Oregon Historical Society

Name: Oregon Historical Society
Address: 1200 SW Park Avenue
City: Portland
Year of Construction: 1966
Architect: Wolff Zimmer Gunsul Frasca; Pietro Belluschi (consulting architect)
Original Use: Museum
Status: In Use
National Register of Historic Places: Not Listed
Description: The Oregon Historical Society’s headquarters—containing offices, exhibition spaces, and research library—occupies a commanding, precast concrete-encased cube fronting the eastern edge of the South Park Blocks in downtown Portland. A secondary volume and raised plaza now lie north of the original volume

As described by Gideon Bosker and Lena Lencek in Frozen Music: A History of Portland Architecture (1985):

“The expressive exposure of the individual structural elements was integral to the design program, which derived its richness not from decoration but rather from the reverence with which the architect had treated the combination of concrete and glass. The exaggeratedly masculine lower levels of the Oregon Historical Center were balanced by the daintier fenestration of the upper floor, which was composed of vertical window slots. With its through-the-block lower walkway, museum exhibition spaces and upper-level archives, the Center’s plans emphasized the particularity of various internal functions, with overall organization tending towards an ‘additive compilation of contiguous spatial units, in some cases equal and modular, in others disparate both in size and shape.’ Unlike other buildings the firm would design in the 1980s, like the Advanced Institute for Biomedical Research (AIBR), the Justice Center and the KOIN Center—in which internal functions would be celebrated by their packaging into appropriate stylistic envelopes and spaces that became parts of a unified architectural collage—the Oregon Historical Center projected a single, unambiguously modern aesthetic.”