Introduction

Portland, Oregon is a relatively small city of just less than half-a-million population in a metropolitan area of about 1.3 million people, placing it 26th in the American urban hierarchy. Straddling the Willamette River at its confluence with the Columbia River, and some 100 miles in from the Pacific and south of Seattle, the city has a fine setting bisected by wooded hills and with long-distance views to the snow-capped Mount Hood and Mount St Helens.

Portland was one of the last American cities laid out before the development of the streetcar, and its central area benefited from a much finer-grained grid that created blocks of only 200 feet in length. This increased the permeability of the city and raised the ratio of open space to 55 per cent (as opposed to 33 per cent in Seattle or New York), thereby ensuring a more human scale of development. The Willamette River and the wooded West Hills enclosed the downtown, while a system of park blocks divided the central business district off from the inner suburbs to the west, helping to ensure an attractive and vibrant urban form.

The city has a culture of design quality stretching back to its original small block layout in 1857 (Fig. 31), and its park blocks. Frederick Law Olmsted's park system and particularly good local architects in the 1920s such as Pietro Belluschi and A. E. Doyle maintained the impetus.