adidas Village
Portland, Ore.
BOORA Architects

A boldly patterned five-building corporate campus nestles into a hilly residential neighborhood

© David Papazian

For more photos click on 'photos & drawings' above. To see the people and products behind this project click on 'people & products.'

By Randy Gragg

BOORA and LRS faced no shortage of challenges in designing a new corporate campus for Adidas. Adidas wanted 360,000 square feet, with room for future expansion to 680,000. The former hospital’s 10.5-acre site was ample, but it was divided by a four-lane truck route and a 30-foot grade change, connected solely by a skybridge. While two of the hospital’s existing wings had shallow, 80-foot-wide floor plates ideal for offices, vast portions of the 240,000-square-foot complex were far deeper.

Using the grade change to advantage, BOORA designed an 830-car garage to slide into the excavated hillside, roughly retaining its former contours. Load-bearing fins face the street, providing a screen of strong vertical elements while creating bays for landscaping that eventually will further obscure the garage’s horizontal voids.

The entire east campus sits atop the parking deck, with the trio of buildings separated from the adjacent residential neighborhood by a soccer field and tennis courts. A new, gently arched concrete bridge supported by canted, contoured columns connects the campus halves at an upper level.

A wedge-shaped plaza also unites the campus across the four-lane divide at the street. The design incorporates several measures to balance any employee preferences of old buildings over new. Adidas suggested the employee cafeteria be located in the former hospital so that every employee used the building.

Using a dry-joint system of metal panels painted with Kynar, the pattern rotates around alternating vertical and horizontal windows in a complex system of grays punctuated by a single bright color for each building, drawn from one of the seven Olympic rings. Window sizes were limited by the varied ceiling heights of the buildings, with the surrounding pattern’s proportions growing or shrinking accordingly.

With the deep joints further articulating each panel, the active skin has the subtle complexity of an intricate masonry pattern. The athletic facility stands apart, clad in brilliant blue but inset with sneakerlike silver stripes. With the campus labeled by only two small versions of the Adidas logo, the company lets the architecture announce its presence, the 20-foot-high windows of the athletic center acting as the campus’ chief advertisement.

A double-height, elliptically shaped atrium lobby in the former hospital greets those arriving on the bridge with an echo of the athletic center. To make the best of the low ceiling heights in the former hospital, LRS kept the ductwork and wires exposed and easily accessed through black metal grates reminiscent of gym-locker doors. Circular, double-height gathering areas help break up the sprawling floor plates of the old hospital’s lower levels. The circle motif is echoed in cutouts in the new seismic sheer walls on each floor.

Inside the athletic facility, the architects designed an innovative sunshade system comprising 170 2-foot-by-20-foot louvers made of lightweight aluminum skin sandwiching paper honeycombs. Swiveling on vertical pivots and rods, they move, six at a time, with no more effort than a push of a finger, to either mitigate the sun’s rays or darken the room entirely for company presentations.

Largely designed before LEED certification, the campus nevertheless won local certification by Portland General Electric’s Earth Advantage program for the recycling of construction refuse, reuse of the old mechanical systems, and energy efficiency.

See the June 2003 issue of Architectural Record for full coverage of this project

Formal name of Project:
adidas Village

Location:
Portland, Ore.

Gross square footage:
360,000 Sq. Ft. (offices and support); 318,000 Sq. Ft. (Parking Garage)

Total construction cost:
$66 million

Owner:
adidas Salomon North America
Owen Clemens, project director
www.adidas-salomon.com

Developer:
Winkler Development Corporation
Shawn Sullivan AIA, project manager

Architect:
BOORA Architects, Inc.
720 S.W. Salmon Street
Suite 800
Portland, OR 97205-3510
Office: 503.226.1575
Fax: 503.241.7429
www.boora.com