Twelve West

And the desks work, particularly because of how they’re laid out, with glass-walled bookshelves on the top of each cubicle divider. They can be either filled with books (creating a private workspace) or left open (creating a sense of continuity and flow). “Some people like to see their neighbor,” Sandoval says. “Some don’t.” This flexibility is first introduced in the lobby, where slatted wood screens can be rolled around the space, creating a series of intimate pockets or one massive open room.

Temperature is controlled throughout the building by chilled beams—exposed cold-water-carrying beams popular in Scandinavia that are slowly coming to the States. The beams bring 55-degree water into the building and cool the space through natural convection. “The sensible thing is putting air at the edges,” Sandoval explains. Does it work? Last summer, during a heat wave, “it was seventy-two degrees on the south wall at three o’clock.”

It sounds like magic, but it’s just good engineering, and much of that was handled by the firm’s sustainability guru, John Breshears. “We wanted the building to be an urban catalyst, to show twenty-four-hour life on the street, which means a lot of glass,” he says. “We also want this to be a paragon of sustainable performance.” The catch? “Those two don’t always go together.”

A little company in the Portland boonies, Benson Industries, helped with this challenge. It had already worked on Renzo Piano’s recently opened New York Times Building. “Did you know that the curtain wall for that building was built out here in Gresham?” Breshears says. It was a hometown advantage that let ZGF figure out how to choose not only the right glass, frames, and reflectivity but also how to have operable windows. “There are about 373 reasons not to do operable windows,” Breshears says. “There’s one reason to do them.” People wanted them.

The public doesn’t see the chilled beams, the concrete floor that renders the interior completely nontoxic, the reflective white-painted ceilings. What they do see is what’s on the roof, which is why the building is known to locals as “that wind-turbine building,” something that raises environmentally sensitive hackles the city over. (And everyone here is

an environmentalist, to an extent completely unimaginable on the East Coast.) The turbines have been criticized for being symbolic but useless. “Wind turbines are very popular right now,” Breshears says, calling them the solar panels of the decade. He doubted that wind moving in from the coast and hitting Portland’s hilly urban topography would be harnessable, but the building’s ownership committee—a consortium that included the gigantic downtown developer Gerding Edlen as well as ZGF itself—was thrilled with the idea of visible environmental sensitivity, and pushed the turbines. The design team demurred, claiming they wouldn’t actually help the building’s operability, until the idea arose of doing them as a research project. After Gerding Edlen put together seed money, ZGF hooked up with a Dutch expert and then, as Breshears says, got into a “shack with the finest aeronautical engineers in the world—they’d just take off their shoes and climb in the wind tunnel.”

And the team has been successful, not necessarily in changing all that much about the technology but in taking an urban-turbine project seriously—so much so that the Energy Trust of Oregon ended up funding much of the project, as did the state Department of Energy. Both organizations frequently reject similar proposals.

Breshears is equally excited about the smaller environmental moves, like composting. “How long have we been doing worms?” Kerns asks Breshears as they discuss the small size of a central trash bin (the designers removed individual trash cans) that they’ve never seen full. Then there are the sensors on every desk that turn off lights and monitors after a period of no movement—a potential downside for an extremely focused architect—and the exposed concrete columns. The latter were chosen both for the hipster-firm aesthetic and because Portland concrete, due to the local land composition, is essentially silver and thus takes a very long time to warm up or cool down, lending temperature stability to the entire interior.

When Sandoval started working on the building, he wanted to tap Oregon’s natural resources—wood, silvery concrete, a temperate climate—and highlight those that are more coveted in this rainy corner of the Pacific Northwest: daylight, a connection with other people, a sense of openness. Vertically stacked offices connected by stairways work here because of a right-left stitching on every floor that satisfies both the fire marshal’s need for safety and the firm’s culture of creativity, in an era of many unsuccessful attempts at vertically stacked offices.

When Sandoval finished the building and everyone moved in at 2 p.m. on a Sunday, he was relieved, happy, and, most of all, glad to be still employed. “The dreaded job is always remodeling an architecture firm’s own office,” he says. “You’re going to get fired afterwards.” Not this time. Here the show will go on.

The 2009 IIDA/Metropolis Smart Environments Awards winners:

THE PLANT CAFE ORGANIC
CCS Architecture

TWELVE WEST
Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects

KROON HALL
Hopkins Architects and Centerbrook Architects and Planners