Although I was born in Chicago, I don’t get back there often and always regard opportunities in this regard as exotic occasions. My most recent trip was in connection with a DjangoCon. I was one of the speakers, as well as an Open Bastion sidekick, helping out as a “snake wrangler” (we’re talking Python) for Steve Holden, the conference organizer.
As a part of this tour (of duty, in the sense of work-related) I went on one of those riverboat rides that focuses on Chicago’s architecture. Passengers look upward as the tour guide speaks knowledgeably, through the amplified speaker system, about high rises one could put down anywhere, versus high rises which reference their environment, by alluding to other buildings in various ways.
Today I was thinking back to that riverboat tour while gazing up at these brand new mid-height office buildings here in Portland, on SE 20th just on the south side of the bridge over I-84, behind the art deco era radio station. These new buildings are so new they’re not yet populated with tenants, and yet its surfaces are rusting already. The facade recalls a kind of dreary (?) industrial landscape wherein it rains all the time. A landscape like Portland’s. I can see the appeal.
Portland architects have mustered around the “rust motif” in a big way, something I’ve talked about with respect to a certain pedestrian bridge over a railway near SE Clinton and 15th. That rusty hulk references the east side esplanade pylons (dark with rust) which are in turn alluded to by the Oregon Convention Center’s deliberately rusty sculptures. The point being: this is a city where it rains all the time, and rather than fight the rust aesthetic, why not embrace it? Start with new buildings already rusty why not? The rust provides a patina that actually protects the deeper layers, like tree bark, like skin.
Is the rust motif actually dreary? That’s a deeper question about the rainforest ecosystem itself. Portland is close to the Pacific ocean, about an hour west by car. Weather systems like to dump their moisture as they move towards dryer climes, crossing the Cascade range and blowing across the high desert. Winds get sucked from the easterly direction as well, snaking along the Columbia Gorge at high speed, powering countless windmills.
Today, however, was bright and sunny, in the seventies (Fahrenheit), yesterday in the nineties. I was heading for Costello’s, a coffee shop devoted to the theme of world travel, riding the bus, while texting a friend in Cyprus I’ve often texted when in the liminal space of public transportation. I take pride in TriMet and used to work for it tangentially, in the Transportation Reaching People department, through various county offices, Clackamas County in particular.
