My apologies for the poor pic – I snapped it from the morning bus commute. I’ve been noticing this structure being built since the late summer and it’s really starting to take shape.
A bit of digging revealed it’s a public art project. Managed by the Regional Arts and Cultural Council, the project is described as:
Inversion: Plus Minus is a set of towering site-specific sculptures created by artists/architects Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo of Lead Pencil Studio. Using weathered steel angle iron, the artists are presenting “ghosts” of former buildings at two similar sites along SE Grand Avenue. One site, at Hawthorne Boulevard, will feature a matrix of metal that almost appears as a solid building. In the artists’ words, “The sculptures reference the outer shells of ordinary industrial buildings found in the Central Eastside Industrial Area like those that once existed on the project sites.
Here’s a rendering of the final product which is targeted to be completed by end of the year:
And, here’s the wiki entry.
Lost Oregon 
The first project looks like it’ll be really cool when finished, and recognizable as an art piece. The description of the second piece just makes me picture a fence around an empty lot, so I’m curious how that one will turn out.
Well that just looks really dumb. They couldn’t come up with a better use for the space? A bunch of old-looking metal? Why not trees or flowers? Or even some kind of water sculpture. I drive past this every day, and it is ugly and an eye-sore.
Can anyone say pigeon poo?
This looks like a Dresden after the horrific bombing. Why would anyone want to look at such an ugly site?
I’d like it removed. It is oppresive and ugly.
These structures are not attactive, disturbing and detract from any surrounding beauty of Portland. What waste of money that could have used in a never of charitable ways.
This is a rusting pile of urban BS. WTF? What happened to the concept of not wasting money – from any source? This city is SO screwed up it is it’s own bad art.
I get depressed every time i drive by this “art work”. Grand Ave and MLK are already fairly dicy streets and now someone has been allowed to make the area look like parts of Detroit instead of the Rose city. Maybe hundreds of climbing roses.or wisteria, using the structure for beautification, would salvage this ugly, distressing, hopeless, uninspiring structure in the midst of our daily lives.
Sorry, but it looks like someone started to demolish a couple of buildings and then never finished the job. I would agree with Leecia…some climbing roses or wisteria might help…even some ivy? The problem would still remain tho…both of these structures will still look abandoned…just older and more depressing.
I wonder how many hungry and homeless, that ply our streets, could be helped with the money that was spent on this nightmare.
I came here from Wash D.C.Do you think they would tolerate this monstrosity in the nations capital?
Dave Buckley
Aug 28
This is so ugly and what an embarrassment. Wasted money and tax payers paid for this?
I’m sure the artist had a good idea and the people who allocated the money had a sense of community. But it all went so terribly wrong I can’t find anyone let’s sees any positive artistic value in this structure.
Even though the artist realize that art is supposed to move you well it’s should also move you in a positive way if it’s for the community wait we could have put up a big skeleton of human or many humans and said that it was our previous mayors and we were just honoring them.