The House that Phil Knight Built

This is a place for student-athletes to have the ultimate collegiate experience: a big old mishmash of running around, learning, avoiding learning, talking to others, having table-pounding arguments, talking to a counselor about your sudden discovery of something that feels like a bad feeling, and generally trying to figure yourself out. This 40,000-square-foot space is the college experience writ architectural, a delineated and multilayered structure floating on a seemingly ephemeral plane of water, with an open middle that belies the controlled force holding the edges in. The Jaqua Center, with its tension between freedom and suggestion, confusion and careful layout, open plan and privacy, articulates an experience in which private and public blend to the point of melting.

The exterior is anything but typical. It is hung with a curtain wall designed by Benson Industries — the same Gresham-based firm that did the curtain wall for ZGF’s office tower in Portland as well as the iconic one for Renzo Piano’s New York Times Building. Engineered in collaboration with Arup (the only firm Sandoval found to have a modeling program complex enough to take on the project), the structure is a two-layered box with single-plate-glass panels on the outside and insulated glass panels on the inside. The glass lets 52 percent of available light into the depths of the building, while the five-foot-deep air cavity, operating under the greenhouse effect, insulates the building against the Oregon chill. It is such a novel construction for the school that it has been co-opted as a research project, a living laboratory for professors from the architecture department. A system of operable rolling shades is in place just in case the sun should ever shine in this corner of paradise, while a stainless-steel screen absorbs heat in the cavities in the winter and reflects light back out in the summer.

There’s a lot of light in the building, surprising for this part of the world. Most of it comes through the central public atrium, which is split in half on the second floor by a bridge that’s the closest the space gets to the library. The light illuminates students’ names engraved on the floor, Academic All-Americans all of them, with the size of the engraving corresponding to the size of their accomplishments. It also illuminates a wall of graduates, where a Nike-inspired phrase “A Few Who Just Did It” introduces former students like Ken Kesey, the pole-crossing explorer Ann Bancroft, and, of course, Knight. It comes through the public cafeteria and the open fire pit, flanked with Moroso furniture, a brand that appears again in the staff lounge upstairs. Sandoval and Stegmeier have also introduced Poltrona Frau (in the form of Duck-yellow auditorium chairs) and Ligne Roset seating for the student lounge and specially modified De La Espada study seats (braced for offensive linemen).

There is a casualness that lies at the heart of what makes this a successful space. The only time the athletes used to see one another, Sandoval explains, “was at the treatment centers, treating their injuries.” The Jaqua Center, on the other hand, “is a place on campus they can see each other as a culture.” With their lives so resolutely monitored — from how many hours they’re in training to how many calories they can take in — the university’s student-athletes clearly needed a place to be students, not athletes.

It’s a freedom that the layout mirrors, with a central open core and private zones that line the perimeter of the building. Thirty-five tutor rooms and twenty-five faculty/advising offices provide respite from the frenzy of the library, auditorium, computer lab, and teaching labs, while two sets of study carrels — one for individuals and silent, one for partners and louder — offer mid-level privacy for studying track stars. Three teaching labs — math, English, social studies — feature electrically switchable smart glass that can be flicked from transparent to opaque quicker than you can say “Help.” Private tutors meet with students to discuss everything from the German language to politics. On a recent afternoon, a tutor’s office wall (they can all be written on) offered insight into Marxism with this breakdown:
Alienation:
1) product
2) process
3) self
4) each other

This building aspires to the very antithesis of alienation. There is no front door or backdoor. Instead, massive glass doors swing out onto perfectly inlaid stones that appear to barely float above the surrounding moat. Just as so many student names are engraved throughout the building — on the floor, in the stairwells — so, too, are the architects’ names engraved: onto the trash cans.

Three quotes — from Herodotus, Sophocles, and Plato — detail the public entry wall, essentially a letter written to the visiting student. “At this moment, you occupy a space and time that will change your life,” it starts. “This building is not hallowed ground. It is an eternal challenge.” And it provides just the kind of hurdles these students truly need.