The Portland Company Site in Portland, Maine

Excerpt from The Art of Classic Planning, Chapter 7 — Precedents: Imitation, Invention, and Judgement

The classic planning knowledge base reflects the order, harmony, and proportionality of material nature, expressing natural laws as measured by beauty. Applying archetypes can both accommodate uses that serve the community and its genius loci [pervading spirit of a place] and guide the configuration of buildings in simple, beautiful arrangements of facades, circulation, and spaces. To enrich a community’s legacy and transmit it to its successors, we draw on one of our most powerful tools, the application of and reference to precedents[I].

The urban order that is still visible in American cities serves and expresses the purposes of their civil institutions. To paraphrase Carroll Westfall, school buildings express their role as arenas for training in citizenship. Banks portray their status among the community’s institutions and their claim on the public’s trust. Municipal waterworks present themselves as services to the common good. As Westfall states, “When a courthouse unambiguously looks like a public building … when a pumping plant hides its machinery behind a civic fa?ade decorum is being honored … In a well-ordered urban realm, a parking garage will exemplify a civic art that decorates the civic realm.” To that end, we use precedents as a point of departure for adaptation into new designs for the characters and experiences they engender[ii].

An example of this is the plan for the former Portland Company site, which fronts a thousand feet of Casco Bay and the Atlantic Ocean in Portland, Maine. It is close to a residential hill neighborhood to its north and to the eastern end of Commercial Street, Portland’s Old Port’s main thoroughfare. The site was at the terminus of the former Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad when Portland was the winter port of Montreal, Canada. Between 1846 and 1978, The Portland Company, originally a cast-iron foundry, produced steam locomotives, engines for Civil War gunboats, merchant and naval vessels, railcars, construction equipment, and Knox Company automobiles. Its cast-iron products were shipped as far afield as Cuba.

In transforming Portland’s easternmost commercial waterfront into a vital, fully accessible, mixed-use urban hub with apartments, stores, a hotel, and a marina, the plan integrates two million square feet of construction and thousands of parking spaces on the steeply sloped site. The new urban fabric developed around existing nineteenth-century buildings is tied to these surrounding streets. The sloping streets cover up to five stories of parking, the heat from which could be used to de-ice the streets in winter.

While each block has vehicle access for service and emergencies, parts of streets too steep for cars are maintained as stair streets. To preserve ocean and bay views from existing uphill streets, the new streets are “view corridor” extensions of them. In keeping with Portland’s waterfront fabric to the west, the urban waterfront is three to five stories tall, its buildings gently rising on the “parking hill.” Cross-hatching in the plan indicates classic streets.

The plan applies precents of typical nineteenth-century Old Port urban fabric and buildings, which change in style at every street as they climb the Portland Peninsula. These include the historic buildings of the Portland Company itself, as well as the typical buildings of Commercial, Fore, and Middle streets. To facilitate accessibility from the top of the steep slope, a cast-iron pedestrian bridge vaults over the historic main Portland Company building to an elevator tower that delivers pedestrians, bicyclists, and those in strollers and wheelchairs to a lovely piazza at the base of the cast-iron bridge, right in the center of the project. Emulating the formerly common brick warehouses built on piers such as Merrill’s Wharf farther west on the waterfront, the plan’s long-term expansion extends into the marina, potentially doubling the size of the development.

In plans like this, each building is composed of individual elements that make sense and contribute to the urban context and its experience. The application of archetypes and precedents enables designs to attain similarities to the originals that embed many of the precedents’ experienced qualities in the circumstances of the new. Through precedents and coherent standards of judgment, architectural and urban character — as well as their historical, cultural, political, and psychological dimensions — converge in expressive designs and their experience. For purposes of evaluation, we use appropriateness, beauty, and architectural judgment based on architectural literacy. [iii]

[i] Westfall, Architecture, Liberty, and Civic Order,1, 60.

[ii] Ibid., 162, 149.

[iii] Carroll William Westfall, personal communication, 2015. Quatremère distinguished between “aptness,” implying moral and social observance, and “propriety,” the observance of an inherited practice of architecture within customs and manners (Younés, Imperfect City; see also “Aptness” and “Propriety,” in QdQ, 70-71 and 214-215).