Boora Architects

A magnet for artists who take creative risks, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) presents the Time-Based Art (TBA) Festival every fall.  This international arts festival presents pioneering performances by artists working in theater, performance, dance, music, and electronic media.

For its 2004 TBA Festival, PICA needed a 200-seat theater, a cabaret stage, a bar, and a café.  After touring existing theaters in the city of Portland and recognizing the infeasibility of carrying high-cost rental terms, the organization challenged its supporters with delivering a more cost effective alternative. As a non-profit organization, PICA limited its budget for the venue initiative to $10,000.

Responding to PICA’s request, Portland developer and PICA board member Al Solheim offered the organization the Jackson Machine Works building, located at 1115 NW 14th Street in Portland’s Pearl District.  The building comprised 25,000 square feet of industrial fabrication space.

In addition to its professional design work for arts presenters, Boora is an active incubator and pro bono supporter of cultural organizations in the city of Portland.  Boora has an especially close relationship with PICA, which was housed within Boora's offices for the first few years after its founding in 1995.  Members of Boora’s leadership serve on PICA’s board of directors and leadership council, while the firm’s staff volunteer thousands of hours annually to support PICA’s programming.  In support of its long-standing relationship with PICA, Boora tendered a pro bono design team for the interior architecture of the Jackson Machine Works space.

As sufficient clear area for the stage could be found only within one of the building’s structural bays, Boora's volunteer design team positioned the seating for the temporary theater in the bays of the grid surrounding the stage bay.  The team then positioned this whole assembly in front of existing offices lining one wall of the building, whose poor construction warranted concealment for their inconsistency with the aesthetic goals for the festival environment space.  A narrow interstitial corridor between the rear of the theater and these offices facilitated their use as back-of-house support spaces.

Inside the theater, an additional scaffold substructure supported the three banks of long-tiered bench seating.  An existing overhead gantry crane accommodated the theatrical lighting.

The theater seating assembly was made from recycled, readily available, or easily returnable materials.  Five-gallon plastic buckets served as the base for the seating assembly, while ½-inch MDF board created the seating platforms.  Recycled carpet tiles lined these platforms, providing cushioning.

Recycled Interface carpet tiles provided cushioning for the seating.

A skin for the scaffold wall was required to isolate acoustics and lighting while guaranteeing the intimacy of the performance environment. The designers clad the scaffold wall’s interior and exterior faces with the translucent materials pegboard and fire-treated visqueen, respectively.

To differentiate the theater volume from the surrounding volume of the warehouse, the designers delineated the theater space with an 8-foot thick, 18-foot tall internally illuminated scaffold structure clad in pegboard and translucent visqueen.  This scaffold wall concealed technical equipment, transformers, and cabling, as well as an elevated control room that served both the theater and the adjacent cabaret stage.  A portal in the wall provided entry to the theater space.

Material tests demonstrated that, unlike the transparent character of non-fire-treated visqueen, the opacity of fire-treated visqueen would more evenly diffuse light from the internal fluorescent lighting system planned for the scaffold wall.  The resultant glow of the clad scaffold wall distinguished the theater from its gritty warehouse surrounding by rendering the scaffold a glowing volume of light.

Specialized construction techniques protected the visqueen and pegboard from damage, reducing waste by allowing the materials to be returned to their original sources or retained by the organization for future use.  Zip ties connected scrap wood blocks to both the interior and exterior of the scaffold.  Staples and screws then attached the fire-treated visqueen and pegboard, respectively, to this blocking.  The screws passed through the holes in the pegboard, leaving it intact, and the staples left negligible tears in the visqueen.