Brad Cloepfil

Brad Cloepfil
Born	1957 Portland, Oregon
Occupation	Architect
Awards	Progressive architecture award
Buildings	Seattle Art Museum expansion, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2 Columbus Circle redesign

Brad Cloepfil (born 1957) is an American architect and principal of Allied Works Architecture of Portland, Oregon. Cloepfil's architectural style can be classified as part of the classic modernist revival movement. His first major project which provided a spark for his later projects was an adaptive reuse of a Portland warehouse for the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy. His more high-profile work include the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and the controversial redesign of 2 Columbus Circle.

Early career and influences

Brad Cloepfil was born and raised in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon and attended the University of Oregon. After receiving his bachelors of architecture in 1980, he went to Switzerland to work with Mario Botta for two years. He then studied at Columbia University and received his masters of architecture in 1985. He founded Allied Works Architecture in 1994.

At the University of Oregon, he had worked under a professor that had worked with Louis Kahn. Cloepfil became entranced by his work.

During his time in Switzerland, he observed the divergence in architectural styles between the United States and other locations where modernism was evolving such as Europe and Japan. Cloepfil termed the American postmodernism as a "diversional aberration", driven by commercialism rather than architecture.

Despite the influences of architectural philosophy from architects like Mario Botta and Louis Kahn, Cloepfil credits the physical and spatial qualities of the Oregon landscape as his largest influence. He also believes the most evocative architecture in the Pacific Northwest are not the buildings, but the unrestricted and pure forms of the rural landscape such as the dam system on the Columbia River, the silos in Eastern Oregon, and the old log flumes.

Career at Allied Works

One of his earliest projects at Allied Works was "Strings" and was allowed to build the Maryhill Interpretive Outlook. Though it was a major notch in his young career, it was a piece that was more sculptural than architectural. It was a very conceptual piece and the crisp geometrical edges have not weathered well. Cloepfil admits that it should be taken down.

His first major commission for the Wieden+Kennedy headquarters was granted to him after the co-founder Dan Wieden sought out the designer of a local Portland bar called the Saucebox, which was one of Cloepfil's early tight-budget projects. The headquarters was an adaptive reuse of a dilapidated storage building. Wieden had major doubts of ever moving in there, but Cloepfil convinced him with his ideas. He turned the dark warehouse into a light-filled, open structure with cold concrete juxtaposed against warm wood. This project earned him several other projects from Dan Wieden and would prove to be instrumental in further commissions.

Contemporary Art Museum in Midtown St Louis

Cloepfil's firm was selected in a 1999 design competition for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis over world-renown architects such as Peter Zumthor, Herzog & de Meuron, and Rem Koolhaas. The museum was sited next to an existing Tadao Ando building for the Pulitzer Foundation and completed in 2003. The program of the museum was rather ambiguous since although the director has an idea of what kind of art it will display, it does not own a collection. Clopefil responded by creating spaces as ambiguous as possible which he intends the artists to inspire upon and complete with their own works.

Seattle Art Museum expansion

When the Seattle Art Museum expansion committee was seeking an architect, it was the chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern art in New York, Terry Riley that suggested they consider Brad Cloepfil based on the work done on Wieden+Kennedy. In 2002, the Seattle Art Museum decided on Allied Works for the expansion project, which more than doubled the museum's space, accommodated Robert Venturi's original design in 1991, and also included offices for Washington Mutual until the museum expands again. Allied Works was selected over other finalists Polshek Partnership and Cooper, Robertson & Partners.

Cloepfil has also been commissioned to design the Clyfford Still Museum, which will sit adjacent and in contrast to Daniel Libeskind's design of the Denver Art Museum. He says that his goal is to provide the visitors an intimate experience with the artist and that the contrast of architectural styles between him and Libeskind's will create an interesting dynamic. The museum is set to open in 2010.

Controversial Redesign of 2 Columbus Circle

In a project that has faced much controversy, Cloepfil won the redesign of 2 Columbus Circle for the Museum of Arts & Design over other architects such as Zaha Hadid, Toshiko Mori Architects, and Smith-Miller & Hawkinson Architects. Interest in landmarking this building began in 1996, soon after the building turned thirty years old and became eligible for landmark designation. In this year, Robert A. M. Stern included it in his article " A Preservationist's List of 35 Modern Landmarks-in-Waiting" written for the New York Times. [1] [2]

Proposed changes to the building touched off a preservation debate joined by Tom Wolfe (The New York Times; October 12, 2003 and October 13, 2003), Chuck Close, Frank Stella, Robert A. M. Stern, Columbia art history department chairman Barry Bergdoll, New York Times architecture critics Herbert Muschamp and Nicolai Ouroussoff, urbanist scholar Witold Rybczynski, among others. Stone's design at 2 Columbus Circle was listed as one of the World Monuments Fund's "100 Most Endangered Sites for 2006." In 2004, the National Trust for Historic Preservation called it one of America's "11 Most Endangered Historic Places."

When the building became vacant in 1998 it was neglected. It then attracted a number of homeless, and required scaffolding to protect pedestrians from the risk of falling marble. Yet, plans to alter the building were called the erasure "of a rare American modernist."

Brad Cloepfil and other argued that the building failed its function, and Cloepfil claimed that Stone's design was "introverted," partly because during that time, the adjacent Central Park was a scary and dangerous place to be, but since that time, the area had blossomed. Cloepfil attempted to appease both sides and pay homage the building designed by Stone while at the same time, open it up for the public. He used the same massing and geometric shape, but carved channels into the structure to bring in natural light. The redesigned building includes a terra-cotta facade, and varied kinds of glass: clear, fritted, and translucent. Its glazed, nacreous ceramic exterior is said to change color at different viewing angles, although eyewitnesses of the redesign have compared the new facade to "suburban aluminum siding" and noted that the top of the building now seems to spell the letters "HI" in its gray paneling.

Of the newly uncovered redesign, James Gardner, architecture critic for the NY Sun wrote that:

Brad Cloepfil, was dismissive of the building itself and of the concerns of many eminent architects and historians: "It's far too weak of a piece of architecture for that site. That site deserves and demands more." As for his critics, he referred to them in the spring 2005 issue of Bomb magazine as "a very small, exclusive and elitist group that opposes most Upper West Side development." Given such talk, one would have expected something brilliant from Mr. Cloepfil or, at the very least, something boldly, memorably bad, a defiant stunt of landmark proportions. And yet the new façade is so mind-numbingly dull as to lack even the posture of ambition. In place of Huntington Hartford's Venetian reverie we have a structure that would not look out of place as an annex to a suburban outpatient center. The brilliant white marble is gone, together with the portals, and in their place Mr. Cloepfil has come up with a flattened, vaguely asymmetrical mess of off-white, sallow, and pale gray panels that lack any formal, cultural, or contextual resonance or coherence.

External links

• Official firm website of Allied Works Architecture
• PORT review - drawings and models
• Missing the Marble at 2 Columbus Circle