Holst 2.0 at two: a conversation with Dave Otte

Rockwood Youth Campus, Boys & Girls Club (Andrew Pogue)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Two years ago, the founders of Holst Architecture, John Holmes and Jeff Stuhr, sold the business to a quartet of employees: Dave Otte, Kim Wilson, Renee Strand and Kevin Valk. Given that Holst was one of the most acclaimed and award-winning firms of the 2000s and 2010s, it seemed like a potential turning point for the local architecture community.

Holst, perhaps more than any other local firm, had been associated with the condo-building boom in the years before the Great Recession. The firm's Belmont Street Lofts project in Southeast Portland, with its beautiful ipe hardwood screening, was arguably the first great condo building to appear in on one of our neighborhood high streets beyond the central city. Its 937 building in the Pearl District, its creamy brick giving way to an eye-catching pattern of windows and red balconies, was one of the best condos among a host of such projects in this burgeoning former industrial neighborhood.

Yet the firm was perhaps already in transition before Holmes and Stuhr handed over Holst to the new quartet. After all, the architects who took on ownership helped design many of those award-winning projects, given increasing responsiblity as the principals took sabbaticals and inched closer to retirement. And particularly with completion of the Bud Clark Commons, which provides homeless services and housing in a prominent NW Broadway location, the firm had already begun to expand its focus.

Even so, new leadership teams always create new cultures, even without meaning to, and so too does the firm's architectural fingerprint change. The building industry moves at a slow pace, so only now, two years into the transition, are we starting to see the constructed result of projects that went through Holst start-to-finish under Valk, Strand, Wilson and Ottee. But just like Holst 1.0, Holst 2.0 is winning awards for their work, most recently an AIA Portland Design Award for the Rockwood Youth Campus.

To learn more about Holst 2.0 and how the transition has gone, recently I sat down for a conversation with Otte.

Dave Otte (Holst Architecture)

PORTLAND ARCHITECTURE: It’s been long enough now that we can start to see for the first time some projects that originated after the transition. I’m interested in how Holst’s design fingerprint may have changed. What’s your take?

OTTE: It’s true: you can see it. The design work of the last two years definitely has a different flavor. You see it in other firms too that make transitions. Is it better or worse or just different?

We have two projects finishing that are two of the first that were designed outside of John and Jeff: the Asian Health Service Center opened at the beginning of the year, and down the street, 72 Foster is affordable housing right across from the Mercado, for REACH Community Development. And then we’ve got market rate housing in North Portland, The Revere at Mississippi and Fremont, and what we call Northpointe in Overlook: two large podium-based, mixed-use housing projects for Fore Development. Those were also designed after the transition. That’s four pretty big projects.

You mentioned a different flavor. How would you describe the difference?

I don’t know if it’s an aesthetic difference. Clearly John Holmes has an aesthetic to his work. But the biggest change I see is the process. There’s been more of a democratization of design. We’ve always hired great designers, but now it feels like more team members have been able to exercise their design chops. That’s been really fun to see. We have a wider variety of perspectives.

Let's talk about some of Holst's recent projects, like the Asian Health & Service Center. The façade I find interesting, both in the strategy of exterior screening (which seems to be an increasing phenomenon).

We were trying to get as much glazing as we could but give it some solar protection. Our clients were interested in how to create a modern version of an Asian vernacular architecture: looking at screens and layers, a strong roofline, yet still modern.

Asian Health & Services Center (Sam Tenney, Daily Journal of Commerce)

I’m also interested in how it gently evokes a Chinese architectural vernacular without seeming like caricature, without seeming like Disneyland.

We use that Disneyland word a lot as shorthand for what not to do. Dr. Szeto, the board chair and founder of the organization, is from China originally and emigrated here. He was very interested in something that spoke to his culture but looked to the future, and was reaching out to the youngest folks his organization serves. He talks about the building as a bridge between generations. So, we had discussions about materiality and aesthetics and how one perceives space and how one perceives the symbols of a building.

What are those façade screen materials?

The eave is wood decking and timbers. The screen itself is steel and aluminum. The columns are steel and the screens are prefinished aluminum. A lot of that had to do with durability.

Coincidentally, a few days ago I visited an apartment project with somewhat similar exterior screening.  Is this a trend at all in your mind, exterior screening as a way of mitigating too much glare and heat gain? It's interesting because coated glass has improved so much, so you can get a clear glass without exterior shading.

We were looking at lots of precedents of Asian screening and this sort of transparency: you can see [through the façade] yet you can’t see everything. It became a galvanizing idea that everybody was able to get behind.

The other metaphor is a lantern, and that’s more about how the building is viewed at night. All of the action happens on the third floor that time of evening. It becomes this bright beacon of the neighborhood.

Asian Health & Service Center will be the resident service provider at your other projects under construction, 72 Foster. Do you see a trend in social service organizations coming together collaboratively, as is the case with Holst’s Rockwood project, where the Boys & Girls Club site also has fellow nonprofit neighbors?

More and more. Nobody can do it on their own anymore, so they need to pool resources and expertise. The whole is greater than its parts. I was at a conference put on by the Meyer Memorial Trust. It was a conference around innovation in housing. They laid some ground rules. The first thing they said was there will be no mention of the federal government at this conference, because we can’t count on the feds for anything right now. You’re definitely seeing local nonprofits, local jurisdictions, coming together to find a way to fund these gaps in education, in housing, in healthcare: that we’ve been abandoned as a society by the federal government.

Rockwood Youth Campus (Andrew Pogue)

Speaking of projects where multiple social service agencies come together under one roof, Holst recently won an AIA Portland Design Award for its Rockwood Campus, anchored by Boys & Girls Club of Portland. How did Rockwood come together?

Holst has a long history with Open School, which was Open Meadow when we first started working together. At the beginning of the Great Recession, they were looking to possibly build a new school in North Portland. But it was a tough time. The project went on ice for a number of years. In the meantime, we got to know the Boys and Girls Club and started working with them on a new project in Rockwood, when we identified a site in Gresham that seemed ideal with a leftover parcel. At the same time we’d been talking to Open Meadow about a shift in demographic. As North Portland gentrifies, the need started to move out to East Portland and parts of Gresham. Rockwood is where 92 percent of kids are on reduced-cost meals, where there are the most languages spoken in the state of Oregon. It’s a diverse, under-served community. So Open Meadow started to think about its school being in East Portland. I said, ‘Maybe you guys should talk.’ They realized there were a lot of shared values and ideas, and could also have shared resources. Open School wanted a gymnasium, a full commercial cafeteria and kitchen; those were some of the things that made the original project prohibitively expensive. We were already building those kinds of facilities for the Boys and Girls Club. Since they’d be using it at different times of day,it became a synergy of nonprofits with adjacent missions.

We found an opportunity to carve out space for a third partner: New Avenues for Youth, who we’ve done a lot of pro bono work for over the years. They started to think about LGBTQ kids experiencing homelessness in East Portland that needed help. We were able to carve about 1,500 square feet for a East County outpost for New Avenues for Youth. We designed that for them pro bono and they got a big grant from Bank of America to build it out.

Rockwood Youth Campus, Open School (Andrew Pogue)

What spaces at Rockwood are the most special to you?

There’s really three main parts. There’s the gym, which is also shared by Open School, where worked to bring in as much daylight as possible. There’s the Teen Club, where we repurposed an old nursery metal building on the site into the new teen center. And then really the space that got a lot of architectural vision was the Junior wing. That’s where most of the classrooms are, where all the kids in elementary school go. It’sa space that we built out of glulams and timbers in a simple volume of flexible space surrounded by classrooms. It’s their game room, their cafeteria. That’s where we took some of the rigor of the outside and brought it inside with a four-foot grid that defines everything.

You’ve added not just clerestories to the gym but other glass as well. It’s really impressive how much natural light there is. But it’s shaded and the transparency is limited from the outside, and you’ve used it as an opportunity for text on the façade, which enlivens things. What was the intent there?

Staying safe is a huge goal for Boys & Girls Club. That’s why we kind of turned the building almost upside-down where the courtyard is towards the back of the site, and we held the street edge along Stark. We’re bringing everyone into the building to the north through a cloistered space, and treating the south façade almost as a piece of art with the brick and the colored glass.

Could you talk about the Open School design?

Open School is smaller—about two thirds the size of Boys & Girls Club—it’s two stories built around this central atrium space. The driving force was that every day they get all the kids together in that space. They have a daily affirmation and talk about what they’re going to do that day. It’s really special. They didn’t have that in their old school, so it was really important to create a place to gather.

We have the classrooms ringing around the space, and then we opened up the corners and peeled away space for this pinwheel orientation. That allows light to come in from all four of those sides as borrowed light, so we always have a connection to the outdoors. The other idea is those nooks become impromptu teaching spaces, more for like one-on-one or small groups. We were trying to take a simple idea and strip away the edges to come up with this second type of teaching.

Open School diagram (Holst Architecture)

It reminds me of something I have always liked about Holst and is a hallmark of most good architecture: the original, defining idea doesn’t get lost.

That’s one of the best parts about that building. When you walk through it, you feel that diagram. You sense it. You inherently understand the architecture. Its one of my favorite things about great buildings: you feel it and you don’t have to think about it.

This notion of collaboration: could it also be a Portland thing? We’re a city that has traditionally lacked capital wealth, which naturally inspires people to work together instead of chasing dollars.

I think that’s true. When my wife and I moved here [from Austin, Texas after college], we were blown away by how self-sufficient Portland was. A lot of cities this size would rely on cities around it for architecture or its big architects. Austin relied on Dallas, for example. But Portland had this rich collection of firms that had been doing good work for a long time. I think that’s where it comes from: the recognition of that mutual talent.

I started at ZGF. Back then Greg Baldwin and Bob Frasca were friends with others like [SRG Partnership’s] John Schleuning, [YGH Architecture’s] Joachim Grube. They all hung out and respected each other. Today I’m friends with other new leaders like Jeff [Yrazabal] at SRG and Amy [Donohue] at Bora. I think there’s a collegial level of respect that we have for one another.

The Upcoming 72 Foster project (Holst Architecture)

It also helps that we’re a young and small enough city for it to feel like it’s possible to make a difference.

Our generation, what do we hold important? We’ve got a long history of people who bucked the trend, whether it was Tom McCall or John Yeon. People thought differently about the environment here, be it the waterfront or Pioneer Courthouse Square, even the Pearl District and the Portland Aerial Tram: those were some pretty big ideas. All the way to Tilikum crossing.I think it’s that big picture thinking in a small town. It’s what gives us our cred.

It’s interesting to hear you talk about advising your clients on site and partners like you did with Rockwood, in what sounds like a quasi-developer roll. It reminds me of what happened with Holst’s One North project and hooking up branding agency Instrument as an anchor tenant for what had been a spec office project. Do you consider this role something that sets Holst apart, or is it fairly common for architects to act as matchmaker like this?

Kevin, Renée, Kim and I try to see ourselves as partners with our clients and not just consultants. Especially working with a nonprofit or creative agencies on headquarters, it’s a lot more personal than a spec office building or something like that. When we sign up, it’s for the long haul. That means trying to find creative solutions to solving their needs. It also means having patience. With Open School it took five years to land at the site with them. A lot of other architects do this too, but it’s something we consciously think about.

We’ve been talking almost exclusively about social-service clients, but a decade ago Holst was largely known as a condo designer. Was this a deliberate shift?

It’s true the ratios have changed. I would say Holst always had some amount of nonprofit work. A lot of it was initially tied to arts: the PNCA headquarters [the now-demolished Feldman Building rehabilitation], PICA’s new home. Our first project around social services came along with New Avenues for Youth downtown. It was a small project but really meaningful. Right on the heels of that was the Bud Clark Commons. That was at the time of the recession hitting. This shift was a combination of where the market was going and us finding a lot of success with Bud Clark Commons and meeting lots of folks within that world. It was in some ways intentional, some ways market driven. In recent years we’ve done a lot of market rate apartment buildings too, both here and in Boise. But we’ve had a shift from about two thirds market rate and one third affordable to flipping that. We enjoy both, but we also follow where the work is. Right now, market rate has slowed down, and there’s a need for as much affordable housing as possible.

Holst also hosted a Design Week Portland talk last year about homelessness and housing. How has doing these projects affected your thinking?

I personally take it very seriously. I also like trying to guide the conversation around quality and dignity, especially around design. A lot of times the affordability and housing discussion is about solving the problem as quickly as possible, which may not be the most lasting solution. I really believe we need to change how our society views housing, healthcare and education, and we should be investing in those things, and architecture is one way to do that.

Bud Clark Commons, 2006 (Christian Columbres)

Bud Clark Commons has been open for seven years now. How is it doing?

I’ve been rally happy with how it’s stood the test of time from a durability standpoint. It’s holding up better than some people anticipated. You walk through the building and it looks really good. I’ve had frustration with the health department building construction next door because as our homeless population has exploded we’re not able to use the interior courtyards. That’s spread a lot of the folks who need services around the outside of the building, which I think has hurt its public perception. The courtyards are dignified places for folks to be. But now tents are popping up everywhere. Hopefully that will get better once that county building is done.

I think that what’s also been interesting is they’re starting the Broadway Corridor master plan. The Bud Clark Commons landed on that site originally because it was a leftover site. It was a parcel where nobody was upset about placing homeless services. Now it’s set the bar. Watching ZGF use it as a precedent for the county building was interesting. And then seeing the Broadway Corridor come together, it validated even further that we were able to take a building typology that doesn’t often get the respect or budget it deserves—homeless housing and services—and created a gateway to the city that sets expectations for what goes around there.

 

Advertisements

Comments

[Jan Davidson]

Thank you for posting this interview; Holst's leadership transition has been something I've been curious about because their recent work is remarkably different and unfortunately I don't think its in a good way. It appears much less coherent, as if it has too many authors. Previous work by the firm also had a very good sense of scale and proportion, which I find lacking in the new work. I know they've also taken on more corporate work like Starbucks rollouts, which while it might help the firm to make money, don't seem to be contributing to the design skills of the firm. Perhaps the new leadership is skilled at managing a business but I don't see the exceptional design talent that previously existed. There are very few firms that come to mind in Portland that have successfully executed a design leadership transition so they are not alone. It seems that what happens more typically is the firms stay around but do more mundane work while newer firms fill the innovation gap.