The Fountain Dictates the Answer

Ira Keller and fountain designer Angela Danadjieva, 1970

When the Portland City Council sits down to decide on the location of a new Civic Auditorium, one immutable factor should make the decision easy.

 Sitting across the street from the current site is what Architectural Digest calls one of the world’s most “stunning” fountains.  The same one that the nation’s premier architecture critic of the era called “one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance.”

 The Ira Keller (nee: Forecourt) Fountain was designed to sit at the Civic Auditorium’s entrance.  It creates a vital, vibrant human space in front of the performance venue, gracing audiences with a spectacular experience both entering and leaving the Auditorium. Very simply, there is nothing that can match it anywhere in Portland – or anywhere else.

For this reason alone, the new Auditorium needs to sit in exactly the same place as the current one.  Building a new auditorium anywhere else would be a massive disservice to the fountain and to its role in the public realm.  The competing site is an old motel once desired by Portland State University that PSU now hopes to unload.

 Architectural Heritage Center directors and other preservation advocates also recommend keeping the current auditorium site.  But there has been little discussion about the value of the fountain and its potential to add greatness to a new auditorium across the street. (Or about consequences if the fountain becomes stranded.) 

The architecture critic who raved about the fountain in 1970 was Ada Louise Huxtable of the New York Times, who won the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for criticism the same year.  While applauding the fountain, she was less enamored with the Auditorium we see today. 

 She called it “a building of unrelieved blandness, sauced with piped-in music at non-performance hours.”  That should be a clue that we can do better – by designing a new auditorium that complements the fountain.  Portland’s best architectural minds should create a building that combines the drama of the fountain with the beauty of the art and music within the auditorium’s walls.

 And here’s another vital factor that must be considered when the City Council makes its decision:  What becomes of the fountain’s environs if the auditorium moves elsewhere?  Could the auditorium block become a parking lot?  Or a high-rise condo?  Imagine how the public would feel if the fountain becomes a “forecourt” for a parking lot, or the private front yard for upscale condo owners? 

Huxtable’s review of the fountain in 1970 touched on the importance of creative, attractive open spaces adding value to historic cities harking back to the Renaissance.   “These spaces have been the human and artistic cores of cities,” she wrote. “The 20th Century has substituted the parking lot.”

 We don’t do Portland a favor by diminishing a valuable asset we already have.  Let’s make the public space even more attractive and desirable with a well-designed new auditorium.

 -----Fred Leeson

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