“I hope you can feel it, because I can,” Mayor Keith Wilson told a sold-out crowd at the Portland Art Museum’s Fields Ballroom on February 2. “Everywhere I walk in Portland, I feel that this Renaissance is now within our reach. Today is a great opportunity for us to see what tomorrow is going to look like.”

Politicians are obviously not immune to hyperbole or, particularly post-2016, deliberate falsehood. Yet as Wilson delivered opening remarks before “Portland’s Next Horizon: Seven Projects That Will Redefine the Central City,” his was not the only voice of optimism.

Moderated by longtime design journalist and curator Randy Gragg, this was one of several public talks between January 31 and March 27 tied to City of Possibility, a two-building exhibit featuring scores of architectural models. Curated by PDX Design Collaborative — a group of local architects, artists, and academics that Gragg co-directs with architect and University of Oregon professor William Smith (who recently co-founded the firm DRAWINGS) — the intent has been not just to celebrate the craft of models but to cultivate a broader dialogue.

Over the two-hour “Portland’s Next Horizon” gathering, developers, public-agency officials and nonprofit leaders shared glimpses of upcoming building and infrastructure projects across the greater downtown. There were multi-block developments of architecture and open space in the Broadway Corridor, Lower Albina, Lloyd Center, Old Town and the OMSI District. There were infrastructure and transit projects, such as the Burnside Bridge and the Green Loop. The presentation moved on with Portland Art Museum Director Brian Ferriso succeeding Wilson at the lectern to update the audience on the museum’s ambitious expansion now under construction.

Together, these events and the exhibit, along with the sizable crowds they attracted, conjure a sense that downtown Portland is on its way back, or at least that people are coming together to will such progress into being. “This has been proof of concept,” Gragg said in a recent video call. “I mean, we had something like 500 people come to the [City of Possibility] opening. We had a countable 600 people to the opening event at the museum. We’re sold out for our other events, basically. It isn’t just designers. It’s all kinds of different people.”

Waking Up

From Christopher Wren’s London risen from the Great Fire’s ashes to the Empire State Building constructed in Great Depression-era New York, disasters and downturns provide impetus to rebuild, often bigger and more ambitiously. Portland didn’t burn down, no matter what they say on TV’s Fox News and the social-media platform X. But the central city was slower to recover from the pandemic than most, with persistent office vacancies and homelessness. Given the hype that Portland had enjoyed in the Portlandia-era 2010s, following decades of internationally renowned urban-planning successes, the hangover has been palpable.

Downtown Portland is still yet to reach pre-2020 levels of activity. In January, the latest twice-annual foot traffic study published by the Portland Metro Chamber showed a three percent increase for 2024 versus the previous year. Although that’s an encouraging 54 percent improvement over 2021’s low point, since 2023 the number of people coming downtown “has mostly flatlined,” as Jonathan Bach wrote in a January 27 article in The Oregonian/Oregon Live. A more accurate word might have been “plateaued,” because the word “flatlined,” which can mean death as well as failing to increase, perhaps unwittingly speaks to the morbid attitude plaguing downtown after the pandemic and protests.

There are also valid arguments that Portland no longer sets the progressive-city pace. Bicycle ridership and corresponding bike-path infrastructure seem to have lost momentum, for instance. And while cities such as Paris have accelerated efforts to limit automobile traffic in their centers, Portland’s leadership has been reluctant to pedestrianize more than the occasional individual block.

Even so, there is a growing feeling that the city has turned a corner. A February 13 Bloomberg CityLab article by Linda Baker collated a number of metrics showing signs of recovery. Bike-commuting numbers are increasing again after nine years of decline. Multnomah County moved 5,500 people experiencing homelessness into shelters and permanent housing between July 2023 and June 2024, a 28 percent increase over the year before. Gun violence rates have finally dropped to pre-pandemic levels. And for the first time in three years, the population increased rather than decreased.

The enthusiastic public response to City of Possibility and its related talks also speaks to widespread public desire to look forward, not just by constructing new architecture, infrastructure and neighborhoods but by re-establishing a robust, idea-rich design culture.

“The idea was, with downtown kind of in disarray, and the discussion about development having left urban design at the curbside, so to speak, this was a really good time to inject that dialogue into both the design community and the larger community,” Gragg explained. “It’s just been kind of slumbering, and it woke up.”

A Model City

Even if one doesn’t attend any of the related talks, the City of Possibility exhibit, featuring scores of architectural models past and present across two buildings, is an extraordinary collection. It also amounts to a kind of manifesto, arguing that the pandemic and its accompanying loss of civic momentum was, though years long, nevertheless a dark chapter in an otherwise uplifting story.

At the Expensify Bank Building (401 S.W. Fifth Avenue), the focus is venerable Portland landmarks. A model of the city’s tallest structure, the Wells Fargo Center, by Los Angeles architect Charles Luckman, is encased in Plexiglass near a competition model for Pioneer Courthouse Square from iconoclastic local architect and artist Will Martin. Midcentury masters such as Pietro Belluschi and John Yeon are also represented, as well as more contemporary architects and firms such as Hacker, TVA Architects, and GBD Architects.

Perhaps even more intriguingly, there are models of unbuilt proposals. Beside the design-competition model of Michael Graves’s landmark Portland Building are displayed models of the two other finalists, by Arthur Erickson and Mitchell/Giurgola. The exhibit also includes display boards from another design competition, for the Portland Aerial Tram. Then there’s the model of the Mt. Hood Freeway, which was planned for Southeast Portland in the 1950s but was scrapped in the early 1970s after substantial publish pushback. Its federal funding was then applied to the city’s first MAX line, cementing Portland’s broader course-change into a pedestrian and mass transit-oriented city.

The exhibit’s crown jewel is a 12-by-18-foot wood model of downtown Portland (on loan from the Architectural Heritage Center), which city planners created in 1971 as an urban design tool to implement the city’s 1972 Downtown Plan. The downtown model is reminiscent of English model villages, popular 20^th century tourist attractions that recreated in miniature form and perhaps even mythologized their less-urbanized country town settings. But in Portland’s case, the downtown model had a purpose. For decades, architects and developers proposing new buildings would have to demonstrate how their design would fit into the larger urban fabric.

Across the street in the JK Gill Building (408 S.W. Fifth Avenue), the assemblage of architectural models represents newer work by many of today’s most acclaimed and emerging architects, both built and unbuilt, as well as the work of students. Dozens of models — by Works Architecture and Allied Works, Rick Potestio and Robert Oshatz, Daniel Toole and Design Research Office — are arranged on one long, large table, like guests at one collective dinner.

Besides the work of these firms, there are more uncommon creations, such as a model by urban designer Morgan Maiolie documenting Portland Police Bureau airplane-surveillance flights over the central city.

At the edges of this spacious room are multi-model displays that document the creative design process itself, including ZGF Architects’ study models for the masterful new Portland International Airport Terminal, Waechter Architecture’s artful study models for a variety of projects, and Lever Architecture’s explorations of mass timber and mass plywood. Here especially, the work of these firms, which have arguably succeeded Allied Works as the most acclaimed in Portland (but in Lever’s and Waechter’s cases descended directly from it), there was in these model studies a compelling sense of exploration.

“I like the double work that the word ‘model’ can do,” said Smith. “It can be little miniature, but it’s also an exemplification of something that others could emulate, that we could want to become. I love the idea that we’re playing with little versions of the city, perhaps, but we’re also dreaming really big about what the city could become in the next few years.”

City of Possibility is also a validation of physical model-making itself. Most architecture firms today use digital models, what’s known as Building Information Modeling, with the ability to create photo-realistic renderings that look just like the actual future spaces they depict. Which in theory makes physical models obsolete. Yet perhaps like vinyl records reborn in the age of music-streaming platforms such as Spotify, physical models have in a certain sense become all the more beloved today precisely because they’re alternatives to digitalization.

“I think what’s clear from this show is that the architectural model is, from a representation standpoint, the easiest way for designers and non-designers to communicate about architecture without it being built in front of them,” Smith said. “A rendering is only showing you something from a very constrained and limited and I would just say controlled view. It doesn’t have to resolve itself in totality, whereas with a model, you can’t really avoid the truth. You confront all of it at once.”

Elevating Discourse

Following the February 2 “Portland’s Next Horizon” presentation at the Portland Art Museum, public events tied to City of Possibility have continued, so much so that rather than an accompaniment to the models exhibit, the reverse might be true.

On February 10 at Revolution Hall’s Slow Bar came “Bold Visions for Portland,” co-hosted by Gragg’s collaborator Smith along with UO Portland Architecture Program director Justin Fowler, and City of Portland chief planner Patricia Diefenderfer. From venerable local firms such as Skylab Architecture and Holst Architecture to recent arrivals El Dorado, from professors to students as well as experiential designers from Plus And Greater Than, the evening offered an array of creative visions rooted in values of equity and sustainability.

— On Wednesday, February 19 at the JK Gill Building comes “On Models: An Architecture Runway Show,” which gives the exhibitors a chance to explain the thinking and ideation behind the models on display.

— February 24 at Revolution Hall’s Show Bar brings “Streets of Possibility,” with 10 designers and activists proposing new uses for our roads and avenues besides just automobile transit.

— On March 3 at the J.K. Gill Building is “On Housing: Infill Models,” a look by six designers at how architects might respond to new city zoning regulations that allow up to six housing units on many 50 x 100 foot lots.

— On March 10 at Show Bar is “Waterfront of Possibility,” with city leaders, designers and thought leaders sharing proposals for the Willamette River’s downtown shores.

— And on March 16, Show Bar will host “What Detroit Learned from Portland; What Portland Can Learn from Detroit,” a talk by former Detroit planning chief Maurice Cox, now a Harvard Graduate School of Design professor.

While Gragg (for many years The Oregonian’s architecture critic) has a long history of curating and hosting public design discussions, Smith approached City of Possibility from a desire to cultivate the kind of professional dialogue he’d experienced while working in New York City and later attending the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

“There’s a certain amount of self-criticality and self-awareness of what people are doing,” Smith said of these settings. “As I’ve traveled and lived elsewhere, I get lots of comments from other architects and designers like, ‘Oh, yes, Portland: There’s a lot of really good work happening there,’ but there’s not really a way for them to see what’s happening here, at the cutting edge. Even if you do live here, there isn’t even really a way to see what’s happening at other practices. I’ve been getting this desire from a lot of architects, young and old, to elevate the discourse around our work.”

If Gragg and Smith have their way, by the time City of Possibility closes on March 27, the exhibition and talks will have led to or reflected a more ongoing cultural shift. Maybe that means future offerings from their PDX Design Collaborative. Perhaps others will take the baton. And beyond discussions and exhibits, hopefully what gets built will be more than just a constellation of large real estate developments, encouraging and impressive as the “Portland’s Next Horizon” projects were.

As food-culture writer and Feast Portland founder Mike Thelin noted in a recent Substack post, regaining a positive outlook for the city comes not from raising Portland’s reputation in fickle national press or on social media. Nor, for that matter, does it come from construction cranes once again dotting the skyline. It comes from managing growth smartly, with quality of life the outcome.

Growth may seem like wishful thinking when population figures go into the negative, and clearly we can’t look to national leadership for help. Yet we do need many thousands of housing units, a new earthquake-ready bridge, and hundreds of accompanying seismic building retrofits, as well as new greenspaces for residents beyond the central city, carbon-friendly new ways of building and consuming finite natural resources, and so much more. Most of all, Portland needs ideas that you and I cannot yet conceive.

There is work to be done, but that’s a largely good thing. It’s what inspired the city that City of Possibility’s models envisioned and now, assembled together, collectively celebrate.

City of Possibility

• Continuing: Through March 27
• Where: Expensify Bank Building, 401 S.W. Fifth Ave., and J.K. Gill Building, 408 S.W. Fifth Ave., Portland
• Times: Noon-6 p.m. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays