Cloepfil to speak Thursday at Portland Art Museum

National Music Center, Calgary (rendering courtesy Allied Works)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

This Thursday at 6PM, Portland Art Museum director Brian Ferriso will host an interview and conversation with Allied Works founder and lead designer Brad Cloepfil.

The conversation comes at an interesting juncture for both Cloepfil and the museum. Today Allied Works is not only coming off the high-profile success of a well received Clifford Styll Museum in Denver, but is seeing other large scale projects beginning to come to fruition like the National Music Centre in Calgary, only adding to the firm's impressive portfolio of public arts institions in St. Louis, New York, Ann Arbor, and Seattle.

“We’re inventing an institution here,” Cloepfil told Fast Company last summer. “It’s an exciting thing but it’s a daunting thing. It’s a building type that doesn’t exist yet.”

National Music Center, Calgary (image courtesy Allied Works)

After beating out famous firms and architects like Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Jean Nouvel, among others, one of the first things Cloepfil did was to question whether such a building was really necessary. “Why build a national music center when everyone’s on their iPods?” he said. “Does a music institution need a venue anymore?”

In the end, both Cloepfil and his clients resolved Canada's music-loving public needed a place to congregate and call its own. “It’s about people coming together,” Cloepfil said in the Fast Company interview. “People always talked about how libraries would disappear. But they didn’t. People still go and bring their laptops. People like to be around people. So this space is about bringing people together for music.”

One could lead this notion into a similar conversation about the Portland Art Museum. Unlike the music center, PAM already has two buildings to call home. But there are increasing whispers that the museum may be gearing up to fundraise for development of the block it owns one block north of its existing Belluschi Building and Mark Building. Rather than an international design competition, as many cultural facilities use to bring top-shelf architects on board, PAM could easily simply sign on Allied Works. Portland as a city has a strong preference for all things local, and Allied is hands-down the local firm with the most international acclaim as well as the most experience with major art museums.

Vancouver Connector (images courtesy Allied Works)

Meanwhile, Allied's biggest local project for now seems to be the Vancouver Connector, which may be one of the few positive results from the Columbia River Crossing project. To buid the  newI-5 Bridge between Vancouver and Portland, mitigation is required under federal law, requiring improved connections between downtown Vancouver and the Fort Vancouver historic site, including an expanded pedestrian overpass at Evergreen Boulevard.

In partnership with landscape firm Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, the 14-acre Connector will feature a promenade lined with flowing water, a native Camas prairie and a wetland meadow. The Connector is organized as a series of intersecting and overlapping plates that allow light to pass from upper to lower levels, and offer framed views of the city and sky.

Trolling the web for other Allied news and Cloepfil quotes, I came across a conversation at UCLA's Hammer Museum between Cloepfil and Portland-based director Gus Van Sant.

As Meara Daly recalled for the Los Angeles I'm Yours blog, the evening began with Van Sant asking Cloepfil about why he lives in Portland. "For both, it seemed to be a respite from the noise of places like NY and LA: it is a place where they are most productive) and how does one find inspiration," Daly writes. "Cloepfil meandered a bit on this topic, but essentially he believes architecture is a means of mining things – they do not have to be new things or even profound – to create a lens that brings insight into things. In a way he feels they both 'edit' experiences and the goal for him 'is not to expand but to limit the conversation.' Van Sant actually contradicted this notion though: he feels that in film 'scale is preferable, to make it personal AND include a vastness.”

In his Hammer talk, Cleopfil on more than one occasion "made a disparaging reference to 'corporate' architecture," Daly adds, and stated "that there are only two kinds of architecture: architecture as commodity, which is about replication and making money, and the 1% (very clever to hit that note!) who do it for the ideas and architecture that lives on its merits." This is a bit confusing to characterize the 1% as the good guys in this scenario, and Daly disagrees with this premise. "I do not believe architecture can be boiled down to these two extremes," she argues, "and in fact it does the profession a disservice to characterize it as such. Is his work for Pixar not a commodity? Is Frank Gehry’s work not considered a commodity AND in that 1%? I would love to hear other people’s thoughts on the subject, particularly folks who work in the industry." Indeed, Cloepfil seems to have a left-leaning sentiment and sympathy for the overwhelming majority earning less than a bundle, even as his clients are often very well-heeled.

Cloepfil's talk at the Portland Art Museum goes from 6-7PM on Thursday, and the museum is at 1219 SW Park Avenue.

 

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