So Monday night I was jammed against a wall at Jimmy Mak’s, scribbling down words of wisdom from Portland’s reigning creative economy king, architect Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works. I got there a little late: Cloepfil had already been introduced by Randy Gragg, editor of Portland Spaces magazine, the sponsoring organization, and had begun a preparatory slide show of his recent work, most notably his remake of the Museum of Arts and Design at 2 Columbus Circle in New York. And the room was completely filled; I was lucky to get my little piece of wall. But even in my scrunched state, I found it difficult to resist Cloepfil. He’s clear-headed, speaks directly, has a dry sense of humor, doesn’t conceal his real feelings (maybe the martinis had something to do with that) and most important, has an obvious passion for Portland, what it is and what it could become.
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He was also comfortable with Gragg’s moderation, maybe because Gragg was a Cloepfil supporter during his years of writing architecture criticism for The Oregonian (full disclosure: where I edited him for several years). It’s hard to get the gist of 90 minutes of talk, so I’ll resort to picking out the most provocative quotes, roughly in the order in which they occurred Monday night.
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“Context isn’t about replicating style.” 
Cloepfil is talking about an early Allied Works building, a glassy, modern building in Northwest Portland which was criticized because it didn’t reflect the Victorian context of the neighborhood. Cloepfil argues that the building’s scale and detailing do in fact mirror the neighborhood. “I said I wanted to put a 20th century building in Northwest before the 20th century ended.” Then he argues for a broader discussion of how and why we save buildings (and presumably styles), adding “Be responsible to your moment in history.” 

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“Can we aspire to something more interesting?” 
The high, building-by-building quality of the Pearl, and Portland buildings in general, was on Cloepfil’s mind; he compared the Pearl favorably to new buildings on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. But our risk-averse nature was, too. This comment comes in response to a question about what should be done about the Post Office site at the end of the North Park Blocks, and he suggests some different approaches to the area – changing the grid, the block size and the sizes of parks. But in general, he says Portland should be trying to do more than simply continue its high-quality tradition. “Let’s just excel!” 
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“That building should be saved. It’s insane if it’s not saved.” 
Gragg showed a slide of Memorial Coliseum, maybe the city’s best modernist building, which he has championed in the past. Both Gragg and Cloepfil fear for the building’s future. “It’s a beautiful glass pavilion,” Cloepfil says, and then decries the idea that we think of stadiums as disposable objects, an idea he expanded later. As I walk across the Broadway Bridge, I can see the stadium bowl inside the coliseum cube, and it’s pretty amazing, far more so than the Rose Garden next door. (Gragg was wrong about the curtains being jammed in the closed position, but he was a focused and relaxed interlocutor, so we forgive him!) 
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“I can’t criticize children, but I am criticizing children.” 
From here on out, Cloepfil’s discussion of the city get progressively looser. He is talking about Jamison Square in the Pearl District – the slide shows a bunch of kids running around in the water feature. “I’m discouraged that it has to be an amusement park,” he says, and doesn’t really serve the neighborhood by providing a more open “urban framework.” 
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“I have no fuckin’ idea what that thing.¤.¤. Our Everglades history?” 
Uh yeah. I hear the F-bomb in connection with the Herbert Dreiseitl park a few blocks up from Jamison Square! “We lost an understanding of the civic,” he says, and again calls for spaces more open for use and interpretation by visitors, instead of having their experience provided for them. Me? I like that the swampy history of Portland underlying downtown has been brought to the surface and even enjoy sitting in this park from time to time. But I also love “our Everglades history”! That’s good.
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“Build something!” 
More park slagging, this time Tom McCall Waterfront Park, which Cloepfil thinks separates the city from the river rather than linking it. And here I’m right with him. The solution? Build on the river somehow. And Cloepfil makes some news along these lines: He’s been talking with Commissioner and possibly soon-to-be-Mayor Sam Adams about converting the natural amphitheater south of the Hawthorne Bridge into a real amphitheater for concerts, like Millennium Park in Chicago. Good idea!
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“We need to stop patting ourselves on the back and repeating ourselves.” 
We all know what he’s talking about by this time — choosing the safe and the solid over the risky and possibly excellent.
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They are selling these as green products, “but buildings shouldn’t be products.” 
I’m not confident about the first part of the quote. (My feet are killing me by this time.) He’s talking about the LEED environmental ratings that our condo towers boast about, and his point is a great one: If you think of buildings as disposable then you aren’t “green” no matter how much energy you think you are saving with your various energy- and water-saving systems. Because the building is all going to end up in a landfill someday relatively soon. Cloepfil talked in terms of a 500-year time horizon for buildings, meaning that they had to be adaptable for other purposes to stay useful. He doesn’t think our condo towers, specifically the ones in the South Waterfront District, are. 
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“When you aspire, you raise the money; when you don’t, you raise what you expect.” 
Cloepfil is talking about getting money for museums beyond their original budget. “If your projects are serving something you can share and everyone can see the benefit, then people will do it.” But it also connects with his belief in excellence. Later on, he praises Pacific Northwest College of Art and its president, Tom Manley, with whom he’s working on the 511 Broadway building expansion of PNCA. He predicts success for the college and then suggests that other Portland cultural institutions take a lesson: “Rethink your mission.” And by that I think he meant: be thoughtful, think about your users and the experience you are giving them, keep those experiences open-ended and interactive, respect your historical moment, think about the long-term consequences of what you are doing, use a lot of natural light. Well, maybe not that last one, but the rest are immediately applicable from Cloepfil’s architectural practice. And it’s darn good advice.
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