Allied Works Architecture

Allied Works Architecture is a 40-person practice led by Brad Cloepfil from offices in Portland, Oregon and New York City. At Allied Works Architecture, we work to discover and distill the elemental principles that drive each building project. It is this essence, revealed in the architecture which resonates within a culture, creating new experience and understanding which endures through time. The defining project of Allied Works is the Maryhill Overlook in the Columbia River Gorge, completed in 1998, the first of a series of five installation designs in diverse landscapes across the Pacific Northwest. It was followed by the design for Wieden + Kennedy Agency, the radical transformation of an historic warehouse in Portland’s Pearl District into a world headquarters that has become a benchmark for adaptive reuse and workplace architecture. In recent years the practice has gone on to complete a number of critically acclaimed projects, including the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; the Dutchess County Residence Guest House; the re-design of 2 Columbus Circle for the Museum of Arts and Design; Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in the Dallas Arts District; the University of Michigan Museum of Art; and a new feature animation studio in Emeryville, California. Current commissions include the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado; the National Music Centre of Canada; a private residence with a major installation by artist Doug Aitken located on 350 acres in Stanfordville, New York; the design of the East River Walk in New York City; a masterplan and new studio building for the Pacific Northwest College of Art; and the Vancouver Community Connector, a major civic space and structure, in Vancouver, Washington. In 2010 leading architecture critic and historian Sandy Isenstadt defined Cloepfil’s work as “aiming to create oases of legibility, spaces that can look out upon the simultaneous contrasts of the modern world to appreciate them from a place no less complex, but one that unfolds over time, with repeated visits, rather than at the speed of a camera shutter, thereby rewarding continued occupation rather than just dazzling the eye.”