Gradient House and Studio (Jeremy Bittermann/JBSA)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Last fall the top prize at the local American Institute of Architects annual Oregon Architecture Awards, known as the Honor Award, went to a first-time winner: Linden, Brown Architecture for the Gradient House and Studio. It’s a smart, beautiful reinvention of live-work space for the post-pandemic era, as well as for Oregon’s new frontier of zoning that breaks down the tyranny of single-family houses.
For me, like many, Gradient provided an introduction to the work Linden, Brown, which is the latest in a succession of award-winning local small firms founded by architects formerly with Portland’s Allied Works (including Waechter Architecture, Lever Architecture, and Beebe Skidmore).
“The work at that place is so good because everybody who's playing a role has is would probably be a very good sole practitioner,” Linden says of Allied. “And even if they're working on the concept design or working on some small detail, everybody's got great vision. So if anybody leaves, they're already primed and have the drive to be a practitioner who can oversee an entire project, as opposed to a role player someplace else.”
Since that AIA award, and since I visited Linden and Brown at their studio in industrial Northwest Portland near the Fremont Bridge, the firm has received another honor. This month Linden, Brown Architecture was named to Architectural Record magazine’s prestigious Design Vanguard, honoring emerging practices across the nation. And besides Gradient, they have seen built striking projects like Sequitur winery, outside Newberg in rural Yamhill County, for which the firm helped save and restore a historic barn as part of a new tasting room.
Gradient House and Studio (Jeremy Bittermann/JBSA)
Linden, Brown’s L-shaped, 5,000-square-foot single-story Gradient House and Studio, located on a double-lot beside a nature preserve in North Portland’s St. Johns neighborhood and designed for the founders of a shoe company, Studio Noyes, is both residential and industrial-looking. Huge sawtooth skylights rise above a conventional pitched roof that connects two separate structures, wrapping an outdoor courtyard. Gradient’s sloping site creates a tall-ceilinged work studio in the rear of the property and a cozier neighborhood-focused residence upfront. Yet as the name suggests, it’s not a clean break, either. Workers sometimes meet on the home side and the family may hang out in the studio.
“A decade ago, live-work commercial buildings were pretty hip, but in most cases you still had a 20-foot-wide, nine-foot-ceiling, shoebox of space,” Brown says. “With Gradient, we had room to figure out what is the right way to craft this thing.” They took inspiration from the site itself. “That idea of gradient, it permeated every thought process through the project,” he adds. “The site drops ten feet from front to back. That’s one example. And the project itself is a gradient of live and work.”
With remote working seemingly here to stay, office vacancies may have ballooned downtown, but neighborhoods across the city have been invigorated, no longer emptied out of people during daytime hours. Yet how we fit commercial space into heretofore residential areas is not as easy as simply setting up desks in former bedrooms—at least not for the long haul. Gradient in that way is both unique and a template.
The firm’s founders, Brent Linden and Chris Brown, hail from different places in the American South and each worked for at least one iconic firm before coming to Portland to work for Allied Works.
Chris Brown and Brent Linden at the firm's studio (Arthur Hitchcock)
Linden is from Miami and at the beginning of his career worked in the New York office Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, leaving the city just before the September 11 terrorist attacks to go attend graduate school at Rice University in Houston, where he graduated in 2004. At Rice, Linden met Allied Works’ Brad Cloepfil, a visiting professor, who also offered him a job. Linden stayed at Allied for over 16 years, rising to the role of design director.
Brown was born and initially raised in Houston, an architect’s son. But when he was seven, Brown’s dad left the profession and bought a hardware store in a small Arkansas town called Mountain Home, in the Ozark Mountains. Later, while attending the University of Arkansas, Brown fell under the tutelage of renowned architect and professor Marlon Blackwell, including a full summer interning at Blackwell’s firm, and then, three years later, joining the firm full-time. “It just baked in all this understanding of how to look at where you are,” Brown says, in addition to what he calls “the re-imagining or revisioning of the vernacular of place.”
Brown first came to Portland to work at another acclaimed local firm, Skylab Architecture, for four years beginning in 2007. While there, he worked on an addition to the firm’s best-known project, the Hoke Residence, popularized in the Twilight movies, as well as the eye-catching Skyline Residence and the HOMB modular system. Brown joined Allied Works in 2013, and worked with Linden on projects including the Corvallis Museum in the southern Willamette Valley, the National Veterans Memorial Museum in Columbus, Sokol Blosser Winery Tasting Room in rural Yamhill County, and the U.S. Embassy in Mozambique, as well as design competitions for expansions to the Metropolitan Museum of Art expansion in New York City and the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo (now the Buffalo AKG Art Museum).
Sequitur winery (Jeremy Bittermann/JBSA)
Despite their architectural pedigree and their ability to produce bold designs, the duo’s process lacks ego. Linden and Brown are at their best collaborating and partnering with their clients to shape the architecture, be Studio Noyes’ founders for Gradient or the founders of Sequitur winery, for whom the firm designed a contemporary new tasting room in Yamhill County that renovated and expanded a historic 1935 barn. Contractors and architects said it was prohibitively expensive, but the renovation saved over $300,000 versus new construction. And, Brown adds, “The soul of that farm is intact because that barn is there.”
The Sequitur winery commission brought them together beginning in 2018, after each partner following departure from Allied Works trying his hand at being a sole practitioner. “It was a bigger project than either of us could have done by ourselves,” Linden says.
Sequitur winery (Jeremy Bittermann/JBSA)
Linden and Brown had lucky timing: By the time the pandemic arrived in 2020, they were already set up with a trio of projects, including Gradient House, another house, and Sequitur winery. “Chris and I actually ended up still working in this studio throughout most of the pandemic, because we both have the same age children,” Linden recalls. “And so we ended up as families co-watching each others’ kids. We were in our own little bubble.”
Despite having no built portfolio (unless you count their Allied Works contributions, which you very much should), they won over Sequitur with a commitment to closely oversee every step of construction. It taught them larger lessons: that the best design comes as much through attention as from talent, and from a culture where the best idea always wins.
“Most of our clients are creative people in some vein, whether they're writers or animators or shoe designers or winemakers,” Linden says. “We get excited about their ideas, and that feeds into the work; they can see their own impact, and the work gets better because of it.”
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BY BRIAN LIBBY
When I began covering architecture two decades ago, not only was Thomas Hacker established as one of Portland’s most-admired architects, but some of the city’s other best firms had been founded by Hacker’s former students and employees.
In 2000, for example, just as Brad Cloepfil’s Pearl District headquarters for advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy gained international notoriety, his former professor and boss Hacker’s Woodstock branch of the Multnomah County Library was named one of the nation’s 10 best libraries by the National Library Association and the American Institute of Architects.
“I’m frankly not that concerned with architectural fame or anything like that,” Thomas Hacker told me on a 2005 tour of the Hillsdale library, another jewel in the Multnomah County system. “I’m much more concerned that the people we’re making these places for, and especially the public, really like them. Because they belong to the public. And our philosophy in this work is that you make buildings that the public can love.”
From top: Hillsdale Libary, Beaverton City Library (Stephen Miller)
But libraries were just the start. From theaters to university classrooms, museums to churches, Hacker, who passed away in late February, was arguably as important as any architect in Portland’s past half-century, in part because he made public buildings a focus — even a kind of spiritual calling. Hacker’s populist intent was also leavened by architectural rigor. He sought simple ways to make spaces sing.
Hacker first came to Oregon in the 1970s to teach at the University of Oregon in Eugene. When he came to Portland to found his own firm in the 1980s, the teaching didn’t end.
As a pro football fan, I’m used to the idea of coaching trees: former assistants under legendary head coaches going on to successful head-coaching careers. The really special ones make it multi-generational, like Bill Walsh, who after winning three Super Bowls in the 1980s saw his former assistants Mike Holmgren, George Seifert and John Gruden each win it all as head coaches beginning in the 1990s. In the 21st century, their assistants Andy Reid and Mike Tomlin have collectively won four more Super Bowls, and Reid’s former assistant John Harbaugh has won another.
In that same way, Hacker grew his own tree of influence, perhaps like no other Portland architect since Widden & Lewis, designers of Portland City Hall and the grand Portland Hotel in the 19th century, whose young-architect employee A.E. Doyle went on to become the city’s most significant early 20th century architect; then Doyle’s protégé, Pietro Belluschi, became Portland’s midcentury-modern master.
Thomas Theater, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland (Pete Eckert)
Hacker’s career was shaped by one of America’s most iconic midcentury architects, Louis Kahn, first as Kahn’s University of Pennsylvania student and later working at his firm. Hacker even got to work on two of Kahn’s masterpieces, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the capital building in Dacca, Bangladesh. Kahn imparted to young Thom a spiritual reverence for great buildings, and encouraged him to always mentor younger architects, both for their benefit and his own.
“I’ve used many times this analogy of a jazz band,” Hacker said in a 2015 interview. “They all have their own sense of what they can do. They’re all really talented and full of energy. The leader of the band sets the tone in some way, and at some points makes crucial decisions of where it’s going to go. But it’s always an ensemble work. It’s never not an ensemble. It has to be played together. The greatest architectural works are like the greatest musical works, where everyone is on the same beat and has the same spirit. And the spirit’s the most important part of it.”
That his firm has only blossomed since Hacker’s retirement, expanding its reach to residential and commercial buildings, is a testament to how the late architect paid forward Kahn’s investment. So too is the fact that in recent years a new generation of award-winning firms founded by former Brad Cloepfil staffers, such as Lever Architecture, Waechter Architecture and Beebe Skidmore, have been extending the influence to another generation.
After retirement, Hacker kept busy as a painter and sculptor, which also is telling. With his blend of poetic building designs and wise mentorship, I think most of all he was an artist — one with a unique eye, a soulful outlook and, perhaps even more, a convivial passion for sharing ideas.
This post was originally published in the Portland Tribune's Business Tribune section. You can read all of Brian Libby's past columns here.
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Daniel Toole (Daniel Toole Architect)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
The latest installment in our longtime discussion series with local architects about their inspirations, careers and collaborators takes us to Daniel Toole, who founded Daniel Toole Architecture in 2020 after stints with acclaimed Portland firm Allied Works, Tuscon's Rick Joy Architects, the Seattle office of Perkins + Will, and Berlin's Barkow Leibinger. While at Allied, Daniel worked on celebrated projects like the Corvallis Museum. A number of former Allied Works and Rick Joy staffers now comprise Toole's small staff.
Born in Vienna, Austria and raised in the Portland area (first Southeast, then Milwaukie), Toole has traveled and worked extensively throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. A recent Seattle house was featured in a New York Times article called "A Modern Home That Looks Toward the Sky and the Water." He has also received a series of commissions in the Miami Design District in 2018 (in collaboration with SB Architects), years after publishing a book on his alleyway explorations, Tight Urbanism, in 2010.
Toole received his bachelor’s of architecture degree from the University of Oregon in 2008, and his master’s in urban design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2016, with a year-long research grant at the Technical University of Berlin in between. He has additionally taught as an adjunct instructor at the University of Oregon School of Architecture.
I recently sat down with Daniel Toole over coffee at Albina Press, bonding as two ginger-bearded architecture lovers with similar tastes (which also, judging by his last answer here, apparently extends to movies). I came into the conversation impressed with his past work for other firms, and curious to see where his own shop goes after an impressive first two years.
Portland Architecture: When did you first become interested in architecture as a possible career?
Daniel Toole: I became interested in architecture in junior high by receiving a book on Frank Lloyd Wright given to me by my aunt, an art teacher in Vancouver, Washington. My grandfather was an engineer as well, who taught me how to sketch and draft with a t square in his workshop, and when I saw what was possible with the Wright book, I was hooked. I was really into skateboarding and trying to become a rock star playing guitar around that time, so my mom was incredibly relieved when I expressed a different career interest, and quickly began to cultivate, stoke, and push that interest throughout high school. On family road trips to California and Washington, my parents would go with me to visit every Frank Lloyd Wright building I could find, and this became a good foundation prior to college, though I might have been a little obsessed. Actually, my first architecture-related job was being a docent at Wright’s Gordon House in Silverton my senior year in high school.
The future architect in 2003, as a Gordon House docent (Daniel Toole)
Where did you study architecture and how would you rate the experience?
I studied architecture at the University of Oregon, Columbia University, and eventually Harvard’s GSD. At U of O, I had a great mix of core professors and classmates, but I grew tired of what felt like a singular focus on sustainability at the time and wanted to get out into the world and learn about other aspects of design and cities. There was a slight ghost of the Kahn crew that had migrated west to U of O previously, and I feel that though it had to be sought out, that legacy set the tone for me, from cold-calling people like Rick Potestio, Jeff Lamb, John Cava, and going to watch Hacker present projects on campus, etc. there was still a slight connection to that era. My most pivotal year in undergrad was my fourth year, where I left Eugene for Columbia University’s New York/Paris program before finishing my thesis in Portland. Spending most of my life up to this point in southeast Portland suburbs, this year at Columbia in Manhattan and Paris opened my eyes to an immense set of experiences, ideas, writings, buildings, and places that continue to inspire me deeply to this day. Spring break that year, a few students and I traveled on a shoestring budget around France by train and bus to all the major projects of Corbusier with many adventures in between that I will always remember. After graduating at the beginning of the great recession, I moved to Seattle and found work for five plus years, and eventually pursued a Master’s of Architecture in Urban Design at the GSD with a year spent abroad on a research fellowship at the TU Berlin, which was amazing and allowed further exploration of western and eastern European building cultures and multiple visits to my grandmother and mom’s side of the family in Budapest. I was fortunate enough to split the research with working in a German American firm I’ve long admired, Barkow Leibinger before going back and taking final GSD studios in Boston from Scott Cohen, and Rick Joy, whom I would then work for in Tucson before moving home to Portland to take a job with Allied Works managing construction of the Corvallis Museum. All these experiences, along with backpacking on travel fellowships, and combing used bookstores for art and architecture books have made me who I am today.
What is your favorite building project that you’ve worked on?
I would say that I am always most excited about the ones that I’m currently designing. At the moment this includes a handful of houses in different urban and natural sites around the Puget Sound region, and a pair of mixed-use buildings here in Portland with visionary developer and friend Ryan Zygar. However, my favorite completed project to date would be my Miami Design District alley revitalization project.
Jade Alley, Miami (top: RA-HAUS, bottom: Heywood Chan)
The rehabilitation of totally desolate alley spaces in a new district in the opposite part of the country came to me after a long love affair with alleyways, and other hidden urban spaces that began with my semester in Paris mentioned previously. I received the commission about a week before my first studio final review at GSD when a team of international developers found a small self-published book on an alleyway research grant funded by the AIA Seattle. I worked on the project simultaneously with coursework at GSD which was stressful, but rewarding as I had never had my own commission, and I had plenty of talented classmates and professors as critics anytime they walked by my desk! This project has now been completed for a few years, and it’s incredible to see a small piece of the city grow up around what had previously been dumpsters and cigarette butts. These spaces are now full of people, shops, restaurants, vegetation, and even a family of parakeets. Art installations by international icons of the design world including the late Virgil Abloh have been installed in the space, and it just continues to amaze me. Whenever I get the privilege of visiting, I like to just sit in the middle of the arches and watch how people use the space and delight in it, reflecting on what it once was. This has given me confidence in the power of good architecture to change communities and the city and inspire further change.
Who has been an important mentor among your colleagues?
Mentorship has been incredibly important to me and my development. Here in Portland, John Cava taught me about things further afoot (he wrote my letter of recommendation to Columbia and secured a personal meeting with Kenneth Frampton while there), while also teaching me about local modern architectural history, I think I was technically his first research assistant on his John Yeon book. Richard Brown was also my first employer during summers at U of O, and I learned what the culture of being an architect about town was from watching him. I have fond memories of him wearing a bow tie and cranking up the music before an important client meeting and the office sort of taking on a special energy.
After moving to Seattle after graduating at the beginning of the recession, a long list of mentors includes Larry Rouch, Carsten Stinn, Doug Streeter, Susan Jones, Rob Hutchinson, Prentis Hale, and more. I spent almost six years in Seattle working for Perkins + Will and collaborating on small projects with some of those listed above and continue to receive mentorship from these people.
Getting to watch the way offices were run by some heroes of mine has been important too. Rick Joy, Frank Barkow, and Brad Cloepfil have all been architects I’ve looked up to and getting to watch the way they navigate the design process and running an office were no doubt very important things for me to see before trying it myself.
What part of the job do you like best, and as an architect what do you think you most excel at?
I love the patient search of the initial concept (which in fact is often more anxious than patient). And then, when a concept crystallizes, watching it inspire and almost design itself once the fundamentals are established is a deeply satisfying feeling, especially in construction. A major part of this is bringing positive enthusiasm to the architectural process which can be incredibly stressful, and I think I excel at keeping everyone motivated and encouraged that we are pursuing something great and we should not let up.
What are some Portland buildings (either new or historic) that you most admire?
I love the houses and churches of Pietro Belluschi. I learned a lot about him while studying at U of O and working with Cava and other local architects. I also was fortunate enough to take a very small elective seminar taught by Bob Frasca, where so few students signed up that it was basically only me in the class, riding along with him in his little red sports car and going to places like Cottage Grove Presbyterian, and Central Lutheran in Eugene and hearing all the anecdotes about working and learning from Belluschi. No matter how far I have traveled and worked from Oregon, I am still a sucker for the core of northwest modernism here and its lore.
Pietro Belluschi's Sutor residence, 1938 (Brian Flaherty)
As far as newer buildings, I love the early libraries and buildings of Thomas Hacker, and grew up learning in them – from the Midland branch, to Woodstock, to taking summer classes at the PSU Urban Center, his work brought a sophistication to the city and no doubt influenced the current generation of leading designers. It was exciting to recently see my parents’ local branch in Milwaukie added to that list with involvement from my close friend from U of O, Tyler Nishitani, a talented friend and colleague who recently moved to Lever and is heavily involved in their library projects.
Of course classic Allied Works projects like Wieden + Kennedy, and the Ann Sacks building around the corner from my office remain favorites.
What is your favorite building outside of Portland and besides any you’ve worked on?
This is a tough one, but I would have to say La Tourette is near the top. This rough but sophisticated structure is the Rosetta stone of architectural language of the last sixty years. Its monumental materiality decaying within a beautiful pastoral landscape on the hills outside Lyon gives it an incredible atmosphere.
Le Corbousier's Couvent Sainte Marie de la Tourette, 1961 (Wikimedia Commons)
It almost feels like a habitable scaled up studio model in how consistent it is, like it was cast in one pour. The spatial complexity, sequences, play of light, and sculptural qualities offer so many lessons to be learned, it serves as a constant measure of the immeasurable. The Salk Institute and Pantheon are also up there on the list, with Centre Pompidou, Adolf Loos’ House Muller, and Sir John Soane’s house following. Steven Holl’s Chapel of St. Ignatius in Seattle was the first building I had to write a paper on at U of O, and upon seeing pictures, hated it, then after reading about it and experiencing it, it forever changed my understanding of what architecture can be and do.
Is there a local architect or firm you think is unheralded or deserves more credit?
John Cava is a great mind, and I would love to see him design more things around town. I also wish he was still teaching, as he instilled some very good things in me that the next generations deserve to have access to.
What would you like to see change about Portland’s built environment in the long term?
I would like to see more great architects cultivated at a local level that then go on to head offices and institutions and raise the bar as designers and civic leaders. I feel we are headed into a great new era in architecture with the mass timber culture that is growing quickly and a shift of focus from the often invisible presence of sustainability in the bult environment to a physical material-based building culture once again that comes with potential for advances in tectonic expression, new spatial and atmospheric potential, and many other things that excite me. I believe this momentum could open the door for a second era of wooden modern architecture that could be the sequel to the legacy of Pacific Northwest modernism and its timeless contribution to the history of the art of construction. It becomes modern and fresh and inspiring but is something that can also be cherished locally as our own regional expression of architectural culture.
How would you rate the performance of local government like the Portland Development Commission, or the development and planning bureaus?
I am going through my first significant permitting process with them on our Lombard apartment building, so I have to be careful what I say here! After primarily being involved in permitting in Seattle and Washington jurisdictions, the process has been difficult, but not unreasonable. I think that the intentions for planning are good, and have managed to keep the city’s distinct neighborhoods in tact through ups and downs, and emphasized the community-focused human scale of the city that is such an integral part of the identity here. I would like to see more flexibility for projects seeking to think outside the box, and a more flexible approach to design standards in our zoning code and life safety reviews that are more adaptive and are more focused on allowing great projects to be realized that contribute to the city, rather than treating each item as a box to check.
Who is a famous architect you’d like to see design a building in Portland?
I really like Steven Holl’s work and would love to see him do an addition to the Portland Art Museum, or a gallery of some kind here. Given the work going on in Seattle and Vancouver with Herzog de Meuron, maybe they could do something here too and raise the bar.
Viewing Noguchi in London (Daniel Toole)
Name something besides architecture (sneakers, furniture, umbrellas) you love the design of.
I love the art and design of Isamu Noguchi. After visiting his museum in Queens a number of years ago, there is something so elemental and timeless about much of his work that inspires and frustrates me, as I know architecture can never be that succinct given all the measurable means it must be executed through, and the number of materials that must be used in today’s buildings, yet it sets an incredible example to follow in its poetry.
Last December, my wife and I traveled to London, where we got to see a major retrospective on him at the Barbican. A great Noguchi quote from the exhibit that stood out was, “What Brancusi does with a bird or the Japanese do with a garden is to take the essence of nature and distill it—just as a poet does. And that’s what I’m interested in—the poetic translation.”
What are three of your all-time favorite movies?
Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth, Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, and the kid in me loves Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy.
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Sky Hopinka's 2021 film Mnemonics of Shape and Reason
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Two recent interviews have got me thinking about the relationship between culture and landscape: the generations of peoples who call a place home, how those histories endure even after the communities may be long gone, and the lessons we can learn about stewardship of the land.
Both interviewees, perhaps coincidentally, came to my attention through Portland State University: one an alumnus and one a visiting professor — filmmaker Sky Hopinka and architect Kevin O'Brien — each pursuing ideas informed by their Indigenous heritage.
Hopinka, who now teaches at Bard College in upstate New York, is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people of southern California. O'Brien traces generations of Aboriginal Australian ancestry on his mother's side.
I'm a seventh-generation native Oregonian, and part of what attracts me to Hopinka's films and O'Brien's explorations is my own interest in connections to my homeland of Oregon, ancestrally and experientially. One ancestor on my dad's side of the family, Solomon Fitzhugh, a southern Oregon judge and territorial legislature member, was a signee of the Oregon constitution in 1859. But ultimately my longer ancestry comes from Europe: England, mainly, to where I can actually trace my roots back before the Norman invasion in 1066; the Fitzhugh family only came to America in 1670 (William Fitzhugh was a member of Virginia's House of Burgesses), and to Oregon in the 1850s. In context, even seven generations is not that long.
Yet it's a connection to the land as much as to ancestry that roots me in the Pacific Northwest and Oregon. During my college years and into my 20s living on the East Coast, I always felt tethered to my homeland, in ways I couldn't completely put to words. Which is why Hopinka's poetic cinema appeals to me, and why O'Brien's ideas about layers of land and history make sense.
Sky Hopinka (John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)
These interviews with O'Brien and Hopinka also come at a time when our understanding of Indigenous history in North America is evolving, thanks to a much-discussed book released earlier this fall: Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, in which Oxford University historian Pekka Hämäläinen asserts that the war for control of the continent was “one of the longest conflicts in history,” lasting some four centuries. Hämäläinen argues that while Native American tribes controlled the continent for thousands of years, “it was only 130 years ago, a brief span when compared to the long pre-contact history of Indigenous America, that the United States could claim to have subjugated a critical mass of Native Americans,” he writes. “On an Indigenous time scale, the United States is a mere speck.”
Sky Hopinka, whom I recently interviewed for Oregon ArtsWatch, was this fall one of 25 people to be named a MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Best known as the "Genius Grant," the MacArthur is perhaps the nation's biggest validation of brilliant minds, ranging from artists to scientists to activists.
Hopinka's 2021 film Kicking the Clouds
Born in 1984 and raised in Ferndale, Washington near the Canadian border, Hopinka came to Portland in 2006 to study at PSU, where he earned a bachelor's degree, and stayed here until 2013 (before pursuing a master's of fine arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). It was at PSU that he became interested in language, learning the Chinook Wawa language used in centuries past by peoples of the lower Columbia basin and the Willamette Valley. At the same time, Hopinka was becoming interested in film and experimental film in particular.
"When I started filmmaking, around the same time that I started working with language revitalization with Indigenous communities, part of the desire I had to make films was to tell Indigenous stories that were unique to my own community and my own identity," Hopinka said in a Criterion Channel interview. "I feel like there was a lot of room to tell contemporary stories without engaging in contextualization around the history and around trauma and around the historical romanticization of Indigenous people. And what I was really interested in doing was telling stories that are relevant to what contemporary experience is without that baggage and how to make things a bit more creative or poetic, or trying to explore these different facets of my culture and my identity and how all those different things had shaped me."
Hopinka's 2016 film I'll Remember You As You Were, Not As You'll Become
In a piece for the Museum of Modern Art called "Film Is The Body" published earlier this year, Hopinka went further, writing, "Somewhere between an active and passive presence, we’re all contending with intergenerational and trans-generational effects of pain, resistance, stress, love, and joy. Forgetting and remembering the impermanence of our existence on planes of being that are both in and out of our body and our control…Indigenous cinema is a cinema of the ineffable dreams suppressed for so long. We return to the land and return to our homes and we exhaust our minds and our spirits, seeing and being in the grass and the water and the dirt. Exhausted and free to remember what we need to know, as now the time has come.”
Watching Hopinka's films in preparation for an Oregon ArtsWatch interview, I was struck by his ongoing exploration of western landscapes, especially the Pacific Northwest. We continually see characters walking down forested trails, driving down highways and canoeing rivers, delighted by waterfalls. But the built environment also figures in, in films like Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary , which begins with a quote by acclaimed Japanese architect Kengo Kuma (designer of Portland's Japanese Garden Cultural Crossing): “The individual is not an autonomous, solitary object but a thing of uncertain extent, with ambiguous boundaries. So too is matter... Both subject and matter resist their reduction into objects. Everything is interconnected and intertwined.” In that film, Hopinka's camera views two Portland area landmarks: the Tilikum Crossing bridge near downtown and the Ridgefield, Washington’s Cathlapotle Plankhouse.
Hopinka's 2017 film Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary
Because these films are mostly non-narrative, with kaleidoscopic imagery and sound collages of spoken word in Chinook Wawa, not only are we able to draw our own conclusions about the relationship between culture, place and identity, but Hopinka seems to get at something deeper and more elusive.
"There’s a lot of different ways that I think about the land," Hopinka said in our interview. "There’s the sort of a high-minded way of looking at the histories of it: the things that it means, and the potential to mean so many different things. But also on a practical level, it’s just a matter of where I’m at, and if I have a camera, if I’m going to film there. After that, it’s a process of understanding: how does it fit into a conversation that I’m interested in having, whether that’s around myth or story or language or history? That’s often just the first way in: framing an idea as I’m trying to understand what that idea is. I make the films that I do in the way that I do because I’m trying to understand an idea that I don’t quite know how to express or explain. The films then become demarcations of that process, or part of the ways that I am trying to relate to these bigger ideas that I don’t have clear answers for. It’s a thing that I’m trying to work through. Who am I and where am I?"
Architect Kevin O'Brien (Portland State University)
Then there's Kevin O'Brien, a Brisbane, Australia-based architect and professor who brings Aboriginal concepts of space to his architectural practice, at Kevin O'Brien Architects. That he's trained as an architect and also has a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Queensland speaks to his thoughtful manner. O'Brien, who like me was born in 1972 and turned 50 this year, spent a week here this fall as a Portland State University visiting lecturer, culminating in a student design workshop in October.
Over the course of the week, O'Brien asked PSU architecture students participating in the workshop (including both undergraduates and master's degree candidates) to look at the city of Portland from three different scales, from single structures to whole blocks to neighborhoods, and then envision ways to empty it of half of the built environment and infrastructure in order to reveal what he calls "country," with a deeper sense of meaning than we ascribe to the word. In O'Brien's description, country is the natural world beneath the city, but it's also a relationship between individuals, cultures, and the land of their ancestry, going back thousands of years.
That afternoon, after the design exercise and O'Brien's lecture—further exploring his multilayered process of investigating a site's geography, geology, and human history—he led the students, carrying their structural models, to the campus's Oak Savanna. There, O'Brien set fire to the models in a ceremonial burn.
The blend of architecture, philosophy and ceremony O'Brien brought was inspiring enough that I had to learn more. I watched online a 2013 lecture O'Brien gave called "Finding Country," in which he first showed onscreen a photo of his aunt's home in northern Australia, a modest hand-built dwelling beside the ocean, where his family often gathered. "It's where the first understanding of space occurs. It's the distance between you and the next person," he explained, "and it's the prospect out onto the ocean. That's the first beginnings of talking and understanding your lineage and where you where you belong."
He then showed a wider view of that same landscape, including two nearby islands, describing a local folk tale about how the land there was formed: "an ancestral dugong [a manatee-like marine mammal] came across the waters from the west, laid up, spat two seeds out of its nose, and these two islands came; the one on the right is where my grandmother's people are from. And that became its story of understanding. The scientific reasoning of this is that there was three volcanoes, but it's not as nice a story to tell."
Preparing students' models for the ceremonial burn (Karen O'Donnell Stein)
In combining his traditional architectural training with a remembrance of these ways of thinking about space, O'Brien said he realized architecture can only come after understanding the landscape, its peoples and their history. "Once you know your relationship with your people and the relationship with country," he said, "then you can develop an architecture that's bound to that....Before we get into the architecture, there has to be about a notion of the city... being made up as a series of layers, as a sort of sedimentary thing with a natural world at the base, an Aboriginal one above that and on an upwards you went to, you got to the final European and modern layers." Even so, he added, "Something in that doesn't quite ring true for me because it seemed to say the Aboriginal place had gone: it was there, but now it's been rubbed out. And it's just not true. The culture is there, the country is still there and people understand it, still believe in it. The way I thought about it was that it's no longer a matter of vertical representation; it's just a horizontal one."
Eventually, I sought out O'Brien for a further one-to-one conversation, which follows.
Portland Architecture: Was there wildfire smoke while you were here in October? Right about that time there was the Nakia Creek fire, which briefly caused Portland to have the worst air quality in the world.
Kevin O'Brien: On the last day, there was a little bit. I went up to Mount Hood to look around and it was a bit smoggy up there.
Reading your remarks about fire as a kind of tiller of the soil and encountering your design exercise at PSU burning the models, I felt pleased to be reminded of some of those ideas, because the very thing that defines Oregon, the bounty of millions of Douglas fir trees and these forests, seems to be under permanent threat now: an age of wildfires. But perhaps how we manage the forest is also part of the story.
Fire as a tool, that's very much part of my Indigenous culture. In the community where my mother's from, in far-north Australia, fire was used as a tool and you sort of grow up with it. It's used in the same way you might use a small lawnmower. You keep the yard in check, you keep the fuel down in the landscape around you, and you manage it. A lot of the Australian native insect species need fire to crack their shells so that they can propagate. In the northern states, allowing that traditional practice, a sort of cyclical patch-burning, been reasonably successful in avoiding big catastrophic fires that you continue to see every ten years in New South Wales and Victoria.
Just as COVID hit, a massive one fire hit Victoria, and they have a strict fire ban throughout the whole year, so they don't do any kind of management of the forest. From my perspective, that means they're allowing it to fall into disrepair. They're not keeping the floor of the forest clean. After ten years, you've got a tinderbox waiting to happen. A fire can start there, maybe a couple hundred meters wide, but the wind blows and changes direction and the embers spread, and what was once a couple hundred meters wide is now five kilometers long. They've got a catastrophic set of conditions and they just don't look after the landscape.
Bill Gammage, a historian, wrote a fantastic book on all of that: The Biggest Estate on Earth. He basically looked at the colonial first colonial paintings that were made at Sydney, Melbourne at the time of contact [with Aboriginal peoples] corresponded that with tree-ring samples from old growth forests. Those early paintings of the show that the understory of all these forests was clear and there's records of the British galloping at full pace around Sydney. But then within ten or 15 years of stopping the ongoing fires, it was all overgrown.
O'Brien beginning the ceremonial burn (Karen O'Donnell Stein)
Could you talk about the word “country” and what it means to you?
What it means to me and how it’s used here in Australia is very different from when I talked about it with Native American students at PSU; they didn’t have a similar kind of word in their culture. When we say country here, we put it in italics. We're not meaning the sovereign boundary. When we talk about country, it's a number of things that go into the making up of it. It's not strictly landscape, although that's part of it. Country is kind of the thing you belong to as opposed to the thing you own. It has a whole cultural, spiritual overlay. There’s memory based in it and there’s experienced based in it, there’s inter-generational rituals that get based on it. So there's this kind of very long association with the place that sort of gets into being. It’s not just what you walk on. It's the thing you see above you in the sky. It's probably the hardest concept to explain. But it’s in the belonging to something that it affects your behavior. It's different from when your own something and it's at your disposal. It's kind of a reverse-arrangement.
I feel in my bones that I'm an Oregonian: that I’m spiritually connected to our rivers and mountain ranges, our ferns and evergreen trees. When I went to college in New York City, excited as I was to be there, I also felt this aching for home: not just my loved ones, but that landscape.
You hit it right on the head. That's exactly what it's about. When I'm to talking to old farmers back here, they get it, especially the ones who engage in self-sufficient and sustainable practices. They're up at sunrise with the animals are doing everything they can to keep the land productive in that way. Surfers get it. Surfing, it's like, you don't own it, but you're part of being bound to it and you certainly don't want to ruin it. And fundamentally, that's what fire was doing to start with: keeping the land in a productive state; it wasn't allowed to fall into disrepair.
The other thing related to this, which you’ve probably heard of, is the term ‘song lines.’
Thomas Tjapaltjarri, "Tingari" (Invaluable)
I vaguely know the term, which seems tied to something else I love: Aboriginal Australian visual art.
A lot of Aboriginal paintings are meant to represent those song lines. A song line in really simple terms is a communal-memory-experience track. So within that bit of country that you might be from, there's a set of tracks that cyclically take people around that country during the seasons and during those seasons there'd be certain rituals and births, deaths, marriages, initiations: All of those things become part of a spoken set of instructions or information that were passed on over 50,000 years. Talking to you now, we may remember the gist of the conversation, but not word for word. When it's put into song, you sing the song and don’t miss the words, ideally. You're just singing the information about where to go. These are the experiences beyond this ridge at this time of the year. These are the right places for the initiation ceremonies. This is the right time now. A friend of mine, Morgan Neill, who is the deputy director at the National Museum of Australia, put this fantastic exhibition on it. She says conceptually, everyone in Australia, at any point in the years on a particular circuit, whether it's between work, where they holiday, where they live, where they go to the football, all these things make up a particular circuit. And if you reduced it down and ask that person to tell their son or daughter or relative and they took up that, you've just started a new song line. And that's what gets you to this sense of belonging to the place. So what you were saying about the whole going to New York and longing for origin makes so much sense.
Reading about your exercise with the students that involved burning their architectural models, I got interested in the idea of design as taking away and not just building things. It reminds me of 1960s visual artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who would artfully, surgically cut apart old houses. How did this exercise develop?
The influence on this matter of taking away and adding at the same time comes from a guy called Noel Pearson, a historian, lawyer, intellectual: an Aboriginal man from North Queensland. About 15 years ago he wrote about the idea of politics and the radical center as it pertains to Aboriginal people. His argument was essentially that the radical left and the radical right have become inconsequential, because they're only arguing with themselves. He said you can't sit on the fence, but you have to be either inside the right or inside the left: able to negotiate and pull the country forward.
The other big influence was a mentor of mine at the University of Melbourne, Michael Martin McCarthy. He told me about an exercise, targeted at getting the students to remove parts of the city. Michael said, ‘If you could take anything out of the city, what would you take out?’ I said, ‘Well, I take it out in this way, but only do it to 50 percent because I'm into this radical-center idea: those two things intersect in the most unlikely places. Where it gets to next, I don't know. That's what excited me about what was happening at PSU. I might have lost a lot of the students and I think a few of the lecturers.
You need to start with the Romans and looking at the horizon as the limit. The Greeks before that, they're looking at the walls as the limit. It’s about being able to recognize what the limit is, whether it's a city or the architecture.
Completion of the ceremonial burn (Karen O'Donnell Stein)
We're lucky in Portland because it's easier to reconnect with nature than in a lot of American cities. Portland has an urban growth boundary, and you can leave the metro area relatively quickly. We also have Forest Park, the largest urban wilderness in the United States. Yet one still winds up being disconnected from nature without meaning to.
It’s interesting too the idea of nature and the city. I noticed that main sort of garden strip through the middle of downtown Portland through the city. Are those trees something native?
Funny you should mention that. No, they’re mostly non-native elms. There was a controversy last year over a plan to replace them with native evergreens, slowly, as the elms die over time.
The thing I've been pushing back here is to use wherever possible endemic species from that country. It's part of its character, part of its real spirit: the light, the breeze, what it attracts in terms of local fauna, all those things that make it unique to other places.
And it’s only a massive reforestation of the planet that will save us: peeling back the city to reveal more of the carbon-sequestering natural landscape.
I think population growth actually is the number one killer of the planet. The premise of that exercise the PSU students did, and every iteration we've done, is that we asked them to imagine half the population is gone. Everything else is reduced by half.
What aspects of Portland struck you as unique or interesting?
When I was looking at Portland before I got there, and thinking about other cities I've been to in the States, I've never, ever got my head around the scale of the city blocks. Los Angeles was the one that I really miscalculated, thinking I could walk somewhere and I really couldn't. But I was looking at Portland's going, ‘This looks like about 200-by 200 [foot] blocks. It couldn't possibly be.’ That sounds un-American. And sure enough, the blocks are 200 by 200. It just threw my whole sense of scale because I expected everything to be a lot larger. I found it was impossible to get a sweat up walking because just as you start to hit a bit of speed, you just hit another traffic light and typically have to stop. But it means there's a lovely scale to everything.
I decided to talk about Hopinka and O'Brien because each one's work helped me understand the other's: two overlapping perspectives that helps me see beyond my own Euro-centric roots and education. O'Brien's notion of country, binding together architecture and landscape, history and culture with a binding sense of narrative, helped me make sense of Hopinka's poetic non-narrative films. Hopinka's blend of kinetic visuals and a musical sense of language helped bring alive some of the ideas I'd just talked about with O'Brien in a Zoom call.
It's not always easy being a freelance journalist. I often seem to take on too many assignments from a bunch of different clients at once. But I love moments like this, where two different interviews for two different publications about two people in different professions can berth some combined understanding, all the more if it helps me understand myself and where I fit into a deeper, longer, continuing story of this place.
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Event co-founder Webly Bowles (Kelly Mooney)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Now in its fifth year, the annual Sustainable Building Week begins today and runs through October 15. The week offers a wide variety of free and paid events, in person and online, hosted by experts and organizations that represent the many fields of sustainability, including architecture, design, building, construction, education and community planning. Around 30 events are planned this year — the highest number yet.
Some of this years events include the Homes of Tomorrow Today Tour from the Portland Home Builders Association, a Green Schools Wins Networking Lunch with Oregon Green Schools, a Passive House Rating System 101 Training session and a Passive House Building Tour from Passive House NW and the Green Champion Summit hosted by the American Institute of Architects Oregon chapter’s Committee on the Environment.
Recently while writing about perhaps Portland's greenest building, the PAE Living Building in Old Town, which is the first local structure to meet full Living Building Challenge strictures (for a recent Portland Tribune column and an upcoming Metropolis magazine article), I got thinking about how for years the city's once-leading role in sustainable design and construction has seemed to fade away, but also that things might be ramping up again.
The 2022 edition of Sustainable Building Week also brings a special opportunity: to further encourage people to come together in person again. Even for the most Covid-cautious such as myself, having my groceries and restaurant meals delivered and still minimizing travel, things seem to have turned a corner. And when it comes to making progress in sustainable design and construction, so much further market transformation is necessary that this must be a collective effort. With that in mind, along with net-zero buildings and solar batteries and mass timber, one of the most noteworthy trends in green building today isn't about materials or energy or technology: it's about equity.
I'm not usually given to writing many preview articles or blog posts, but I decided to have another conversation with the organizers of Sustainable Building Week, Webly Bowles (a senior project manager at the New Buildings Institute) and Terry Campbell (a vice president at Sustainable Northwest Wood), as a way not only to help promote this week's sanctioned events, but to stop and ponder the broader notion of green design and construction in Portland.
Portland Architecture: This year’s Sustainable Building Week comes at a time when the pandemic is maybe finally (hopefully) receding and people are starting to go out more again. Is there a special opportunity or energy that can come this year, kind of re-uniting a lot of people who haven’t been together in person?
Terry Campbell: Yes, I feel we may have hit a perfect balance between the practical uses of virtual events and the human need to learn and connect with colleagues and others in-person. This is the power of Sustainable Building Week, our model is nimble and meets our attendees where they are at — whether that be in the virtual or in-person realm. That said, we are certainly seeing a big upswing and a return to more in-person events during SBW '22.
Webly Bowles: I’ve read that 55 percent of communication is reported to be non-verbal. Meeting in-person, even when masked, is a different type of collaboration; one word sparks an idea for someone else and starts an unwavering back and forth of ideas that leads to an innovative scheme.
Event co-founder Terry Campbell (Cambrae)
How has the pandemic most changed sustainable design and construction? There’s been a lot of disruption—to supply-chains, market demand, energy prices—but sometimes times of crisis can lead to accelerated change.
Bowles: From a design standard, I think there will be more focus on air quality. Not only to address what we’ve learned from an airborne pandemic but also our recent experiences with outdoor air quality. Climate change has increased the amount of allergens in the air and wildfire smoke is becoming an annual health issue.
Campbell: The pandemic took the building boom we were already experiencing before 2020 and turned it into a monster, all while revealing weaknesses in the manufacturing and supply chain. Predicting the future of market demand and energy costs is a tricky thing but what I am seeing is an interest, at a local and federal level, to initiate policies that address social injustice and climate change. Unlike times in the past, these two challenges are now in lock step with each other.
Looking at the Sustainable Building Week schedule, there are a whole lot of events. Could you highlight just a few specific events that either you’re personally excited to attend, or that you think the public will be especially interested in?
Bowles: Two categories of events come to mind: tours and films. There are two films and seven tours this year. Elemental is a film about fire resilience and a screening event called Usurped: Housing Injustice & the Fight to Prosper While Black is the Albina Vision Miniseries of short films by Dru Holley. Two tours that should be of interest to everyone are Solar Oregon’s GO Zero Tour and the Home Builders Association’s Homes of Tomorrow Today Tour. There are also two tours happening at the Meyer Memorial Trust HQ, a materials tour at the PAE Living Building, and a shop tour of panelized construction.
Campbell: I am still always excited about the diversity of topics that SBW brings together. Where else can you go to an event about sustainable design and construction and rub elbows with architects, designers, energy engineers, carbon experts, solar advocates, home builders, material specialists, mass timber academics, wildfire movie-makers, BIPOC community groups, Latino builders, general contractors, etc.
Scenes from one of the Albina Vision Miniseries short films (Dru Holley)
In the last two years we’ve seen equity become a bigger part of the conversation about what it means to be sustainable. We’re used to talking about physical stuff to do with green building and energy efficiency, but how does a commitment to cultural inclusiveness change the goals and how we measure success?
Bowles: The outcome of a building project is strongly impacted by who is engaged and when they’re engaged. We know that greater team diversity leads to better solutions and that the sooner communities are heard, the more successful the project will be. If future residents are involved, they can feel more ownership in the project and likely live in the building longer. If it’s a commercial building, community members feel connected to the building and may likely support the commercial businesses within the building.
When the modern sustainable building movement was first gaining steam in the early 2000s, Portland seemed to be viewed as a leader, with some of the first LEED-rated buildings and a lot of interest from the local building industry. Has the city lost some of that momentum, or perhaps lost and regained it?
Bowles: PAE. PAE. PAE. The PAE Living Building is ALL THE RAGE. PAE brought a new vision for what’s possible, not just for Portland, but for market-rate high-performance buildings. The need for sustainable buildings has never been more important. Portland – and the greater Pacific Northwest – has always shown what’s possible with sustainable design. Look at the airport expansion project, the Portland Low Carbon Concrete Initiative, and developers like Anyeley Hallova at Adre. Then, we have Solar Oregon organizing a two-day tour of net zero homes! We’ll take that crown back now, thanks!
When people ask me what I’m most excited about in terms of positive green-architecture trends, I have two answers: solar batteries and mass timber. The ability to not just generate more PV power than ever before but store that energy can help take net-zero energy use mainstream, reduce fossil-fuel consumption and decentralize our electrical grid seems like a tipping point of sorts. The proliferation of carbon-sequestering timber buildings and even a new generation of tall wood architecture seems like a win-win for everyone, especially since we all prefer looking at timber to drywall and drop ceilings. But what gets you most excited about the future and positive trends or technologies?
Bowles: I’m excited about general material manufacturers considering the carbon emissions of their products (either on their own or through requirements) and refrigerants. Those are two invisible things that have huge impacts on climate change.
Embodied carbon from construction products is somewhere between 11-20 percent of global emissions. At home, I had a portion of my sidewalk replaced and my contractor knew what an environmental product declaration (EPD) was. Portland’s low-carbon concrete requirements have far-reaching impacts and it’s changing what’s normal.
While refrigerants only clock in at 2 percent of global emissions, the use of refrigerants is on the rise with high-efficiency electric heat pumps for heating, cooling, and water heating. If we don’t manage these highly volatile gasses, they can quickly get out of hand. Leak detection is easy to spot if you’re trained to look for it, but the average homeowner doesn’t know what to look for. Couldn’t we make refrigerants smell bad, like fossil gas, or add a colorative? I’m not a chemist, so I’m not sure of that answer, but I do know we need to pay more attention to invisible gases that are quickening climate change.
Campbell: I would add that I’m fired up about the potential role forest products, including mass timber, can play in a low-carbon, built environment when the forests are managed with respect for the vital ecosystem services they provide to all living things. Just specifying mass timber is not going to solve all of the problems and could cascade into more problems if we damage our ecosystems. However, projects, like PDXNext, are demonstrating ways we can deep dive into the supply stream of the wood products and celebrate, and even reward, landowners (tribal, public and private), manufacturers, and suppliers who balance the need to build with low-carbon forest products and the stewardship required to safeguard our ecosystem services. I also get fired up when I hear about projects that are trying to track, trace and reward good land stewardship. And, I’m even more fired up about the potential use of biochar in building materials!
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BY LUKE AREHART
With its location near the confluence of two rivers, Portland has always been a natural location for floating homes. And while many floating homes along the Willamette or Columbia may be utilitarian, others have been designed by noted local architects, such as Robert Oshatz. Yet these projects also sometimes attract non-architects with design savvy in related professions, as is the case with the striking Aqua Star residence, which was sold last year and has been called iconic for its shiny aluminum cladding.
The nearly 3,000 square-foot, three bedroom Aqua Star residence was designed and built in 1984 by Buzz Gorder, a local designer and creative director focused on event-based exhibit spaces and products (whose clients include Nike), with assistance from Portland architect Larry Hart. Seen on the “Portlandia” TV show as well as HGTV’s “Extreme Homes,” its forms and voids are carved out using high-grade corrugated and anodized aluminum. The home exists less as a place of whimsy, and more as a place of family and soul.
For years it has occupied a site along the Willamette River south of downtown, near the Oaks Amusement Park. Prior to its move upstream to a new site on the Columbia River, Gorder designed a renovation for its new owner. Despite being moved, the home seems so knitted to its surrounding that they become one.
Recently I sat down with Buzz Gorder in hopes of learning about its striking façade and his initial design of the Aqua Star.
Portland Architecture: What was your thought process when putting pencil to paper to design this piece of architecture?
Buzz Gorder: The first intention was to create a nice piece of sculpture: some shape that really would reflect a lot of where we live and what we're doing here in the Northwest. By using the anodized aluminum, we wanted to pick up as much light as possible because this material changes colors throughout the day. When the sun is coming up and going down, all the downtown buildings turn gold, and the reflection is like gold bars coming down this river right at us. The house was always in a midst of color changes especially in different seasons.
When we first drew the plan out, I put Aqua Star on it because it's kind of like naming a product. The name's got to reflect what the product delivers. That's kind of exciting. Everybody said, "Aqua Star." I said, "Yeah, man. It's on the water, and it's bright like a shining star.”
A recent visit to the Aqua Star (Luke Arehart)
I think every morning, you wake up here, you feel good. It kind of brings you alive and makes a good direction for the day to start.
How did you continue to explore that space you were creating in plan and elevation?
I was trying to combine the upper and lower spaces, so you don't feel like you've gone somewhere else separate from the main spaces. When you walk around upstairs it gathers you up there from down here by just leaving the interior balcony and atrium open.
I felt like you don't have to live small to live in a tight space. You can still have the feeling of grandeur, and bigness. There’s room for our yearly 12-foot Christmas tree. I think of all the houses down here on the Willamette River, Robert Oshatz's Wave residence is probably the closest one that deals in expansive spaces. Some other homes can feel a little bit like you're on a limited flow.
I drew the design for this house at three in the morning. I knew what I wanted it to kind of to look like, and it was about 90% true to plan in final construction when it was done.
Gorder's original Aqua Star drawings (Luke Arehart)
How did you choose this material?
I grew up in the Midwest, in Minnesota. When farmers built their silos, they’d use a barrel vault between them. They built the barrels for the Aqua Star in a little town in Illinois, 40 miles outside of Chicago. I called them up and told them the size I wanted. Coincidently, we had a semi-truck back in Chicago, at a national sporting goods show with Nike and on the way back, we had enough room in the truck to pick them up and bring them back to Portland. They were made in 15-inch pieces, and they earned a patent on the process of how they slid them together.
In relation, we developed and built a 10,000 square foot exhibit for Nike. It was made all out of stainless, anodized, and corrugated aluminum. It was a wild material choice because nobody was using any of that stuff except [Frank] Gehry.
The Aqua Star seen from above (Cascade Sotheby's International Realty)
How did you create the form?
The radii are all kind of soothing. When you're in here, you just feel how the radius informs the different forms and programs inside. Where they're fluted, they're made that way to roll.
The whole house is sitting perpendicular to the flow of the river. In the house, it's at a 33 degree angle. It creates all these really neat little indentations, like where our tree is potted outside. As you go around the house, the form comes in and comes out. So, inside and outside, it creates all these neat and dynamic spaces. It creates the same shape that shapes the house, creates the shape for the inside. And it creates all these kinds of neat areas, too, for sculpture or whatever.
We skirted the house with the same material so it kind of looked like it's sitting on the water with all the metal. Some floating homes have a beautiful top deck, but you see all the structure underneath it, that’s where we skirted it; so, it looks like it's something that would move/float on the water. When you see it on the water, the way it reflects the water, it seems like it belongs here.
The Aqua Star puts residents right on the water (Cascade Sotheby's International Realty)
Any Aqua Star moments you especially recall?
We've entertained the Flying Angels twice, both times when they flew in Portland. The guy that did the airshow asked me if we could have a party for the Blues down here because they wanted somewhere unique. We picked them up downtown in our old antique speedboat, brought them down here, and then they had a catered party.
When Robbie Knievel jumped in Portland to beat his dad's record, my company had the opportunity to build the jump because it had to be brought out onto the track. The minute he did his jump, it had to be moved away. We had to build it like an exhibit. The Knievels ended up staying down here twice.
Its ribbed aluminum helps Aqua Star a beacon absorb and refract light (Luke Arehart)
If you were to present this design in architecture school, what would your opening thesis be?
Don't be afraid to express yourself. Never hold the pencil too tightly. When you squeeze the pencil, your brain squeezes. You've got to have light hands; everything comes together with light hands. Like when writers experience writer's block sitting there looking at that blank piece of paper: just let her go, man.
That's the way this house started out being a freeform, thinking about light and spaces, and then putting an envelope over them, capture all these spaces with neat light and a great shape over the top.
This house is about light, water, and structure because there's really no land. It's a different palate, you're dealing with reflection and structure. It's a little unique in that you don’t necessarily take the land into consideration.
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The Lower Garden District in New Orleans (Brian Libby)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Call it the summer travel edition of Portland Architecture. After all, sometimes it takes leaving home to understand it properly: a sense of perspective.
That was true for me 22 years ago this month, when I arrived for college in New York in 1990, having enrolled at a university there without ever visiting the city first. The culture-shock was strong, especially since I arrived in hot-humid late summer during a sanitation-workers strike that resulted in huge piles of trash on local sidewalks. Even so, going to NYC divulged me of certain small-town naivete and helped me better understand Oregon, my home, both good and bad.
Recently I visited New Orleans for the first time, and the experience has lingered in my mind. Perhaps that's in part because this was the first time I'd flown somewhere since before the pandemic began. It was also one of my only visits to the American South, which feels like a whole different country. But it reminded me of seeing New York for the first time: gritty but in certain spots undeniably beautiful, and full of energy.
It took me a couple days to get acclimated, especially since it was very hot and humid. After one multi-hour morning walk, it looked like I had dived into a pool with my clothes on. Yet it was hard not to be enthralled by the architecture of New Orleans, particularly its houses: all those wrought-iron balconies on the outside, and all the high-ceilinged, transom-window-lit spaces inside. New Orleans also has a kind of energy that I appreciated: not just a party atmosphere for which the city is famous, but because it's a more culturally and racially diverse city than Portland.
The Mississippi River from downtown New Orleans (Brian Libby)
Perhaps most of all, though, I enjoyed being out on the water, be it the Mississippi River, which I crossed via the Algiers Ferry, or Lake Pontchartrain, which I crossed by car along a 25-mile causeway. In New Orleans it's impossible not to be aware of the water, because only the levees are keeping the city from being overtaken, and its history is full of tragic hurricane strikes and floods. Even the city's extraordinarily pothole-ridden streets are because of the water underground, constantly shifting the topography. Yet the combined presence of the river and the massive lake makes New Orleans an extra-special location, just as the combined presence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers is inherent to Portland's DNA.
A few days ago I came across one stat indicating that both Portland and New Orleans' downtowns are struggling. The Recovery Rankings feature data compiled by the University of California at Berkeley about downtown recoveries, based on 62 North American cities' cell phone activity between spring of 2019 to spring of 2022. It ranked Portland 60th, next-to-next-to last, with 41% of activity recovered. New Orleans was only nominally better at 50th. It reminded me that that both cities are really about their great neighborhoods more than their central business districts. And the fewer people live downtown, and the more it relies on offices, the harder it is to come back.
What sticks out for me the most is that Portland is still a young city. It lacks the grit of New Orleans, as well as the aforementioned diversity and energy. Yet there is every bit as much beauty, and maybe more of a sense of possibility.
A screen shot from the Recovery Rankings page (downtownrecovery.com)
In the weeks after visiting New Orleans, I got thinking more and more about how the cities are oddly similar. They're both river cities that are surrounded by lush green landscapes, vast enough to make the metropolises still, even with modern sprawl and population growth, feel somewhat isolated, or at least humbled by the scale of the forests surrounding them, be it tropical or temperate. I started working on a video travelogue and explored the fraternal-twin relationship of New Orleans and Portland in a recent Portland Tribune column.
Ultimately the most significant distinction between these two cities (besides perhaps their demographics) is that Portland is more focused on the future than New Orleans. In the latter city there is a richer history and historic urban fabric, but I saw few works of new architecture mixed in the old beauty. Even so, I became interested enough in this idea, and these comparisons, that I talked to two media and arts colleagues who have lived in both cities.
"City By Water," a New Orleans travelogue (Brian Libby)
Matt Davis, a former Portland Mercury reporter and editor whom I got to know in the late 2000s, moved directly from here to New Orleans in the early 2010s (before returning to his native England and then settling in New York City). I've always enjoyed Matt's candor.
"I found New Orleans refreshingly culturally direct," he told me by email. "People were much more inclined to tell you what was on their mind than in Portland, where people tended to skirt around the issue. In that way, the Mardi Gras celebrations and the rich music scene had a similar in your face-ness, probably a Catholic-inspired, French-inspired "this is what we're doing" quality to them, where Portland's felt more indirect and subtle."
"It extends to the civic life too," he added New Orleans is honestly corrupt. I'd describe Portland as self-satisfied or corruptly inclusive. Like, we THINK we're doing the best version of civic engagement. In New Orleans everybody just knows you run for office to enrich your friends and family! New Orleans, too, is actually remarkably small. I was struck by that, often. Portland's downtown core is small, yes, but the outlying neighborhoods give the city more scale. I'd say I preferred living in Portland for livability, and I preferred living in New Orleans for grit and excitement."
The French Quarter (Brian Libby)
I also talked to Brian Borrello, who has called Portland home for more than 25 years but was born and raised in New Orleans. Borello is well known for his environmental works and public art projects. As described by Jeffrey Thomas Fine Art, "His experience with a broad array of sculptural and graphic techniques, and a versatile range of conceptual approaches is evident in his paintings, sculptures and public art pieces. As a visual artist, Brian is particularly interested in creating awareness of human life in balance with other life forms and with our shared environment. In his art for the public realm, he seizes opportunities to make 'places' by activating urban spaces through image, form and symbol, in response to history, community and context. "
We wound up having a longer conversation about New Orleans and Portland, which follows.
Portland Architecture: Can you tell me about the New Orleans neighborhoods where you grew up?
Brian Borrello: The first house my family bought was in Broadmoor, one of the lowest points in New Orleans: a former lake they filled in. And it often flooded. That's one feature of New Orleans, a city that's six feet under sea level. Then at some point, we moved out to the Gentilly area, right by the lakefront, which then was sort of the burgeoning suburbs that's still in town. And we lived right on right across street from Bayou St. John, which was a connecting point between Lake Pontchartrain and the river, part of this series of canals and bayous. Once upon a time, there was sort of a Venice like canal structure that supported the industry in New Orleans.
New Orleans and Portland are both river cities in these lush green landscapes. Is that part of what drew you here?
a pretty accurate observation. I was a city kid, but growing up, my uncle and my grandpa would take me out into the swamps and teach me woodcraft, how to fish and hunt how to gut an animal and shoot a gun. It's kind of a southern rite of passage. My grandpa had a camp at Honey Island Swamp, an hour outside of town. on the Pearl River: deep cypress swamp, pretty primordial, pretty snake-infested, pretty awesome. That nature connection was one of the reasons that drew me up to Portland, because you can be in the forest within an hour: in some pretty deep woods. You have to go a little further to find the old growth. But there's not a lot of old growth left in Louisiana. In a way, it's kind of part of the same legacy, an area of colonization: a presence that pretty much cut down all the old-growth trees.
City Park in New Orleans (Brian Libby)
When did you come to Portland?
I came here a few times beginning in 1996 and just kind of fell in love with the Pacific Northwest. Portland being a new city, to me it’s a little bit more forward-viewing, you know, a little bit still establishing its identity.
New Orleans is an old city that’s been under Spanish and French and English domination. You had opera houses and cafe culture and the slave trade: all this stuff before Portland was even founded. New Orleans is kind of always looking towards the past for culture and architecture. Everything's about Mardi Gras and the sort of vestiges of culture and food and arts. It was a pretty significant cultural footprint there that was distinct from the United States, even before Manhattan and San Francisco and everything else, but kind of waned. Even now as it’s sort of reinventing itself as a foodie town, it’s definitely with an eye towards the past: the heritage of architecture that you saw: all the old brick buildings with the ferns sprouting out of them, the tropical type building styles with the French doors and the high ceilings.
That heritage can be an inheritance but also a burden, I’d suppose.
Yes. I felt the need to kind of get out and see some new horizons. I needed something completely different. I’d traveled and lived in New York for a bit, Los Angeles. Did my graduate studies in Arizona. The Pacific Northwest seemed like it was kind of green and growing progressively. At the time I moved up here, you know, TriMet was doing light rail stuff and incorporating public art. That was one of the reasons I really wanted to do more public art. And in a lot of art over all, there’s more of a spirit of embracing the new. In New Orleans, history influences a lot of what you're able to do. Some of my good friends are architects down there and they're always, you know, trying to do something new, but always having to face the, you know, the historic New Orleans preservationist community.
I loved traveling across Lake Pontchartrain on the causeway. For a portion of that 25-mile journey across the lake, the land was so flat I couldn't see the horizon. It felt like we were on this highway into the ocean or to infinity. That experience and riding the Algiers Ferry across the Mississippi reminded me in a visceral way how New Orleans and Portland are water cities—each at a delta near multiple bodies of water and each, not coincidentally, receiving a lot of rain.
I think New Orleans might get even more rainfall than Portland, but not as consistently. There are these big cumulonimbus clouds that come off of the Gulf in the afternoon. Those thunderstorms do their thing and then it's just a steam bath, and then it goes away. And of course the danger is the storms are increasingly getting more numerous and more intense. I wish you could've gone to New Orleans before Katrina, because it changed everything, you know?
Could you talk a little bit more about that, how the storm changed the city and how it impacted your family?
I'd been through some intense storms before I moved. I went through Hurricane Betsy as a kid [in 1965]. We watched a lot of carnage in the neighborhoods there with trees and old carports disappearing and places flooding and stuff. Hurricane Camille [1965] pretty much wiped out a good chunk of the Gulf Coast, did a lot of damage to New Orleans, and I saw that aftermath. Very humbling. But Katrina was different. Just to be clear, though: Katrina didn't destroy the city. I describe it as the Great Federal Flood of 2005, that resulted from the compromised and shabby levee system. I considered myself pretty much bicoastal up until 2005, dividing my time between Portland and New Orleans. I still have family there, and I had a little studio space for cheap, a couple of hundred bucks a month. I’d fly down there, do shows pretty regularly, make art. But my studio took about six feet of water. There was this dirty line, like a bathtub ring that just went and cut across, you know, everything: all socioeconomic barriers, Black, white, everything. We lost four of the five family homes in Katrina. My family home had to be demolished.
It seems like Portland hasn’t had its Katrina moment yet, but with the earthquake that’s predicted for our region, that may change.
Katrina taught me something. When the storm hit I went down there and saw the mom and pop establishments were pretty much the first to come back online and feed people. My friend had a café, and she pretty much opened just to feed her neighborhood. All the corporate stuff—the Popeye’s and the Burger Kings—just folded up. You always imagine, you know, you pay your taxes, you're part of the social contract where you do all the right things, and you figure somebody's got to come take care of that, government or whatever. But there was no cavalry coming over the horizon to save people after Katrina. It was a big fucking mess and lot of, ‘Well, too bad you should have just not built on a floodplain.’ To this day, I still have a lot of disappointment about that. But also it was a reality check. It's like, you know, with an earthquake, you know, it's going to be us. It's not going to be the National Guard coming to save the day.
The Mississippi River from the Algiers Ferry (Brian Libby)
How has that impacted affordability? That was one of the city’s attractions, much like in Portland until recent years.
Up until Katrina, which again, was a pivotal moment of change, it was a cheap place to live. After Katrina, everything had to be rebuilt to, quote, modern standards. Almost everyone who could had a new mortgage, or a new loan to rebuild, and it all got expensive. Where you could once upon a time live pretty cheaply, that went away. In the before times, you've got a job, you're making rent, and you can spend some time on the front porch and cook that pot of beans, play the saxophone and have a porch party or take a week off for Mardi Gras. Some of that affordability left with Katrina. But I'm really concerned about that loss here in Portland too. As an artist, you always have a gravitate towards the places cheap rents. We do our best work in the cracks between things. When I lived in New York, it was a warehouse or when I was in Los Angeles, it was a it was an airplane hangar. In New Orleans, it was studio space that was fashioned out of garage space. And when I moved to Portland, I moved into a Quonset hut on Alberta Street. My rent was less than 500 a month, which is crazy to think about today. Then at some point my landlord told me, “I'm going to I'm going to triple your rent.”
How are the cities different?
I think the obvious distinctions is between Black and white cities. New Orleans is absolutely a Black city.
That was one of my favorite things about the city: that different energy you get from a place with diversity and a sizable Black community. I saw a large communal group of bicyclists go by one evening, and almost none of them were white. Nearly the opposite would be true in Portland.
I remember back in the Nineties going down to Jazz Fest not long after the unrest following the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles. I remember being surprised that the vibe was just so chill. Everybody was talking about that first not-guilty verdict and how it was really fucked up. But there was a sort of ease. It’s not to say there isn’t discrimination, because there is most definitely that. Yet I think that Black people and white people have lived, side by side for centuries now in New Orleans, and at times there’s more of a sense of collective culture.
What both cities’ Black populations share is displacement. There’s the I-10 freeway in New Orleans, which destroyed a lot of Claiborne Avenue were destroyed, in a plan by Robert Moses. That was all Black businesses, along places like Basin Street, which forms some of the roots of jazz. All those clubs and homes got destroyed to build that that freeway, the same as Portland with and Albina. These freeways got built pretty much over the path of least resistance, which was a Black neighborhood.
A Garden District house associated with painter Edgar Degas (Brian Libby)
Are the cities different in temperament?
New Orleans is a party town and it's got a nightlife that’s kind of unstoppable. You can kind of find something to do at all hours, for better or for worse. And that's it's another reason I moved here: I had to give my liver a break. New Orleans will feed all of your appetites. And I've seen any number of artists and creatives that kind got besotted by drugs and French Quarter nightlife. I realized if I really wanted to get some stuff done, New Orleans was going to be aiding abetting the other the other distractions. That was that was another reason I had to put some distance between them.
I still see Portland as a young city, still kind of finding its identity, finding its way. I'm just hoping it doesn't get priced into boutique land and priced out of affordability. I'm not seeing the housing situation improving right now. We're focusing on how to find pods for people on the streets and on the freeway corridors instead of going way upstream and looking at the real cause, which is Wall Street and investor acquisition.
A lot of a lot of my artist peers have disappeared into other places simply because of, not being able to afford to make it here or to find a place to make their work, because as an artist, it's not just living space, but it's work space. New Orleans has that same kind of challenge now that it's been discovered as a good real estate investment. But the perception of crime in both of the cities is now kind of taken a little bit of the shine off. I think maybe there's a little bit of a silver lining with that perception. It maybe makes things a little bit more accessible to people.
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