Published December 2008
The way Brad Cloepfil tells it, when he and Terence Riley -- former architecture and design curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and current director of the Miami Art Museum -- met, Riley gave Cloepfil a word of advice. This aw-shucks thing? Riley, all smooth edges and polished words said to the blond and blue-eyed Cloepfil, an Oregonian who would very clearly never truly leave his green and chilled-out state. It wouldn’t last.
Aw-shucks might have been one way of describing Cloepfil’s rejection of the usual tropes of architectural discussion, in which the questions asked and answers given rarely make any sense whatsoever, in which architects sketch wordlessly to music by way of explaining their bridges and others play a convoluted game of “Who’s on First?” with anyone asking for a concrete answer. Complete dedication to the actual practice of architecture itself might have been another.
Cloepfil tells the story on a Monday afternoon at his Morrison Street office in Portland, a city so beloved by Americans interested in urban planning – not only for its completely forward-thinking urbanism, one of controlled sprawl and appreciation for civilized togetherness, but for its trees and hills and grassy greens and coffee. It’s easy to see why, even though he’s made it in New York, he calls this Oregon city home.
The narrative is the stuff of story. Ten years ago, Brad Cloepfil was a forty-year-old architect with two kids and just as many employees. He’d done a few projects here and there, the best one so far a bar called Saucebox. That’s where the Wieden + Kennedy kids went to drink after they were done for the day with their ads for Nike and Miller High Life, and it’s where, one day, after rounds and rounds of meetings with architects who weren’t quite cutting it, one of them looked around and said “Hey, who did this place?”
