U.S. Bank to leave iconic, pink Portland high-rise named after it

Published 9:52 am Thursday, September 5, 2024

U.S. Bank announced this week that it will vacate an iconic downtown Portland high-rise known as U.S. Bancorp Tower, or “Big Pink” to many Portlanders.

The 42-story structure at 111 S.W. Fifth Ave. near Burnside was designed by the famed architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which also designed Portland’s Memorial Coliseum, the New World Trade Center in New York City and the Sears Tower in Chicago.

As first reported by The Oregonian and the Portland Business Journal, the bank has confirmed that it will let its lease expire in 2025 in what bank officials call a move to manage their real estate.

A U.S. Bank spokesperson told KOIN 6 News — a media partner of this newspaper — that there won’t be any job cuts related to the move. Instead, some employees will move to other facilities downtown and several hundred will move out of downtown. Many of the employees will be moved to a facility the company owns in Gresham.

“The Portland area is a significant part of our company history and we’re committed to maintaining our presence and involvement there, which is why we chose it as one of our hub markets,” U.S. Bank announced in a press release. “As part of our work to manage our real estate, we made the decision to not renew the lease for most of our space at U.S. Bancorp Tower. We will continue to serve customers through our four branches in or near downtown. We expect employees move to other U.S. Bank locations by the end of the year. There are no job reductions or changes to branch services associated with this transaction.”

Brian Libby writes a regular column on Oregon architecture for the Business Tribune and is working on a book about downtown Portland architecture. He said “Big Pink” is the second tallest high-rise in the city but has more floors than the Wells Fargo tower, which is a little taller.

It’s set several blocks from the core of downtown, with a trapezoid shape and a podium base. “It’s one of the reasons ‘Big Pink’ really stands out. There aren’t a lot of tall buildings near it.”

It opened in June 1983, according to the building’s website, and marked the end of three decades of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s presence in Portland. The firm moved to Portland, Libby said, because the city’s most famous architect, Pietro Belluschi, had sold his firm here to take on the role of the dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Belluschi served as a consultant on the U.S. Bancorp Tower and may have suggested the pink Spanish granite that, along with pink-tinted windows, gives the building its nickname, Libby said.

He calls the building “Modernist, but with a hint of Post-Modernist design in it … a subtle and dynamic quality to it.”

It was the last major Portland building designed by Skidmore Owings Merrill, “one of the great architectural firms in North America,” Libby said.