Brad Cloepfil: Open Satellite Lecture
Wednesday, March 10, 2010, 7:00 - 8:30 PM
Kane Hall, Room 120, University of Washington Campus
Advance Tickets: $10 General Admission and $7 Students and Henry Art Gallery Members. At the door: $15 General Admission and $12 Students and Henry Art Gallery Members. Tickets available at Brown Paper Tickets. Seating is first come, first served. Doors open at 6:30 PM; Lecture begins at 7 PM.
Open Satellite, in partnership with Henry Art Gallery, is pleased to announce an upcoming lecture by Allied Works Architecture founder Brad Cloepfil, on Wednesday, March 10, 2010, 7 PM. Cloepfil’s lecture is a feature program of SUPERMODEL, a two-part exhibition featuring models of recent projects from Allied Works Architecture along with the winning results of a juried student competition from degree granting architecture programs in the Western US and Canada. SUPERMODEL is on view at Open Satellite through March 13.
In the brief span of only fifteen years, Allied Works Architecture has earned international acclaim by creating architecture with restrained conceptual rigor and complex spatial poetics that consistently compliment their art-based functions. Included in SUPERMODEL are two models from the recent competition-winning entry for the National Music Centre of Canada (currently in design) and one model from the competition-winning entry for the Clyfford Still Museum (currently under construction in Denver). For his lecture at Kane Hall, Cloepfil will speak about his practice elaborating on these projects.
Brad Cloepfil studied architecture at the University of Oregon and went on to earn an advanced degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture. After more than a decade of work and teaching in Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York and Switzerland, Cloepfil founded Allied Works Architecture in his native Portland, Oregon, which now includes an office in New York, New York.
Cloepfil’s earliest influences lay outside the field of architecture. While studying at the University of Oregon, Cloepfil drew inspiration from the vast landscape and monumental works of civil engineering in the Pacific Northwest and looked to the simple yet profoundly resonant gestures of land and installation artists of that time. Cloepfil’s body of work is as informed by the land and the history of place as it is by formal training, and it is one that cuts a clear line through much of the rhetoric surrounding the practice today. His approach to design combines a research-intensive focus on the specific character of each project with an understanding of the profoundly affecting possibilities of building.
Terence Riley, a leading architecture critic and former chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, identified Cloepfil as an architect who is “setting the pace for the future” in the compendium of contemporary architecture, 10×10, published by Phaidon Press. Riley believes Cloepfil’s work “has a certain assuredness and grace that comes from an intimate knowledge of materials and constructive possibilities” and that “his natural tendency is to fulfill the potential of any theoretical project, to realize it in such a way as to test and perfect the building art.”
With offices in Portland, Oregon and New York, New York, Allied Works Architecture is engaged in a wide variety of cultural, commercial and residential projects across North America.
Among the first projects completed by Allied Works are the Maryhill Overlook in the Columbia River Gorge, the first of a series of five interpretive designs in diverse landscapes across the Pacific Northwest, and the adaptive reuse and transformation of an historic warehouse in Portland’s Pearl District for the world headquarters of advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy.
In recent years, completed projects include the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, a major addition to the Seattle Art Museum, the Booker T. Washington School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas, Texas, and the redesign of 2 Columbus Circle for the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan. Most recently, the firm completed a renovation and expansion of the University Of Michigan Museum Of Art in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Current commissions include a new animation studio for Pixar in Emeryville, California, master planning and feasibility analysis for the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon and master planning and feasibility study for the Caldera Arts Foundation in Central Oregon. Allied Works has also recently won international design competitions for the Vancouver Community Connector in Washington State, an urban park that spans a major highway serving to re-connect the city’s downtown core to Fort Vancouver National Historic Site.