2020 Vision

Your guide to the industries of Portland’s future

Edited by Kasey CordellBy Zach Dundas, Oakley Brooks, and Kasey Cordell

GREEN BUILDING

by Zach Dundas

AS WIND TURBINES SPROUT from downtown buildings, the city’s status as a green-building hotbed can seem like it has always been thus. But, in fact, it began—almost accidentally—in the early ’70s, as young idealists flocked to a place run by magnetic leaders who launched headline-grabbing initiatives like urban growth boundaries and light rail. The result: a promising business sector in architecture, planning, engineering, and materials sciences.

“We stumbled into leadership in this field,” says Patrick Quinton, business and industry division manager for the Portland Development Commission, “because Portland is a place where people can see innovation happening in the real world.”

But we still get credit for grabbing ahold of our looky-what-we-found industry: Portland has more LEED-certified buildings per capita than just about any other US city, and city policies—like the one requiring all new government-owned facilities to achieve at least LEED Gold certification—have leveraged a growing cluster of green-focused professionals. Sustainable-building consultants such as Green Building Services and architecture firms like Boora and Sera have exported the Portland ethos to other US cities and abroad. New research centers affiliated with Portland State and the University of Oregon could establish Portland as a place that invents, as well as deploys, next-generation construction materials. And the proposed Oregon Sustainability Center, designed to generate all its own power and gather all its own water, already has the ever-Portland-fascinated New York Times using the word “icon.” All in all, not bad for a stumble.

PIONEERS

The Collins Companies A patriarch of this family timber firm first used the word “sustainably” back in 1943. Today, Collins’s ownership of three Forest Stewardship Council–certified woodlands and its line of green wood products underscore Portland’s ambitions to become a materials mecca.

ZGF Sienna Architects helped blaze P-town’s sustainable-building trail with the Norm Thompson Outfitters headquarters in 1995. But once local architectural behemoth ZGF got in on the game with projects like designing the East Side MAX stations and, more recently, a $61 million contract to build the new Homeland Security building in DC, Portland’s fate as a jolly green giant was sealed.

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