Discovery Center at the South Waterfront
Posted By LaurenI ended up at the Portland Jazz Festival’s VIP party last night. It was hosted at the Discovery Center at the South Waterfront, you know, those large condo buildings on that former superfund site down on the Willamette. The Discovery Center is where they take you to awe/pressure you into buying one of these furturistic Portland condos. They apparently also host parties. It’s a pretty good place to have a social event. The Discovery Center is fairly spacious but with plenty of tables and dividing walls to keep it from looking empty and unattended. It’s a promotional area for the South Waterfront homes so it’s filled with fancy commercial propaganda for guests to inspect if they get bored of each other.
My favorite exhibits were the paper models of the high rises. They were detailed down to little people walking around, miniature benches, fluffy green faux foliage, and toy cars roaming the streets. (They were all BMV’s, Jaguars, Mercedes, or Audis.) You can see a few of these paper models in this slideshow of images from the Discovery Center.
In the Discovery Center, there are floor plan layouts and model kitchens and bathrooms to give the potential buyer an idea of what they might get stuck with, since they can’t physically visit their unbuilt future home. The bathrooms I saw were rather nice, especially the one with both a shower stall and a bathtub. They were spacious and bright, light colored stone tiles that are easy on the eyes. I was less than impressed with the kitchens. The designers have a sincere problem with veneer. The cabinets may be very expansive, and probably expensive, but they look very cheap. Up close, it’s obvious that they’re made with real wood veneer but from the distance of even a few feet, it’s somewhat reminiscent of 1970’s fake wood paneling. You can see an image of what I’m talking about in the slideshow. In fact, a lot of the furniture in promotional photos I saw (suggesting what the condos might look like when fully decorated) have a very sorry 1970’s look. In some ways, this might make sense. Since most of the clientele may be wealthy elders looking for retirement homes, the 1970’s were probably the heyday of their success and productivity. A bit of nostaglia for this active time couldn’t hurt.
There’s a general theme to the South Waterfront advertising that I find unsettling. It’s the selling of this complex as a self contained utopia. According the planners, there will be everything that you need right there, restaurants, spas, grocery stores, a gym. There will be no need to ever venture out into real Portland. “Whatever you need to see or taste or experience is close, reachable, touchable, from right here. So let the destination not be a place, and make the journey the whole point.”
There’s almost a sense of anti-nostalgia. That one did not live life with adventure and fulfillment. Upon entering the Discovery Center there is a banner with a quote by Nadine Smith:
IF I HAD MY LIFE TO LIVE OVER
I’d like to make more mistakes next time. I’d relax. I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I’d have fewer imaginary one. You see, I’m one of those people who live seriously and sanely hour after hour, day after day. If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies.
What did these people give up in their lives to earn enough money to live in these condos? What dissatisfactions can the South Waterfront marketers take advantage of? But how can they sell a more interesting exciting life to a person by locking them into an area that looks smaller than a square mile? There’s something wrong here.
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