Wieden + Kennedy Agency World Headquarters (Nicolai Kruger Studio)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
In a few months, Portland's most acclaimed work of 21st century architecture will celebrate its 20th anniversary. That would be the Wieden + Kennedy Agency World Headquarters, designed by Allied Works. From a 1908 warehouse first built for the Fuller Paint Company and long serving as a cold-storage warehouse with its windows and doors bricked over, architect Brad Cloepfil and his firm created something wondrous.
Recently, as part of an interview for my podcast, In Search of Portland, I talked with Cloepfil about the W+K building and how it helped launch the firm, which has gone on to design a host of acclaimed buildings around the country including the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, the Museum of Art and Design in New York, and the National Music Centre of Canada in Calgary. You can listen to the whole episode, which includes an additional interview with Wieden + Kennedy veteran Danny Sheniak, here or here. But below is an abridged transcript of the conversation with Cloepfil.
Portland Architecture: I admire how the W+K building keeps a low profile on the outside—the exterior of the 1908 warehouse is kept pretty much intact—before this atrium opens up to you inside. It reminds me of something I've heard you talk about before that I'd like to ask you about again: the influence of Oregon’s landscape. Here we learn to be reverential towards natural wonders first. Do you still think that's the case?
Growing up in Oregon when I did, one could say I think without being too harsh that it’s not a place where buildings have tremendous presence. The presence comes from other forces and other things. And so I think just as a kid growing up, or as any layperson, the first places that moved you were probably landscape. I remember in high school, I had a Triumph TR-4. I would drive from Carlton over the Coast Range down the Nestucca River, just to get away. That was my sort of solitude, pilgrimage. And I’ve had various ones over the years. I’m going to the Strawberry Mountains tomorrow. But I think it’s only because you are drawn to what moves you, and the first thing that really moved me was landscape.
But then you ultimately came to be moved by not only great architecture but especially visual art, as well, which probably informs Allied's designing several art museums.
I’ve never been a real student of architecture, actually. Never been necessarily even a follower of architecture. But I am drawn to beautiful places, powerful places. When I went to Europe for the first time—what was I, a junior in college?—I actually was able walk into rooms that moved me for a first time: Gothic cathedrals, Roman ruins, medieval cities. So that sense of landscape, awe and wonder that’s here was translated to buildings. And it all kind of came together: the pursuit came together.
Brad Cloepfil (Allied Works)
What about the early days of Allied Works? You’re full of ideas but maybe having to do kitchens and bathrooms at first. I think of the Saucebox restaurant and bar on Broadway as a milestone. How do you reflect on those early days? Somebody like Bruce Carey had to take a chance on you, right?
I love Bruce but I’m not giving him that much credit. In Saucebox he asked me to remodel the bathrooms and bring them up to handicap code. That’s what I was hired for. And I convinced him that he actually needed to remodel the whole restaurant. I mean, architecture is a funny business. It’s really a vocational trade. I think a lot of people go into architecture just for the joy of crafting things. So you do a kitchen remodel or a bathroom remodel, but there’s still an intense gratification of just making something better, you know, and just doing it really well and making it viscerally beautiful. No one goes into architecture without that love of just…that kind of banal joy of just making something better like that.
But it was really when I got the Wieden + Kennedy. That was the first patronage project, where the door to ideas was just wide open, and all I had to do was walk through.
W+K Agency World Headquarters (Allied Works)
What is the talent you have in, say, an interview process? You have to be a charmer or at least a good communicator to convince the client. You had to kind of charm Dan Wieden and others, and make them believe. You have to sell them on your ideas. The St. Louis Contemporary people said you were very good at that, and in the interview you just started drawing. What was the W+K interview process like?
I don’t think I’m a very good salesperson, to tell you the truth. I mean, I would have a much bigger office if I was. And I compete against some people who are really masterful, so I know what the masters’ sales look like, but I won’t name names.
Maybe ‘sell’ is the wrong word. Persuasion, let’s say, or just the art of sharing your vision.
Yes. My passion is ideas, so if I have some insight about the nature of the problem or the possibilities of something, then I get excited. And when I get excited, it’s like anything else: you can be compelling. You have to be interested and excited: you have to have something to day.
And did you have a firm idea going into that W+K interview of what you felt like the building wanted?
We didn’t even have a building. I didn’t know anything. They interviewed me three times. All I knew was they were in eight different buildings downtown and they wanted to be in one building. We didn’t know what building or where, or anything else. Three interviews, and I think the one that really maybe convinced them—and John was in this interview as well—is I had a book on Donald Judd’s studio in Marfa, and I basically or literally just passed the book around and said, ‘Don’t we all just want to work in that space?’ Right? Which is true. And I think the fact that I wasn’t talking about office space or anything but just a kind of beautiful place to work in, with amazing space and amazing light, I think that got to them. Because architecture is such a jargon-filled field, and especially workspace: oh my God.
A wood model and the completed W+K (Allied Works)
So what about looking at this 1908 cold storage warehouse and how you might transform it?
I kind of discovered it, I guess. I was driving by and they were just starting to tear the…the openings were all bricked in because it was a cold storage building and they were just starting to tear those open. I thought, ‘Maybe we could fit in there.’ That was after we had done some initial programming to understand how big they needed to be, because they had no idea how big a space they were looking for. They had just hired an architect. Some I reached out to them, found out probably through realtors, whatever. I showed it to Dan. I remember we were walking through and he literally said, ‘There’s no way in hell we’re moving into this building.’ That’s a quote. ‘Are you crazy?’ And on and on. I said, ‘Just let me show you what’s possible.’
Obviously the atrium is the centerpiece, and it’s easy to think that design of it just fell into place. But I remember your first employees at Allied, Chris Bixby and John Weil, telling me the design went through different iterations and there was more than one concept.
I sort of saw the building as a piece of clay that we could carve up and perforate and puncture. And so we looked at it that way. My charcoal sketches were that way. We did models of the whole building by cutting up blocks of individual offices and conference rooms and stacking them up to equal the massing and show the kind of transparencies and light wells and openings. We must have studied that building a hundred different ways, to tell you the truth. Great fun, you know? Really, really fun. So we reduced it two or three different examples and Dan chose the one [with the atrium]. I drew the atrium as the most obvious one. It’s the one I did not want—adamantly did not want. But Dan chose it because he wanted everybody to be in one room. He wanted everybody to be in that one space together. That was his desire.
Massing study and wood model of W+K (Allied Works)
What design did you want him to choose?
You’d have to look at the drawings, but it had a kind of pinwheel of openings that interlocked. It was more spatially complex, and probably more spatially interesting, but it wouldn’t have served them at all. Dan did this two or three times in the process, where he was maddeningly right: where I was adamantly disagreeing with him and he ended up being right. But once we got into it, we saw the potential of that single room, and it was pretty exciting.
What makes the right kind of client? You want freedom from constraints and criticism, but sometimes that push-back makes the work better.
I think with public arts—film, architecture, whatever else—that rub, the rub of dialogue, the wearing down of forces if you will, is required to really offer something to the public that’s engaging. It’s not like making art. Making art is an individual act. It really is just for the artist. If offers us insights, we consider it to be better and good and profound. But film, theater, certainly architecture requires, I think, that process of kind of grinding away. And if it doesn’t happen with the clients we do it internally.
Interior of W+K (Allied Works)
What are people responding to in the W+K building design? It’s more than just an atrium with light and volume. I’ve actually called it a secular cathedral. How would you describe the impact it has?
It’s so interesting you say that, because one of the high points when the building was done was when I was walking through the building with a Presbyterian minister. He said, "You made a church." It was one of the greatest compliments. I think back to the landscape of my youth, back the cathedrals of my college days: I think the pursuit of the ineffable…I think in a way all my spaces aspire to be spiritual space. Because I think we call it that because they are spaces that move you, that have a sense of wonder, that can’t be summarized in an image or in a sentence. There’s a quality that you just can’t quite describe. And we don’t know that when we’re designing it. We’re aspiring to that. We hope it will have those layers of perception and meaning experience and the kind of richness over time—all of that—that you really have no idea until it’s done. I mean it’s a simple concrete box inserted in a block. But there’s something about it that is more than that, more than the sum of its parts. That’s what you hope.
It’s been nearly 20 years since W+K...
Wow.
...and Allied has designed a lot of big landmark projects in that time. Did W+K set you up for that? Would the Brad just off W+K thought of where you are now?
No, it’s incomprehensible, actually. We were just taking about that with the addition to Providence Park. I had no idea I’d be here today, absolutely no idea. Dan giving me that opportunity, when I said yes when I had two employees, John and Chris, it really set everything in motion. When the people from the St. Louis Contemporary came to Portland and walked the building, the building wasn’t even done yet. But I walked them through that space, and the building kind of closed the deal. And it still has that impact on clients. It doesn’t matter if they’re asking for a museum or an office. It’s just the quality of that space that is so moving.
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