Exploring Portland.

Mark and I stoll down the block from their house to have brunch at a place called ¿por que no? The temperature is already reaching 90 degrees and the high for the day is 98. We get a seat under a ramshackled metal roof on the back patio and the papas con chorizo they serve up is very delicious. Rachel joins us to help Mark finish the largest serving of chilequiles I’ve ever seen.

[¿por que no? taqueria]

[papas con chorizo]

After brunch, we head back to dissect the car stereo in Mark and Rachel’s new car. Mark wired a FM modulator for sending tunes from his mp3 player, but there is some background noise he wants to eliminate. The project requires a trip to the hardware store and some collaborative troubleshooting, but we are eventually successful.

[FM modulator project]

We decide to head into downtown Portland for a walking tour of the city. We park at Rachel’s office and she gives us a great tour of Allied Works Architecture. They are preparing for an exhibition of their work, so there are a lot of drawings and models out to see.

[Allied Works Architecture]

The tour continues to Powell’s City of Books. The gargantuan bookstore occupies an entire city block and is packed with an endlessly diverse collection of new and used books.

[Powell’s City of Books]

We head north to a rapidly developing area called the Pearl District. We check out a handful of highrise residential projects Mark’s office has designed as well some really nice parks knitted into the neighborhood.

[Tanner Springs Park]

[Jamison Square allée]

Our walk then takes us to see a building that Rachel recently completed for the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA). Its a great project that transformed a historic post office built in 1916 into an art school. The dialogue between the preserved facets of the building and the new interventions is really successful.

[Pacific Northwest College of Art]

[Pacific Northwest College of Art]

[Pacific Northwest College of Art]

We weave our way through North Park and head to see Mark’s office. Boora Architects has a diverse mix of projects from small residential to large institutional work and they have a great space at the top of the Morgan Building in downtown. It’s fun to see Mark’s office and some of the work he has done over the last eight years with the firm.

From there we wander past one of the parking lots in downtown which has been lined with quasi-permanent dinning establishments. They vary from food trucks to stick-built shacks and they offer every variety of cuisine imaginable. The parking lot is still fully functional on the interior, making this model for better utilizing surface parking lots in urban environments seem inevitable.

[parking lot food court]

After an exceptional tour of Portland, we head back over one of the many bridges to the east side of the Willamette River.

[crossing the Willamette River]

Mark and I jump on bicycles for an evening out. Our pub-pedal around his neighborhood on a very warm summer night is a lot of fun. He shows me his favorite establishments and we sample our share of Oregon brewed beers.