Revitalizing Downtowns

Urban Revitalization - Creating Spaces That Inspire

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Hollywood Home Depot

The design for the first mixed-use urban Home Depot in the country was produced working closely with a multidisciplinary team of Home Depot representatives and consultants. The planned four-acre site is beside the core of Portland’s historic Hollywood District, and backing up to an interstate highway, and a few doors down from a light rail transit center. The program and architecture had to respond to the City’s award-winning Hollywood/Sandy Boulevard Vision Plan, which Laurence Qamar had taken part in drafting with LCA.

The Halsey Street front is designed with ground-floor retail storefronts, a garden center, offices on the second floor, and 26 apartments on the third and fourth floors. The 104,000 sq. ft. Home Depot store itself would largely be screened by these uses, including two floors of structured parking above.

The mixed-use building transitions between a regional expressway to its rear and downtown Hollywood to its front. This Home Depot project, while not built due to a recession, preceded a growing movement in coming years for urban, mixed-use ‘big box stores’ in other city centers by Home Depot and similar large format retailers.

Location
Hollywood District, Portland, OR
Client
Home Depot
Type
Mixed-use Building Design, Urban Infill, and Redevelopment

Hollywood Town Center

The Hollywood Town Center and Sandy Boulevard project was developed in close collaboration with the Portland Planning staff to establish a plan for redevelopment of one of Portland’s major historic corridors, and streetcar town centers. The project, which won an award from the American Planning Association, set the vision for the redevelopment of numerous underutilized properties around the newly built light rail transit station at the edge of the Banfield Freeway. The plan established clear code-supported standards to create street-oriented, mixed-use buildings, and pedestrian links between the rail station and the community core along Sandy Boulevard.

Sandy Boulevard, cutting diagonally through the city grid, both borders and unites a string of adjacent neighborhoods. The Town Center Plan was established concurrently with the corridor plan for Sandy Boulevard, a historic diagonal through the city. Street design changes have helped establish safer pedestrian/bike integration, which in turn slows traffic and supports newer and more valuable street-oriented building development.

The original planning Charrette was conducted in 2000, while Laurence followed up with other projects in the study area such as the Hollywood Home Depot and in 2010 a proposal for a Holly Square to face south across Sandy Boulevard at the heart of Hollywood.