Allied Works Architecture is a 40-person practice led by Brad Cloepfil from offices in Portland, Oregon, and New York City. Guided by principles of craft and innovation, Allied Works creates designs that resonate with their specificity of place and purpose. The firm’s practice is grounded in the belief that architecture provides meaningful new insight into its surrounding physical and ideological landscapes. Using a research-based approach, Allied Works distills the elemental principles that drive each of their projects and transforms these into material, shape, and structure—architectural designs that engage public imagination and amplify a city’s cultural legacy.
Founded in 1994, Allied Works is widely recognized for its cultural projects, among them the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado, which has been acclaimed for its nuanced approach to light and space in showcasing the creative vision of a single artist. Additional prominent arts and educational projects include the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; the Museum of Arts and Design in New York; Seattle Art Museum; the University of Michigan Museum of Art; Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in the Dallas Arts District; and the Schnitzer Center for Art and Design at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon.
Allied Works has also designed and completed private residences, offices, and creative workspaces, such its design for Wieden + Kennedy Agency, which radically transformed an historic warehouse in Portland’s Pearl District into a world headquarters that has become a benchmark for adaptive reuse and workplace architecture; the Dutchess County Estate in Stanfordville, New York; and Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, California.
Major current projects include the National Music Centre of Canada, in Calgary, Alberta, which will be completed in 2016; a U.S. Embassy compound in Maputo, Mozambique; the Veterans’ Memorial Museum in Columbus, Ohio; and studio and production spaces for Theory and Helmut Lang in New York City.
Case Works, the first traveling exhibition on Allied Works dedicated to its architectural models and drawings, will open at the Denver Art Museum in 2016. A comprehensive monograph on Allied Works was published in 2011 by Gregory R. Miller & Co., featuring essays by Sandy Isenstadt and Kenneth Frampton alongside a series of conversations between Cloepfil and artists, scientists, thinkers, and makers, bringing to light the firm’s influences and approach, and exploring the foundations of design and creative practice writ large.
