Jumping Burnside in Portland necessary for West End's redevelopment

You could say that Portland's newest planned development is the ultimate in mixed-use. With five floors of below-grade parking, first-floor retail, three floors of office space, a 112-room boutique hotel and 17 floors of for-rent housing, the building - expected to stand 29 stories tall - leaves no use ignored, save industrial warehousing.

It's an endeavor never before attempted in Portland and also the first of its kind whose primary goal is to help bridge the gap between the highly successful Pearl District and the budding West End.

The architecture firm Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Partnership - along with Gerding/Edlen Development Co. and London-based hotelier Taylor Clark Inc. - is in the initial design stages of creating the company's new headquarters building on Southwest Washington Street between 12th and 13th avenues near the Clyde Hotel, American Apparel and Jake's Famous Crawfish.

This project plants a flag for Portland's West End, said Bob Packard, managing partner with ZGF. We are jumping (West) Burnside across from the Pearl District in hopes of being a catalyst for the next wave of redevelopment in downtown Portland.

I think this will bridge the gap along Burnside, said Mark Edlen, a principal with Gerding/Edlen. It will kick start that West End effort between the Pearl and Central Business District, where projects like the Eliot Tower, the new addition to the Portland Art Museum and the Clyde Hotel are going on. This will give people a reason to cross Burnside.

No other building in Portland has been designed for so many uses, and along with being the first of its kind comes the responsibility of doing it right. According to Edlen, that's no small feat. We're the only ones silly enough to think of it, he said.

It's a signature building in that you've got four major uses, he said. You have to have multiple entries that are private and separate from other parts of the building; the hotel doesn't want to share uses with the office, and the apartments want to be separate from the retail aspect, and so on.

Packard said the design team is aiming to create distinct architectural components to each part of the building to articulate the different uses.

Along with accommodating so many different users in one edifice, one of the biggest challenges will be ensuring that all the building's structural and mechanical systems are aligned, all the while keeping in mind LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, the U.S. Green Building Council's rating system for sustainable buildings. Structurally, this is very complex, said Edlen. (There are) a couple of mechanical systems in the building - and we have to make sure the uses shift easily from a sustainability perspective.

Not that LEED is new to Gerding/Edlen, one of whose Brewery Blocks buildings, the Henry, earned a gold rating. The problem, Edlen said, won't be getting the building LEED-certified but getting it to that gold standard. The design team has gone through so much to provide the elements of a high-quality project. Now, take that and multiply it by four. That makes it much more difficult.

Another characteristic of the building that differentiates it from others that are currently under construction is that the residential portion will be made up of high-end, for-rent condos rather than for-sale units. New condominium towers and condo conversions are quickly emerging as hot trends in the city.

As Portland Center Apartments converts into the Harrison condominiums, it's almost surprising to see any developer choose to create rental housing in downtown. But Edlen said that the influx of condo conversions actually helped spark his company's decision to create rental housing.

It brings people into the core who are not buyers for whatever reason, he said. If we don't create these opportunities, they'll head to Beaverton and take their retail dollars with them. I'm an advocate of different types of housing in the urban environment. It makes downtown more interesting and exciting.

Ultimately, all of the stakeholders agree that West Burnside is the barrier that must be crossed in order for the West End to become successful. The pedestrian needs to own the street, said Edlen. Yes, traffic will move slower, but if we're serious about being an urban city, we need them to own it.

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