From the Canadian Bush to Architecture School

by Robert McMonies

“It was mostly an accident,” says George Crandall, thinking back to his early days.

On a rainy Wednesday afternoon, I interviewed Crandall, a wise older gentleman with round glasses and wispy gray hair. Crandall is someone very few people outside of the design world in Portland, Ore. would know about, yet every Portlander has seen examples of his work. From helping design Big Pink to the Multnomah County Library Rehab, among other projects, Crandall is an urban planner who has significantly impacted the way Portland looks and feels today.

Crandall’s story seems to be a series of lucky happenings and chance events which shaped him from a young boy from the Bush of Canada into a highly esteemed Urban Planner with a large impact on Portland today. Crandall grew up in Northern Ontario and had worked as a surveyor in high school, until he was given an unexpected opportunity to shift the course of his life.

“I was in the bush and [my mother] said, ‘Do you want to go to the University of Arizona?’ I'd never been in the States. And, she said, ‘You can miss your last year of high school if you do that,’ since we had five years of high school. So I said, ‘Hey, okay.’ And I showed up. She said, ‘If you show up and get in the car, we'll go to Arizona,’” says Crandall.

After studying civil engineering at the University of Arizona, based on his prior experience with surveying, Crandall went back up to Canada and got a job at the largest lumber mill in the world on Vancouver Island, and worked as a management trainee.

“And one day I was sitting on a hillside in the summer after two years and I was doing some painting. I always liked to draw; I like to paint and I like to create. And I just said, this is not the life I want to lead as a manager in a in a large corporation. I think I'll go back to school and get a degree in architecture,” says Crandall.

At this point on Vancouver Island, Crandall decided to shift the focus of his life again towards the world of architecture and design. Crandall went back to the University of Arizona to get a  degree in Architecture and follow his passion.

“...A lot of these things are by chance, but, in my last year of architecture, I got a call to go down to the head office. I went down in the head office and they said to me, we need a driver to take Mies van der Rohe,” says Crandall about his series of chance events.

Van der Rohe was one of the most famous architects of the 20th century, known for designing towering rectangular structures like the Seagram Building. If you’re still at a loss, think of any cubicle-filled office building from a movie, or where you imagine hurried people with briefcases are headed, it’s probably a van der Rohe. As Crandall stated, “He’s the ‘less is more’ guy,”.

Crandall drove van der Rohe and two others 80 miles out of Tucson to the Kitt Peak Solar Telescope and back.

“We drove up to Kitt Peak and [van der Rohe] didn't say a word...he just chewed on a cigar,” says Crandall.

Crandall, trying to engage this man he viewed as a legend, says, “What'll I ask him, how do I engage them? And I said to Mies, ‘Is it architecture?’” referencing the stunning Telescope.

“He said, ‘It is a very fine instrument.’ That's all he said,” says Crandall, doing a great imitation of van der Rohe’s curt accented speech.

After returning, the man from the back seat of the car ride actually called Crandall’s school and got in contact with him. The man told him to apply to work at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the company who designed the telescope, which Crandall had written a paper about, and offered to give him letters of introduction because he thought going to SOM would be the best thing for Crandall to do.

So because of this chance car ride with this man with connections at SOM, Crandall was able to apply for the job at SOM in Portland, got the job, and loved the city. He started work at SOM, and during his relatively short time there, he helped design countless Portland landmarks.

Becoming an Urban Planner:

“I understood that architects had a very narrow scope of work that they were involved in, which was the individual site, the individual building. And while that was rewarding in its way as far as design, I was interested in big picture stuff,” Crandall says, about his shift from architecture to urban design.

In addition to helping design many of Portland’s favorite buildings, Crandall opposed many famous projects including the the Mt. Hood Freeway, the Columbia River Crossing, and the expansion of the Eastbank Freeway. If these plans had been enacted, we would be living in a city with more freeways and traffic, and less community and walkability.

“It was not intentional where I said, ‘I'm going to be an urban designer and, this is how I'm going to go about it.’ I learned about design, to appreciate design. I learned about cities, I traveled to cities, and I decided I needed to deal with a much larger scale,” says Crandall.

After working with SOM for many years, and then FFA Architecture and Interiors, Crandall went on to start his own firm focused on urban design because of his interest in the subject, and his frustration with the way urban development was driven only by developers and a drive to make a profit.

“...The developers are calling up and saying call off Crandall, because it's making our lives difficult, about that time I decided to start a firm that focused on urban design only and revitalizing cities. And we are the only firm in the US that has that singular focus. And that's how I got into urban design,” says Crandall, about his reasoning behind this change.

Crandall had shifted the course of his life away from designing buildings and other projects for big companies, and instead towards shaping cities to make them better for people.

Ideas for a Changing City:

Crandall and I talked in depth about the continued growth of Portland and how to make sure our city grows in a healthy and sustainable way. Crandall believes we need to invest in public transportation, land use planning, and have an overall plan to combat climate change and deal with its effects. He talked about how we keep spending money on things like freeway expansion when what we really need to be doing is reducing miles driven and increasing spending on public transportation.

“So when you do these plans for cities, city transformation, they need to be implemented. And, so it's all about implementing is what it amounts to. Good design. How do you implement it, how do you bring the community along? So it was important to develop a whole new set of criteria for how one puts one of these plans together,” Crandall says about his unusual approach to planning.

This type of planning, the kind where it is about communities and the people who are affected by changes, is what I think we should be most thankful to Crandall for. Without people like him, we might still be completely stuck in the era of soulless plans being put into place by bureaucrats with no input from the community.

“My firm is thinking about a national education program to educate people about the dangers of global warming, so they will change their elected officials,” says Crandall excitedly.

Crandall wants our generation to be more aware of climate change and how it will affect our daily lives. He thinks that young people should keep thinking about the world around them and how they can change it so we can have a better future for urban design.  

Crandall has a long and winding life story, filled with many chance events, but at the center of it is a devotion to improving the world around him through design and policy. Through his work as a surveyor, a businessman, an architect, and an urban designer, Crandall has had a large impact on Portland and the culture of urban design in our country as a whole.

George Crandall lives in Portland and currently co-leads his firm Crandall Arambula. He recently published his book, Fixing Your City, and hopes to continue inspiring people to care about city design.