oregon historical society : ryan enschede studio

A new building proposed for the Oregon Historical Society, on its current downtown Portland site.

The Society includes a historical museum, library, film archive, education and administrative departments. The impulse for the design was a desire to improve the typically dry historical museum experience and make it more meaningful to contemporary Oregonians. Towards that end this proposal omits curated exhibit space, instead transforming the full museum component into an “open storage” archive of the permanent collection. This archive is then organized by location - the visitor finds all the parts of the collection which pertain to a particular place together, across time and culture. A visitor may browse across locations or find their own home, utilizing their familiarity and interest in their own home to engage with other cultures and historical time.

The architecture of the building is intended to reinforce the experience of separation-then-reconnection. Entry is via an internal street-level courtyard which is buffered from the surrounding city. Using street-level grade as a metaphor for the here-and-now, visitors then depart their contemporary lives, either ascending to the museum or descending to the library. Extending the separation metaphor, the museum is housed within twelve abstract metallic cubes, screened from direct exterior views. Within these rooms passes the continuous archive structure, which is constructed of rough rammed earth made of the soil of the Oregon Country’s various regions. The visitor circulates up into and through the storage structure, browsing regions or seeking out a specific place, before being collected back to the museum floor at the last room, where the only direct exterior view from the museum opens down busy Broadway St through the otherwise unbroken form of the cubes, serving as a reminder of the here-and-now at the end of the museum-going experience.

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