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Portland State University unveiled its new Jordan Schnitzer School of Art + Art History + Design Tuesday, Oct. 13. The school first announced the project in spring 2024, when its namesake and his family foundation donated $10 million to the university’s arts programs, $5 million of which went toward the new building.
“Four or five years ago,” Schnitzer told WW outside the new building before the public opening, “I said, ‘Gee, maybe the next thing we should fund on campus is an arts building.’”
For students and faculty, the new building updates materials and equipment while bringing the university’s various art departments, which were previously split across five buildings, under one roof. The departments were technically grouped into a larger school back in 2024, when the School of Art + Design became the Jordan Schnitzer School of Art + Art History + Design.
In a more symbolic, citywide context, the strikingly modern, forest green building, which is accented with a bubblegum pink staircase and beams, reflects a public investment in the arts and in downtown, especially considering that $81.7 million of the total $90 million budget came from state bonds, which the Oregon Legislature approved for the project in 2021 and 2023.
In a statement, PSU President Ann Cudd called the university’s College of the Arts “a generative force for our region’s creative workforce and the pilot flame for arts in Portland.” Touring the building on Tuesday, Cudd explained how the new building aids that mission. “Human connection, human creation, human interaction, that’s really gonna be stimulated here,” she said, pointing to a room full of typewriters, then mentioning the new photography darkroom; on the more progressive end of the spectrum, there was talk of “knitting with alginate” (algae-based bio-yarn) in the sustainable fashion design studio. “That is what we have to offer the world in the age of AI,” Cudd said.
The 106,000-square-foot building was designed by LEVER Architecture, a firm based in Portland and Los Angeles that specializes in eco-friendly mass timber construction, a method of using bonded chunks of lumber in place of concrete and steel beams. The building’s four stories include practical and expected elements like a lecture hall, student studios, and discipline-specific workshops. But there are more progressive features, too, like the “memory lab,” which is equipped to splice together biographical documentaries from personal archives. There’s also a “catalyst lab” devoted to teaching students about new technologies that might apply to their fields of study.
Lis Charman, director of the new school, says faculty began moving into the new building in July.
“We used to be scattered across campus,” Charman said. “I never got to see the MFA students. I rarely got to see somebody in printmaking. It was the same for the students. They had to cross campus. So you were kind of siloed.”
Now everybody’s together, Charman went on. “You can just walk upstairs and you can see the catalyst lab. You can go and see somebody doing something in textiles. You can see all the opportunities you have as a student here, whereas you wouldn’t have had those opportunities [before]; they were kind of behind closed doors.”
