Boora Architects

Consistent with the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's roots in itinerant programming, the organization has always sought vacant warehouses and empty urban spaces to host the late-night events presented as part of its annual Time-Based Art Festival. In 2005, the organization commissioned Boora with temporarily converting a full city block to be used as a studio theater with a lobby; a cabaret performance space; a restaurant; and extensive outdoor common space. Partnering with landscape architect Allison Rouse, Boora's design team developed a solution that accommodated all of the program within the existing warehouse buildings while creating an award-winning outdoor environment.

The result earned wide critical acclaim, stoking the imaginations of Portland's and the world's leading thinkers in contemporary architecture and performance art.  The innovative design of the structure was itself time-based art, coalescing through the efforts of an ensemble and disappearing at the end of the festival. Today, no trace of this lively performance and social space remains except for a few pavement marks and a fresh coat of paint on one of the buildings.

The design team positioned a concert canopy on the site's asphalt service yard to provide protection for the outdoor space. This use of outdoor space allowed the team to connect the new structure to the existing building, creating a unified whole from the existing warehouses and the ephemeral structure erected only for the event.

The canopy was elevated to a height corresponding to the height of the existing warehouse, creating a uniform mass from the existing warehouses and the new scaffold structure. The warehouse doors through which trucks received and unloaded goods were left open, blurring the distinction between the performance space inside and the outdoor covered garden.

The two structural towers supporting the concert canopy defined sub-spaces and enclosed service spaces.  Wrapped in orange construction fencing and illuminated from within, architectural writer Andrew Blum, in an article for Surface magazine, called these structures "gauzy lanterns." The first scaffold tower served as the entrance to the venue and held the ticketing control point. A banner identifying the festival hung in this tower. Upon passing through this portal, guests entered a covered garden, over which the concert canopy floated.  In this space, guests could participate in the performances taking place in the cabaret, through direct observation or through video feeds. Seating and a bar gave the covered garden the feel of a night club.

The central axis proceeding from the entry and below the concert canopy terminated in a smaller open garden sheltered by a grid of deciduous trees. This naturalistic treatment rendered the space an intimate anteroom to two adjacent spaces, the covered night club and the restaurant housed in two bays of the warehouse building. Guests seeking relief from the driving energy of the cabaret and the nightclub space mingled amid the trees and dined in an al fresco café. The trees were moved every day to make room for food service deliveries and stage equipment.

On the opposite side of the site, the team converted a former nineteenth-century Wells Fargo stagecoach depot into a studio theater for 100 patrons.  Outside, a lounge doubling as a theater lobby offered coffee and soft-beverage service.  Within the performance space, a circular translucent drape above the stage reinforced the 26-foot diameter of the acting space.