Michelle Black and Brian Carleton (KLiK Concepts)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
For quite a while now, I've been meaning to check in with Carleton Hart Architecture, and for a variety of reasons.
I first met co-founder Brian Carleton just over 20 years ago, when I was working at the local American Institute of Architects chapter and he was the chapter's president for a year. (Architect-members rotated as chapter president for yearlong terms, really acting more like a board chair, while an executive director ran the office.) At the time, the firm Carleton had founded with architect Bill Hart in 1994 was just starting to establish itself, but if you flash-forward to today, Carleton Hart Architecture has a large and impressive portfolio of community-oriented projects. Just as importantly, the firm has retained a kind of mission and focus.
"Bill and Brian established a firm that had a really clear vision from the beginning. It was community-focused; it was about how do you use architecture in a vision-driven way, whether that’s affordable housing or commercial or community engagement," firm principal Michelle Black told the Daily Journal of Commerce's Josh Kulla in an interview last March. "That was so clear from the beginning, and we’re still in that same zone, which is a testament to what their vision was in the beginning.”
Carleton Hart is also about one year into a new era: just Carleton, no Hart. Founding partner Bill Hart retired from the firm last year, to form Hart Development LLC, a real estate development and consulting firm. The architecture profession has long lacked diversity, both culturally and in terms of gender, and Portland is less diverse than many other large cities; Hart was one of the state's unfortunately few Black architects. But as the following conversation with Carleton and principal Michelle Black indicates, Hart's influence remains.
Most of all, though, I’ve become increasingly interested in Carleton Hart’s work as affordable housing has become more and more needed. This firm, a certified B Corporation and 2030 Commitment participant, has worked with a variety of communities and stakeholders and cultures to create a host of successful affordable housing and community-oriented projects. How do they make it happen? How did they get here? And like everyone else, how are they handling these disruptive times? Our recent Zoom talk provided a few answers.
Portland Architecture: Did I see correctly that the Carleton Hart offices are in what used to be the Willamette Week offices, across the street from Central Library?
Brian Carleton: Correct.
Small world! I was a freelance movie reviewer for Willamette Week from 1999 to 2006, and my partner ran the personal-ads section for a few of those same years, so I spent a lot of time there. But you're doing this interview from your homes. How much do you use the office right now?
Michelle Black: I work from home. I mean, the office is open to staff to use. You have to be masked for governor's mandate and all that. But it’s understanding that people have different home situations, and some might benefit from getting out of the house for a little bit. So the office is technically open to our staff to use, but we're not mandating any time in there right now.
So you’re kind of maybe kind of going by feel and see what happens, and just trying to give people flexibility.
Black: Yeah. It's been hard to know how to approach all this because we've, you know, no one has any experience with anything like this. And so we really erred on the side of caution. We're one of I think many firms that are working on a hybrid back-to-work model where we do have some required in-office time. But we will offer way more flexibility and really acknowledging that each of us is different and we have different project needs at times. So there's real benefit to having those options. In surveys from staff, people both acknowledge that they wanted more flexibility in the option to work from home in some level, and then they also wanted to be in the office where everyone was there at the same time. We are a team and there's a real benefit to that cross-pollination of ideas, specifically with people that you're not seeing on a regular basis. So how do you put together a system that is going to really help balance those needs?
Woodie Guthrie Place (Josh Partee)
I did some reporting on this topic earlier this year, and what you're saying is right in line with the survey data that I read. Something like 80 to 85 percent of people did not want to go back to the office five days a week, but almost as high of a number did not necessarily want to remain working five days a week at home, either. I’d imagine that’s a conversation you’re having with office clients, too.
Black: The pandemic has been interesting because we are obviously in a very unique position of changing the way spaces work for people, and yet we still have so many questions. We have immediate needs, but what are the what are the future needs? And so [it’s] being able to walk clients through those conversations and let them just take a pause and really think through what priorities they think their projects are going to need in the future. Lots of conversations about indoor air quality, for example.
It seems like the economy is kind of booming in some measurable ways, and then things are really messed up in other ways. What's it been like for your office in terms of like the kind of work that's out there? How's business?
Carleton: Business is booming. We we've been staying busy. We are trying to hire additional staff, and a lot of that is due to the affordable housing and community work. But our non-housing team that is currently focused on county/Metro/city work, it's mostly public sector. We're getting into a little bit of commercial. They're keeping busy as well, and we're trying to hire additional staff for their teams. The work has continued to flow particular to the housing world; there's a lot of funding flowing into that area of : affordable housing.
I imagine having a mix makes it easier. What's it been like given that you have a kind of mission that's beyond just being financially successful, in wanting to focus on community-based projects? How have you been able to strike the right balance?
Carleton: My perspective is that balance has kind of found itself. A focus leads to getting to know an industry really well and long-term relationships with clients. We've been working with some for 20, 25 years now. So it kind of just starts to feed it, so that work just flows and you get to be a certain age as a firm and your reputation is out there now. We've been able to develop a similar reputation with public-sector work, but just at a smaller scale. So it literally just kind of balances itself. Some of that does have to do with, as you rightfully called out, we practice with that sense of mission. Clients are drawn to us and as importantly, staff are drawn to us. They want to come work for Carleton Hart because of what we do. Therefore, we have people who want to do that work. It allows us that capacity to do that work, and it just kind of feeds it. We like to think we're real strategic and we sit in the conference room and planned this out five years in advance. Really, what happens is the phone rings and we decide whether that's a good project for the firm or not. And it just kind of builds from there.
Learning to say no once in a while can kind of define you as much as what you say yes to.
Carleton: Yeah. And I'm learning that. I surrounded myself with really smart people who know exactly that and are working with me every day to learn how to say no.
Black: I think the unique place that Carleton Hart is in is over the lifespan of the firm, like Brian said, like, we have had so many repeat clients, and we have this reputation within specifically the affordable housing world. That is 65 percent of our portfolio and could be well over 65 percent if we would let it. And so we are in the unique position of saying no to good projects. It is hard to say no to a lot of the things that we say no to. But we are only saying yes to something that we can do at our full capacity and full engagement.
It’s an interesting journey finding the right size for your company. I was talking about this with the founders of another firm, who a few years ago they had gotten up to something like 50 employees, but they realized that kind of just weren't happy. With more projects to manage, the founders felt they were getting too far away from what they enjoyed doing. So they downsized.
Brian, could you talk about 1994 and starting the firm with Bill Hart? Where were you in your lives?
Carleton and Hart early on (Carleton Hart Architecture)
Carleton: I had actually started my own firm three years earlier. I had been a partner at the Lee Ruff Waddell, which is now LRS Architects. Bill and I had met there and worked together—he was actually on loan with us for a while from YGH—and really kind of bonded. I was trying to convince the other partners to offer him a full-time position, and he wisely decided that wasn’t the right place for them. About the time they got to the point of offering him a position, he had found the similar position over Fletcher Farr. In '91, I left soon after that started my own firm. We kept in contact, actually did some work together. He came over and helped me on a really interesting project, a mosque/Islamic center down in Southwest Portland, using vacation time to come over and help me with that. And then we also worked on Friendly House Community Center together, me as a board member and Bill as the project architect over at FFA. So we kept the relationship real close and talked about this eventuality. He left Fletcher Farr and wanted the experience of starting his own firm, so he started William Hart Architects but rented a desk from me, and spent about a year doing that. say this jokingly, but it's a story I love telling. We had an agreement where he was supposed to have access to my staff. He was building up work, but I was keeping my staff so busy that he could never get any time from them, and he finally realized he was just going to have to join me . It was something we had talked about and kind of planned for it. So then in '94, we hooked up and he joined the firm.
Did you feel like you had complementary skills? Some are good at drawing, some are good at working with clients, some are good at project management. How did your skills fit together?
Carleton: You know, that is a great question, and we got asked that a lot. And that's not how we looked at the firm. We both left our positions wanting to do a different type of architecture. We both came from firms and project types where we didn't feel we were getting that connection to clients and communities and mostly the people who were going to inhabit our buildings. Certainly, we had connection to clients, but there was always this kind of veil between us and the users of the building and the communities that these buildings would be for. And so it was really that common philosophy, about wanting to do community-based work and really connect with people, that bonded us in the first place and convinced us that we’d make good partners. It wasn't necessarily based on this very thoughtful strategic blending of different skill sets. We always practiced as two parallel partners, where we both wanted to be well-rounded architects that did a lot of everything. You know, certainly we had our different contributions. I was the writer in the group and took on a lot of proposal work. Bill was always great out in the public and would do a lot of presentations and stuff. But we both did everything and it would just support each other and work together.
Michelle, I saw on your LinkedIn page that you spent a lot of years in New York City. How did you make your way out west?
Black: I grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, a college town, and went to school there. I moved to New York upon graduation. My partner was doing his Ph.D. at Columbia, which took me out there, and I just fell in love with being in New York. And then and then, you know, life gets complicated. You're pushing a double stroller through 30 inches of snow in Brooklyn, and you think, ‘Maybe we should try something different.’ We have friends and family out here, and had been coming out here to visit for years.
I would love to hear just a little bit about what you guys are working on now or what's got you excited.
Carleton: I'll start and then Michelle will be eloquent. In one sense where we're still doing the same thing, and in other sense, it's just totally different. And that's what's exciting about the path we've taken. It's easy to say that we're still doing affordable housing or housing of all types. We’re doing shelters. We're in a transitional housing, we're into different types of intergenerational living. What's exciting is that we are constantly discovering new dimensions to that work. Currently we're doing a lot of permanently supportive housing and trauma-informed design and realizing the impact of trauma on the people we serve and the impact of being aware of trauma has on our design work. We're designing for all types of communities, whether they are culturally unique or ability-unique. We're starting to do some work with intellectually and developmentally disabled communities. There's just constantly these new dimensions being layered onto a work that keep it really exciting. We're always learning new things. So from that base of housing and community work, it just feels like we're growing. We get to work with the people we've worked with for a long time, who are also learning and excited to be trying new things and serving people in a different way. And so as a group, you know, clients, consultants, providers, housers—it's just an exciting time to be there and doing different stuff.
It seems like a term like affordable housing is a kind of broad brush and actually there's all kinds of different types of sort of sub-types within that. It seems like there's more opportunity to serve individual audiences and less one size fits all.
Carleton: I really feel like it's growing out of our equity work. I think being more aware of it, putting the work in to diversity and equity has really led to this awareness that it's not one big world out there, that there's a lot of unique individuals and unique groups that we ought to be paying attention to and celebrating those differences.
Black: As difficult as the last few years have been, I think it has given us a shared language and an understanding that these things are important, and people are more open to ]a fuller discussion of who we're designing for and making sure that this isn't just a one-size-fits-all property. We do a lot of R&D work and talking to people ahead of projects because, once they get funded like we're trying to get units online as soon as possible. There's not a lot of time to sit and rethink. So when we’re doing, say, trauma informed design, it’s really looking at how we can be providing better, more sustainable, and socially and physically healthy environments. And so it's been really rewarding.
The Madeleine, for The Madeleine Parish (Pete Eckert)
How much do broader trends in architecture or even housing specifically like prefab or mass-timber construction permeate the markets you’re working in? How much are your nonprofit and public-sector clients interested, or do budgets allow for it?
Black: Some people really are explorers, and they want to try the next big thing, and some people aren't. The hard part with public clients or affordable-housing clients is there is a lot of pressure and even part of the funding responsibility is to be creating durable, lasting environments. It can be really stressful to take a take a chance. We have done research and cost analysis for modular versus stick built for multiple projects. We have wonderful clients who are who are willing to look at different, different ways to go about stuff. We’re all trying to just find the best tool to get people housed. And so I think for the most part, we get to work with visionaries who are who are willing to explore things. But it is difficult sometimes depending on what that what that new technology is, to get the funding to also agree, I guess.
What have you got under construction or coming up?
Black: In construction right now is the Susan Emmons housing project in the Alphabet District. That's with Northwest Housing Alternatives. So that's one that's in construction right now. I mean, it's a big project. So it's going to be under construction for a little while. There's the Behavioral Health Resource Center, which is downtown on Oak Street under construction right now. We have projects in Forest Grove and Gladstone under construction. We have a project out in Ontario that's under construction. I mean, we have a lot. You talked about the balance of finding the right number of staff, and we're at 39. We're trying to stay in that sweet spot of still being very much a cohesive team and knowing each other and all that. But you know, there is some freedom that that size gives us. We have our fingers in a lot of different projects, which exciting. And again, finding it hard to turn away clients is part of it, because we have so many wonderful clients that keep coming back to us.
Your firm’s restoration of The Madeleine just won a Restore Oregon award for historic preservation. It looks incredible!
Black: Yeah, that was a really rewarding project. When we first toured that space with them, it was being used as literally storage space. They had built this other bigger sanctuary. And so it had fallen out of use and therefore fallen out of being code-compliant. How do you put in completely new systems and air conditioning into a space that never had it—and you've got no place to hide ducts, right? And so it was about trying to problem solve. And this is where my work in New York comes into play, where you get used to just having to deal with a lot of old conditions, having to put in new code-compliant things into buildings that never, ever had that. I'm so pleased that they that it turned out the way it did, but also that they just gush over it, which is just the best thing: to hear how happy they are with it, and that they get to use that wonderful space again.
The Susan Emmons multifamily housing project struck a chord with me because I find it an interesting challenge going into a historic district and doing something that borrows from historical antecedents yet strikes the right note, where it doesn't seem like caricature. I also feel like how architects approach this has evolved over time. When I first started out writing about architecture 20 years ago, there was a lot more sort of hesitance upon architects to try and work in a kind of neo-historic style. In retrospect, maybe there was like a little bit too much reticence. People like architecture that borrows from the past, and some of those old buildings in Northwest Portland are beautiful, so it’s natural to be inspired by them.
Black: I think what you're touching on is what makes architecture so hard, especially when you are an architect that wants to be respectful of context. It's easy to just go in create architecture that just sits as a sculpture, right? But that's not what we believe in at Carleton Hart. As we want to create beautiful and unique pieces of architecture, it must be responsive to the community, and some of that is not only just from an architectural context. You know, you're always approaching it from like, ‘This needs to feel like it belongs here.’ But it is a very delicate balance. We don't want it to seem like Disneyland—not that there's anything wrong with Disneyland. So how is it pulling from historic precedent and using it in a way that is modern and that is clearly not trying to be a caricature? It's tricky. You're looking at bigger ideas of form and mass and taking techniques but not replicating fully. That’s one of the starting points that that we use. Are there different, more modern materials that can we can use? You're clearly seeing a modern element. But also, what how are people going to feel about it in 20 or 50 I do think that you learn certain techniques, you apply them. If it doesn't look good, you go back and start again. Particularly when you are designing in in a place that is so beloved as the Alphabet District, you want to get it right. And so it just it takes time to get to do that.
Rendering of The Susan Emmons (Carleton Hart Architecture)
Carleton: We're applying a lot of what we learned on the Susan Emmons to a really large, affordable housing project down on the former Marylhurst campus right now and applying some of those same principles. There's a lot of pressure to fit into the campus, rightfully so. I don't see that negatively at all. But a lot of eyes on this project wanting to keep the culture of the campus, the feel of the campus, the architecture of the campus, even though there's a wide range of architecture. People have this sense of what the campus means. And so it's been really challenging designing this 100-unit, four- story building that fits in nicely to the campus.
One other past Carleton Hart project that comes to mind that I quite like is the Woody Guthrie Place. That one seemed like it had a nice materiality to it, and I liked the way it sort of seemed to float a little bit.
Carleton: That was a fun one. Rose Community Development brought the project to us. They already knew the name of it, and they wanted to honor Woody Guthrie's legacy in the neighborhood. You’ve got this inspiration there just handed to you. It was wonderful. And so we quickly picked up on the boxcar image of the rambling musician and just played with that.
I find it interesting, like working from a point of inspiration like that. There's a group of 1940s horror films I love where the producer, Val Lewton, would come up with the title first and then go to a filmmaker and say, ‘You can make any film you want, but you have to call it 'Cat People,' or 'I Walked With A Zombie.'
Black: I'm writing that down. We'll talk about these in the next interview.
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