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Portland Design Firm Leeb Architects Ditch Concrete to Cement a Reputation

Posted on: Monday, 13 March 2006, 21:00 CST

By Justin Stranzl

Last month, the Portland design firm Leeb Architects scored national recognition for its work on a Pearl District parking garage built with structural steel. Now, as Portland welcomes a host of new buildings in the South Waterfront District and elsewhere and prepares the parking garages that will support them, the architects at Leeb hope the city doesn't forget what their design did for the Pearl.

Quality design, said Keith Pyeatt, Leeb project manager, helps establish a quality level for the development that comes after.

Leeb's design of Station Place Garage, a five- level parking structure at the west end of the Broadway Bridge, was unusual in that it incorporated stainless structural steel instead of the precast concrete used to fabricate most of the multi-deck parking lots scattered throughout the city.

The design caught the attention of the American Institute of Steel Construction, which hailed the Station Place Garage as 2005's most innovative architectural design nationwide that used structural steel.

The use of steel in the design wasn't all that was surprising. So too was that the project's developers signed off on its use in the garage construction.

Steel, said Robert Leeb, the garage's principal designer, has a reputation of being more costly, and he and Pyeatt had to sell a horde of developers - Williams & Dame, Reach Community Development and the Portland Development Commission - on its merits.

We did a lot of research on the costs, and at that time steel wasn't as rare a commodity as it was today, Leeb said. So we were advocates for it - and we got them enthusiastic.

Said Pyeatt: We were pleased that PDC elected not to value- engineer the design. We could've designed a concrete, precast structure and it would've been cheaper. But it would've been a dog, aesthetically.

Now, Pyeatt said, he's crossing his fingers that the Development Commission and private developers remember steel's merits the next time they think about a garage.

We'll have to wait and see what comes after, that wasn't already on the boards and in design review, he said. Downtown Portland has so many precast concrete parking structures. This neighborhood's a better neighborhood as a result of this project.

Source: Daily Journal of Commerce (Portland, OR)

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