Recently I made a long-overdue visit to Opsis Architecture, the six-year-old firm founded by three former Yost Grube Hall practitioners: James Meyer, Alec Holser and Jim Kalvelage. I was exceptionally impressed.
Opsis thus far has not been part of the condo boom that occupies much of our attention. Instead, they work mostly on public buildings: college classrooms, libraries, community centers. The firm is unequivocally committed to green building, specifically the notion that simple materials and open expressions of structure can act as a kind of visual poetry, even as that structure is simply doing its job.
Looking at the Opsis portfolio, specifically work for regional universities such as Portland State, Western Washington, Idaho and Montana State, as well as local community colleges such as Clackamas and Portland Community College systems, one sees elegant fusions of glass, metal, concrete, wood and other materials. At the Wade King Student Recreation Center at Western Washington University (pictured above), for example, a massive canopy extends over simple concrete pillars to create a plaza beneath a ribboned wall of glass. The Niemeyer Center for the Arts at CCC (pictured below) acts similarly, with uncomplicated grace.
As one architect (outside the firm) put to me recently, when modernism is done right, there’s nothing better. When it’s done cheaply and crudely, there’s little worse. I hate to sound too much like PR for the firm, but I think Opsis represents some of the best contemporary architecture produced out of Portland. And while the trio of principals tell me they fear the firm growing too much—they don’t want to become a boring service firm, after all—I hope there’s even more ambitious work ahead.
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