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Brian Cavanaugh (Architecture Building Culture)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Since its founding in 2008, Portland's Architecture Building Culture has accrued a succession of awards and acclaim even as the firm has retained a somewhat low profile locally. Perhaps that's because nearly all of ABC's projects have been in other places, such as in British Columbia, where the firm's Vancouver office is located, and Fiji, where they've designed a succession of villas and a spa for Vomo Island Resort.
These days, however, the firm led by Brian Cavanaugh and Mark Ritchie is seeing several projects built in Portland, such as the award-winning Laura's Place, a transitional housing project for Central City Concern, and the Jarrett Street Condos, a modular multifamily project, as well as a handful of upcoming works. And Cavanaugh in particular, through his presidency of both Portland's American Institute of Architects chapter and the Center for Architecture, and teaching at UO, has also become a leading architectural voice in the community.
I've long been a fan of this firm, and conversing informally over the years with the Harvard-trained Cavanaugh. Recently I sat down with the architect at ABC's Grand Avenue offices to discuss the firm's recent and upcoming projects.
Vomo Island Spa in Fiji (Architecture Building Culture)
Portland Architecture: The Jarrett Street project is a handsome example of relatively affordable high-density housing. How did it come about and why was going modular of interest to you and the client?
Cavanaugh: Jarrett Street is our first modular project. It’s a 12-unit condo project that was designed and envisioned as affordable units. We partnered with Blazer Industries for the modular fabrication. It’s been interesting in terms of how we found ourselves becoming sort of experts on modular housing. It’s allowed us to think about when it makes sense and when it doesn’t. It’s not going to be the cure for our housing crisis. But Jarrett was a tight site, and it was a way for developer, Lloyd Development, to expand their capacity. It was a good scenario for them. We are continuing to work with Blazer on a series of homes in Los Angeles.
Can you talk a little about the work in L.A.?
It’s very much a strategy to develop what are otherwise very difficult hillside sites, in an area just northeast of downtown. The client has acquired over 30 sites now. We’re currently working on four projects for them and that will just continue. That has been interesting not just from a modular standpoint but also in exploring how you balance one-off custom design with very systematic ideas that could be replicated for unique and difficult site conditions. Each of those projects is different. Relatively speaking, each is its own project. But they share prototypical conditions. They’re all speculative. Relative to LA, the idea is that they’re going to be offering a kind of affordable product for the real-estate market. But it’s market rate.
Jarrett Street Condos (Architecture Building Culture)
Besides the attractiveness of cutting on-site construction time, how much of going modular is about reducing cost, and therefore selling at a lower price premium?
I think the idea is you’re providing high-quality architecture that can’t otherwise be delivered at these price points. They’ve assembled a really interesting group of architects to work on all the sites. I’ve known the client for nearly 20 years now. There’s a deep commitment in doing really progressive architecture, but trying to also find a way to explore issues of modular construction and replicable architectural ideas and systems. It’s been a great exercise. That will be happening for a number of years.
With the firm doing more projects in Portland, are you still working much in Vancouver and Fiji?
There’s a lot of work we’re doing up in BC, a mix of commercial and high-end residential. Two of the projects we are working on are restorations and additions to midcentury houses. One is a secondary dwelling suite, a sort of glorified ADU, to a really classic midcentury house. Then there’s this restoration and slight alteration to another midcentury house. It’s something we’ve begun to find compelling: to understand the architecture.
Lubavitch Center, Vancouver, Canada (Architecture Building Culture)
We recently completed a villa as part of our ongoing work in Fiji. The villa is was completed about a year ago. We just started another villa on the island for a client in San Francisco, which is going to be a unique project on the island. We’re exploring how to do two separate villas that can be combined as one, which doesn’t otherwise exist on the island. And continuing to explore how to develop a language informed by traditional Fijian architecture and contemporary ideas about space and tectonics.
How did the Laura's Place commission come about and what was your approach?
Laura’s Place was completed about a year ago and has won two awards: a Citation Award from the AIA Northwest & Pacific Region Design Awards, and a national Small Project Award from the AIA this year. That’s been really fulfilling. That was a small project, a two-unit addition to a fourplex that Central City Concern has. It’s amazing, this transitional housing: It’s single mothers coming out of this recovery program. They stay at Laura’s Place as part of their next step in the recovery process and translate new skills to everyday life. It was a project that required a lot of commitment from everyone involved. There was pro-bono effort involved, donations from our window and door manufacturer, Innotech. We were able to achieve a very transformative architecture within some tight constraints.
Transformative?
Central City Concern’s basic goal, quite rightly, was just to try to expand the number of units on the site to its maximum, and serve more people. But there were these other issues with the site and the existing facility. One was site safety. Another was a lack of communal open space. There’s a community that forms between these six moms. They can come together, kids can play, moms can be outside. And also just a sense of arrival to the place, and an identity. We approached it saying, ‘The thing we know we’re going to be doing is inserting these two new units.’ That in itself was challenging. The site could only accommodate five units overall. We had to achieve a 20 percent amenity bonus to get that sixth unit: solar hot water, improved safety and security, and expanded open space.
Laura's Place (Joshua Jay Elliott)
You take those two units as the insertion on that site. We said, ‘We have one move we can make. Can we make that one move reconfigure the whole site: how people enter their units and and creating that communal space? We identified the north side of the site was where we could achieve this. Just the simple placement of the new two units as a detached building from the existing, the placement of that structure relative to the existing building, one, redefines the north edge of the project and its position on the corner of that block, and two, creates a defined common space for the facility. That common space is also a product of another aspect of the project: renovating the old garage to the old building and turning that into a community room. It extends into this new courtyard space, which is connected to an outdoor yard. The juxtaposition between the existing and new building also sets up these clear points of entry. It used to have these stairways and deck structures that went to each of these existing units and were outmoded.
In that way, I think it’s transformative: that one move that can actually set in motion a whole series of improvements to the facility that don’t actually cost any money. It’s changing the formal characteristics of how the buildings occupy the site, and putting a focus on outdoor and communal space.
ABC has a few different residential projects in the works. Could you talk a little about those?
For our Jarret Street client we’re continuing to do two smaller scale multifamily projects on North Montana. Before that, we'd been designing another project for this narrow lot just off MLK on Failing, which we considered a prototype unit and a way of thinking about these narrow lots in this zone. When this Montana project came up we realized we could take a similar approach and begin to expand it. That’s been really interesting for the practice to look at housing from that standpoint. The first Montana project will go for permit within the month. The little one off Failing is in land use right now. We’re trying to get an adjustment to the density restriction on the site. Which has been an interesting conversation given the need for Portland to explore ways to create more housing.
Renderings of projects on NE Failing and N Montana (Architecture Building Culture)
What's the adjustment you're asking for?
There was a density restriction placed on the site that doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s a density restriction not consistent with the zoning. What was placed on it was a unit restriction, not an FAR restriction. We’re arguing it should be more of an FAR restriction. It’s a two-unit restriction and we’re proposing eight studio units. In this case it’s a land-use adjustment: they subdivided a larger lot. And when they subdivided this smaller portion, the city said, ‘You can develop this as a kind of duplex.’ Density on this site should have been measured by FAR, not by number of units. If they’d done that, there’s a number of different ways you could have approached it. The massing you could accomplish on the site, be it a duplex or ours, is about the same, because the duplex would be a three bedroom, two-bath kind of thing. But to get approval, there’s a whole series of conditions we have to meet.
Even though it’s a basic planning consideration on a land use level, it opens the doors for a kind of design review. They need to say, ‘We’re going to let this happen, but based on the specifics of what’s being shown.’ The Planning department will ultimately decide, but a number of people will ultimately have to weigh in. We’ve had a traffic study done. We’ve had to look at stormwater. It might come down to the cladding we propose needing to be modified. But it’s interesting: the minute you do something like this, it opens the door for a full review of the project.
Your firm is seeming to get more commissions built in Portland these days. How do you account for that?
It’s just a product of being here. I’m from Portland and the practice, we’ve always imagined doing more and more work here. But at the same time, our fundamental goal was to be able to pursue interesting work wherever we find it. Mark and I come from practices in which we worked on projects most of the time where we weren’t located. That’s just part of our work. The work we do in L.A., having worked there for many years, makes sense to me. But I think we’ll always focus on trying to expand the ability of the office to pursue work anywhere.
What does the future hold? Are there other types or scales of projects you'd like to work on?
My background was working with cultural institutions, arts institutions. I’d definitely like to see us move into that arena and start working with those groups. Up in Vancouver we’re looking to expand our commercial projects. In general I think we just want to continue to get work that’s interesting to us. We have a wide variety of interest.
Rendering of upcoming Skyline Residence (Architecture Building Culture)
Sometimes firms expand quickly and then must contract down the road. Other times a small studio firm can expand in a way that pulls its founders away from the day-to-day design process. How do you approach the notion of growth?
It’s something we’ve been thinking a lot about. Firms sort of arrive at these very particular points in their existence. One of the commonalities to those is the question of growth. We definitely don’t want to grow for growth’s sake, but to expand the capacity of the office requires a commitment to growth. It’s a bit of a risk you take. A project can drive growth, but at the same time, making a commit to expanding the office also can drive your ability to get bigger projects. When I was at Machado Silvetti in Boston, I remember someone who used to advise the firm advised them to grow, because the work would come. I think that’s the question we’re currently considering, this idea we should evolve into the office we want to be and the work will follow. I think that’s probably a more controlled way of doing it. You have to be the office you want to be. You have to do the type of work you want to do, because that work begets similar types of work. You have to make really very specific and measured decisions about what the nature of your office is going to be, and not let external circumstances drive rash decisions. We’ve found we have the ability to do a very high level of work and a good amount of work with a pretty lean office. As we grow, we want to grow in a way that’s consistent with that ability.
I think the biggest question any firm faces, especially a design driven office, is as we grow, and more personalities come into the office, how do we maintain the overall trajectory we’re trying to establish?
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