Portland projects and firms were well-represented at the recent 2021 American Architecture Awards.

More than 130 buildings from a list of over 400 received the award, which recognizes the best new architecture designed and constructed by American architects and by international architects with offices in the United States. It is described as the nation’s highest public award for new architecture and urban planning.

The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design, along with The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies presented the awards.

Oregon’s winners are:

Affordable Housing: The Louisa Flowers

LRS Architects and LEVER Architecture designed the 12-story affordable, multifamily housing for Home Forward. The building was completed in 2019 and was constructed by O’Neill/Walsh Community builders. With 240 apartments available, The Louisa Flowers is the largest, single affordable housing building constructed in Portland in 50 years.

Institutional: Oregon Conservation Center

Designed by LEVER Architecture, the Oregon Conservation Center renovation and expansion in 2019 completely reimagined the building. The exterior was replaced with steel cladding, as well as Juniper wood cladding and cedar decks that were sustainably harvested from the Nature Conservancy’s conservation sites.

Restoration and Renovation: The Portland Building

Built in 1982 as city administrative offices, The Portland Building is an award-winning icon on the National Register of Historic Places. However, it faced structural problems and needed exterior and operational system repairs. DLR Group completed renovation and restoration of the 400,000-square-foot, 15-story building, which included new exterior cladding and a seismic upgrade.

Schools and Universities: The Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, University of Oregon

Ennead Architects, based in New York, designed the two L-shaped towers for the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact. The 166,000-square-foot structure is adorned with a glass curtain wall, while the inside uses cross-laminated timber in places as a connection to the surrounding environment. Bora Architecture & Interiors also worked as the architect of record for the project.

Private Homes:

• William Kaven Architecture – Royal
• Scott|Edwards Architecture – Slabtown 4

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Local architecture firm William/Kaven Architecture recently received an Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects’ Michigan chapter for a home project completed last year.

Camp MINOH, located near Charlevoix, Michigan, is a 4,000-square-foot private home designed for extended family stays. The project team sought to encapsulate regional history, from French fur trappers to Al Capone’s mobsters to Ernest Hemingway.

The building’s ground level has concrete floors, exposed ceiling beams made from fir trees and cabinets made of black walnut and blackened steel. The upper floor, in contrast, has oak accents dispersed throughout.

Camp MINOH is far from urban distractions and enclosed by trees, save for the back deck, which is mere feet away from the edge of Lake Michigan.

“We got a permit in somebody’s living room, basically,” firm partner Daniel Kaven said. “It’s a rural location.”

The project started in 2014, but completion was delayed because of challenges presented by harsh winter weather, Kaven said, adding that he had never worked in such a remote location.

Kaven and fellow partner Trevor William Lewis accepted their award in Rochester Hills, Michigan, in a Tudor-style mansion once owned by the auto-pioneering Dodge family.

“The project is really amazing,” Kaven said. “It was really enjoyable to build something that was on a sort of end-of-America location.”

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Bremik Construction is putting the finishing touches on a new four-story mixed-use building at North Williams Avenue and Mason Street, in Portland’s Boise neighborhood. The Silica contains three stories of leasable open office space over ground-floor retail space and an at-grade parking garage. The project was developed by Ruben J. Menashe Inc., and was designed by William Kaven Architecture.

The concrete and heavy timber structure consists of a concrete podium up to the second level, two concrete cores, and upper floors framed with glulam beams and three-by-six car decking with a concrete topping slab. Bremik self-performed the timber framing and the concrete work on the building, which features multiple board-formed concrete walls. A curtain wall skin allows ample light penetration into the office spaces, which have floor-to-floor heights of about 13 feet.

The top two floors measure approximately 9,000 rentable square feet, while the second level has about 10,500 rentable square feet and a 700-square-foot outdoor terrace. Each of the upper floors contains a 329-square-foot balcony with large sliding doors. The building’s ground floor contains five retail spaces totaling around 4,500 square feet and a parking garage with a 13-car stacker and seven surface spaces. There are multiple racks for bicycle storage, and each of the office floors has a shower room.

KPFF Consulting Engineers handled structural and civil engineering, and Shapiro Didway served as the landscape architect. Colliers International is the broker of the office space, and Urban Works Real Estate is representing the building’s retail component.

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The Portland Historic Landmarks Commission on Monday got its first look at plans for Block 33, at 125 N.W. Fourth Ave., and advised the development team to consider closely how the building will fit in the neighborhood.

“We have been working on the project for two years,” said Daniel Kaven, a partner at William Kaven Architecture, during the design advice meeting. “It’s come a long way.”

Plans call for a full-block, mixed-use glass and brick building. Still unresolved is how tall it will be. Currently, it’s designed to stand 125 feet, but the maximum allowed height in the New Chinatown/Japantown Historic District is 100 feet.

That height limit is expected to change with new rules being reviewed by the City Council. The rules, however, wouldn’t take effect until 2018 at the earliest.

The developers had planned to submit a design for review by Feb. 1. That date is important because anything submitted thereafter will be subject to the city’s new inclusionary housing rules.

“We are still examining our options,” Kaven said. “We thought the (height) guidelines would be in place by 2016 and here we are in 2017.”

Currently, plans for Block 33 call for five stories of residential units, four levels of office space, a ground-floor retail market and more than 300 underground parking spaces spread over a 140,000-square-foot site.

“This is an unabashedly big building,” Kaven said.

Some commissioners expressed reservations over a building stretching up to even the current 100-foot maximum.

“I would counsel the applicant to look more closely at the forms in the district,” Commissioner Kristen Minor said. “You need to do a lot more context study. It’s not reflective of the district. You need to have a more fine-grain understanding of the scale and proportion at the ground floor especially.”

The size of the opening bays was also a major concern of the commissioners.

“I would agree that the bays look like you could drive one of the contributing buildings right in there,” Commissioner Matthew Roman said.

Commissioners also suggested looking at comparable districts for inspiration.

“I just wondered if you looked at other chinatowns,” Commissioner Wendy Chung said. “A giant building causes people to know they aren’t in a chinatown. This is a big step toward making it look like it’s not a chinatown.”

The commissioners weren’t the only ones with reservations about the current design. It wouldn’t win the favor of the Portland Chinatown History Foundation, said Jackie Peterson-Loomis, its executive director.

“This is not necessarily a very strong response to the guidelines,” she said. “We want it. We want housing. We want retail. But we also want something that is going to be not only compatible, but respectful of this neighborhood and its Asian-American culture.”

Commissioners did praise the modern elements, brick façade and canopies included in the design, but expressed desire for something more representative of the neighborhood.

The developers will return for a follow up design advice review on Feb. 27.

Also on Monday:

Southeast Portland garage

The commission voted 7-0 to approve a staff recommendation to deny demolition of a 94-year-old garage at 1445 S.E. Division St.

The garage, behind the house, was disassembled during an effort to convert it into an accessory dwelling unit. Contractors needed to work on the foundation, and gained access by taking apart the garage.

That was considered demolition, despite the builder’s intention to reassemble the garage using the same materials and a design approved previously. That required a trip back to the Historic Landmarks Commission because the structure was in the Ladd’s Addition historic district.

Had the commission approved the demolition, the homeowner could have had to return to the commission to seek approval of a new design for a new garage.

By denying demolition, the city allows the contractor to rebuild the garage with the current materials and approved building plans. It also ensures that the garage will stays on the register of historic landmarks.

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Guardian Real Estate Services is moving forward with plans for a mixed-use development including affordable apartments on Portland’s Block 33 in Old Town Chinatown.

The proposed full-block project at 125 N.W. Fourth Ave. would have five floors of apartments and four floors of office space over ground-floor retail and market space.

Guardian purchased the property in July from David Gold for $11 million.

“It’s a wonderful block,” said Tom Brenneke, Guardian’s president. “The neighborhood is certainly supportive of development there.”

The outlook for multifamily projects remains strong despite some concessions in the apartment market, Brenneke said.

“All of the data points to the supply being short and demand being healthy over time,” he said. “Anytime you dump a bunch of apartments at one time, it’s going to take some time to absorb.

“Big picture, we’re optimistic about the Portland market. The job growth has been consistently good. By the time we’re ready to deliver – we’re a late 2019 delivery – we anticipate the market to still be in a pretty good balance and we expect strong absorption.”

The office space will total approximately 137,000 square feet. Guardian is targeting the creative office market.

The project will include a minimum of 200 parking spaces, Brenneke said. A public notice posted Nov. 21 by the city’s Bureau of Development Services shows current plans for two levels of underground parking, but Brenneke said the development team is studying options for more.

“We’re considering an alternative that would expand it to a third or potentially a fourth floor (of parking),” he said.

The block is also adjacent to MAX light-rail lines running along Fifth Avenue.

Block 33, now a parking lot, has long been targeted for development. In 2011, Seattle-based Asian grocer Uwajimaya moved on from its plans to anchor a mixed-use development on the site.

Guardian has not selected a finance partner yet, Brenneke said. The developer is finalizing an agreement with a general contractor. The project is being designed by William Kaven Architecture.

Guardian is also at work in Northwest Portland on blocks 290 and 290E, where 200 multifamily units are proposed for property at Northwest 21st Avenue and Pettygrove Street. That project is designed by LRS Architects.

The developer has under construction a 40-unit affordable project for the Native American Youth and Family Center in Lents, and it recently completed the 47-unit Miracles Central Apartments in a fee project for Central City Concern. Guardian is also building the Bridge Meadows II affordable apartments project in Beaverton.

The developer is also working on a potential deal in Milwaukie, Brenneke said.

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A 250-room hotel is being planned for Portland’s Old Town Chinatown district, but construction has to wait until the city raises commercial building height requirements. And because of current city staff shortages, that could take at least a year.

Daniel Kaven, co-owner of William Kaven Architecture, is planning a striking glass-topped building on Block 33, a 40,000-square-foot parking lot bordered by Northwest Fourth and Fifth avenues and Northwest Couch and Davis streets.

Before the project goes through design review, though, Kaven is waiting for the city to implement a recently approved increase to 150 feet in allowable commercial building height in the central city that will be included in its 2035 West Quadrant Plan. He plans for his building height to be between 10 and 12 stories, he said.

“It sounds like the implementation of increased height is not moving along like it’s supposed to because they don’t have enough staff,” Kaven said. “I’m hoping to start construction next summer.”

Kaven’s assessment is correct, said city planner Nicholas Starin.

The problem is that the proposed Central City Plan must be adopted before new height requirements can be adopted, Starin said, which in the best scenario would be next summer. Under proposed changes, some areas would see lowered height limits while others would be higher. However, the city currently doesn’t have enough staff to do the work.

Starin said Kaven has taken the project “fairly far in terms of preliminary design,” but the city has not caught up. He’s hoping some answers might come from a meeting of the Old Town Chinatown Community Association meeting, where Kaven’s project will discussed by the association’s Land Use Design and Review Committee. The meeting will be at 9 a.m. on July 21 in Room 152 at the University of Oregon at 70 N.W. Couch St.

“I’m hopeful there will be a productive conversation,” Starin said. “This is really a key development parcel with potential for a really catalytic effect that will help revitalize the neighborhood, and I think everybody recognizes that.”

The current height limit for the central city is 100 feet, Starin said, which would be too low for Kaven’s project to pencil out. Even though the West Quadrant Plan would raise the limit to 150 feet, that can’t be implemented until guidelines are adopted.

“The problem is that there are a whole bunch of design guidelines to update and we’re planning to update after city council adopts the Central City Plan,” Starin said.

A draft of the Central City Plan will go before City Council in November.

“I think July of next year would be the earliest we could change the height,” Starin said. “But we don’t currently have the staff to do those design guidelines.”

Lack of staff has been an ongoing problem for the city this year, one of the busiest for post-recession development in Portland. Although some new staff has been hired, it is not enough to keep up with development demands. That’s a problem Starin would like to see solved for Kaven’s development.

“It’s not impossible and a lot of people are excited and see the potential (of the project) for Old Town/Chinatown,” Starin said.  “There is a willingness from all parties to try and problem-solve this.”

AN URBAN RESORT

The yet-unnamed hotel will bring the idea of an “urban resort” to the Chinatown area, Kaven said, with a roof-top swimming pool, outdoor common spaces with possibly a “beer garden” ambiance, a ballroom and space for events. Plans also call for the hotel to house several restaurants.

“We will have a big, beautifully landscaped courtyard,” Kaven said. “One of the exciting things about the whole block is that you can have outdoor spaces that are not afforded when a hotel is fronted on a sidewalk.”

The building’s design will be by William Kaven Architecture, owned by Kaven and his brother Trevor William Lewis. The developer is Kaven+Co., founded by Kaven.

Taking on such a large project is quite a departure from his previous work, Kaven said, when he primarily developed residential and smaller commercial projects. But he said he’s not worried about the challenge.

“I have total confidence in building the team and doing the project,” he said.

Preliminary plans call for the building to have a ground-floor retail, and Kaven is currently interviewing commercial real estate brokers about leasing retail space.

“It’s a night market concept for Chinatown, something to really activate the neighborhood at night,” he said.

A major hotel group already is attached to the project, Kaven said, though he declined to reveal a name.

The concrete-and-steel building will be post-tensioned concrete with a faceted curtain wall system on it, Kaven said. The plinth will be modern brick with steel apertures, with the glass structure on top.

“The outside of the envelope of the building has lots of glass,” he said. “It’s going to be a great building with great views.”

Both Kaven and Lewis studied architecture at the University of Oregon and started their architecture firm in 2004, Kaven said, and he’s pleased with the initial design of the hotel.

“It’s a simple geometric structure,” he said. “The idea is that that the building feels very grounded at the retail and pedestrian level.”

With other hotels in addition to his project planned for the neighborhood, he feels the area is on its way to being revitalized.

“It’s absolutely exciting that this is the oldest part of Portland,” he said. “I believe that neighborhood can be tremendous. There’s a good neighborhood already there.”

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