Portland Architecture

Kevin Cavenaugh & Anna Mackay discuss Guerrilla Development's new affordable housing project

Jolene's First Cousin rendering (Guerrilla Development)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Chances are you've noticed Kevin Cavenaugh and his Guerrilla Development company's last project, the Fair-Haired Dumbbell office building, with its prominent location at Burnside and MLK and its wildly colorful mural-covered facade. It's also hard to miss some of Guerrilla's other recent projects, like The Zipper on Sandy Boulevard with its lenticular facade graphics or the Burnside Rocket, its red metal exterior including artist-painted window screens.

One associates Cavanaugh, who is trained as an architect but carved out a unique development career, with funky-festooned and boldly conceived projects that are as much creative experiments as business endeavors. His projects seem to make profits but that is, refreshingly, clearly not his only measure of success. Guerrilla Development often eschews buildings that rise to meet height limits in favor of something more intimate and iconoclastic, reminding us that it's a mistake to conflate density and height.

With that in mind, the developer's latest project, called Jolene's First Cousin, is visually quite tame. With frequent collaborator Brett Schulz as architect, the project is comprised of a pair of small two-story buildings sitting side by side in Southeast Portland's Creston-Kenilworth neighborhood south of Powell Boulevard and comprising just 6,500 square feet on a 50x100-foot lot, they seem to mostly recall a kind of neighborhood storefront vernacular that exists outside of the downtown core on boulevards and avenues acting as retail centers for otherwise residential neighborhoods. There are no arresting primarily colors and nothing too challenging about the forms.

Instead, Cavenaugh and Guerrilla are saving their boldness for the development approach and the social mission behind it, and the crowdfunding financing plan first utilized with the Fair-Haired Dumbbell (which inspired a popular New York Times story).

Quite simply, Jolene's First Cousin is a mixed-use affordable housing project that doesn't use a dime of public subsidy. Instead, this small development's 750-square foot market-rate apartments and the ground-floor retail are intended to privately subsidize eight micro-sized apartments with shared showers and kitchen — basically single room occupancy. Guerrilla sees this as a way for some homeless or nearly-homeless people to make the transition back into permanent housing and as catering an under-served market of renters, largely young people but potentially retirees as well, willing to trade square footage for a more centralized urban location.

Recently I visited Guerrilla Development's offices in its own New New Crusher Court building on Sandy Boulevard, where the Eighties songs playing throughout the office — Springsteen's "Dancing In The Dark" and The Pointer Sisters' "I'm So Excited"—seemed to express the developer's enthusiastic, iconoclastic approach to buildings. Following is a conversation with Cavenaugh and Guerrilla Development's Anna Mackay about Jolene's First Cousin and the broader vision it's part of.

Model of Jolene's First Cousin at Guerrilla Development's offices (Brian Libby)

Portland Architecture: Tell us about the concept behind Jolene’s First Cousin.

Mackay: The concept here is that it’s a mixed-use project combining market rate and this very inexpensive single room occupancy [housing] arrangement. The ground floor has three market units facing Gladstone Street and 28th Place. The second story of the north building has two market-rate one-bedroom apartments. The shared space on the ground floor is a shared kitchen, dining and living room. There is also an ADA-accessible unit on the ground floor. They share this courtyard. You head up the stairs and you have 10 additional bedrooms that are about 100 square feet apiece. They share showers, toilets, washer-dryers. In the rooms there is a sink, a bed, a desk, a closet.

Cavenaugh: It’s in the tradition of a flophouse, an SRO. In Old Town, all those buildings were built as SROs for guys working on the docks. And they did that because it was so cheap and affordable. It’s the bare minimum of housing. This is about safe, clean, warm, sanitary housing. But there is a big-screen TV and a pretty badass kitchen.

And what about the market-rate units?

Cavenaugh: Plans [by most developers] have been squeezed down to the most efficient footprint, and I think it’s sad. We’re contrarians here. Those are big one-bedrooms, 750 square feet, and they’re market rate. We want to charge a lot of rent for those. This is a study in internal subsidization. It’s how we pay for our affordable housing.

Who do you imagine living in the micro units?

Mackay: the neat thing about how we’re filling these rooms is maybe logically you’d put all 11 in conjunction. In our case, Street Roots will be providing the names of their vendors that can move in. Then we’re going to split that dynamic by posting five of the rooms on Craig’s List for $425 a month, the same it’ll cost the vendors. There must be students or young people interested in having a $425-a-month room in close-in Portland.

Cavenaugh: The 25-year old me that moved to town in 1993 site unseen with skis and a duffle bag of clothes: I would’ve lived here in a heartbeat. Studies show when you put a monolithic type of housing in one place it doesn’t work. We talk about the emergency state of homelessness in Portland right now. A handful of solutions involve putting 1,000 in a tent village out by the airport. That’s a fine temporary solution, but a horrible long term solution because you’ll never break the cycle of poverty. But if we get some people living in their cars in Jolene’s First Cousin, or other people who wake up and scuttle off to work, it’s a healthier organism.

Do you see this as a one-off or the first of multiple such hybrids of market-rate and affordable housing?

Mackay: That concept scales with Jolene’s. We’re aiming to have Jolene’s Second, Third and Fourth cousin, and the intent is to drop them into established neighborhoods.

Cavenaugh: Where this is done successfully in Europe, every neighborhood does their part. Look at all the pushback on Dignity Village. Nobody wants it in their backyard. We showed this to the Creston-Kenilworth neighborhood association, and they were like, “Awesome. Cool.” Because there are six rooms housing people currently without homes, not a hundred and six. I want to put these in Montavilla and Portland Heights and Irvington. In Europe it’s a given that everyone does their part to absorb these into the community. The success of those models is really high. We’re not reinventing the wheel here. We’re dusting off a centuries-old model.

Jolene's First Cousin floor plans (Guerrilla Development)

Architecturally it’s not as bold or as colorful and graphic as past projects of yours like the Fair-Haired Dumbbell, The Zipper or the Rocket, which perhaps says something about the different context. It's not on such a thoroughfare as the Dumbbell or other Guerrilla projects.

Cavenaugh: It looks super vernacular. It doesn’t look like the Dumbbell or the Zipper by any stretch. If we do one on Sandy, it’ll be more exotic. But it’d be a dick move to do something that was…the program is exotic enough. The architecture should be a thoughtful nod.

Even so, Jolene’s First Cousin is like the dumbbell in its being broken down into two smaller buildings instead of one larger building.

Cavenaugh: It is about positive and negative space. The Dumbbell does this. The Two-Thirds Project does it. I don’t think we have a project that extends to the lot line. Even here [Guerrilla's New New Crusher Court] it was zoned to go taller than this. We’re leaving FAR [floor area ratio] on the table. But it’s our first ‘Cousin’ building. We were frankly expecting more controversy for it. We didn’t want to be perceived as pushing the physical as well as the programmatic envelope. When you look up and down Gladstone Street [at a similar vernacular], that’s why it exists.

Mackay: It does feel like a counterpoint to the building across 28^th Place.

Cavenaugh: I remember someone critiqued The Zipper for being one story when it could go six. I said, ‘We go to Paris and Amsterdam, and we see three stories next to five next to one. And that’s what makes it great. Density for density’s sake—600 people a day go to the zipper. It’s dense-just not in terms of square footage. And this will be dense too [in the number of people]

Could you talk a little bit about the funding? The Dumbbell was unique in its crowdfunded component and small investors. Will you be taking that further with Jolene’s First Cousin?

Mackay: Yes, it’s partially funded through crowd-invested equity. At the time we were looking at a max investment of $250,000. Now it’s $300,000.

Does the investment strategy affect how you lay out the units?

Cavenaugh: No. We always start with the napkin sketch, then the pro forma. If it works, we go with it.

Mackay: You mentioned crowdfunding, but I make the distinction: it’s crowd investing. This is not Kickstarter. You get real equity in a hard asset. You invest in your community and you get more than one kind of return.

Kevin, could you talk a little bit about the motivation behind the crowd-funding? With the Dumbbell I know it started as a way to fund the project and then became more about providing an opportunity to small-scale investors.

Cavenaugh: There’s this massive wealth gap in America. Most crowd investing is about still getting high-net-worth individuals to the table. And that’s not interesting to us. If you invest in this, your dividend is better than you’d get most anywhere else: five percent. But also on the Dumbbell a lot of investors said, ‘Gosh, we wish we could ride the appreciation train.’ On this, it’s ten years of five percent. At the end of ten years, we assume a sale and those people get paid off. Whatever it has appreciated, they’ll get a percent of that.

Mackay: I think with each new crowd investing effort we are creating the kind of financial opportunity for folks that they just can’t find anywhere else. Yes, an unaccredited investor can put in $1,000 and look at all their charts and see it go up. Here it’s more like a traditional real estate investment that the fat cats tend to have access to, but the common me or you not so much. There’s also this socially responsible aspect to it. Your money is going to this good cause and you’re going to get a return. That’s’ social-impact investment.

Cavenaugh: If I used an online real estate investment platform like Fundrise, I’d own part of a strip mall in Plano, Texas.

Mackay: We are banking on the fact that people want more and deserve more in this new economy.

Are there minimum and/or maximums to the crowd-investing?

Mackay: $3,000 is the minimum. $50,000 is the maximum. We don’t want someone to take it all.

Fair-Haired Dumbbell (Brian Libby)

Cavenaugh: With the Dumbbell a few people came in and took big chunks, but the majority came in at more like $3,000. It’s easier for us to deal with one, but that’s not the experiment.

Mackay: After the big fish at $250,000 and $150,000 on the Dumbbell, and about three investors around $1,000, the average investment was $6,500. Eighty-five percent of those investors came from Portland, even though it was available to four states and DC. It’s only Oregon residents eligible with this one.

When are you breaking ground?

Mackay: We are deconstructing the house there now through mid-January. Our contractor is aiming for February or March. That’s contingent on finalizing our permits.

Cavenaugh: We want to be done by end of summer but who knows? It’s not a complicated building.

 

 

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Design calendar: December 16-31

Portland Aerial Tram (OHSU)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

OHSU Campus — Places and Spaces
Explore the site and learn the history of the Oregon Health & Sciences University campus, built on top of a ridge with great views but very challenging access. This Positively Portland Walking Tour will traverse the campus's architectural highlights and provide stunning views, bookended by rides on the Portland Aerial Tram. Tour begins at South Waterfront Tram Station, 3303 SW Bond Avenue. $15 (plus $4.70 round-trip tram fare).

Architects Without Borders holiday open house & film
At this holiday open house for the Oregon chapter of Architects Without Borders, complete with food and festive drinks, there will a screening of the 19-minute film Francis Kere: An Architect Between. Currently showing on the festival circuit, this film comes to AWB-Oregon from filmmaker Daniel Schwartz. "The work of Francis Kere is at the forefront of a paradigm shift within architecture," Schwartz writes. "Globally, people are turning to designers to address intractable problems from poverty to climate change. Kere seeks to do just this, using a mix of low tech and high design and working in partnership with the communities for whom he builds. This film documents Kere at the mid-point of an ascendant career, in action between his native Burkina Faso and Germany, where he is attempting to build a performance centre for Syrian refugees." AIA Center For Architecture, 403 NW 11th Avenue. 5:30PM Wednesday, December 20. Free.

Portland Heights Walking Tour
The Portland Heights neighborhood towers above southwest Portland, providing spectacular views and close proximity to downtown. This area was virtually inaccessible until a cable car was built in 1890 that provided all-weather access to this highly desirable location. In 1906, the electric streetcar provided even more reliable service to Portland Heights and continued on up to Council Crest.Portland Heights became one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the city, with a mix of spacious and elegant early 20th century homes. This Positively Portland Walking Tour covers less than one mile but has some steep ascents and descents. Come prepared for a rather strenuous walk. Tour begins at Vista Spring Cafe, 2440 SW Vista Avenue. 1PM Friday, December 22. $15.

 

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A first look at the Nike World Headquarters expansion

Rendering of the Serena Williams Building (Nike)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Last week Nike announced the names of four new structures that will comprise the expansion of its Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton, which adds approximately 3.2 million square feet of office, mixed-use and parking facilities to the campus, all designed by three Portland firms: ZGF, Skylab Architecture and SRG Partnership (with landscape design — no small aspect of this campus — by PLACE).

The renderings of these buildings have been public for just over a year and a half, but given the company's tight-lipped nature when it comes to controlling message, only now are we learning the names and what each building's role will be.

As it happens, the naming of these buildings isn't something the company can take lightly. When I first visited the Nike campus in 2001, they were just getting ready to dedicate was then called the Lance Armstrong Fitness Center. It sat not far from a child care center named after Joe Paterno. Both buildings were renamed in 2012, and I'm not sure they want to go through that again.

The largest structure, at more than one million square feet and the equivalent of three city blocks, is the Serena Williams Building. Expected to open in 2019, its design seems to be led by Skylab Architecture. I say "seems to be" because Nike isn't saying which firm designed which structure, and the firms are bound by a strict non-disclosure agreement. But the only picture Skylab put on its Instagram feed was of this building. And to my eyes at least, it seems to look akin to Skylab's vocabulary, not so much the controversial Yard building but more like its predecessor, the unbuilt Weave Building, with a simple geometric interplay of linearity and triangularity.

The soon-to-be-completed Sebastian Coe Building (Nike)

There are also two structures that appear to be designed by ZGF. There is the Sebastian Coe Building, a six-floor, approximately 475,000 square foot structure named for the British distance-running icon, which will add about 475,000 square feet of office space. There is also the Michael Krzyzewski Fitness Center, its name being not an unintended explosion of consonants but a tribute to the Duke University coach who leads college basketball in all-time wins; this 47,000 square-foot facility will include workout studios, exercise equipment and locker rooms. Both of these buildings have a sense of lightness and kinetics in how they appear to lift or cantilever off the ground, making their mass seem reduced and giving them a striking sculptural form. The architectural language also seems somewhat comparable to ZGF's design of the Hatfield-Dowlin Complex at the University of Oregon, which was bankrolled by Nike co-founder Phil Knight.

There is one more project that's part of this expansion, and its opening is the closest. The NYC Garage, a parking garage that seems to have been designed by SRG Partnership, is themed around the New York City’s sporting heritage, with each level featuring graphics for championship New York sports teams. (One presumes it will thus include a few different shades of blue, a lot of pinstripes, and a tiny smattering of green or orange.) Besides the parking spaces, there is also a covered outdoor courtyard for community gatherings, special events on campus and sports activities. One might say a parking garage is the least interesting or significant of these projects, but it's also perhaps the biggest opportunity to enliven an otherwise unremarkable or unappealing architectural form. Herzog & De Meuron, arguably the world's top architecture firm, made headlines by imbuing a parking garage in Miami with a high level of design. With Nike the focus is more on graphics than program, but as with the Hatfield-Dowlin Complex's parking garage, where visitors are delighted by a host of Oregon Ducks quasi-graffiti, there's still a chance to make an unmemorable space memorable, and that certainly counts for something.

This is not the first time Nike has expanded. After the campus opened in 1990, the Nolan Ryan Building completion just two years later marked its first expansion, and in 2001 an expansion doubled the company's footprint. Over the last decade there have been incremental smaller projects. But this is certainly the biggest expansion in 16 years. What's unfortunate is that this expansion comes at a time when Nike, long dominant in the athletic-apparel industry, has lost some of its mojo.

The nearly complete Michael Krzyzewski Fitness Center (Nike)

The company's stock is valued today on the NASDAQ at $61.58, down from its peak of $67.16 in November 2015, after going nowhere but up in the prior decade. In September of this year, the company announced it was eliminating about 1,400 jobs worldwide, 745 of which were based at its Beaverton campus. It's all relative, of course, because Nike still dwarfs is primary competitors: Adidas and Under Armour. But it's not the kind of celebratory environment to unveil an expanded World Headquarters. However, by the time the Serena Williams Building opens in 2019, a rebound could well be underway.

When discussing the Nike campus, I also think back to something former Portland mayor Charlie Hales said to me about the company's headquarters in a 2001 interview, as part of a Metropolis article I was writing about the contrast between the Nike and Adidas headquarters. (Adidas's American headquarters is located in North Portland in the former Bess Kaiser Hospital on Greeley Avenue — as urban a setting as Nike's is suburban.) "It's great architecture, but it's terrible place making," said Hales, then a City Council member. "Nike's corporate campus is the ultimate well-designed, well-executed, attractive suburban pod. It's offices surrounded by parking lots inside a berm across the street from a trailer park and down the street from strip malls."

That, of course, was 16 years ago. Is it still fair to say Nike is an isolated outpost in suburbia? Yes and no.

I'd argue it's possible to live in Beaverton today and live a more walkable, cultured life than it was in 2001. Because of the gentrification that has happened in central-city Portland, Beaverton is actually considerably more diverse than it used to be. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, in 1990, 87.7 percent of Beaverton residents were white, but by 2013, that figure was down to was 63.2 percent. And there are increasingly clusters of transit-connected density where a person can walk to the grocery store or the movies. On the other hand, I think of all the times over the last five years I've driven my partner to medical appointments at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute, adjacent to the Nike campus; looking to kill time while she saw the doctor or received treatment, I was often frustrated at how unwalkable the surrounding area felt. It often took me 15 minutes of walking to reach a drive-in coffee stop that technically was a block away; and when I got there, it was a novelty to the baristas that someone had made it there on foot.

As it happens, I think a lot or possibly a majority of Nike's Beaverton-based employees live in Portland. That means the daily grind of inching along Highway 26 in traffic, or perhaps taking MAX paired with a 25-minute walk or a bus ride. Earlier this decade, Nike even considered building a satellite campus in Portland proper, but ultimately decided to double down on its Beaverton headquarters.

NYC Garage (Nike)

Even so, it's not as if Nike is the only big company that chose to locate in the suburbs, and it's not the charge of ZGF, SRG or Skylab to make the Nike World Headquarters feel part of a walkable place or to reference in any way the architectural context outside that grass berm forming the campus's property line. And if one forgets the question of the Nike campus's distance from central-city Portland, there is arguably something interesting about the opportunity the company has had on that huge campus to create its own little world.

When it first opened in 1990, the campus, designed by Thompson Vaivoda (now TVA Architects), gained international recognition as a model for corporate campus design. It wasn't just office buildings and parking lots but something more like a college campus: a place with trees and greenspace and even a lake, albeit a human-made one. Even so, the Nike campus at times can, like other special corporate headquarters such as Vitra's headquarters in Basel, Switzerland or Adidas's main headquarters outside Nuremberg, Germany, feel like a laboratory for place-making and even architecture. In Nike's case, it's a place of office buildings but also big athletic fields and winding trails. And it's a place where modern sporting culture as we know it was practically invented, where designers like Tinker Hatfield and others created shoes and other products coveted around the world. You can't help but feel the creative energy.

As it has evolved, the Nike campus has also become more and more dense, perhaps in parallel to the city around it. Surface parking lots have shrunk or disappeared, and while parking garages aren't always great place-making either, the company has prioritized the preservation of open space. I can't help but wonder if, should the company remain a giant in the industry, a future Nike World Headquarters might have parking buried under ground in order to reclaim even more land for its buildings.

Rendering of the campus when expansion is complete (Nike)

But what would be truly revolutionary is if the campus could someday become more connected to its surrounding environment. Why not let the public walk in and out of the campus, for example, like they could walk around a corporate headquarters immersed in the city? Why not introduce housing, or shops? It would be a net-positive gain for Nike itself, perhaps encouraging more employees to live nearby. And it could lead to a whole walkable neighborhood not just surrounding the campus but part of it. Back when I interviewed Charlie Hales 17 years ago, he presented the grass berm surrounding the campus as a kind of personal affront to the community, suggesting it was a way of saying, "Keep out." When I passed on Hales' comments to Robert Thomson, TVA's co-founder, he strongly disagreed, saying the berm was a way of providing a prettier face to the community than parking lots would have. Either way, why not open the Nike campus to the community with open arms?

I keep saying Nike's campus is in Beaverton but actually a decade ago the company went to court to make sure it wasn't part of the town. Back then, led by mayor Rob Drake, Beaverton was trying to annex the Nike World Headquarters so it would officially be part of the city and not just Washington County. Nike won that battle, citing in county government a more "hospitable climate for businesses," as Julia Brim-Edwards, Nike's senior director for government and public affairs, put it at the time. Maybe the company avoided paying some taxes or a bit of red tape, but that posture does not exactly strike me a textbook example of good corporate citizenship. And you know what, guys? Legally this may not be the case, but for all intents and purposes, you are undeniably located in Beaverton.

All that said, I quite like what I've seen from these renderings and photos — which are the closest I can get until Nike decides to let media take a tour. One never knows what a building is like until you walk inside, and get a sense of how the architecture is working for the occupants. And yes, architecture is inseparable from context — if not legally than in every other way. Yet our area seldom builds ambitious corporate architecture; we lack a community of affluent Fortune 500 companies to enable that kind of opportunity. And Nike has always been invested in place-making, even if it's not urban place-making. Founders Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman were shaped and made who they are by their time on the University of Oregon campus in Eugene, and indeed, it's not such a bad model for how buildings and landscape can come together as an alternative to the asphalt and chaos that can sometimes dominate urban life. These buildings figure to enhance that ongoing experiment.

 

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Restoring Pietro Belluschi's Sutor House

Sutor House foyer (Brian Flaherty for Dwell)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In the November issue of Dwell magazine, I had the opportunity to write about one of the great works of residential architecture in Portland: the Jennings Sutor House by Pietro Belluschi from 1938, which has undergone a renovation overseen and designed by the legendary architect's son, Anthony Belluschi. After summarizing the story in 500 brief words for the magazine, I can flesh it out a little more here.

Any house by Pietro Belluschi is of course significant, for he and John Yeon are, along with A.E. Doyle, Belluschi's former boss (because of Doyle's Wentz Cottage on the Oregon coast), the forefathers of the regional Northwest Modern house style that married International Style modernism with wood buildings featuring pitched roofs, large overhangs and a combination of local traditions (farmhouses, barns) and Japanese influences.

The Sutor is particularly special. It's not the absolute first Belluschi-designed house. That would be the Council Crest House, completed in 1937, which a few years ago was renovated by Brad Cloepfil and Allied Works Architecture. It undeniably shows a recognizable Belluschi fingerprint, but with its brick facade and simple boxiness, it is arguably a reflection of Belluschi at the time working in architect Doyle's office. Belluschi biographer Meredith Clausen in her book Pietro Belluschi: Modern American Architect describes the Council Crest house as being identifiably Belluschi and Northwest yet retaining "lingering Georgian associations" from Doyle. There was also an existing farmhouse in Aloha that Belluschi renovated for his family.

Yet the Sutor, along with the John Yeon-designed Watzek House completed a year earlier, really came to establish the Northwest Modern regional style from the template of Doyle's Wentz Cottage. "It was a significant change in the sense of establishing that midcentury modern direction," explained Anthony Belluschi of the Sutor House in our interviews for the Dwell article.

Sutor House exterior (Brian Flaherty for Dwell)

Great as the Sutor House is, the story really starts with the hillside site. "He knew the hillside because he’d worked on the design for the Watzek," while in Doyle's office, Anthony added. (Yeon was not licensed as an architect so Doyle's office served as architect of record.) "He’d walked the site. And Jennings Sutor was wealthy enough he could afford a piece of property with that view, the original view, of Mt. Hood: he understood how important it was to get a view from every room. He did such a great job of siting the house. I think the Sutor is remarkable in the sense of the siting. It’s the best use of a great piece of property given the view corridor and the garden."

The Sutor was also about showcasing Belluschi's fascination with wood, Anthony Belluschi said of Pietro: "He came from Italy. They don’t have big forests at all. When he came to the Northwest, you’ll see the Portland Art Museum is brick and travertine, but his fascination with houses was he had access to these natural materials like the wood. He got into that. It was all new to him, whereas others took it for granted: the grains of the different woods. I think he really mastered that." At the same time, the Sutor House, like the Watzek, really shows the influence of Japanese architecture on Northwest Modernism. Looking at the house it's not hard to see its resemblance to a traditional pagoda.

In the Sutor's case case, the Japanese influence can be seen not just in the house itself but the garden. The Sutor occupies a four-acre site bordering a protected forested hillside. While designing the house, Belluschi befriended Jiro Harada, a professor at the Imperial Household Museum in Tokyo and author of numerous books on Japanese gardens and architecture who was in the Northwest as a visiting professor at the University of Oregon. Influenced by Harada, Belluschi and local landscape architect Florence Holmes Gerke created an elegant, Japanese-style strolling garden. A 1948 Sunset magazine article concentrated more on the house’s garden-like setting than on its architecture.

Owner Aric Wood pointing out portions of the uncovered garden (Brian Libby)

"When Hirada was lecturing at the Portland Art Museum he and Belluschi struck up a number of conversations that stimulated his ideas about Japanese art and architecture: the basket weave ceiling, the overhanging eaves," explained the Sutor's current owner, Aric Wood. But in subsequent decades, the garden, perhaps Hirada's biggest influence on Belluschi, was until recently, mostly buried.

With its large roof overhangs (a staple of Northwest Modern) and its covered backyard portico, the design is meant to foster indoor-outdoor living. "When you live here you recognize the house and the garden are inseparable," Wood added. "We kind of flow through the house with the seasons. Spring and summer, our living room is the portico. The dining room is the terrace. The winter we contract to the hearth."

Anthony Belluschi acted not only as the architect supervising the renovation, but also a kind of matchmaker between the Sutor's last owner, André Stevens and its new one, as he has done for other houses designed by his father.

"I knew André going back 25 years," he recalled. A few years ago she approached Anthony about becoming the owner himself. "I was a long way from having any idea of when I’d come back to Portland but knew I was destined. She said in her Swiss accent, 'I so want you to have this house.' I said, 'I really love it.' It’s a wonderful piece of property, and other than the house he designed for our family in 1937, it’s the first he did for a client in the style he wanted. I stayed in touch, and any time I came to Portland I’d go up to see the house and say hello."

But he wasn't quite ready to move here, and when he did, Belluschi had his eye on the house his parents had ultimately occupied, the Burkes house. "Of the 35 plus houses my father did, the Sutor house and this one [the Burkes] are the best in terms of siting, layout, materials," he told me. "Without exception, the cream of the crop was the houses he did from the late '30s, '40s and '50s."

Sutor House living room and extended entertaining space (Brian Flaherty for Dwell)

If Anthony Belluschi wasn't going to live in the Sutor, he decided to play matchmaker. First he took two well-known architects on tours of the Sutor house, each interested in purchasing. But one of them already owned a Pietro Belluschi house and decided to stay in it. The other intended to make some major alterations to the Sutor. "That was distressing to André," Marti Belluschi, Anthony's wife, told me. "She wanted a buyer who appreciated it as-is."

That's when Anthony approached Wood, a fellow member of the Pacific Northwest College of Art board of directors. "André took him on a tour and he just fell in love," Belluschi recalls. "We knew he'd be a perfect owner." There was even a moment when Wood, touring the house with Belluschi and Stevens, identified a location in a painting of the Alps near Stevens' original home in Switzerland. It helped seal the notion that he was the right person to whom Stevens could sell the house. And ironically, Wood's company, XPLANE, is based in the Pietro Belluschi-designed Equitable Building downtown, perhaps the most important building in the acclaimed architect's entire career. Anthony Belluschi says Wood may be the only person in the world who lives and works in two different Pietro buildings.

To buy the Sutor house, though, meant Wood would have to abandon his dream-house plans. "I had bought a piece of land on Skyline Boulevard. My dream was to build a home," he said. "I had the permits set and was ready to break ground." But ultimately Wood fell in love with the Sutor.

Unfortunately the house had been altered from Pietro Belluschi's original design, but not irreversibly so. One of the bedrooms near the entrance, originally the maid's quarters, had been turned into a breakfast nook and the kitchen altered. Despite the beauty of the design, it was only a two-bedroom house, meaning Wood's two children would have to share a bedroom. But Anthony Belluschi created a restorative plan that turned the breakfast nook back into a bedroom while also shrinking the size of a wet bar attached to the kitchen in order to expand the kitchen itself.

An original layout of the house (Aric Wood)

The renovation also restored the original configuration of the entry foyer and living room. It's somewhat of a strange layout, in that after passing the magnificent foyer, with its woven-wood ceiling and a curving grass paper-clad wall, one enters a kind of under-utilized space that can be considered part of an extended living room — ideal for entertaining during the days when Sutor, a well-connected bachelor, owned the house — but during Stevens' ownership had become a kind of second living room attached to the first. The Anthony Belluschi design removed the second living room and restored a series of built-in bookshelves that, along with a credenza, help give proper definition to each space.

As one enters the restored Sutor house, the pairing back of furniture and clutter in that double-sized living room allows one to really marvel at the gorgeous interiors and materials. Anthony Belluschi believes that curving wood wall at the foyer, for example, shows his father's Italian roots, as does the way the zebra wood-clad living room wall also curves at the corner of the space. "As Tony reminds me, this house was designed for entertaining," Wood said. "Sutor was a bachelor. For banquets or dances they needed that [extra] space off the living room. We didn’t get a feel for that initially because of how the prior owners had renovated that space. As soon as we restored it back to the original plan, you could feel it instantly."

What's also unmistakable about the house is the bounty of natural light. Not only is there floor-to-ceiling glass at the entrance and a long row of windows forming the living-room wall, but the relatively long, thin form of the house means there is always light coming in from at least two sides. Sitting in the living room, you get not only the light coming through its wall of windows but from the floor-to-ceiling glass at the patio just beyond the dining room table. The renovation also restored a wall of mirrors in the dining room perpendicular to the glass wall at the patio. So much natural light comes through the main living-dining space that the relatively dark zebra-wood walls and oak floor almost seem to glow.

Then there's the garden, which is not only huge given the four-acre property and the forested canyon it overlooks, but also the Japanese garden that Wood and his family have slowly uncovered. "We found so much buried. I never would have imagined that hillside was a strolling garden," Wood said. "It was so overgrown you couldn’t even find the rock wall. Then we followed the rock wall to find the stone steps. We dug out the stone steps to find the path. Last summer we discovered the pathways heading into the forest [the canyon sloping down from their property]. We found paths down to the creek and back up. It’s been kind of a continuous process of uncovering."

Looking at the Sutor House today, even in the context of there being many wonderful houses that Pietro Belluschi designed over some 50 years, I can't help but feel it ranks near the very top of the list if not the very top. Anthony Belluschi is understandably partial to the Burkes, which he and Marti live in. And indeed, it has panoramic views east of downtown Portland, Mt. Hood, Mt. Saint Helens and more, not to mention a wonderfully intimate courtyard, with natural light permeating every inch of the interior. The Burkes may for that reason be the best Pietro Belluschi residential architectural experience.

Even so, at least for now I find myself even more drawn to the Sutor. The way the perches on that hillside, the garage it sits on acting partially as a plinth, makes the Sutor seem very grand, almost like a little Acropolis, despite its modest size. With its pitched roof and large overhangs, it shows the Japanese influence more than perhaps most Belluschi or Northwest Modern houses. And inside the materials are particularly memorable, particularly the aforementioned woven-wood ceiling, and the curving walls of exotic zebra wood and grass cloth. You feel all of Belluschi's influences in the house as well as, dare I say it, his competition with John Yeon after the bad blood that emerged from the Watzek (Doyle's office, which Belluschi was of course part of at the time, was in the past sometimes unfairly given credit for Yeon's design, which understandably embittered Yeon). Yet I have come to think of the Watzek and the Sutor as companion pieces. While the Sutor feels more classical, with its formal layout and its stately portico facing east, the Sutor is more Japanese, and yet they resemble each other perhaps more than they resemble their influences.

Talking with Anthony Belluschi, I also have a renewed sense of the late 1930s and 1940s as a particularly golden time for the architect. "He did St. Thomas Moore the same time as the Sutor House," he told me, referring to the great early Catholic church completed in 1940. "Those were all the best projects, from the '30s and '40s. Then he was less knee-deep in alligators on each project." In that way, Belluschi's very success and ambitions became for him a challenge, a juggling act, that ultimately led to his leaving Portland for some 20 years to be the dean of MIT's architecture school. During and after that time, Belluschi would produce some of his most famous designs, such as the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption in San Francisco and the Julliard School at Lincoln Center in New York, as well as a co-design of the Pan Am building there. Yet that pre-MIT period may still be the time of his simplest, finest architecture.

"Having the office here, the churches and houses were actually his favorite thing to do," Anthony Belluschi says of his father. "I think he put so much time and energy into the Equitable, and I think that was the crowning achievement in the first half of his career. The second part going to MIT, I think that’s a whole different scenario. The consulting role in that period was how he got involved with so many projects. I clearly think that the houses starting with the Sutor and up through this house [the Burkes], and the churches, are all gems. There aren’t many exceptions."

  

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