I stepped out of my Volkswagen and there he was.

It was a rainy Wednesday afternoon at 10^th and Main outside the Portland Art Museum, a few weeks before its new Rothko Pavilion was set to officially open. And it was 20 minutes before I was scheduled to meet Brian Ferriso, the museum’s director, for a tour.

Before I had even shut the car door, Ferriso was standing there in a long raincoat, smiling with his hand out for a shake. He had been returning to the museum after lunch and happened to see me. But the fact that we immediately dove into the scheduled Rothko Pavilion walk-through seemed appropriate, because Ferriso has been preparing for this opening for nearly his entire two-decade tenure, and was understandably eager for people to see it.

Time was also of the essence. Shortly after the Rothko’s November 20 opening, Ferriso will be leaving Portland for Texas to become director of the Dallas Museum of Art. Receiving my congratulations as we looked at the Rothko from across Park Avenue, he acknowledged the bittersweet feeling. “Another six months after it opened would maybe be more fun,” Ferriso said. But in Dallas, he will oversee a similar challenge: renovation and expansion of a historic, architecturally significant building. “It too is very insular,” Ferriso added. “How do you make it a beacon?”

Deference and Connections

And yet in this case, he gave the Rothko Pavilion’s designers, Chicago’s Vinci Hamp and Portland’s Hennebery Eddy, a different brief: not for the new structure to be a beacon, calling attention to itself, but rather to yield in deference to the original Portland Art Museum structure, known informally as the Belluschi Building for its architect, the great Pietro Belluschi.

“Architecturally, I felt that this was always the key: the jewel box of the Belluschi,” Ferriso explained. “How do we continue that in a contemporary way, that’s respectful? The scale needed to be in conversation with that building.”

The Belluschi Building, completed in 1932, had been one of America’s first Modernist-style public buildings. The museum’s own trustees had at first expressed doubt about its boldly forward-looking design, until the young Belluschi enlisted legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright for support. And Wright, who persuaded the trustees to change their minds, was right: Over the ensuing 93 years, Belluschi’s building has proven to be timeless. Rather than being indifferent to the past, it was instead a fusion of clean-lined Modernism with classical design language, clad not with glass and steel but with traditional brick and elegant travertine limestone.

The Rothko Pavilion, Ferriso reasoned, should act as a connector between the Belluschi Building and the museum’s other structure, the Mark Building (the circa-1927 former Masonic Temple by architect Fred Fritsch, purchased by the museum in 1994), and add openness. “Ever since I started, I always felt like we had all these beautiful parts that just needed a cohesive strategy,” Ferriso said.

Imagining this role for the Rothko may also explain the architect selection. Back in 2016, a Portland Art Museum expansion seemed to be Allied Works’ to lose. By that time, the Portland firm led by architect Brad Cloepfil had won accolades for several art museum designs nationwide, including New York’s Museum of Arts & Design, the St. Louis Contemporary Art Museum, Denver’s Clyfford Still Museum, and an expansion of the Seattle Art Museum. That summer, the Portland Art Museum had even hosted an exhibit of Allied Works’ models, called “Case Works.” During a press tour of the Allied show, however, in his praise of the firm Ferriso said something perhaps telling: “People think about this as an architecture show, and I want you … to think about it as a sculpture show.”

Perhaps more importantly, Ferriso had worked with Vinci Hamp before, on the Milwaukee Art Museum, where he had served as deputy director and senior director of curatorial affairs from 2000 to 2003. Vinci Hamp redesigned the museum’s existing gallery spaces in preparation for a major expansion by acclaimed Spanish architect (or rather, starchitect) Santiago Calatrava in 2001 (the Quadrucci Pavilion) — a much lower-profile task but equally important to the museum-going experience. John Vinci and Phil Hamp’s firm has also designed reinstallations and exhibitions at numerous other galleries and museums. As Ferriso clearly realized, they could design the Rothko Pavilion from the inside out.

“It’s very, very specific: You’re talking about high-end art viewing and preservation, and knitting together old structures,” Ferriso explained in an October 2016 interview for my Portland Architecture blog. “I think you’ll find in the art world and various other upper echelons, people will go, ‘Oh, Vinci Hamp—of course.’ John [Vinci] and Phil [Hamp] start from the object and then move the architecture out from there. It’s all in the details.”

Refining and Problem-Solving

Yet in the months and initial years after Vinci Hamp’s commission, the Rothko Pavilion’s forward progress was nearly derailed by a pesky problem: the heretofore-public plaza that it was set to replace between the Belluschi and Mark buildings. Many locals protested the lost right-of-way through the former Madison Street on what’s otherwise a super-block; many even testified before City Council in 2017.

Could there be some kind of compromise, where a passage through the former plaza was maintained without detracting from the Rothko experience? It seemed like a Catch-22 situation, because the Rothko Pavilion’s whole reason for being was to make it easy to walk straight through from the Belluschi to the Mark.

Some historic preservationists had also taken issue with Vinci Hamp’s first pass at the Rothko Pavilion design. Renderings released to the public showed a glass-ensconced stairway tower rising above and partially blocking views of the Belluschi Building. It did not seem deferential.

Maybe that’s why the museum eventually brought on a second architecture firm: Portland’s Hennebery Eddy. Large projects often utilize two firms, especially when one is from out of town. Traditionally what’s known as the design architect comes up with the big ideas and initial concepts, while an architect of record works more closely with the general contractor (in this case Mortenson) to oversee what’s built and solve problems — to essentially tailor the suit that had been designed to fit its wearer. And bringing on an architect of record made particular sense here, because the museum planned to stay open throughout construction: no easy logistical feat.

Hennebery Eddy’s skillset and expertise also complemented Vinci Hamp’s in other ways. Co-founder Tim Eddy and numerous other principals at the firm have collectively served on the City of Portland’s Design Commission (regulating urban design) and Landmarks Commission. They could help refine how the Rothko interacted with its context of bookending historic buildings and how they interfaced with the surrounding streetscape. They could also help solve the question of a public passageway.

“Tim Eddy and his firm did a really good job of thinking about how to proportion the pavilion,” Ferriso said outside the Rothko Pavilion, as we weaved past construction workers completing the entry plaza’s granite surface.

Inside-Out, Outside-In

Finally came the anticipated moment, eight years in the making: stepping inside the Rothko Pavilion. At this point much of the art had not yet been placed, including the project’s namesake Mark Rothko paintings, on loan for 20 years from the Rothko family. But the tour was a chance to focus on the architecture.

Before focusing on these new interiors, Ferriso and I took a moment to look back, through the glass walls, to note how the Rothko Pavilion frames views of the leafy South Park Blocks and the spire of First Congregational Church. “From early on, I was talking to John Vinci about this: How do we frame the skyline? How do we frame the church and the park?’” Ferriso said. “I mean, that is a beautiful sight if you actually just stop and look at that.”

As the tour progressed, we enjoyed a variety of vantage points, inside and out. The Rothko Pavilion’s different levels of walkways create a series of catwalk and mezzanine-like viewing experiences that seem to direct one’s attention outside as much as in. And on both sides of the glass addition are outdoor decks — on the second floor facing east and the fourth floor facing west — to further the connection and create a sense of place. All of which accomplishes a key part of the assignment: breaking down that sense of the Portland Art Museum as a fortress.

Moving upstairs, we stepped onto the fourth-floor deck, looking out at West End buildings on 10^th Avenue such as the Eliot condominiums and the YWCA. Just beyond the Eliot’s pedestrian passageway to 11^th Avenue is the Empire Apartments, my first residence in Portland after moving here in 1997. Yet perhaps most delightful was what I noticed closest by: the decorative parapet of the Mark Building, just a few feet away from us.

“It feels very European to me,” Ferriso said as we ignored the rain. “You get a sense of the urban experience.” This is not a city of tall towers but, perhaps a bit like Paris, one where you can look out over the rooftops, even when just a few stories up. Downtown Portland has very few public observation points, and while the museum is no tall tower, this is a great perch to look out from.

West of The Sun

Moving back downstairs to the Rothko Pavilion’s ground floor, past a series of sculptures being erected, we next headed to the renovated museum store and café, which are no longer separated by walls from each other, or from 10^th Avenue — and which was one of the project’s inspirations.

Ferriso likes to tell the story of a moment in 2006, just after he joined the Portland Art Museum, while riding the streetcar to work. Before exiting at the 10^th & Jefferson stop, “I overheard some students say, ‘What’s that?’ They said, ‘I think it’s a museum, but I don’t think anything happens there.’ They’re looking at these big brick facades,” Ferriso explained, acknowledging the validity of the assessment. “I thought, ‘How do we become more inviting? How do we become more of an invitation and a center?’”

Indeed, although the original Belluschi Building’s entrance faces east toward the South Park Blocks along Park Avenue, this redesigned Portland Art Museum quite rightly gives equal attention to the west-facing 10^th Avenue side. It’s actually the better place to hang out, thanks to a larger plaza fronted by the newly glass-clad café and museum shop, which seem liberated from their inwardly-focused brick and drywall quarantines to become real storefront businesses. “This is what it wanted to be,” Ferriso said.

The west side also arguably is the more handsome of the two Rothko Pavilion façades, with slightly more aesthetic clarity. It features 28-foot-high glass panels, which had to be manufactured in Germany because no American company was up to the task. (Pietro Belluschi, coincidentally, once similarly innovated with large, tricky-to-produce glass panels, for 1947’s Equitable Building in downtown Portland, credited as America’s first glass curtain-walled office building.)

The west plaza also features what will probably become the museum’s signature outdoor sculpture (or at least a companion to Brushstrokes, the large Roy Lichtenstein sculpture near the entrance): The Sun, by Swiss-Italian artist Ugo Rondinone. It’s comprised of tree branches arranged in a large circle, cast in bronze and then gilded.  Even on the rainy day our tour took place, it was glowing.

“I’ve seen so many people get their selfies” here, Ferriso said of the sculpture. “I saw it in New York in 2016, and I’ve been working in fundraising for almost 10 years to acquire it.”

Ferriso was pictured showing the sculpture to a visitor in the lead image to a recent New York Times feature about the Rothko Pavilion. “I was like, ‘Oh, timber — Portland, Oregon. Oh, the sun — in Oregon, we need it.’ And all of those things come together.”

Ferriso told me people have suggested The Sun actually most resembles a crown of thorns. Was he implying a reference to the Rothko’s long road to completion, through lengthy fundraising, overcoming the plaza pass-through conundrum and the pandemic?

Maybe. But you can see in a work like Rondinone’s what you want to see. I suggested that The Sun evokes time’s passage, perhaps because nearly every building surrounding the Portland Art Museum when I lived a block away at 11^th and Jefferson in the late nineties was different, and has since been torn down and replaced. For the museum itself, that was two renovations ago, when the Berg-Swann Auditorium was located here. In those 28 trips around the sun, which have also taken us from Clinton to Trump, nearly everything has changed.

Passing Through

If the Rondinone sculpture and the café-facing west plaza activate the museum’s grounds, so too does the pedestrian and bicycle path going through the Rothko Pavilion. Recalling the open-air underpass at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, this pavilion’s passageway exemplifies how a project’s biggest design problem can, in the right hands, become an asset.

Hugging the Mark Building side of the former plaza, the passageway can actually serve as a place to stop, because it provides views into the new Black Art and Experiences Gallery on the Mark Building’s ground floor, as well as into the Rothko Pavilion itself. Conversely, watching from inside as people move through the passage becomes a modest theater of its own, further enhancing a sense of connection to the rest of the city.

The passageway necessitated an interior stairway from the Rothko’s ground floor to the second floor of the Mark Building, now home to the newly-christened Crumpacker Center for New Art. (Overall there is an additional 2,700 square feet of exhibition space for contemporary art, including a new gallery space on the second floor where the Crumpacker Library had been located.) Moving up and down the stairway becomes another one of the Rothko’s memorable design features: a procession as well as another place to stop and look out from.

“We had a lot of adjustments with the design elements because we were penetrating into old spaces. How do you fit this grand staircase into this jigsaw puzzle? And it was complicated,” Ferriso said as we stood at the top of the stairs. “It could go wrong really fast. It’s not an easy assignment.”

The Rothko stairway also complements the Belluschi Building’s south stairway, which is one of its best architectural moments. “Before I was working here, I remember visiting this museum, and I remember walking into this [Belluschi] space and I thought it was really special,” Ferriso said, “just the detailing, the elegance, the stairway, and all this natural light.”

The stairway is also part of a larger post-2025 narrative here, for the Rothko Pavilion’s greatest success is how it transforms the entire museum-going experience: from looking at art in a series of individual rooms to continually flowing from one space into the other.

From the beginning, Ferriso said, Vinci Hamp co-founder John Vinci focused on taking advantage of the Belluschi Building’s strong existing north-south axial connections, to create an intuitively easy-to-navigate passageway straight through from the original building, through the Rothko to the Mark. “I just felt like we were a lot of nice little parts. And how do we make one big, beautiful museum? The circulation routes become a journey,” Ferriso said. “Every floor, you get to have that experience.”

The new north-south pathways feel so intuitive that it’s as if the Belluschi Building were always waiting to receive this 2025 addition. As a result, exhibition spaces that seemed beautiful but isolated, including Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Center for Northwest Art on the third and fourth floors, and the Center for Contemporary Native Art on the third floor, now feel so open and accessible that you can experience them without even entering the galleries — just by walking past their enlarged openings facing the circulation routes. “There would have been a wall here,” Ferriso said as we passed the Schnitzer Center. “Now it’s much more central.”

Looking Back to ’05

As we moved to the staircase at the southeast edge of the Rothko Pavilion, I was reminded of the museum’s 2005 renovation, overseen by Boston’s Ann Beha Architects, completed one year before Ferriso succeeded John Buchanan as director. It created the Jubitz Center for Modern & Contemporary Art on the south side of the Mark Building, adding substantially more exhibit space, as well as the Whitsell Auditorium one floor below ground level in the Belluschi Building.

The two buildings were connected by an underground pathway, which, if you wanted to see the whole museum, could feel as circuitous as the Steadicam shot in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 film Goodfellas, through the claustrophobic back rooms and kitchen of New York’s Copacabana nightclub.

I asked Ferriso: Did Buchanan and his wife Lucy (who was the museum’s development director) contemplate a more ambitious project like the Rothko?

“Yes they did,” Ferriso said matter-of-factly. “My assessment is I don’t think they felt they had the political clout or the financial wherewithal. They also knew it was the [issue of the] passageway, and I don’t think they wanted to take that on. But I have found memos where some trustees have sort of proposed a concept like this.”

Yet to Ferriso the 2005 addition “was not a wasted investment,” but rather a stepping-stone to the Rothko. “One of our major long-time trustees recently said to me, ‘Many years ago I thought we should have taken down the Masonic Temple. Now my opinion has changed.’ What this [Rothko Pavilion] has done is added to that [previous renovation].” That 2005 addition, Ferriso added, reinforces that “the story here is not about new. It’s new in service of the old. I feel like it’s a completion and making two plus two equal five.”

Confidence and Comfort

Walking through all three buildings, we continually encountered members of the museum’s staff, all of whom Ferriso knew by name.

In the Whitsell Auditorium, where new seats were about to be added, he said hello to Erica Freyberger, associate director of operations for PAM CUT, the museum’s cinema arm. Outside the Crumpacker Center, where drapery for the entrance to an installation by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist was being set up, Ferriso warmly greeted Brandon Martinez, an assistant preparator, and told a colleague of Martinez’s from the Portland Garment Factory, “You’re working with the best.”

Then in the museum’s new conservation studio, which Ferriso was showing me in order to emphasize that a substantial portion of the budget went to renovating and improving non-exhibit areas the public doesn’t see, we encountered conservation technician Esther Murphy.

She was assisting artist Lisa Jarrett in preparing an artwork for her first solo exhibition in Oregon, called “Tenderhead,” kicking off the new Black Art and Experiences Gallery. The piece, made with human hair, was exceptionally delicate and a challenge to assemble. “I know you’re in good hands,” Ferriso told Jarrett. “I remember for so many projects, the curators would be like, ‘Talk to Esther,’ and it was solved.” Jarrett, conversely, greeted Ferriso like an old friend, telling him of her work, “I just can’t wait to get it on that wall.”

When Ferriso became director in 2006, he changed the museum’s culture. Whereas John Buchanan was “perfectly coifed and dapper,” and ran the museum as “a top-down organization,” as D.K. Row’s 2008 Oregonian profile put it, Ferriso came across from the start as “a well-grounded administrator,” with “a confidence and comfort with who he is and where he comes from.”

Ferriso inherited a nearly $20 million debt, but still managed to quickly triple the museum’s education budget and raise its endowment from $49 million to $70 million. He broadened programming to reflect his interests in community, architecture and contemporary art, while also giving curators and senior managers more authority to run their own divisions, eschewing micromanagement.

That Ferriso was able to orchestrate fundraising for the museum’s $116 million renovation and expansion, despite Portland’s relative lack of capital wealth and large funders, is no small feat. “Over a thousand donors. I think we’re at 1050,” he said as the tour began to wind down, “which is just remarkable. Couldn’t be happier. Yeah, it’s a challenge. It’s a lot of hard work. But I think for the health of the organization it’ll be good. And a good number of people stepped up more than once during this during this process.”

People over Postcards

After beginning our tour with a brief mention of Ferriso’s next gig, in Dallas, as we concluded our walk through the Rothko Pavilion our conversation turned back to one of one of Ferriso’s earliest museum jobs: as an intern at Newark Museum in 1994 (while earning a master’s degree in visual arts administration at New York University). “Newark is a tough city and the museum was about aesthetic inspiration and hope,” he said. “And I think that still needs to be part of the conversation.”

Portland is not Newark, but in recent years our downtown has struggled to reach pre-pandemic levels of activity. The Rothko Pavilion has been seen as a potential catalyst, in tandem with other arts projects such as a Keller Auditorium renovation making the city center more of a destination again.

Arts infrastructure can’t bring back office workers or address homelessness, but a recent study from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bureau of Economic Analysis found that the arts and cultural sector grew at more than twice the rate of the total economy in 2023 (the most recent year for which data are available), and that arts and culture surpassed its annual value added to the U.S. economy with $1.2 trillion, representing 4.2 percent of the nation’s GDP.

If the Rothko, too, adds value, it’s probably not by being an eye-catching object, which Ferriso would probably be the first to concede. Instead, it’s an architectural enabler, but it does so proudly and intentionally.

In a 2023 presentation to donors and patrons unveil the Rothko Pavilion’s redesign, Ferriso began with a condensed history of museums over hundreds of years. In the 18^th century, he said, it was “about enlightenment, and bringing all these different cabinets of curiosities into a single place,” exemplified by London’s British Museum (1753) and Paris’s Louvre (1793). But their collections came in part via colonialist appropriation, and these museums were not always welcoming to all. In the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, there was the so-called Bilbao effect (named for the Guggenheim Bilbao, in Spain), with art museums perceived as catalysts for urban revival.

Yet even though Ferriso had a front-row seat for one such postcard-worthy museum project, in Milwaukee, his thesis, described to the donors that night two years ago and again during our tour, was all about people.

“The Museum of the 21st century is not only collections, which are important, but it’s people and program,” he said as we stood outside the Mark Building, about to say goodbye. “You have to keep all of them, I think, as a priority, not elevating one over the other.”

In a split second, he turned from serious to smiles again, expressing concern that after being surprised by him at my car two hours earlier, I’d still had time to feed the meter and avoid a ticket. And before I knew it, he was shaking my hand again and then was gone, through a side door, off to the next meeting, where no doubt the same disarming, unpretentious charm would prevail.

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The transformed Portland Art Museum, at 1219 S.W. Park Ave., will be unveiled Nov. 20, 2025. The grand opening celebration will include four days of free admission, activities, and events, Nov. 20-23.