Building bonds


 

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Bob Thompson and Robert Van Brocklin
// Photo by Adam Wickham

When the developers of the Park Avenue West Tower announced this past fall that construction would resume on the 30-story skyscraper downtown, the city’s business leaders and owners heaved a collective sigh of relief. For the past four years, the Park Avenue West Tower has languished as a massive crater in the middle of downtown, a symbol of the recession and the economic damage it wrought. The project’s reset has been heralded as a boon for Portland real estate — concrete evidence there is renewed confidence in the marketplace.

That’s the real estate story behind the Park Avenue West Tower. But if the skyscraper symbolizes a new era for Portland downtown development, the tower’s lesser known backstory is equally symbolic: about a 45-year friendship between two men who were influential in shaping and executing that development vision.

Robert Van Brocklin is the managing partner of Stoel Rives, the largest law firm in Oregon and the Park Avenue West Tower’s anchor tenant. Bob Thompson is the founding principal of TVA Architects, the firm that designed the tower. Now 60, the two men met when they were 14 years old as freshmen at Andrew Jackson High School in Portland, then lived together as undergraduates at the University of Oregon. After college, the duo traveled around the United States and Europe before eventually returning to Portland to raise families and build successful careers. 

The story of their friendship is a footnote to the story of a landmark building and a chapter in the history of Portland, a city that, over the past 40 years, has morphed from a small-town backwater into one of the country’s leading examples of sustainable urbanism.

“If you go back to 1977, when we all got out of school, and took a snapshot of what the city of Portland looked like at that point in time and look at it today, you won’t even recognize it,” Thompson tells me. “It’s pretty amazing what our generation has accomplished in terms of building the city.”

I met Thompson and Van Brocklin in a Stoel Rives conference room about a month after TMT Development, the developers of the Park Avenue West Tower, announced construction was back on track. The longtime friends are a study in sartorial contrast. Wearing a black turtleneck and black-frame glasses, Thompson epitomizes a kind of urban architecture cool. Perhaps best known for his collaborations with Nike — TVA has designed more than 37 buildings for the global sportswear company, including the Washington County headquarters — Thompson has also earned a reputation for the sleek, modern residential and corporate projects that dot the Portland skyline, including the Fox Tower downtown and the John Ross Tower in South Waterfront.

Dressed in a suit and sporting a red tie, Van Brocklin looks every bit the corporate attorney, infused with a playful, energetic spark. A 30-year veteran of Stoel Rives, Van Brocklin helped grow the firm from one office in 1987 to 12 offices around the country today. As former director of government affairs for the city of Portland, Van Brocklin also helped lay the groundwork for many of Portland’s signature public projects: light rail, the convention center and the performing arts center. 

“I used my skill set to get those things authorized and funded, and get legal permissions for the buildings to go up,” says Van Brocklin, who did the land-use work for the Fox Tower, another TMT project. “But I didn’t design any of it. Bob would have been the one to do that.”


Complementary career paths and interests are among the recurring themes in the story of the “two Bobs.” So is a common will to succeed and a commitment to public service. As the two men tell it, their friendship was based on several factors: a driving ambition, the fusion of different skill sets, and a shared passion for the music of their generation — the Beatles, Jackson Browne, Simon & Garfunkel.

Although Thompson and Van Brocklin met in high school, their friendship didn’t blossom until they were undergraduates at the University of Oregon, where they roomed together for three years. Theirs is not a tale of youthful debauchery, at least not in the version Van Brocklin, ever the lawyer, admits to “sanitizing” on occasion. Thompson is less diplomatic, noting he was “in trouble half the time” in high school and that he is neither “deep or intellectual.”

Regardless, for 18-year-old kids, the two Bobs come across as remarkably focused and dedicated. “We had this unspoken pact between the two of us to get the most we could out of college and set ourselves up for a good life going forward,” Van Brocklin recalls. During their freshman year, the friends put a sofa in front of a west-facing window, where they would gather most evenings, looking out at the Coast Range and talking about the future. “Where we really coalesced is we were going to work hard and we were going to be the best we could be,” says Van Brocklin. Several mutual interests bound the friends together, Thompson says. “But ultimately, it was like this deep drive to want to succeed.”

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Montana, 1974

What they were going to succeed at was very different. Hands-on and creative, Thompson had always excelled in the art of painting and drawing; from an early age, he knew he wanted to be an architect. Intellectually curious and academic, a young Van Brocklin had decided by middle school he would become a lawyer, a profession that provided an outlet for his interest in policy and government.

Where Thompson had a deep passion for a single field, Van Brocklin’s interests were eclectic; a voracious reader, he pursued art and music with equal zeal, with a future attorney’s appreciation for the analytical frameworks explaining human endeavor. “I had a pretty good construct for how literature evolved from the epic to drama to the novel, and how music evolved from Bach to Beethoven to Mozart.”

While the two were playing off each other’s knowledge — Van Brocklin majoring in political science, Thompson fashioning architectural models out of popsicle sticks, — the city of Portland was also evolving, earning a national reputation as an urban pioneer. In 1974, a few years before Thompson and Van Brocklin graduated, Portland made history by voting against the construction of the Mount Hood Freeway, an eight-lane highway that would have carved its way through Southeast Portland. Four years later, the Portland transit mall opened; with streets dedicated specifically for buses, the mall became the focus for downtown redevelopment. And in 1981, the city decided to shelve plans for a 10-floor parking garage in favor of Pioneer Courthouse Square — Portland’s signature urban public space.

These kinds of projects, and the green development ethos they set in motion, helped inform the two Bobs’ career accomplishments. Thompson was involved in the design of Director Park, another public plaza, as well as the master plan for South Waterfront; Van Brocklin’s government work also helped grow a new generation of downtown buildings and transportation projects.  

If the city became a guiding force and inspiration, Van Brocklin and Thompson’s families provided another foundation. “We both came from very strong families; that was a driver,” says Thompson. Both men also adopted each other’s parents, he adds. “Van’s mom and dad were as interested in me as my own parents, and vice versa.” For his part, Van Brocklin says he is “not totally self-congratulatory“ about his success. “I’ve been very lucky to come out of a great family, to have had a good education because of them.”

About those youthful hijinks: “There were some wild times,” says Thompson, referring in particular to a couple of Christmas breaks spent near Livingston, Montana, bartending in a cowboy bar owned by an acquaintance of Van Brocklin’s. “We didn’t know what the hell we were doing.”

In 1976 Thompson and Van Brocklin traveled around the United States, followed by a four-month trip to Europe, the latter undertaken in a $400 VW Microbus the two men purchased in Amsterdam. These were “real road shows,” says Thompson, but with a clear objective: to visit key architectural and historical sites reflecting the accomplishments of the great men (the gendered noun seems appropriate here) who inspired them. Stops on the tours included Frank Lloyd Wright’s residence in Spring Green, Wisconsin; the British underground headquarters from which Churchill communicated during WWII; and the chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in the French town of Ronchamp, designed by Le Corbusier. 

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Holland, 1976

“We wanted to see things by people who had achieved at a high level,” says Van Brocklin, “because we had ambitions to do something at the highest level we were capable of.” Visions of grandeur notwithstanding, the two Bobs did allow for spontaneous side trips, although even in their chance encounters, the young men seemed to attract people who were leaving a mark. A serendipitous meeting at a bar in southern Holland turned into a one-month stay on a farm with one Anton Lohuis, a Dutch inventor of the miniature light bulb who eventually sold the patent to Philips. Lohuis paid Thompson to design an office in his on-site barn and engaged Van Brocklin in nightly chess tournaments. The visit culminated in a birthday party for Lohuis, with hundreds of guests attending.

Says Van Brocklin: “I remember Bob and I sitting on the roof of the barn at 6 o’clock in the morning, and the party was still going on.”

Inevitably, after college the form of the two Bobs’ friendship changed. Van Brocklin headed to Washington, D.C., where he served as a staff lawyer to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation before returning to Portland to first work for the city and then Stoel Rives. He is married to Sue Van Brocklin, public relations director for Coates Kokes; the couple has three daughters. Thompson opened TVA in 1984; today the firm employs 40. He and his wife have three children.


Thompson’s first job out of college was with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, a global architecture firm that designed the Standard building currently occupied by Stoel Rives. “The first architecture firm Bob worked for designed this building, and the building we’re moving to he designed,” says Van Brocklin, who clearly relishes the literariness of it all. “You can’t write stuff like that.”

Today Thompson is busy working on Nike’s 700,000-square-foot Asian headquarters in Shanghai, along with half a dozen Nike retail stores around the United States. Van Brocklin has been instrumental in helping integrate Stoel Rives across offices and practice areas, as well as growing the firm’s energy, renewable energy and natural resource practice areas. 

Both men count each other as among their closest friends: “one of the three people in your life that you have a foundation with,” Thompson says. “We can walk into this room and sit down and not struggle with small talk, because there is a real deep root to what formulates our relationship.” And yet: amid the all-consuming tasks of raising kids and building businesses, the two men typically see each other only a few times a year.

 “Time has a way of going and going, and all of a sudden, you lift your head up and 10 years go by,” says Thompson. “Then you start thinking about all the things that are important in your life outside of what it is you do.”

Enter Park Avenue West. A longtime architect for Tom Moyer, the influential founder of TMT Development, Thompson was a natural choice to design the skyscraper, an elegant, precertified LEED Platinum tower that will include, among other green features, the city’s first 30,000-gallon rain-harvesting tank, designed to reduce potable water by 40%. 

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A rendering of the Park Avenue West Tower

After 43 years in the same building, Stoel Rives, which employs 150 lawyers and paralegals in Portland, was ready to relocate, says Van Brocklin, who knew Moyer from working on the Fox Tower. The Park Avenue West’s green design will also serve as an important recruitment tool, he says. What is good for Stoel Rives is good for the city; the firm’s decision to sign a lease occupying nine of 13 floors of office space was the key to securing the financing that allowed construction on the building to move forward.

One of the state’s most environmentally friendly buildings, the Park Avenue West marks the ongoing evolution of downtown as a vibrant place to live, work and play. But if the skyscraper is a logical extension of urban growth patterns established several decades ago, it also stands as something of a monument to two men who helped push the city’s legacy forward. As Thompson observes, another story about the Park Avenue West “comes back to Van’s success as an attorney and mine as an architect. Now we both get to share rights.”

Van Brocklin and Thompson’s kids are grown, and the men are approaching the twilight of their careers. Both expect to spend more time together going forward. “I think of us coming full circle,” says Thompson, “from sitting on the couch in college dreaming about where we want to get to, and now we will be …” Van Brocklin finishes his friend’s sentence, “… sitting on that deck on the 29th floor of the Park Avenue West Tower.”

“I’m finishing my legal career in a building he designed,” Van Brocklin muses. “Of course, that’s how the story is going to end.”