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The Evergreen Chapel was designed for a real site in Forest Grove, Oregon, and for a real client. There was a real program, too, though the program didn’t come from the client. It was a fantasy project for the real world, and part of the marketing plan for a small firm called architecture w, which has offices in Portland, Oregon, and Nagoya, Japan. “The chapel is part of what we call our ‘Office Strategy One,’ ” said Brian White, one of the firm’s two principals (Michel Weenick is the other). “We know the types of buildings we want to pursue, and we knew of this congregation, so we just picked a site and guesstimated a program.” The resulting chapel is a simple white box oriented to capture the filtered light of the forest and a view of a cross, set in a clearing. The intended congregation, as it turned out, could not afford the building, but now architecture w has a model that the firm can use to sell itself to other congregations.

Gail Peter Borden also began work on his Rubber-banded House for a real client who didn’t necessarily want the work done. Borden knew of a vacant lot owned by a developer who planned to build a speculative house on the land. “I wanted to try to design something while the land was still a clean slate,” Borden said. The project also dovetailed with Borden’s research work, which focuses on the nature of the suburban landscape. The developer chose to build a standard suburban house on the lot instead of Borden’s design, which features interlocking horizontal and vertical “courtyards” and interior walls made from rubber bands. The house did, however, win the architecture category of the 100% Rubber competition, sponsored by Dalsouple Rubber.

Pacific Palisades Residence, by paastudio, was designed for a more
practical purpose: It will be both the home and office of its designers, the husband-and-wife team of Ivo and Teo Venkov. Their contemporary design for the house had trouble passing the Coastal Commission’s review board. “The predominant cheesy Spanish-Mediterranean style has made a permanent imprint on the commission’s minds,” said Ivo Venkov. The foundation, with 35 concrete piers, will cost more than the house.

Structural design also takes up a good deal of Stephen Atkinson’s time (and that of his structural engineer, Bogidar Yanev), when he is working on the Gerritsen House, a design for a hillside house in New Zealand. Atkinson, who recently moved to New York from the South, won the commission for this house because the client had seen one of his previous designs. The client wanted Atkinson to reinterpret New Zealand’s culture through architecture, but Atkinson had little context to work with. His solution was an architectural sculpture that, he said, would give “the suggestion of a vanished culture but be devoid of any purpose, like a ruin.”

“All of my friends make fun of my so-called ‘pretend clients,’ ” Brian White of architecture w said. But they don’t make fun of his designs, and the same goes for the other architects featured in this portfolio.

by Kevin Lerner