An unusual adaptive reuse journey in Portland–from car dealership to bank offices to local government–was nearly capped off with an impressively bonkers bit of public art, a "green roof sculpture” with a 50-foot windmill, earthen mounds, and a tree atop a rotating platform.
Heavily altered but still standing, it’s a testament to the sturdy automotive architecture of the 1910s and 1920s that this building is on its third productive use a century later–hard to imagine, like, a 2000s Chevy dealership in the suburbs stripped to its bones and converted into something else. Built as the Francis Motor Car Company dealership and service center in 1920, a 1980s renovation converted it into offices for Benj. Franklin Savings & Loan and added the taller building next door. Multnomah County were the ones who almost crowned the building with an ambitious rooftop sculpture by Canadian artist Noel Harding, commissioned as part of the county’s Percent for Art program when they moved their offices here in 2000–cost and feasibility concerns unfortunately scuttled those plans.
