At the Portland Art Museum’s grand reopening on November 20, a free-admission day giving the public its first look at the Rothko Pavilion and all 100,000 square feet of new and upgraded gallery spaces, a line of people waiting to get in stretched around the block.

The turnout was not only a boon to downtown Portland, after years of post-pandemic malaise. For PAM director Brian Ferriso, his staff and trustees, it was a triumph after their decade-long, nine-digit fundraising campaign. And it validated a design that had evolved in response to public pushback (particularly the matter of outdoor public right-of-way through the campus’s conjoined two blocks).

Ever since Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened in 1997, art museums have been seen as opportunities for bold, iconic buildings by famous architects. Ferriso and PAM bucked that trend, instead favoring a Chicago firm, Vinci Hamp, more experienced with art galleries and historic-building renovations than architectural trophies. A few years in, Portland’s Hennebery Eddy Architects joined the project to boost the team’s urban-design acumen.

The overflowing crowds on opening weekend, and the almost universally enthusiastic response, also speaks to how the glass-ensconced Rothko Pavilion transforms the Portland Art Museum experience. It doesn’t just connect two existing historic structures: 1932’s Pietro Belluschi-designed Main Building and 1926’s Frederic Fritsch-designed Mark Building, the former Masonic Temple. It does so exceptionally well, with seamless flow and a variety of vantage points, inside and out — including an outdoor passageway through this double-sized block, over which the Rothko Pavilion cantilevers.

Recently Andrew Smith, a principal at Portland’s Hennebery Eddy Architects, discussed his firm’s collaboration with Chicago firm Vinci Hamp Architects and how the Rothko Pavilion design progressed over the project’s long gestation. Smith, who this year marked 10 years at the firm, also chairs the City of Portland’s Historic Landmarks Commission.

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Brian Libby: How would you describe Hennebery Eddy and Vinci Hamp’s working relationship? Often a lead architect from out of town creates the vision, and a local architect of record escorts the project through regulatory hurdles and construction. But the most fruitful collaborations transcend those roles, with both firms providing creative input and problem-solving until completion. And in this case, your firm joined Vinci Hamp a few years in, but helped solve some prickly design challenges.

Andrew Smith: I think you’re sniffing around the essence of this. The old paradigm‚ you’ve got the design architect with the [esteemed] portfolio, and the local that needs to be there but is along for the ride a little bit and doing the heavy lift in the end. That’s the antithesis of what our relationship was with Vinci Hamp. We quickly got to know them, and put a lot of effort into figuring out how we were going to collaborate. I think It helped a lot that we both have that historic-rehabilitation experience and both like working with cultural, public-facing projects.

I think it’s fair to say that their experience working with gallery spaces and museums was the genesis of their involvement, while our taking on complex urban design problems and finding creative solutions was the basis for our involvement. From the very beginning, it was truly a blended team. We collaborated on virtually all aspects of the project together, virtually, through BIM [Building Integration Modeling software]. I think it worked really well. We both came to the project with a lot of chops, but we sort of left the egos at the door.

Brian Libby: How did you see the challenge of connecting the Belluschi-designed Main Building with the Mark Building, and how much the Rothko should stand out or be deferential?

Andrew Smith: As a historical architect, I was drooling over this, but I was also terrified. ‘Okay, there’s these two buildings; they’re firmly their own things stylistically.’ But when you really start to break them down, they’re not that different. The Masonic Temple is very restrained, and it’s this sort of planar brick massing. And obviously, the Belluschi is really the same way. The buildings use different stones for their bases and the trim, but as different as they are in terms of their style, these are actually close cousins.

It wasn’t really that apparent at the outset, because we put them into silos. But we knew pretty early on that the Rothko Pavilion couldn’t really be one or the other. It really did need to be this third thing, but it needed to be deferential. It needed to be quiet but beautiful, and it needed to be super-rigorous, because there’s just so much rigor to the two buildings that it was joining together.

Brian Libby: Of course the Rothko is not just a connector between the two existing buildings. It’s providing a new entrance, which is accessible from both the east and west. It’s connecting the museum to its outdoor plazas, which especially on the west side provide a place to linger. And it wasn’t easy lining up the buildings’ different floors. That’s a lot to balance.

Andrew Smith: Exactly. And because of the physical levels of the two buildings — neither building is really more than four stories tall, technically, but we were dealing with and having to connect 11 distinct floor levels between the two — the pavilion had a heavy lift to do.

Brian Libby: I’m always interested in how constraints prompt creativity, and cause designs to evolve. The pedestrian and bike passageway wasn’t in Vinci Hamp’s original design prior to Hennebery Eddy joining the project. It was added after public pressure to retain right-of-way through this super-block. But ultimately, wouldn’t you say this became an asset?

Andrew Smith: I completely agree with you. I’ve seen it on the Landmarks Commission and the Design Commission. I think when there is significant public input, like with this project, almost invariably it makes the project better. We knew from the beginning that an open-air, unobstructed passageway was the answer. It was just a matter of how we got ourselves to that solution. It was really one of the fun parts of the project, and I think the passageway is such a cool thing in and of itself.

But also, universal accessibility was one of the paramount goals of the project, which the passageway enhanced, and it was a chance to turn the museum inside-out. It allowed us to get views into both the Black Art and Experiences Galleries in the Mark Building and into the [Rothko’s] Community Commons: for the public to gain visual access into the museum in an actual meaningful way where they can see art.

Brian Libby: The stairway that goes over the passageway (and was necessitated by it) also seems like a benefit to the project. It creates a kind of dramatic processional. Did that go through may iterations?

Andrew Smith: As logical and coherent as that north-south concourse is on the ground floor, going from the Jefferson Street addition [in the Main Building] all the way through to the Crumpacker [in the Mark Building], that stair wasn’t always in alignment. For a whole host of reasons, it was directly opposite the ticket desks at one point, so you’d actually jog and go up the steps, across and into the Mark. But it always felt unresolved, so at some point, that stair got pulled into alignment with the rest of that [interior] street. Then it was like, ‘Okay, now it’s settled into its spot.’

Brian Libby: Adding the passageway was maybe the design’s most important evolution. But I also remember in the first renderings in 2016, there was a stair tower beside the Main Building that actually was taller than it. This was before Hennebery Eddy even came on board, but your firm was in on the decision to scale back that stairway and make the Rothko no taller than its adjacent structures. Could you talk about that?

Andrew Smith: I think in Vinci Hamp’s original concept, they were taking that slot where the loading dock had been and making the stair tower a linchpin. I think there was something really intriguing about that concept. But looking at the Secretary of the Interior standards for treatment of historic properties, that scale sort of outdid Belluschi’s original building, and we felt like pulling it away and kind of tucking it back [was a better solution]. So now the stairs are in the same place, and you can go from the basement to the third floor; but then from three to four, you double back into a switchback stair that’s tucked away, further back in.

Brian Libby: What you described with the switchback makes me realize the stair tower would have provided a simpler, more intuitive solution. It just seemed a little too intrusive on the Belluschi building.

Andrew Smith: Yeah, and I think Vinci Hamp definitely acknowledge that that was the case. It was an early concept.

Brian Libby: The Rothko Pavilion’s transparency means visitors feel so much more connected to the city and surrounding blocks, but there are also two wonderful outdoor terraces, on the second floor facing east and the fourth floor facing west. How did those come about?

Andrew Smith: That second floor terrace was in the project really from the start, as an area of respite. There wasn’t really a space in the old museum where you could pause from your visit and go outside or get some fresh air, sit in the sun, rest, and then continue your experience. So the second floor was really intended to be connected to the east plaza, to the Park Blocks and the trees, and a place to just take a pause. And inside on that same level, there’s also places to overlook the gallery and look out through that big west Pavilion wall.

That fourth-floor terrace was a late addition to the project. I think it’s going to do a lot of work for the museum in terms of evening functions and things of that sort. You can’t see much of the West Hills from there, unfortunately, but especially with the Ugo Rondinone sculpture that’s there now [Sun, in the west plaza], there’s a lot laid out in front of you. I love that space because you get to see up close Belluschi’s cornice and Fritsch’s [Mark Building] cornice opposite one another, sort of point-counterpoint.

Brian Libby:  And the west plaza in particular is, I think, really going to feel active thanks to the café and the museum store facing it, and it offers a little more room for outdoor tables. I actually think it’s the Rothko’s west façade that is the most handsome. Why is that?

Andrew Smith: I think it’s partly the scale of the outdoor plaza there, and the regularity of the facade on that side. The east façade isn’t as regular. There’s more pushes and pulls and slips and slides. But [on the west], that façade is really super regular. It’s got the largest pieces of glass in the entire project: these 28-plus-foot-tall sections.

Brian Libby: I remember these panels had to be manufactured in Europe because no one in the U.S. could do it; and the panels were complicated to install. It reminds me of Belluschi’s Equitable [now Commonwealth] Building from 1947, with its large double-pane glass panels. Belluschi, too, faced difficulty finding a manufacturer. The first one he approached, Libbey-Owens-Ford, refused, saying they couldn’t guarantee panels in such large sizes. Pittsburgh Plate Glass initially said no, too, but after Belluschi persisted they agreed. Six months after the building was completed, several panes cracked, but they turned out to be defective and, once replaced, have remained functional to this day. Maybe the Rothko’s big glass panels are a sort of unintended tribute.

Andrew Smith: I’m really glad you mentioned that. I hadn’t made that connection back to the Equitable Building. But, yeah, it’s true. The individual panes were fabricated in Germany, then sent to Spain, where the whole IGU [insulated glazed unit] fritting was put on, the lamination was done. It’s got three separate pieces of glass, with an air gap and then the inner pane of glass. The whole thing is almost an inch and three-quarters thick, and extremely heavy.

Brian Libby: I know the Rothko Pavilion is freestanding, and doesn’t depend on either of the adjacent buildings for support. Especially given the cantilevering it does to the north over the passageway, and the weight of these glass panels, as well as today’s more stringent seismic codes, how did the team (including general contractor Mortenson and structural engineer KPFF) approach the project structurally?

Andrew Smith: The Belluschi portions are virtually untouched in terms of seismic retrofit. The Mark Building got a seismic retrofit when the museum converted it around 2004, but that was done to a 1999 seismic standard‚ which isn’t really that close to the current standard. So, the two buildings were going to behave very differently in the event of a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake, or something similar. There are eight columns, and we did a really rigid [steel] moment frame with incredibly thick plates of steel that got bolted onto the sides, so it’s just not going to move in any meaningful way.

Because we’re dealing with really tall, thin, pieces of glass, racking was going to be super-detrimental. Those big 28-foot glass pieces weighed enough that we didn’t want them to create flex in those cantilevers. Having that frame be really rigid allowed us to get those joints tighter together on the facade. So‚ Mortensen fabricated these rolling weight-cubes [temporary concrete ballasts], and lined them up along the western edge. As the pieces of glass were installed, they rolled those away, which pre-flexed the floor system, so that the structure really didn’t move with the glass curtain wall in place. It was almost like when Indiana Jones [in Raiders of the Lost Ark] snatches the idol away and replaces it with the bag of sand. As the glass went in, these cubes got rolled away.

The moment frame also allowed us to have a 15-inch gap between the Rothko Pavilion and the two flanking buildings. It manifests itself in a dark-colored seismic joint, and was intended to be sort of a shadow line where the pavilion sort of approached the Mark building, but then gave it some space.

Brian Libby: There is a gentle asymmetry to the Rothko. You moved the columns slightly south to make way for the passageway on the pavilion’s north side, and cantilevered over it to connect with the Mark Building. In traditional architecture symmetry is a virtue, but here I appreciate that the Rothko is its own thing. And it communicates some of the contortions happening to connect these two buildings and make way for the outdoor right-of-way.

Andrew Smith: Yeah, I think so. This Pavilion is doing a lot, modulating between these. And the thing that I’m proud of, or will be proud of as we go forward in time, is the fact that I will have to explain some of this to people. Because they’ll look at it, and hopefully what they’ll see is this sort of quiet, crystalline, beautiful third thing that brings the two buildings together and does a lot of work in connectivity and accessibility. But there’s so much other work that it’s doing that is not intended to be evident. The fact that I will have to explain that to people I think is a good thing, because if all those things were apparent, there’s no way you could synthesize that into something architecturally satisfactory.

Brian Libby: Often the simpler it looks, the more complex it was to make it happen.

Andrew Smith: Yeah, I think‚ that’s the case, and maybe the more effort it took to get that resolution.

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See also:

• The Rothko Pavilion opens! John Weber writes about the grand reopening of the Portland Art Museum and its new Rothko Pavilion.
• Touring the Rothko Pavilion with Brian Ferriso. Brian Libby takes a pre-opening tour of the revamped museum and its new pavilion with museum director Ferriso, who has since moved on to Texas to lead the Dallas Museum of Art.
• Framing the Rothko Pavilion. Brian Libby takes a look in 2023 at plans for the new pavilion, two years and several adjustments before the pavilion opens.
• Portland Art Museum reaches $116 million capital campaign goal. A month before the museum’s grand reopening, museum leaders announce they’ve raised the entire amount needed to pay for building the Rothko Pavilion and transforming the Belluschi and Mark buildings.