Harrison & Abramovitz did the first master plan for Corning in the early 1950s, when the company was still being run by members of the founding Houghton family. The firm designed the first museum building, as well as a research & development building (seen above), both with a pioneering glass-block facade and black glazed-brick ends. The museum building and its auditorium have now been absorbed by a later addition by Smith-Miller Hawkinson; the R&D building is not open to the public.

Around the parking lot from the R&D building, facing what was then a major Corning thoroughfare, Harrison & Abramovitz designed a black-glass slab tower for the company administration. In a town that still only had 10,000 people, a tower was obviously not necessary. But its form, and the still-impressively detailed curtain wall, were obviously meant to speak to the skyscrapers of Corning’s urban competitors in the Fortune 500 before the company had a Fifth Avenue building of its own (see below).

In 1976 Corning asked Gunnar Birkerts to add on to the existing museum. He took the existing 20-foot grid and ran it through Frank Stella’s Protractor series, adding curves and continuing the tradition of glass buildings focused within. Raised above the flood plain on pilotis, Birkerts’s building is space-age without and velvety within, carefully controlling the lighting and display of the company’s incredible collection of historic glass objects. The exterior panels are glass-over-stainless steel, with a bottom flange of mirror, allowing for daylighting without direct light or skylights. Below the building Birkerts cut its shape out of the lawn, so a gravel surround imitates the sharp angles and curves above. I think it’s wonderfully weird, like all the best Birkerts.

The museum collection is expertly installed, and while curators like to distinguish between art glass, design objects, and teaching exhibits, I found the categories easily blurred. Here, for example, you see a screen once installed in the Corning Glass Building on Fifth Avenue (also by Harrison & Abramovitz, 1959), now in the museum, as well as an explanatory piece on Pyrex, demonstrating the color change in the material depending upon the temperature to which it is heated. At top you see that company’s best-selling, opaque white baking dish, after a trip through clear, to amber, to smoked. My grandmother has one and yours probably does too.

Finally, a few images from the construction, showing what will be inside Phifer’s white glass box: a set of curving concrete walls, inspired by the favorite architect wedding gift of all time, Alvar Aalto’s Savoy vase. Artworks in these galleries will be daylit from above through a set of translucent and transparent skylights; large windows in the box will allow for views out. The curves allow for a number of interesting interior paths and views. Among recent acquisitions that will be on display next year: “Liza Lou’s Continuous Mile.”: http://www.cmog.org/press-release/corning-museum-glass-acquires-monumental-work-liza-lou Four-and-a-half million black glass beads woven into a mile of cotton rope. The work’s minimalism, restricted color palette, and commentary on the labor of making all seem exceptionally well-chosen for this venue.

The hotel, a remarkable work of art made by hand, indeed takes timber as its theme, from a trunk-like central fireplace, to branching, Frank-Lloyd-Wright adjacent light fixtures, to chairs hewn from logs and apparently woven from bark. It’s fascinating to see modernism mixed with what some Oregon history sites like to call the “Cascadian school” of architecture. There’s the Wright influence, which permeates the color palette as well as the way nature is abstracted in hardware, fixtures and different decorative elements. There’s the modern influence, seen in chairs cantilevered on flat pieces of blackened steel. Bicycle tubing would have been a bridge too far. And there’s the Arts & Crafts influence, seen in the hardware, the signage, even the decorative mullions on the windows. The nine-square window in the balcony bar seems like Greene & Greene grown all out of proportion in the Oregon summer sun.

Reading the plaques on site at the hotel, prior to taking a hike up the mountain to touch snow in August, it was hard to reconcile the grandeur with a public works project. But the art was an integral part of the back to work effort; 100 artists worked alongside the 400 construction workers on every aspect of the hotel. One story says each hotel room has original botanical prints. (There’s a book that chronicles it all.) I’ve rarely seen such a stunning water fountain as the one at Timberline, backed by a gold mosaic mural. One newel post was carved with two-foot eagle, another with an owl. The grandeur (Timberline is much larger than the Forest Service’s other period lodges) obviously needed some explanation even at the time. I found online a document drafted for Congress justifying the WPA’s Federal Art Project.

Timberline Lodge, with its opportunity for the revival of dormant crafts and arts, offered employment to many men in this classification, and in their successful absorption suggested the possibility of a permanent program designed to perpetuate handicrafts and to make them serve a social need.

Timberline’s history after completion has not been smooth. It was closed during the Second World War, and again in the mid-1950s after mismanagement brought gambling and prostitution to the mountain. The hero of the story is Richard L. Kohnstamm, shown in a variety of Nordic sweaters in period photos. He took over in 1955 and, boosted by the increasing popularity of alpine skiing, it became a success. The sub-La Tourette Wy’East Day Lodge was added below the 1938 building in the early 1980s to accommodate skiers. It’s terribly gloomy, despite attempts to translate the overscaled rusticity into post-modern terms. It’s also orphaned in a vast parking lot. If you visit, speed across the tarmac and enter the lodge, where no one seems to mind if you wander around the public spaces. Behind it you can access a variety of trails to wildflower meadows and the desired summer snow.

“Who threw this tantrum?” That was the reaction—according to Halprin—of a number of Moore’s Yale architectural colleagues when they saw his Lovejoy Fountain Shelter (1966), perched atop the concrete waterfall designed by Moore, Halprin and Turnbull. The whole Portland Open Space Sequence, of which Lovejoy is a part, recalls the natural forms of the nearby High Sierra, with sprays, erosion channels, tumbled rocks, and weirs. Made of a series of board-formed concrete slabs, the fountain works as well with water as without. The pavilion serves as both mountaintop and protection, its expressive hillocks made with a latticework of straight wooden members. One explores the fountain like a natural discovery, climbing down, scaling up, losing one’s sense of oneself in the city. Moore had been interested in water as an element of architecture since his student days; that was, in fact, the topic of his doctoral dissertation at Princeton. In period photographs, one can see the fountain and the shelter against the geometric, repetitive backdrop of nearby SOM towers. “Looking at the photograph of that form, now 50 years old, I thought: This is what people are doing with the computer now,” Lyndon says. “How amazing is the juxtaposition again with the corporate modernism in the background. The latter was the norm of the time.” Before Frank Gehry (with whom Moore and his partners competed for the Beverly Hills Civic Center) lofted an angled chain-link fence in the air at his own famous house, Moore was working with the everyday to make something more monumental, memorable, and strange.

In the historical photograph of Lovejoy in the linked Metropolis article, you can see Lovejoy’s original mountainous backdrop. Today the fountains are indeed surrounded by corporate modernism, both residential towers and glassy offices, which to my mind provide an even greater sense of excitement and escape. You can no longer see the fountains’ inspiration, but instead come upon them like water sources in the urban forest, oases of open space, greenery, waves. I was with my children (as you can see in some of the photos) and they were at first suspicious of my motives for bringing them downtown. I had to keep promising them that fun, both for architecture critics and for kids, was around the corner. At Lovejoy they plunged down the shallow steps into the pool. The lesser-known mounds of Pettygrove Park, next on the list for restoration, pop up like green bubbles. Kids immediately zip up, then down. At Keller, they were initially stunned, bouncing in front of the waterfall on dry land, before they figured out where the pools were, and noticed the narrow shelf where you could walk behind the water.

The interstitial passages between the four elements were as interesting to me. Green canopies, paths lined with high-1970s lampposts, link each fountain to the next, cutting between and across downtown superblocks. The kids thought they could walk without shoes because the passages (for better and for worse) did not feel like the real city. I loved the idea in theory, but in practice the alternate grid may take the fountains too far off the beaten path of the city grid. Along a few of the passages were strange subterranean townhouses. The residents of the towers we saw seemed to be elderly, with dogs: no one moves to Portland now to live in a high rise. The other users of the open spaces were the homeless, who had set up camp under the shelter and on an outcrop of benches at Lovejoy. We were alone there with two sleeping men for a time, until they realized we had invaded their space and moved away. Maintenance workers suggested we not let the kids play in the fountains since they were used every day as baths. Only Keller was busy, mostly with families reverse-commuting to the urban nature.

At Keller, the crashing, symphonic end to the sequence, the particular influence of the Columbia Rover Gorge is obvious. These aren’t just any concrete plates. Their color, their striations, their canted geometric arrangements recreate in miniature the specific landscapes of Oregon. The fountains seem to speak to the continuing yearning of Portland residents not to live in the city at all, naming their companies after natural landmarks, flying into the airport with camping gear on their backs. The open space sequence is like a fissure in a city that has to exist to educate, to produce, to govern, but is always dispersing itself into the countryside. Halprin saw this in the 1960s, and some aspect of that urban personality remains. It’s wonderful that the fountains are being taken care of. I do hope more people can incorporate the plazas and pathways into their daily routines. The idea of an urban playground not just for the kids is very current; there is a lot still to be learned from these examples.