Gradient House and Studio (Jeremy Bittermann/JBSA)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Last fall the top prize at the local American Institute of Architects annual Oregon Architecture Awards, known as the Honor Award, went to a first-time winner: Linden, Brown Architecture for the Gradient House and Studio. It’s a smart, beautiful reinvention of live-work space for the post-pandemic era, as well as for Oregon’s new frontier of zoning that breaks down the tyranny of single-family houses.
For me, like many, Gradient provided an introduction to the work Linden, Brown, which is the latest in a succession of award-winning local small firms founded by architects formerly with Portland’s Allied Works (including Waechter Architecture, Lever Architecture, and Beebe Skidmore).
“The work at that place is so good because everybody who's playing a role has is would probably be a very good sole practitioner,” Linden says of Allied. “And even if they're working on the concept design or working on some small detail, everybody's got great vision. So if anybody leaves, they're already primed and have the drive to be a practitioner who can oversee an entire project, as opposed to a role player someplace else.”
Since that AIA award, and since I visited Linden and Brown at their studio in industrial Northwest Portland near the Fremont Bridge, the firm has received another honor. This month Linden, Brown Architecture was named to Architectural Record magazine’s prestigious Design Vanguard, honoring emerging practices across the nation. And besides Gradient, they have seen built striking projects like Sequitur winery, outside Newberg in rural Yamhill County, for which the firm helped save and restore a historic barn as part of a new tasting room.
Gradient House and Studio (Jeremy Bittermann/JBSA)
Linden, Brown’s L-shaped, 5,000-square-foot single-story Gradient House and Studio, located on a double-lot beside a nature preserve in North Portland’s St. Johns neighborhood and designed for the founders of a shoe company, Studio Noyes, is both residential and industrial-looking. Huge sawtooth skylights rise above a conventional pitched roof that connects two separate structures, wrapping an outdoor courtyard. Gradient’s sloping site creates a tall-ceilinged work studio in the rear of the property and a cozier neighborhood-focused residence upfront. Yet as the name suggests, it’s not a clean break, either. Workers sometimes meet on the home side and the family may hang out in the studio.
“A decade ago, live-work commercial buildings were pretty hip, but in most cases you still had a 20-foot-wide, nine-foot-ceiling, shoebox of space,” Brown says. “With Gradient, we had room to figure out what is the right way to craft this thing.” They took inspiration from the site itself. “That idea of gradient, it permeated every thought process through the project,” he adds. “The site drops ten feet from front to back. That’s one example. And the project itself is a gradient of live and work.”
With remote working seemingly here to stay, office vacancies may have ballooned downtown, but neighborhoods across the city have been invigorated, no longer emptied out of people during daytime hours. Yet how we fit commercial space into heretofore residential areas is not as easy as simply setting up desks in former bedrooms—at least not for the long haul. Gradient in that way is both unique and a template.
The firm’s founders, Brent Linden and Chris Brown, hail from different places in the American South and each worked for at least one iconic firm before coming to Portland to work for Allied Works.
Chris Brown and Brent Linden at the firm's studio (Arthur Hitchcock)
Linden is from Miami and at the beginning of his career worked in the New York office Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, leaving the city just before the September 11 terrorist attacks to go attend graduate school at Rice University in Houston, where he graduated in 2004. At Rice, Linden met Allied Works’ Brad Cloepfil, a visiting professor, who also offered him a job. Linden stayed at Allied for over 16 years, rising to the role of design director.
Brown was born and initially raised in Houston, an architect’s son. But when he was seven, Brown’s dad left the profession and bought a hardware store in a small Arkansas town called Mountain Home, in the Ozark Mountains. Later, while attending the University of Arkansas, Brown fell under the tutelage of renowned architect and professor Marlon Blackwell, including a full summer interning at Blackwell’s firm, and then, three years later, joining the firm full-time. “It just baked in all this understanding of how to look at where you are,” Brown says, in addition to what he calls “the re-imagining or revisioning of the vernacular of place.”
Brown first came to Portland to work at another acclaimed local firm, Skylab Architecture, for four years beginning in 2007. While there, he worked on an addition to the firm’s best-known project, the Hoke Residence, popularized in the Twilight movies, as well as the eye-catching Skyline Residence and the HOMB modular system. Brown joined Allied Works in 2013, and worked with Linden on projects including the Corvallis Museum in the southern Willamette Valley, the National Veterans Memorial Museum in Columbus, Sokol Blosser Winery Tasting Room in rural Yamhill County, and the U.S. Embassy in Mozambique, as well as design competitions for expansions to the Metropolitan Museum of Art expansion in New York City and the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo (now the Buffalo AKG Art Museum).
Sequitur winery (Jeremy Bittermann/JBSA)
Despite their architectural pedigree and their ability to produce bold designs, the duo’s process lacks ego. Linden and Brown are at their best collaborating and partnering with their clients to shape the architecture, be Studio Noyes’ founders for Gradient or the founders of Sequitur winery, for whom the firm designed a contemporary new tasting room in Yamhill County that renovated and expanded a historic 1935 barn. Contractors and architects said it was prohibitively expensive, but the renovation saved over $300,000 versus new construction. And, Brown adds, “The soul of that farm is intact because that barn is there.”
The Sequitur winery commission brought them together beginning in 2018, after each partner following departure from Allied Works trying his hand at being a sole practitioner. “It was a bigger project than either of us could have done by ourselves,” Linden says.
Sequitur winery (Jeremy Bittermann/JBSA)
Linden and Brown had lucky timing: By the time the pandemic arrived in 2020, they were already set up with a trio of projects, including Gradient House, another house, and Sequitur winery. “Chris and I actually ended up still working in this studio throughout most of the pandemic, because we both have the same age children,” Linden recalls. “And so we ended up as families co-watching each others’ kids. We were in our own little bubble.”
Despite having no built portfolio (unless you count their Allied Works contributions, which you very much should), they won over Sequitur with a commitment to closely oversee every step of construction. It taught them larger lessons: that the best design comes as much through attention as from talent, and from a culture where the best idea always wins.
“Most of our clients are creative people in some vein, whether they're writers or animators or shoe designers or winemakers,” Linden says. “We get excited about their ideas, and that feeds into the work; they can see their own impact, and the work gets better because of it.”
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