Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/603573
308 CULTURED useum exhibitions devoted to architects can be dicey—curators can't cart in whole buildings to show, so what are we left with? But Brad Cloepfil, the founder of Allied Works Architecture, is an outlier whose career lends itself more naturally to such things. He has roots as a conceptual artist of sorts, albeit one often working in his favorite material—concrete. Le Corbusier's phrase about a house being "a machine for living in," rings true across his oeuvre. And that means "Case Work: Studies in Form, Space & Construction by Brad Cloepfil/Allied Works Architecture," which debuts next month at the Denver Art Museum, is poised to be a window into good design. When visitors look at "Resonant Vessels" (2009)—a white cube with scooped-out, golden voids that resembles a Picasso sculpture—and then realize it's both made of reassembled pieces of a trombone and functions as a study for a huge new building, they'll start to get the gist. Cloepfil, 59, says that the show features both the "tools" and the "toolbox," and there is a cabinet-of-curiosities quality to the objects going on display. He adds, "They're more about pursuing ideas that are free from architecture. They're not representational." The architect is an Oregon native, and Allied Works maintains offices in both Portland and New York City. The Pacific Northwest has deeply imprinted Cloepfil's aesthetic and his ideals, and he notes that his parents grew up on farms there. After attending the University of Oregon, he decamped to Switzerland to work with the great Mario Botta. He admired the "pragmatism, rationalism and elegant, thoughtful pieces of architecture" all over the country. Cloepfil also earned his architecture degree from Columbia and then put in his time, as many architects do, with an early-career stint at a large firm, in his case the Los Angeles office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. He chafed at the corporate ways there ("they gave us colored pencils to compose façades"), and founded Allied Works in 1994. Right out of the gate, Cloepfil produced a structure that is closer to a Robert Smithson earthwork than a building: The Maryhill Overlook in southern Washington State, overlooking the Columbia River Gorge. Inspired by conceptual and Land Art of the '70s and '80s, it's a long, rectangular viewing platform made of concrete, with dips and perforations—some of it even suggests an abstracted Greek key motif, which reappears in his work. "It's the touchstone for everything," says Cloepfil of Overlook. "It's about framing, scaling and sightlines." To grow, an architect has to eventually ramp up his work to fit the needs of the world, and Cloepfil did that in memorable fashion in the Portland headquarters of Wieden + Kennedy, the powerhouse ad agency. Working in luminous concrete and reclaimed, rough-cut timber beams, he took a dumpy warehouse that was falling down and transformed it into a complex series of staggered spaces. "All of our projects starting with Wieden + Kennedy have had this sense of the labyrinth," he says. "I think that sense of wonder in me comes from the landscape. This idea of nothing resolving itself." A chapel-like central space, filled with soft Pacific Northwest light and created because of a client brief to bring employees together, anchors the scheme. "It's a room that moves you in some way," says Cloepfil. "I brought a Presbyterian minister through there in the beginning and he said, 'You made a church.'" The project certainly established his reputation with his favorite material. "I'm in love with concrete because it's about making," he says. "Concrete's like alchemy. Every day is a new day." Cloepfil's reputation largely rests on his cultural work, which is generally true for architects who are lucky enough to get it. His troika of art museums are instructive for their mastery of scale, often the least appreciated and understood element in good architecture. The kunsthalle-style Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2003) is a modest, flexible plan done on the relative cheap. "This is the project where I understood art space—you really try to make space that catalyzes art," he says. "It's not scaled right when it's empty. It's an instrument." He adds, "Artists love this building. There's enough architecture but not too much architecture." The architect's controversy moment came in 2008 with his tough-love retrofitting of Edward Durell Stone's "lollipop" building on New York's Columbus Circle, for the Museum of Arts and Design. The original was loved by a vocal few and baffling to many; Cloepfil, showing no fear, ripped off the façade and scooped out most of the inside. "We tried to simplify it," says Cloepfil, and his efforts were picked over. "It was so fraught—I often joke that they hired us because we were the only ones foolish enough to do it." He made the odd spaces more elegant, and nodded respectfully to Stone in a few places. For the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver—located just steps from the wildly gesturing Denver Art Museum's Frederic C. Hamilton Building by Daniel Libeskind—Cloepfil was designing a quiet space for a specific collection that can never change. The 2011 building is "in the earth and of the earth," he says of the concrete home for the Abstract Expressionist's work, which has vertical striations in its exterior and interior walls that might make you think of frosting that's been run through with a knife. But its earth-bound weight is emphatically lifted up by daylight, from roof openings concocted with the engineering firm Arup. Next year is a big one for Cloepfil, as he debuts his largest freestanding building yet, the National Music Centre in Calgary, Canada—the project for which "Resonant Vessels" was a study. It's an assemblage of nine towers, clad in a checkerboard of glazed terra cotta tiles. The village-like grouping is a departure for him, as is the presence of a few large, dramatically curving volumes. The architect is perhaps most jazzed at the way the design harkens back to Wieden + Kennedy in its labyrinth-like capacity to awe, albeit with some new formal language. Cloepfil points to one vignette of the Music Centre's rendering, where a family is seen looking out over a void, beyond which several of the building's volumes meet. "You see these structures passing each other," he says, sounding at once like a seasoned architect and a wide-eyed Oregon kid. "It's kind of unbelievable." PORTRAIT BY ADRIAN GAUT M