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?”
Proposals and meetings and rounds of ideas later, Cloepfil was, despite their interest, about to start considering giving it – the whole architecture thing -- up. And, like clockwork, Dan Wieden called. “Can you do it?” he asked. Of course Cloepfil could. And he did, and it was tremendous, a big concrete box of an open room, an adaptive reuse of an old warehouse building before “adaptive reuse” became a catch-phrase for architects from Oregon to DUMBO and back again. Wieden + Kennedy is the kind of place you see in movies that show cool places to work, all walkways and open slices and staircases made of unbelievably solid pieces of clear fir, beams taken from the original building and re-installed to make meaning.
Ten years later, Cloepfil doesn’t think we need any more buildings. “ If it was just about having physical enclosures to have stuff happen in, we could stop today,” he says. What we do need, then, is architecture. And architecture is something way beyond a building in which stuff happens.
Cloepfil’s work is all about ideas. And most of those ideas center and circle around a few large themes. Threshold. Wonder. Experience. Emotion. Time. Juxtaposition. And, on a brave day, beauty. Those moments translate through buildings from a small guesthouse for a couple of New York art collectors to the newly opened Museum of Arts and Design, Cloepfil’s firm’s Allied Works’ update of an Edward Durrell Stone building on Columbus Circle that Ada Louise Huxtable essentially condemned via lollipop name (and, once Cloepfil started unraveling the facade, New Yorkers started to say they had all fervently loved). These ideas appear in projects from a small Denver museum devoted to the paintings of the mid-century artist Clyfford Still to an art museum for the University of Michigan. And they are all, when it comes down to it, very very brave.
One commonality that runs through all of these projects is that they are all, inherently, buildings for art. Museum architecture has, since the tremendous introduction of Bilbao (and the effect that followed) and the slow-rise-to-sudden-boom of thoughtful architects like Renzo Piano -- the go-to guy for careful and light-filled and beautiful boxes -- and Tadao Ando, been on the upswing. When Allied Works got the commission to do the Museum of Arts and Design, Brad Cloepfil was an insider’s favorite; now, he’s brought himself up to the A List, and, for museums, to the very top.
Cloepfil describes his work as a conversation. Each building is another quote, another line of dialogue. “And what’s exciting,” he says about working on projects that focus so much on art, “is that the conversation is taken further.” Houses, like his Dutchess county one, can be closed loops of meaning. That tiny jewel of a conversation about landscape, enclosure, delineation, inside, and outside (and those are just to start), doesn’t need the art that’s inside it to make sense, and to say something about architecture and its multiple functions. The steel frame says that architecture is a drawing in a landscape, a figure in a ground. The enclosed panels say that architecture is a shelter in a field, a space of protection. The art is like an extra footnote, or illustration, or marginalia: something that can itself be read, and that adds something, but an addition that isn’t necessary.
The Museum of Arts and Design is the other side of that coin, a building that’s so contextual and so rooted in conversations outside of itself that it is for a second remarkable that it was built by the same architect who designed the tightly consistent Clyfford Still. “It was really about keeping the bones and the memory, but about transforming it,” Holly Hotchner, director of MAD and Cloepfil’s client, says. “I think it’s just an amazing idea.”
That tension between responding to 2 Columbus Circle’s long-standing history and making it do something new is expressed in Cloepfil’s unraveling of the exterior of the building, once blocky and impenetrable, now pierced by slices of glass, the windows’ outlines marking galleries and visual entry points to this newly exposed museum. It also operates as a doubled feedback loop with its own history. Standing on the 9th floor gallery, looking out over Columbus Circle and SOM’s Time Warner Center, itself curved in response to the shape of the circle, it’s easy to feel yourself as part of one big sweeping loop of building and design, and hard to remember that 2 Columbus Circle was here before Skidmore came along. “Is it an open or closed building?” Cloepfil asks, expressing this architectural world of juxtaposition and threshold he talks about. “How transparent can it be, as a concrete box?”
Those questions Cloepfil is raising aren’t meant solely as intellectual exercises, as only for the architecture critics of the world who will come to the Museum of Arts and Design flush with the knowledge of the trials – literally – the building went through to get fnished, and of the historical importance -- whatever they might think of its aesthetics -- of Stone’s original. Those questions are, to him, about that moment “where you step through a door and your heart races.” That ineffable experience is, to Cloepfil, what it’s really all about. “It happens in poetry, it happens in movies, and it’s not a formal technique,” he says. “It’s just a pure experiential thing where someone’s taking you somewhere, and then you pause for just one second.”
Translating that into buildings isn’t something that takes one day or a really hard night at the office. It’s something that seeps through everything Cloepfil does with Allied Works. The architect draws constantly, using the practice as a kind of ritual, and thinks about all these big ideas while he does. At this point, he is also deft enough to be able to start thinking about all the practical issues – program, client, budget, site, context – in the back of his mind while he’s thinking about resolution and ambiguity and non-symmetry in the front. “You learn from the buildings,” he says. “And either you see something new in the architecture, or you see yourself new, in relation to the architecture.”
It’s a viewpoint that in these post-post-historical and definitely sensationalistic – Bird’s Nest, anyone? -- times can seem at blank odds with what is often seen as the more enlightened view of architecture. Where is the heavy theory? Where is the impenetrable description? Where are the words that just don’t make sense, jumbled together to make anyone visiting the building sure that, somehow, there’s something meaningful going on even if they can’t quite get it? That’s for the others, Cloepfil says. “For the last ten or fifteen years I saw architecture so desperately trying to find its voice, swinging from neo-historicism to complete sensationalism, believing in all the ghosts that would save it,” he explains. “Let’s just do what architecture does.”
