos of this gallery,” Savitt said. It will open next April.

“I think advocacy and change-making is kind of addictive; it’s contagious,” Savitt explained. “When you do something, you see the success of it. You really want to do more. And our desire here is to whet the appetite of kids to see that they can be involved. They can do it.”

This ethos is sharply different from the idea that young people can’t handle the truth and must be protected from unpleasant challenges but, Savitt said, “the history that we tell here is the most inspirational history.”

“In fact, I think it’s what makes America great,” she said. “It is something to be patriotically proud of. The way activists over time have worked together through nonviolence and changed democracy to expand human freedom — there’s nothing more American and nothing greater than that. That is the lesson that we teach here.”

Encouraging hopefulness

“Broken Promises,” which will open in December, includes exhibits from the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, cut short when white mobs sought to brutally reverse advances by formerly enslaved people. “We want to start orienting you in the conversation that we believe we all kind of see, but we don’t say it outright: Progress. Backlash. Progress. Backlash. And that pattern that has been in our country since enslavement,” said its curator, Kama Pierce.

On display will be a Georgia historical marker from the site of the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner, pockmarked repeatedly with bullets, that Turner descendants donated to keep it from being vandalized again.

“There are 11 bullet holes and 11 grandchildren living,” and the family’s words will be incorporated into the exhibit to show their resilience, Pierce said.

Items from the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. collection will have a much more prominent place, in a room that recreates King’s home office, with family photos contributed by the center’s first guest curator: his daughter, the Rev. Bernice King.

“We wanted to lift up King’s role as a man, as a human being, not just as an icon,” Savitt said.

Gone are the huge images of the world’s most genocidal leaders — Hitler, Stalin and Mao among others — with explanatory text about the millions of people killed under their orders. In their place there will be examples of human rights victories by groups working around the world.

“The research says that if you tell people things are really bad and how awful they are, you motivate people for a minute, and then apathy sets in because it’s too hard to do anything,” Savitt said. “But if you give people something to hope for that’s positive, that they can see themselves doing, you’re more likely to cultivate a sense of agency in people.”

Fostering a healthy democracy

And doubling in capacity is an experience many can’t forget: joining a 1960s sit-in against segregation. Wearing headphones as they take a lunch-counter stool, visitors can both hear and feel an angry, segregationist mob shouting they don’t belong. Because this is “heavy content,” Savitt said, a new “reflection area” will allow people to pause afterward on a couch, with tissues if they need them, to consider what they’ve just experienced.

The center’s expansion was seeded by Home Depot co-founder and Atlanta philanthropist Arthur M. Blank, the Mellon Foundation and many other donors, for which Savitt expressed gratitude: “The corporate community is in a defensive crouch right now — they could get targeted,” she said.

But Savitt said donors shared concerns about people’s understanding of citizenship, so supporting the teaching of civil and human rights makes a good investment.

“It is the story of democracy — Who gets to participate? Who has a say? Who gets to have a voice?” she said. “So, our donors are very interested in a healthy, safe, vibrant, prosperous America, which you need a healthy democracy to have.”

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The Portland Art Museum‘s $111 million Mark Rothko Pavilion is nearing completion as construction crews work to meet a Nov. 20 opening date.

Museum Director Brian Ferriso pointed to “punch list” items on Monday that need finishing before the museum’s renovation and expansion centered on a landmark glass pavilion opens to the public.

On a recent visit, workers led by construction manager/general contractor Mortenson Construction were touching up paint, removing tape and sweeping floors.

The project was ambitious from the start: Constructing a new glassed-in pavilion sandwiched between two separate existing buildings, renovating the older structures, and melding it all together into a cohesive and seismically resilient 21^st century museum.

Designers from Hennebery Eddy Architects and Chicago’s Vinci Hamp Architects had to join 11 distinct floors among the three structures. Previously, there were no above-grade connections between the Pietro Belluschi-designed 1932 Main Building and the Mark Building, formerly a Masonic temple, built in 1927. Only an underground passageway joined them, requiring an elevator trip. Visitors complained of getting lost.

“If you’re looking at a map and feeling lost, you’re not looking at art and you’re not feeling welcome,” said Donald Urquhart, the museum’s director of collections and exhibitions.

Soon, a grand staircase will allow patrons to freely circulate around the museum, and additional elevators for both humans and large art pieces have been installed.

The project adds nearly 100,000 square feet of new and renovated public and gallery space. Museum officials have acquired nearly 300 new works to display.

The museum’s design takes transparency literally. Inspired in part by Apple stores, architects made liberal use of fritted glass that was expensively imported from Germany and fritted in Spain before its journey to Portland. It hangs 28 feet high, forming what museum officials call the “jewel box” of the Rothko Pavilion at the museum’s center.

Museumgoers will be able to view the downtown surrounds from indoors. During a tour this week, visitors could see the Portland Streetcar as it trundled by and daily activity at the Eliot tower and Park Blocks on either side of the museum.

“You can feel the city here,” Ferriso said.

Visitors don’t need to go inside the museum to get a taste — a glass passageway through the Rothko Pavilion allows pedestrians to see in. “Everyone will have a museum experience, whether they’re inside or out,” Ferriso said.

Other changes include relocating the loading dock to Southwest Jefferson Street and moving the library to a 4,200-square-foot space on the ground floor of the Mark Building to make way for the Crumpacker Center for New Art, an experiential contemporary art space. A state-of-the-art security center is hidden from view.

On the museum’s West Plaza, Coquelico, a café from Providore Fine Foods, will open in September.

Throughout, museum officials sought to uphold universal design principles to ensure patrons with disabilities can seamlessly experience the exhibits. No longer will patrons in wheelchairs have to enter the museum through a side door.

The design also pays attention to basic human comforts. More bathrooms are being constructed, and additional seating will be installed throughout the museum in response to feedback. “These areas for relaxation and contemplation are so important,” Ferriso said.

Construction crews were challenged by the complexity of linking HVAC and other building systems across the three structures, Ferriso said. Heating and cooling are provided by water tubes located under the slate gray stone floors. In other areas, the flooring is white oak.

No large construction project comes without surprises, and one arrived when workers discovered asbestos in the Main Building. “We ran into asbestos in the 1930s building,” Ferriso said. “That cost us some money.”

Now the project is on track to open to the public Nov. 20 with four days of free admission. Ferriso himself has announced he’ll be leaving shortly after that to take over as director of the Dallas Museum of Art after nearly 20 years helming the Portland museum.

Ferriso sounded a contemplative note as he discussed the Portland Art Museum’s collections. “We’re just stewards for a moment,” he said.

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