Portland, you make it look so easy

Portland’s historic Heathman Hotel already knew a thing or two about sustainability.

Riding up to our room last year in the elevator, the doorman noticed me admiring the Brazilian rosewood paneling. “We have to be careful with it,” he said. “It’s endangered so we can’t replace it.”

So how does the historic luxury hotel in downtown Portland keep its cache in the midst of a changing world? It goes green, of course. Green Building Elements has a story today on the undertaking.

USA Today also got smitten with the Rose City. A story in today’s paper marvels at how carefree and car-free you can be in our compact little cousin.

Portland rocks, and many of us here have long known it. But an even better descriptor found in the piece: “studiously hip.” So true.

My DJC colleague Lynn Porter reported today that the Carroll’s Fine Jewelry clock that has been on Fourth Avenue near Pike Street since 1913 could make a move to MOHAI.

Carrolls Clock photo courtesy of MOHAI

Carroll’s closed this Spring. The Carroll family has donated the two-ton freestanding cast iron timepiece to the Museum of History & Industry.

The Seattle Landmarks Preservation board will weigh in on the landmark’s move at its Aug. 6 meeting.

Eight other Seattle street clocks are also designated city landmarks. They include the Ben Bridge jewelry store clock at the Fourth and Pike Building and the Greenwood Jewelers clock on North 85th Street.

Read more at DJC.com

Transfers of Development Rights are not new. In 1916, New York City planners zoned the city and included a provision letting owners sell their building rights to neighboring lots. In the 1960s, they changed the law so lots didn’t have to be next to each other to TDR-swap.

Thanks for the development rights

In downtown Seattle, the owners of older, landmarked buildings get money for selling their development rights, and downtown developers buy those rights to build bigger on other sites.

King County also has a TDR program that lets developers in areas targeted for growth buy development rights from rural landowners. Vulcan took advantage of that program in 2005, purchasing 19 private TDRs to build 40,000 more square feet at Westlake/Terry. The county’s TDR program sunsets this month.

Now, the Seattle City Council is considering expanding Seattle’s program to other areas of the city. Proponents like former council aide Roger Valdez say other neighborhoods like Capitol Hill and First Hill are also seeing rapid growth and the TDR program will help the city hold on to some of the older buildings that might otherwise get razed.

The Seattle City Council’s Planning, Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee could discuss the idea at its meeting at 9:30 a.m. this Wednesday.

The committee will also talk about raising allowed building heights in Interbay and South Downtown, and about extending the developer incentive program, where developers get to build higher if they build or pay for affordable units.

Heather MacIntosh, president of D.C.-based lobbying group Preservation Action, will be back in her old stomping grounds tonight for a lecture on grassroots advocacy.

The lecture starts at 5:30 p.m. tonight (July 1) at the First United Methodist Church Sanctuary at 811 Fifth Ave. It’s free and open to the public. The event is sponsored by Daniels Development.

MacIntosh was a preservation advocate for Historic Seattle and was deputy director of Historylink. org, the online encyclopedia of Seattle and Washington history.

A master plan for London’s Battersea Power Station reads like a utopian post-industrialist fantasy and a developer’s dream: a power plant reborn as dense community center by 2020.

It’s a non-local story of adaptive reuse that should result in an interesting addition to London’s skyline.

Beyond Pink Floyd

The power plant itself (you may know it from Pink Floyd’s Animals album cover) will serve as more than art deco centerpiece, with a new biofuel-powered co-generation plant in its basement sending water vapor through the 1933 plant’s chimneys. Other buildings of the plant will be converted to offices.

A transparent solar canopy will cover some of its buildings and plazas and, combined with an “eco-chimney,” will reduce the need for air conditioning.

The master plan, conceived by Rafael Vinoly Architects and Real Estate Opportunities Ltd., also features luxury apartments, a waterpark and connections to the tube. (Rendering shown above is by Rafael Vinoly Architects)

The relics of industry can tell a very important story about a city’s past glory and gloom.

Seattle’s Gasworks Park was landmarked, letting us marvel at its grotesque beauty without condos or a waterpark ever competing for our interest (though free concerts there by local legends like Pearljam have offered some distraction).

It’s interesting to look at the different tools cities employ to keep these industrial beasts alive.

The Southwest Design Review Board will check in tonight on a strangely familiar West Seattle development.

As built in 1927

The project is at 3811 California Ave. W. The developer initially proposed tearing down the Charleston Court building to build an entirely new project. Then, partway through design review, Charleston Court was nominated for landmark status. The project went on hold for a year.

The landmark board voted in April against landmarking the 1927 building, designed by William Whiteley, clearing the way for demolition. (Original building shown above.)

But the developer is back with new plans that will give the neighbors deja vu.

What the developer wants

The new design (seen at left) proposes retaining the wings of the original building and the building’s courtyard.

The rear portion of the old building would be torn down, but the developer wants to use that brick to create a new building front between the wings.

Steven Butler and Paul Cesmat bought the building in 2007. Project architect is Nicholson Kovalchick.

Crosscut’s Knute Berger wrote an interesting column today about the animosity between historic preservationists and green building proponents.

Too often, he says, green building techniques and density goals are used as justification for tearing down Seattle’s usable buildings and squandering their embodied energy and inherent greenness.

Meanwhile, historic preservationists get sidetracked by the historic and architectural significance of the buildings they are trying to protect. They don’t put that same effort into making a sustainability case for keeping those buildings.

Adaptive reuse in Portland's Pearl District

If Seattle really wants to be sustainable, Berger says, the two groups need to form an alliance. Both need to embrace the environmental value of the existing building and build from there.

I think things get complicated when density concerns are added into the mix.

But some cities, like Portland, have done a great job of encouraging adaptive reuse of historic building stock. These aren’t the landmarked buildings that allow only minimal changes, but the buildings that serve as mainstay to new floors of condos or offices above or around.

The federal government even offers a 10 percent tax credit for adaptive reuse of certain historic buildings. There are a few caveats, like making sure the addition can be removed and the historic building is left largely intact.

It could be painful for preservation purists to see some buildings getting such a drastic face-lift. It will likely be even harder for those greenies who like to start from scratch and leave their fingerprints.

No, this has nothing to do with that boarded up building with the unique swooping roofline that you won’t see much longer at the corner of 15th Avenue Northwest and Northwest Market Street.

Landmarking a living thing?

Still reading? The Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board also voted Wednesday to designate the Washington Park Arboretum’s Japanese Garden a Seattle landmark.

Exactly how to preserve a landmark comprised mainly of living plants could get complicated.

Landmark board members said the garden is an obvious landmark candidate because of its historical, cultural and architectural significance.

But they were concerned that the designation be worded in a way that means arboretum staff won’t need their approval every time a rotting tree is removed or new bulbs are planted. Landmark staff said they will work to come up with something.

The 3.5 acre garden is mainly the work of Juki Iida, a Japanese landscape architect who came over and worked with Seattle’s William Yorozu, a Japanese-American general contractor.

It was the first large-scale post WW-II Japanese Garden completed in the U.S.

On the garden’s opening day in 1959, everyone who wore a kimono got in free.

Key Seattle landmark staff are advising the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board against preserving the former Denny’s on the corner of 15th Avenue Northwest and Northwest Market Street.

The recently boarded-up landmark

The board voted in February that the building’s prominence for the Ballard neighborhood makes it a historic landmark worth protecting. But what that actually means for the building and plans to build a multi-use development on the site has been up in the air.

Over the past several weeks, board staff and site owner the Benaroya Co. have been negotiating over controls and incentives for the building. That will establish what the owners and developers can and can’t do with the site.

The board meets at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday in the Seattle Municipal Tower in Room 4060 at 700 Fifth Ave. to go public with their decision.

As first reported on Crosscut, Historic Preservation Officer Karen Gordon and Landmarks Coordinator Beth Chave say in the memo that they can envision no scenario that preserves the building’s “character defining features” while allowing the developer “to realize a reasonable return on their investment.”

The Seattle Monorail Project bought the one-acre site for $7.5 million in 2005, before voters rejected the monorail plan. Benaroya paid $12.5 million for the site in 2006 and said the price reflects the high-density development planned there.

Just six months ago, Denny’s was still operating in the building. But Benaroya said in February that the building is not up to code and Denny’s does not pay enough rent to justify using the space as a restaurant. Denny’s paid $5,295 a month for rent in 2007 and covered the site’s $26,485 property tax bill.

The building was designed by San Francisco Architect Clarence Mayhew in 1964 for the Manning brothers in the flamboyant roadside “googie” style. The original oversized sign and glazing are gone. Denny’s remodeled the interior to add modern mechanical equipment when it took up the lease in 1984.

Board members said in February that the building still conveys its architectural significance through its unique roofline, and is a visual marker for Ballard.

Grace Architects' vision for adaptive reuse of the building

Some still argue the building can be kept without depriving the developer.

Above is a rendering Grace Architects submitted to the landmarks board that envisions denser development while keeping the 1964 building on the site.

“The only way that a reasonable financial return can be realized at this site is by embracing a creative
approach to the site, allowing additional density on the remaining site area to compensate for the
lower retained height at the landmarked structure,” writes Ralph Allen of Grace Architects in a May 19 letter to the board.

Donovan Rypkema, the historic preservation and economic development expert, was here this week from Washington, D.C. for a lecture sponsored by Historic Seattle.

I went to his lecture Thursday and spoke to him Friday morning. He had been out with his camera, wandering First Hill and downtown and snapping photos of older blocks and newer developments. He said Seattle has really changed in the 20 years he’s been watching it.

“I’ve loved (Seattle) because of its grittiness and that’s rapidly disappearing,” he said.

He said he was also surprised we don’t have more historic districts in our great, historic town. Rypkema believes historic preservation is key to economic development but has a special affinity for historic districts. Unlike one historic building, where preservation can be seen as an economic burden on a building owner, he said, a district sees all its values rise.

He said rehabbing a historic building is the greenest construction there is and said there is no function in today’s world that couldn’t happily be housed in yesterday’s building. He said churches, universities and hospitals are the worst at claiming they need to raze historic buildings to suit their modern needs.

“Developers are often painted as the villains in neighborhoods but the biggest villains in neighborhoods are churches hospitals and universities,” he said Friday. “They screw up more neighborhoods than anyone else in the country.”

At the Thursday lecture at Wallingford’s lovely Good Shepherd Center, Rypkema said historic districts also: have stabler prices and are better equipped to ride out economic downturns, and draw better tourists and do a better job overall at supporting the local economy than new construction (because more money goes to workers than materials, and then the workers spend that cash locally).

Seattle has seven historic districts: Ballard Avenue, Columbia City, Fort Lawton, Harvard-Belmont, the International District, Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square. For comparison, Portland has 13 historic districts and seven conservation districts.

Read the entire text of Rypkema’s lecture for yourself, and read his own blog about his recent trips to Seattle and Portland.