The upcoming Northbound 30 Collaborative project (Jones Architecture)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
A few weeks ago, I received a press release about a new eight-building multifamily housing project set to break ground in Slabtown called the Northbound 30 Collaborative. Designed by Waechter Architecture and Jones Architecture, it caught my eye for two reasons, or maybe three.
One, the project's design is based on a series of easements that allow buildings to be arranged not in a row but like a checkerboard, creating numerous courtyards. That seemed uncommon and intriguing. Two, anything Waechter Architecture does is worth taking note of. But three, Jones Architecture was a firm I'd come to admire but not heard from in a couple years. Turns out they do have a lot going on: much of it a series of medium-density residential projects with a pleasing sense of proportion and craft, and much of these projects either under construction or—fingers crossed—about to be.
Two years ago when I visited the 16-acre former Conway property being redeveloped in Northwest Portland, among a series of new buildings there on a super-block site, my favorite was the Carson South. The double-sized block had been bisected by a pedestrian alley, faced by these three brick-clad, rowhouse-like buildings. They were only the foreground to the Carson Apartments, a much larger 14-story project. But Carson south was handsome and beautifully scaled.
I eventually realized that Jones Architecture founder Alan Jones (not to be confused with the local jazz drummer of the same name) had been a key designer at Holst Architecture for the past decade. He contributed to some of the other nicely scaled going up in Slabtown that Holst designed (with GBD) like 2015's LL Hawkins apartment and its predecessor near there, Sawyers Row, and was a project manager on 2016's gorgeous Olympia Place student housing project in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Carson South (Christian Columbres), Olympia Place (Christian Phillips)
Normally I don't do a lot of interviews with firms about their upcoming projects, because renderings can make even mediocre projects look good and you can't truly evaluate a building without going inside and talking to occupants. Plus I don't necessarily want to assist in PR. But I decided to reach out to Alan Jones and his firm, because once Northbound 30 caused me to take a second look, it turns out the firm has a lot of projects on the boards and under construction. 2020 is that kind of year.
When I talked with Jones and colleagues Meaghan Bullard, Jason Bolt and Sienna Shiga via Zoom recently, Jones was the only one in the firm's studio, in the Pearl District on the second floor of the Graphic Arts Building, overlooking the North Park Blocks.
"I’m here half the week, but everyone else has been working from home. It’s actually worked," Jones says. "There’s part of me that feels like we’re doing some of our best work right now."
Whether architecturally or psychologically, maybe surviving in these times is all about adapting — keeping things in proportion.
Even so, Jones was not feeling nearly as stable back in March, at the pandemic's outset. "I’ll be honest. It was very difficult to watch people leave the office. I was very emotional about not having people together working," he says. "We were not set up from a technology standpoint with the way that our Revit models and our server was working. It was not cloud-based. We had to scramble to get set up online and adjust to everyone being at home…in a week. It normally would have taken years."
"Our office had all this pinup space, all this stuff up on the wall. All of a sudden, we were forced to communicate our ideas to each other another way," adds Jason Bolt, a Wisconsin native who got his graduate architecture degree at the University of Oregon.
Alan Jones, Meaghan Bullard, Jason Bolt and Sienna Shiga (Jones Architecture)
At the same time, this notion of adaptation has a broader connotation. Jones Architecture, like nearly all firms, has "learned to practice in this way that’s super fluid," Alan Jones says. "Projects are stopping and starting all the time." He stresses that there is no hierarchy at the firm: that everyone is equal.
Despite the uncertainty, despite the stops and starts many projects have experienced, the building industry and real estate economy actually seem to be doing fairly well this year, all things considered. Jones Architecture has had a number of projects put on hold, but also a number of new projects commissioned during the pandemic, and no outright cancellations.
"I think March and April were extremely scary because of the pandemic and the unknown," Jones says. "There were a lot of sleepless nights for people. But we’ve remained busy. The pipeline got thin a couple times but we have as much work right now as we ever had, which is remarkable. It’s hard to stay what’s going to happen. I think construction financing, it will be very telling what the banks are willing to do as…there are things on hold now. But there doesn’t seem to be a lack of interest in getting projects started. We’re very optimistic, cautiously. There are people really hurting right now. It’s very real. We’re fortunate we’re able to do what we do."
Alan Jones grew up outside Ann Arbor, Michigan working in his family’s fine millwork and earned an architecture degree at the University of Michigan. He came to Portland in 2001 after stints at architecture firms in Ann Arbor and Seattle focused on residential projects. "Several of us, Meaghan [Bullard] and I and Jason [Bolt] a little bit, started through the custom residential world," Jones says. "It was a high-touch-service approach where it’s a fairly intimate relationship with your client."
"It’s something we treat as its own design problem. Each client has different needs, different goals," says Meaghan Bullard, a Yale-educated Brooklyn native who previously worked at Manhattan's Murphy Burnham & Buttrick Architects. "We take it upon ourselves to dig into that, and translate that into a successful project, whatever that means.
It's par for the course that when an architect leaves a firm, he or she inevitably takes some of the client relationships along. Alan Jones is the first to admit that Holst's work in Slabtown helped set up his new firm with projects like Carson South. But he and staff members learned how to work collaboratively as a result.
"When I decided to leave [Holst] and start Jones Architecture in 2014, Slabtown was kind of booming and the economy was fantastic," he says. "There were a lot of growing pains. How do we get set up fast enough to do this? Here we are designing two full city blocks, Carson South in Slabtown and The Union in St. Johns, these full-block projects without a lot of infrastructure set up. It set things in motion in a way where we had to be super fluid and collaborative and figure out how to get things done. The firm had to set up quickly."
Pediatric Therapy Services (David Papazian)
What I like about both projects, and other residential works by Jones Architecture including the upcoming NB30, is their sense of scale and proportion. When I ask staff about style, they say there is no Jones Architecture aesthetic fingerprint, at least not an obvious one: that they adapt to and work from site conditions and client needs. Yet I look at these and other projects like the Pediatric Therapy Services project in Gresham and see some kind of connection: simple forms, repeated use of textured or traditional materials like brick, and an easy compatibility with older buildings. I would not call these neo-traditional designs at all, yet whether it's because of materials or the more human-scaled forms or some other reason, these don't exactly feel like they belong in a category with lots of glass-and-steel contemporary buildings, although they'd fit well next door to one.
"We really wrestle and think about scale and the pedestrian realm and what buildings are like to be around," Jones explains. "The Slabtown work, Northbound 30: what’s beautiful is it’s all five story. With a 50-foot-wide building, it’s a super-elegant proportion. If you go to the elevations, you get this vertical element. It’s Copenhagen. Copenhagen is all five stories, and the buildings are broken down into livable bays. It feels really livable. Then we played with textures to break it down further."
I too have loved Copenhagen ever since I visited in 2007. Turns out Jones spent a semester there during graduate school. "It was very informative," he says. "They’re very proud of housing in Copenhagen. We spent most of the semester studying housing. I grew up wanting to design houses. I always thought it was part of what I would do. But seeing the cohousing projects in Denmark influenced a desire to do more multifamily projects."
Copenhagen also figures into an upcoming Jones Architecture house project that caught my eye: the Princeton Street Residence.
The upcoming Princeton Street Residence (Jones Architecture)
"It’s for an interior designer I met in school in Copenhagen 25 years ago," the architect explains. "There’s a little bit of a Danish farmhouse appeal here, this super-simple gable. This project in the front was a part of the original house, which we more or less tore down except for the foundation. And there’s this piece in the back. The project gets larger as it goes to the back. We’re excited to work at this scale as well."
The firm has also done two local renovations that I appreciated.
One is the Lovejoy Medical Building in Northwest Portland, a very quirky circa-1965 building by architect James Gardiner that is somehow at once ugly and very cool. It's fronted almost entirely by screens, metal in front of a glass curtain wall and breeze block in front of the fire-escape-like outdoor stairway. It's essentially very good sustainable design decades ahead of its time. And in Portland's 2020 built environment, it's utterly unique. But from the street it's about as easy to see inside as a prison. Having visited the building a couple times as a patient, however, I can tell you the rehab really gave these interiors a new lease on life.
Lovejoy Medical Building (Christian Columbres), Fisk Tire Building (Josh Partee)
The other rehab was for the circa-1924 Fisk Tire Building on NW 13th Avenue in the Pearl District, part of the 13th Avenue Historic District. Currently a Room & Board furniture store, the interior is a fusion of natural wood and exposed concrete, and feels warmer than one might expect. This collection of buildings is truly one of Portland's architectural treasures, akin in collective value to the remaining cast-iron buildings on the waterfront and the collection of midcentury-modern houses in the city's West Hills.
Overall, though, so much of the Jones Architecture portfolio seems either under construction or about to break ground. In theory, 2021 could be a great year.
"The firm has been around for seven years and I’m surprised, in some ways. I can’t believe we’ve done this much. But in other ways it’s, ‘I can’t believe it’s taken this long to get things done.’ I suspect that people probably don’t know our work that well yet. But we have a lot of work in the pipeline that we’re excited about. For one reason or another, projects have been delayed for the last two, three years. There’s several that are ready to go."
The upcoming Northbound 30 Collaborative project (Jones Architecture)
Like Northbound 30, on the site of the former Royal Oak Metalcraft near Montgomery Park. "We had a few meetings with Waechter’s office and the developer. There were all these 50x100 sites," Bolt recalls. "How do you get into these buildings? I think it was just a light-bulb moment: ‘What if we offset these buildings and create these created these courtyard spaces?’ It just snowballed into a checkerboard pattern. It took a lot of planning in terms of the building easements on property lines. Each one has an easement to allow windows looking into the other spaces. We went through numerous rounds of appeals. What it allowed the project to do was create these small footprint buildings with lots of open space and lots of corner views. It was a win all around."
"There are examples in Portland of taking advantage of an easement on someone else’s property. But I don’t think there’s an entire development put together that way," Jones adds. "We had to go through a long code process to set this all up. and It did become an exercise in thinking about…like the bay sizes, studying Portland and how the properties are divided up. East of the Mississippi, it’s modules of 16 feet, 32 feet, 64. In Portland with the 200 foot blocks, the module is more like 12 and a half feet or 25 feet. How do you break it up into the proper proportions? And with multifamily, how do you get those to connect? Units want to be a certain width. Blocks are a certain width. What’s the module?"
The upcoming Tree Three (Jones Architecture)
Another house currently under construction is called Big Tree Three: a trio of units with arboreal presence. "It’s a collaboration between a fabricator we work with on a number of projects, Robb Rathe and Steelab, which does steel and wood fabrication for clients like Nike and Adidas," explains Sienna Shiga, a Reed College and UO grad who used to work as a sommelier. "It’s his house and he wants to develop the site into a duplex with an ADU in the back. He’s incredibly hands on and collaborative. We’ve worked with him so many times as a designer. He’s going to do all of the finishes and the interior. He’s fabricating this aluminum cladding formed into this hexagonal shape. Because he has the ability to do this, it’s going to have a beautiful and unique exterior."
One thing I've noticed about Jones Architecture is that the firm seems to often return to the same neighborhood or place. That's true in Slabtown and industrial Northwest, in St. Johns, and on the Oregon Coast. Alan Jones regularly vacations in Pacific City, and approached the owners of one popular local business, Pelican Brewing, which has led to a new outpost for the brewpub in Lincoln City. The firm is also designing the Kingfisher workforce housing project in Pacific City, currently in permitting.
The upcoming Siletz Bay Pelican Brew Pub, Lincoln City (Jones Architecture)
As we wind up our Zoom call, with Alan Jones sitting in the firm's studio alone and the rest joining from their homes, he takes a final moment to emphasize that while his name may be on the door, that's not the way to think of Jones Architecture.
In addition to colleagues like Bullard, Bolt and Shiga, he says, "There’s a whole other group of people coming up behind us that’s equally committed and influential. I always want people to know. It’s not just about me. It’s not just about the four of us. It’s about the whole firm."
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