Namaste ADU (Carlos Rafael)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
They just wanted to design something.
As I began a recent conversation with the quartet behind Propel Studio—the Portland architecture firm that first made its name with a succession of accessory dwelling units and has since graduated to a broader portfolio including single and multi-family housing, commercial projects, even art installations—they all pointed to the firm's origin as being a chance to finally do what they loved and were trained for. But ultimately this firm is not strictly about brick-and-mortar architecture at all. As much as designing, I think they wanted to form the community ties and relationships that enable design commissions.
Even so, maybe it's the longtime freelancer in me, or the old punk fan, but I've always appreciated those who want to start their own band.
It's not to say Lucas Gray, Tuan Vu, Nick Mira and Sam Sudy hadn't been working in the architectural profession. Before the first three form Propel in 2013 (Sudy joined two years later), Gray spent time at Opsis Architecture while Mira and Vu both were employed at SERA Architects. Nor do they speak ill of those firms at all. Quite the contrary: both firms gave these young architects gainful employment and valuable experience on a host of mid to large-scale projects in the wake of the Great Recession when a lot of their young colleagues had been or were being laid off. In the case of Vu, a Vietnamese immigrant who met Gray while studying at the University of Oregon, being on staff also gave him a much-needed sponsor for his H1V visa. But eventually, these designers wanted to do more.
Top: Nick Mira, Tuan Vu; bottom: Sam Sudy, Lucas Gray (Propel Studio)
"By the time we started this firm, I was 11 years in [to the architecture profession] and I still hadn't ever really designed anything," Mira says.
Gray and Vu echo that sentiment. "I was a little luckier," Gray says. "When I worked at Opsis, it was maybe more design-focused than these two. But I was still Revit’ing the partners’ sketches. There’s only so much you can do of that."
"You're a screw in the machine and doing the same thing over and over again," adds Vu. "You don’t have the opportunity to exercise your creativity or even understand the nature of collaboration. I think that’s how the idea came about to do something else."
Propel Studio didn't take any clients from its founders' former firms. Instead, they got their start in part by following a new wave of ADU construction. But even that they had to graduate to. "A guy in my neighborhood wanted to renovate his driveway into a patio," Gray remembers. "Then another neighbor of his wanted to do the same thing, and then a different neighbor wanted to do an ADU. That kind of snowballed. Someone saw that project and it turned into two and five and 10. We’ve probably done 60 ADUs now."
The ADUs by Propel that I've visited, like one known as the Wedge in Southeast, which was previously part of the Portland Modern Home Tour, and the Namaste, also in Southeast, are handsome. But more than that, they do well the most important design task for such a unit: they make smart, economic use of space. I also have enjoyed additions to existing homes such as the firm's recent Poolhouse Home Addition.
Poolhouse Home Addition (Carlos Rafael)
Propel has also made working with nonprofit organizations and community groups a priority. A good example is the Lents Story Yard, which turned a vacant Prosper Portland-owned lot in the outer Southeast neighborhood of Lents into a combination park and photography installation highlighting local business owners.
"The challenge here was it had to be somewhat temporary, because at some point they want to develop the site," Gray explains. "It needed to be durable on a small budget, something that wouldn’t get scratched up or tagged. But it never did get tagged. They've changed the photography but it’s still there. It was supposed to be a one or two-year thing, but now it’s six years."
Lents Story Yard (Propel Studio)
The firm has just seen completed its first single-family home completed. Known as the Sheltered Nook House, the three-bedroom, 2,200-square-foot home is tucked onto a hillside in the hills of Northwest Portland, near Cornelius Pass Road and within a stone's throw of Sauvie Island. With its large roof overhangs and floor-to-ceiling glass, the home recalls the classic Northwest Modern style house made famous in the mid-20th century. Yet with its shou sugi ban charred-wood siding and sustainable credentials, it also feels contemporary.
"We carved into the hill to bring the house down into the landscape so it was more about blending in, with this terraced retaining wall that created a protected outdoor courtyard. All the rooms have views into the forest, but access into this courtyard space behind." There are two wings to the house, one of which can act as a separate apartment or short-term rental space. The overhanging roof extends to cover a patio in back. All of the bedrooms rooms have sliding glass doors that open onto the back courtyard. The sloping twin roof lines in different directions break up the mass while collecting rainwater into a flow-through planter. Because the house is L-shaped, "you never see the whole thing at once," Gray explains. Yet the pattern of the tall, thin windows is also related to a curated look out at the landscape. "It’s framing trees in different views as you go around the house," he adds. "You don’t have a horizon line like a beach house so it’s emphasizing the verticality."
Sheltered Nook House (Propel Studio)
The quartet believe that the economizing of space they learned working on so many ADUs has helped them make create more efficient layouts in larger projects. "I think our designs are inherently more efficient," Sudy says. Adds Gray:"They come to us and say, 'We want a 3,000 square foot house.' We say, no what you want is a great house.' Before we talk about numbers, a house without 1,000 square feet of hallways can be much more efficient."
Today Propel is starting to design multifamily projects as well, such as The Folds Townhouses, planned for a site on North Williams Avenue. "A lot of this builds off the foundation of the ADUs too," Gray says. "We learned how to make nice 600 to 800-square-foot units and we’re applying that at larger scales. Multifamily housing is a lot of ADUs stacked on top of teach other. The idea here was to densify an R-1 [zoned] site, where we fit seven units on one 150x100-foot lot. Each is 650 square feet. The idea was how do we create density in a sensitive way?" At the same time, because North Williams is still a mix of commercial and residential, the design actually adds a storefront to the street-facing edge of the building.
The Folds Townhouses (Propel Studio)
"I think what makes Propel a bit unique is a lot of the other firms love pigeonholing themselves into a certain type of architecture. Each of these gentlemen has very different aspirations. Nick loves multifamily housing and the complexity of bigger projects. I see Lucas as the person who loves the one off art installations or the smaller community projects. Tuan, you’re in the middle. We’re excited about a bunch of different types of architecture. We’ve done ADUs and are transitioning into multifamily housing, but we don’t want to move away from what we started with."
Like those first commissions that came from Gray's neighbors, one of Propel's recent commercial projects, a renovation of Alberta Cooperative Grocery, similarly came from his daily life. "I shop at the Alberta Co-op a lot, and they talked for a while about how to liven up their space and attract more people to know it’s there," he explains. "There were two things we tried to do. One was to increase transparency. There had been display cases and signs against the windows. And then within the space, circulation around the aisles was clashing and creating a bottleneck with people in line at the cash registers. We needed to improve the flow."
Alberta Cooperative Grocery (Josh Partee)
"Before they had three or four cash registers vertically. We created this register island that improves flow around it. There could be one single line and you go to which register is open. It’s really clear where you check out. The people working have views in all directions. We were limited by a column we couldn’t move at the pinch point, but we tried to bend the registers around that and open up the space. We designed some custom shelving to go up against the windows to keep it light and transparent. The island is just a quartz countertop with custom white oak tiles. The idea was to create something tactile and expressive. We wanted to show something hand-made here in Portland."
Another similarly small-scale retail project for a community-oriented client is the unbuilt Diaspora Cafe, which just finished schematic design and also has a community component. It's set to occupy a corner retail space at the Central City Concern-operated new Blackburn Center on East Burnside and 122nd. "The owner of the café is an immigrant from Burma," Vu explains. "He’s been working for a few local cafés in town and running his own business for a year or two with his partner. Their business model is using the café as a hub for immigrants and refugees to be trained and to feel welcome. There’s also a classroom component where the owners want to be able to teach English to immigrants during off-hours. We’ve been working with the owners, but also with CCC, who owns the building."
"They’re on this prominent corner, and the MAX stop is right there," Sudy adds, "so they’re going to get a lot of visibility. There’s not a lot of good cafes there right now. It’s a space that can be a huge asset to this neighborhood."
"It’s got the most diverse population in Portland," Vu says of the neighborhood. "It can be a hub, not only to hang out but to be educated and find possibilities."
One of Propel's most interesting design efforts is not a building per se, but a series of workshops the firm co-led in Japan. I could tell as we talked that it meant a lot to them too, because this seemed to be the point in the conversation when everyone was at their most eager: as if something about the cross-cultural engagement was particularly fulfilling. I think this says something about Propel Studio: they're brick-and-mortar designers, and I wouldn't want to short-change that talent. But they're really using architecture to build community.
We Build Green Cities initiative, Aridagawa, Japan (Propel Studio)
As part of Prosper Portland’s We Build Green Cities initiative, the designers traveled to the town of Aridagawa, Japan to lead a community design process, joined by Prosper Portland staffers and landscape architecture firm Place. "We Build Green Cities works with Portland firms to make international business opportunities," Mira explains. "We reached out to them expressing our interest as a young firm. We didn’t hear anything for a year or two after. But we got on some list and they called us about a specific project: to go to this small town in Japan and help facilitate community design conversations with the government and business owners and the townspeople."
In the workshops, "the townspeople would talk about the strengths and weakness of the town and what could make it a better place to live. Based on that, we did a series of design charrettes showing what that could look like physically," Gray explains. "The idea was to focus on a recently decommissioned school building. It was an asset no one was doing anything with. The city donated that to the townspeople and they could come up with ideas on how to use it. We weren’t there to impose design ideas but show them ways of approaching the problem. Japan is usually a top-down society. This is an alternative to that."
"Not only is it top down, but they don’t have a lot of gender equality," Sudy says. "By engaging the community, it was trying to help the women of that community to speak up. A lot of women were tending to leave for Tokyo. Engaging a lot of the female neighbors was crucial."
The team created a role-playing exercise to help people get beyond their usual comfort zones. "We assigned to people different identities. To the wealthiest businessman in town, we said, 'You are a young mother."
"It’s getting people to think outside of themselves," Sudy adds.
Besides assigning charrette participants temporary new identities, the Propel designers also asked them to act conceptually. "We went around the table and said, 'Now you draw,'" Mira recalls. It was a form of the Golden Rule, after all: the people at Propel had waited years for their own chance to design from ground up. "I think we and Place were able todevelop a format that broke through the shyness and pretty quickly became a fun cultural exchange. We had smaller groups and everybody presented their ideas to the big group. It turned out there were a lot of common ideas. We just had to think about what to focus on and prioritize. But I think the most valuable thing we did was give them a voice. Japanese design is beautiful. We’re not there teaching them to design nice thing. We were there to help them think about the process."
I like the look of a lot of Propel Studio projects, but I think for this firm, process is key: engaging people in their own back yard or a world away, and seeing where it leads.
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