Two For One: The Great Look Back

What was doing in architecture in Portland in 08? If you missed the AIA/IIDA awards AND Portland Spaces‘ design awards, the Root Awards–both surveying and calling out great architecture, interiors, sustainable projects with Spaces going beyond to include construction and industrial design–all is not lost. A joint exhibition of award winners opens this Thursday, December 4 at the at the AIA Portland Center for Architecture (403 NW 11th) with a reception from 5:30-8:30 PM.

More from the press release:

-Portland Spaces magazine’s 2008 Root Award winners

Spaces’ inaugural design competition celebrates the finest work from our city’s leading architects, designers, builders, and artisans. Five nationally acclaimed jurors selected more than 20 winners in residential, commercial, and institutional categories based on the local traditions that have long distinguished Portland architecture and building: timeless aesthetics, fine craftsmanship, and a commitment to sustainability. Through the Root Awards event, Spaces has raised more than $15,000 to award to our area’s top students in the fields of design and construction.

-The Portland AIA/IIDA 2008 Design Awards winners

For the past three years, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Portland Chapter and the International Interior Design Association (IIDA) Oregon Chapter have teamed up for a joint awards celebration that coincides with each organization’s annual design awards program. In addition to the IIDA’s and the AIA’s juried awards, a People’s Choice award is given to a recipient chosen by the public, and Portland’s mayor selects the winner of the Mayor’s Award for Design Excellence.

Plus, the winners of the What Makes It Green? competition, sponsored by the AIA Seattle Committee on the Environment, will be exhibited. The What Makes It Green? Top Ten Regional Green Awards, now in their 10th year, recognize the best in innovative, sustainable design and promote the importance of green building, livable communities, and social equity.

The exhibition is sponsored by Ankrom Moisan Associated Architects and BetterBricks.

Digital Empire

Can’t say we were happy about artist Scott Wayne Indiana moving to New York (any more than we were happy about losing gallerists Jen Armbrust and Laurel Gitlen or designer Diana Lang), BUT at least he sends home postcards of the very most conceptual nature.

This screen you’re looking at is the source of a lot of information about your world, from the New York Times to Dazed Digital to Mapquest. But there’s no substitute for being there, for placing your palm on the cool tiled surface of  Niki de Saint Phalle sculpture or breathing in the wet air in an Olympian rain forest. But that doesn’t mean that the digital among us don’t try. With a new online piece called Digital Empire at 39forks, Indiana addresses scale in a way that he’d be hard-pressed to do through analog means. And it was good.

David Laubenthal at OPSIS 920 Gallery

If you want to understand our point of view, it’s as simple as knowing how thrilling we still find the Bauhaus (for applied arts) and Black Mountain (for fine arts) models of integration, overlap, intersection, equal weight, mutual influence and inspiration of the various arts, their practitioners and processes. (That felt like a manifesto.)

So, a furniture designer who is also a fine artist who is showing encaustic paintings inspired by architectural rendering techniques…presumably analog…showing at the art gallery of an architecture office (OPSIS) is Right Up Our Alley.

Dave Laubenthal (check out his killer furniture at DJL Studio) has a a show of painting and sculpture opening tonight September 13, 5:30-8:30 PM at “OPSIS “:http://www.opsisarch.com/architecture’s 920 Gallery (920 NW 17th).

1300

image via Burnside Blog

Yes, please. This undulating beauty is the new Skylab-designed tower destined for 1300 W Burnside, according to Mike Thelin over at the Burnside Blog. This design is 27% more interesting, even, than the original tower that was to be much taller with condo/hotel/etceteras.

The static made dynamic, it is Bucky Fuller meets Antonio Gaudi. Jutting its chin into the Future, it is hope-full like the earliest skyscrapers embodying the ambitions and Great Ideas of the City and its people. Yes, design has to work, but we appreciate design that generates an emotional response.

(And we’ll only chock a fraction of our feelings for the design up to the fact that the street-level perspective of the rendering makes it feel even more awesome (and we’re, for once, using the word more or less correctly) here).

Talk Wright: Designs on Portland at DWR

Gordon House, Frank Lloyd Wright. photo via Portland Architecture, Brian Libby

This Wednesday night, Design Within Reach Portland (1200 NW Everett) hosts its fourth in the “Designs on Portland” series of discussions on architecture and design. This time around, Brian Libby talks to Larry Woodin of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy about the Gordon House, the only Frank Lloyd Wright designed home in Oregon, which in a big brouhaha had to be moved (!) to The Oregon Garden in Silverton. RSVP to portland@dwr.com. Doors open at 6:00, program begins at 6:30.