OFFICE 260
ART CENTRE – Portland
Located in an earthquake zone, the complex of early twentieth-century brick buildings that house the Yale Union contemporary art centre had to undergo seismic retrofitting. Rather than a major structural renovation of the entire complex, which risked damaging the existing buildings, the project proposed to demolish the building with least historical value and replace it with a new tower. The tower would structurally reinforce the adjoining brick building but also allow for the expansion of the centre’s activities anticipated by the client, with a flexible layout of plans that could easily be adjusted to different rentable units of apartments, offices and artist studios. The new building would thus provide both structural and financial support for the renovation of the entire complex. It is conceived as a concrete structure of slabs and columns, with massive diagonal braces that extend its entire height. The ground-floor gallery of the tower is an open public space, as an emptied-out counterpart to the adjacent historic Yale Union Laundry Building.
Year
2018
Location
Portland, US
Type
Culture, Education, Mixed use, Office, Public, Residential, Adaptive reuse
Status
Unbuilt
Surface
7 000 m2
Client
Yale Union
Design team
Kersten Geers, David Van Severen, Nenad Ðuric ́, Yuichiro Onuma, Nicholas Jacobs, Alice Galligo, Linea Dyrbye Jensen, Shinji Terada