CASTING CALL an Architectural Talent Scout Goes on the Hunt for Buildings with Star Power
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CASTING CALL An Architectural Talent Scout Goes on the Hunt for Buildings with Star Power By Brian Libby Metropolis February 2001 From Norman Bates to the Brady Bunch, the homes of our Hollywood heroes and villains say a lot about them-and about us. Just ask Sarah Burton. A ten-year veteran of location scouting for movies and television, Burton is a name in the credits we ignore while exiting the theater, or waddling to the fridge for another beer. But when Hollywood goes on location, scouts like Burton take the first steps in a long journey from screenplay to celluloid. Scouts don't directly determine film style, but as Burton attests, "We're acting as the cinematographer, the director…We're they eyes of every department before they get there." Take Burton's latest assignment: MGM has sent her to Portland in search of a Modernist house to use in Bandits, a film by Oscar winner Barry Levinson with Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton. Hollywood likes Modernism for its simple, clean lines (easily identified in today's split-second shots) and because it evokes both the future and the past. But this particular style is uncommon in Portland, which was probably chosen with other criteria in mind (it's cheap, beautiful and a two-hour flight from L.A.). Armed with the scout's trusty tools—a camera and cell phone—Burton finally tracks down one sleek gem off fashionable Twenty Third Avenue, but the kitchen is too small. An award-winning house across town looks perfect, but the homeowner won't cooperate. Desperate, Burton sends MGM some photos of a wood-festooned, Northwest-style home-and to her surprise, the filmmakers agree to use it in the film. With one click of her shutter, Burton has changed the face of a multi-million-dollar movie. According to Beth Milnick, a former model and documentary filmmaker who's scouted for David Fincher and Oliver Stone, gaps between script and reality are usually no accident. These days most families choose bland homes in blander suburbs, but onscreen it's still gorgeous old Victorians with porches and picket fences. "We're selling a dream," exclaims Milnick. "People get enough reality in their daily lives." And finding pretty places isn't always enough. "Things that are beautiful aren't necessarily filmable," says Milnick. "There's an elegant simplicity in most great locations." Scouting for Bandits, Burton found an otherwise suitable house that was nixed because of its purple kitchen cabinets. "In person you could see how it tied with the rest of the house," she says, "but on film it never would have worked." Conversely, everyday locales can gain new contexts in the right project. When the Ethan Hawke sci-fi opus Gattaca called for a retro rendering of the future, Burton helped writer-director Andrew Niccol uncover a variety of mid-20th Century buildings before his script was even finished. "Andrew really inspired me to look for architecture that stands out in strange ways," she recalls. (Modernism has since turned up everywhere in movies and TV.) For Anywhere But Here, director Wayne Wang envisioned Susan Surandon and Natalie Portman's Southern California pilgrimmage as a trip down the Yellow Brick Road, and sent Burton to find shimmering Century City skyskrapers and green Beverly Hills lawns that evoked Los Angeles as an Emerald City. Soon an army of teamsters and filmmakers will hit town, but Burton will be gone before a single daisy gets trampled or donut consumed. "IF YOU BUILD IT..." By Brian Libby Metropolis July 2001 On a crisp blue-sky morning at the Nike World Campus in Beaverton, Oregon, anticipation is palpable. Cycling champion Lance Armstrong is coming to dedicate a new athletic center bearing his name. While organizers busily erect bleachers and a ceremonial ribbon for Lance to scissor through, architect Bob Thompson takes a last empty stroll through the latest edifice that his firm, Thompson Vaivoda & Associates, has designed for America's athletics juggernaut. From a walkway paved with legendary cyclists' names-Hinault, Lemond, Indurain-Thompson proudly strolls past the Armstrong Building's new amenities: a rock climbing wall, a sea of exercise bikes, an Olympic-sized pool, a giant aerobics room, and just outside a beach volleyball arena. That's right, Nike has built a 65,000-square foot rec room. And the company's deluxe employee accommodations already include the state's largest day care center and six restaurants. "There's no corporation in America that gives back to its employees like Nike," says Thompson. You can't blame Thompson for beaming over these 12 billion square feet of granite, glass, and landscaping comprising Nike's stunning combination of business park and athletics theme ride. But there's also a hint of defensiveness in his voice. No, it's not because of Nike's oft-maligned Indonesian labor conditions. Thompson is mad because this magnificent Utopian society he helped create-winner of 14 design awards and the envy of corporations worldwide-is being upstaged by an old hospital across town, where a renovation by Adidas is creating a new kind of corporate campus. From Baltimore's Camden Yards, where baseball's vintage-ballpark renaissance began, to LA's Staples Center, where basketball's most privileged franchise reclaimed its throne, Sports 101 says you can't win without fancy digs. Perhaps it's no wonder this same obsession besets the firms outfitting our athletes, whose industry is competitive as any game on the hardwood or gridiron. And with the two biggest competitors occupying very different headquarters within one metropolitan area, Portland has become a controlled experiment for erecting the corporate field of dreams. Since its inception in the early 1970s and the subsequent jogging-fitness revolution overseen from its headquarters (which has grown to 5,000 employees in twenty buildings), Nike has been metropolitan Portland's most recognizable corporation, even as the area has become a high-tech hotbed. But since Adidas moved its American headquarters here from New Jersey in 1993, local leaders have embraced the German-based company like a member of the family-and having government on your side never hurts business. "Both companies have shown a lot of community spirit and willingness to be good corporate citizens," says Charlie Hales, a member of Portland's City Council. "But I think the real distinction is where these corporations choose to live. That's about as sharp a contrast as you can see." For the past eight years, Adidas has been headquarted, like Nike, in Beaverton, a suburban enclave of chain restaurants and strip malls located about fifteen to sixty-minutes' drive from downtown, depending on traffic. But unlike Nike, Adidas was unhappy with its outer locale. "Demographically we're a young work force," says Adidas' Owen Clemens. "Our lifestyles revolve around downtown more than the suburbs, and being in Beaverton made for some nasty commutes." To win the battle for top talent, the firm decided to build an urban dream house. Given the relative scarcity of large-scale urban property, Adidas' downtown dreams initially seemed unattainable. But just as local executives began to settle for moving even further out, word came that the Bess Kaiser Hospital in North Portland was vacating its premises. Working with local neighborhood representatives, Kaiser sought a tenant who would embrace the surrounding community, which has recently emerged from years of middle-class migration and economic despair to enjoy newfound prosperity. "We wanted a visionary willing to make a bold statement about their commitment to urban life," says developer Jim Winkler. "Adidas got that right away." First came the task of turning a hospital built in the late 1950s into a state-of-the- art office complex. "There was a lot of stuff that had to come out," recalls Clemens. The hospital had 490 separate toilets, most of which were pulled out, along with surrounding doors and sinks. The hospital was also full of hazardous materials-asbestos, chemicals, even a nuclear radiation lab. Worse, in some cases as-built plans did not match what was actually constructed. And the building was glaringly short on windows, as most operating rooms require mutable artificial light. "Recycling an existing building is always an adventure," says BOORA Architects' Eric Cugnart, the lead designer on the project. "You never know exactly what you'll get." Adidas called for a new site plan that would expand what was then 215,000 square feet of space by claiming a parking lot across the street, thereby adding another 150,000 square feet. Now stretching from the existing hospital to include a new building, Kaiser believed it was, in Cugnart's words, "important that we use the potential of the site as much as possible and try not to build something completely foreign [across the street]. The challenge was to give an impression of continuity of space." With a mid-century modernist building forming the core of their complex, the architects sought a sense of design continuity without actually duplicating the style. "It's more like the repeating of a rhythm," says Winkler. BOORA devised a new outer surface of both the new and old buildings, teeming not only with windows, but with vibrant color (particularly the red, yellow, blue and white of the Olympic rings), something missing in most mild-mannered corporate offices. And as Clemens recalls, "We took out any wall we could take out. People are forced to talk to each other and communicate." This idea continues with a central plaza that regulates flow in and out of surrounding office buildings and parking structures and toward common areas.