The under-construction Pioneer Lavada Jones project (Brian Libby)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Over the past decade-plus, perhaps the most interesting and iconoclastic Portland development firm I've followed has been Guerrilla Development. Whether it's the Fair-Haired Dumbbell, that eye-catching office building at MLK and Burnside that's covered in a colorful mural, or a succession of retail and mixed-use projects along Sandy Boulevard, or some innovative approaches to affordable micro-housing, this is that rare developer that treats buildings like artful experiments.
Of course in development, you have to turn a profit of some sort, or otherwise there may not be a next project. Yet Guerrilla won't build luxury condos or populate their storefronts with ubiquitous chains to make a buck.
Founded by Kevin Cavenaugh, who was trained as an architect (I wrote about his work most recently in an Oregon Business magazine profile a couple years ago) and seems to retain a kind of punk-rock spirit or value system from his early days as a musician (in other words: don't sell out), Guerrilla has been a creative enough developer that it became possible to forget that there were still architecture firms carrying out their visions. Sometimes that partner has been FFA Architecture, where Cavenaugh worked as a designer before launching Guerrilla. But often it has been Brett Schulz Architect, whose namesake founder used to work with Cavenaugh at FFA.
Recently I happily accepted an invitation from Ben Carr, a project architect at Schulz's firm, to talk visit his office and talk about its evolution with and without Guerrilla, with a visit to the firm's under-construction project with them, Pioneer Lavada Jones, a renovation of a 1950s auto garage building that includes the creation of a new outdoor courtyard in the middle.
New New Crusher Court (Brian Libby)
The two companies share two sides of an office space within one of their previous projects together, New New Crusher Court, one of a string of buildings along NE Sandy Boulevard between 20th and 30th Avenues that they have renovated into creative office and retail spaces from the bones of old car dealerships and repair shops. Like Pioneer Lavada Jones, the outdoor space it carves out from heretofore indoor warehouse space is what the project is all about.
"We enjoy a close relationship with Guerilla," Carr says. "We both have this feeling that we want to build the city that we want to live in. More often than not, Kevin will come to us with a napkin sketch and say, ‘This is the idea. How do we build it? How do we get the city to approve it? How do we navigate the seismic upgrade requirements?’ We become specialists in both new construction and adaptive re-use to turn those napkin sketches into reality. There’s so many design decisions that get made during that process. And it’s really a collaboration. Really all these buildings, as we take them through structural engineering and city permitting, they evolve naturally. One of the most fun parts of the job is seeing how the project grows on its own. And being in the same building, having that open work flow is essential, to pop over with sketch ideas. It’s a symbiotic relationship."
Although I was there to spotlight Brett Schulz Architect — the firm, that is, as opposed to architect Brett Schulz — the fact that Carr was speaking for the firm instead of Schulz made for a coincidence, because Kevin Cavenaugh has begun to do the same thing at Guerrilla: to step back as the public face of the company and empower younger team members to do their thing and gain leadership.
Brett Schulz, Ben Carr and Shea Gilligan (Brett Schulz Architect PC)
"Empowerment is the right word," says Carr, who earned architecture degrees from Columbia University and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before coming to Portland. "Like Kevin, Brett realizes that this is a collaborative process and not the result of any one person's efforts or ideas. Brett's been a valuable mentor as an architect and as the owner of a small business, and It's been an amazing place to grow as a professional. He has given my colleague Shea Gilligan and I the opportunities to work and learn about all aspects of the process beyond architectural design, from client relations to billing to financial management to marketing and client outreach, which has been very successful for the company and beneficial for Shea and I as we learn how to run a firm."
As it happens, Carr and I used to live within a few blocks of each other in New York City, and we got talking about a building there, in which he grew up, that may have foreshadowed the kind of adaptive-reuse narrative his career has since taken. While I was a student at NYU in Greenwich Village (and while Schulz was studying design at New York's Pratt Institute, for that matter), Carr was a child living in an apartment at Westbeth, a three-building complex of artists' housing in the West Village that was renovated from portions of the old Bell Laboratories complex, a 13-building campus that in its oldest portions dates to 1868.
In the 1960s, portions were renovated into one of the first examples of adaptive reuse of industrial buildings for artistic and residential use in the United States. Westbeth's conversion was one of the first projects by Pritzker Prize-winning starchitect Richard Meier. "It was like a giant ship," Carr recalled, "with parts from the 1860s and newer portions because it got added on to sequentially. Understanding that spatially as a concept was really fascinating."
Bell Laboratories/Westbeth Artist Housing (Westbeth)
Our conversation continued as we visited Pioneer Lavada Jones, which is under construction but nearing completion. You'd never know from Sandy Boulevard the interesting and welcoming little courtyard that awaits, with the building's bowstring trusses extending across the open air from inside to outside and back again. "You have a little bit of protection from Sandy. It’s a pretty high-traffic road. There’s an idea of a space that’s open to the public but can be discovered." The courtyard walls are also clad with simple plywood, a look I enjoyed. It's a humble material but the combined effect is one of clarity and texture.
"It’s light and air for the tenants," the architect says of the Lavada courtyard. "These spaces would have been land locked and you’d never be able to lease it. You’re losing square footage so it’s counter intuitive from a development standpoint. But you’re improving the quality of the rest of the square footage. We’ve done a lot of projects where you’re not maximizing the density. But you can create a higher quality of space that in theory won’t lead to as much turnover. You also interact with other tenants a lot more."
As we walked along this stretch of Sandy Boulevard, where the former Pepsi bottling plant is set to be redeveloped ("You've no longer got the right one, Baby, uh-huh!"), I was reminded of the number of Schulz-designed projects for Guerrilla are here, with potentially more in the works. For a long time it was a sleepy light-industrial area with several car dealerships and related businesses as well as the soft drinks. In more recent years, with small and micro-sized restaurants percolating up and down the street with projects like The Zipper and (nearby on Glisan) The Ocean, this area has become a culinary destination.
Pioneer Lavada Jones rendering (Brett Schulz Architect), The Zipper (Guerrilla Development)
Some emails I exchanged with people at Guerrilla confirmed that Schulz's firm is also particularly good at the unsexy but necessary series of steps that have to happen to make these sometimes unconventional projects work — and, just as importantly, to get them approved by the city despite being a stretch of what codes allow or requiring a re-interpretation.
Overcoming those kinds of hurdles was certainly part of the process for Tree Farm, one of the developer-architect team's most talked-about upcoming projects and currently under construction in the Central Eastside. It's going to have 55 fairly mature trees growing in large planters on the outside of the building.
"It's a completely unique design exercise, obviously because of the trees," Carr says. "And there are so many constraints: the Hawthorne Bridge, power lines. There’s a huge pipe that goes under the site for the stormwater management sewer pipe. That impacted our foundations. Multnomah County has jurisdiction and had a say about tree planters cantilevering over the building. And this is the only time we’ve worked with an arborist and an irrigation specialist, who helped us pick trees that would thrive in both shade and full exposure."
Renderings of the upcoming Tree Farm (Brett Schulz Architect PC)
The trees are actually strawberry trees and the architect says will aid bird habitat while perhaps offsetting a tiny amount of carbon from all the cars going by on the Hawthorne Bridge's long elevated entry ramp. But I was also interested in Carr's description of what the trees do experientially.
"This is taking that concept of having trees being a unique silhouette and having them be a unique part of the experience of the building. You’ll be able to look from inside out over the canopy below, a unique experience from the tenant side," he says. "In Portland, if you look east towards Mt. Tabor or west to the hills, you have a serrated skyline of hilltops. This is a way to make a building that’s very Portland: the importance of timber here, and the landscape. In other buildings you don’t get that serrated tree skyline."
Tree Farm is a natural successor to the Fair-Haired Dumbbell (which FFA Architecture & Interiors oversaw for Guerrilla), in that they are similarly sized and both will feature facades given over entirely to an artist-designed mural. It's also, especially with the addition of the oversized trees, another conversation piece that is likely to divide opinion. Carr is fine with that.
"Creating a building that establishes that dialogue is already a success," he explains. "Living in a dense city is about being exposed to the other, and that makes us all better people: seeing a building that you may not like, but other people do like: it opens up your mind. You can learn a lot from the debate. And it’s better than everything being a generic status quo and copying what we know is a known model and what is safe. That’s why I love talking about it. When the Dumbbell was completed I’d hear people on the street talking about it. That’s a beautiful thing. It’s people talking about their environment and not looking at their phones. I think that’s part of the whole point of living in the city."
The Dumbbell and Tree Farm, with their artist-painted facades, are also part of a larger phenomenon: the proliferation of murals since the city relaxed its code to allow them.
The new Tree Farm murals will "fit into a conversation of street art and this idea of a blank wall being an opportunity. By doing that we’re diminishing the chance of the building being tagged, because there is a certain amount of regard within the community of graffiti artists for a conditioned piece. A percent of all Guerilla projects goes to art, and in this case it’s the façade. I think it’s going to be a great play on street art that’s already all over the Central Eastside."
Han Oak (Grace Rivera for Dwell), Nomad (Dina Avila)
With and without Guerrilla Development, Brett Schulz Architect has also been responsible for a host of cool restaurant spaces. Of these, the most noteworthy may be Han Oak, not only because it and chef Peter Cho have become one of the most talked-about culinary forces in Portland but also because Han Oak is something fairly unique: a live-work restaurant. Named one of the "10 Best-Designed Places to Eat and Drink in Portland" by Dwell, It fuses residential loft within The Ocean, Schulz and Guerrilla's micro-restaurant complex from 2012. Schulz's firm has also designed eye-catching dining spaces like Nomad and the new Besaw's.
The firm has several other projects—many of them not involving Guerrilla—in the works. At SE Second and Main in the Central Eastside, the firm is renovating a former dry-dock company's warehouse into office spaces. They're doing two market-rate apartment projects in Arbor Lodge, another off N Dekum Street, and an adaptive re-use of a former pickle factory on Columbia Boulevard.
So much attention in building-industry media is given to the big new-construction projects: the corporate hotels, the class-A office towers, the big condo and apartment towers. But so often it's adaptive re-use projects and unconventional works of entrepreneurial-architectural creativity that are the most delightful. That's what this firm is all about.
Advertisements
Comments