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I recently took a tour of Bud Clark Commons – a center for the homeless – with a group of architects and contractors through American Institute of Architects Portland. Our guide was project manager Dave Otte with Holst Architecture.

The questions that came up over and over from Otte’s peers were about the materials. “Why do you have a flat wall here, where someone could draw on it?” “Why did you line the halls with Douglas fir?”

One attendee told me that he wished he had “such faith in human nature.鈥�

I caught up with Otte a few days later to see if these were reactions he had expected. They were.

鈥淢any people in the general public will have a guttural reaction to giving needy people beautiful things,鈥� Otte said.

The Bud Clark Commons is a three-part building: there is an open-to-the public day resource center on the first two floors, a 90-bed men’s shelter on the next floor and 130 apartments for the most medically vulnerable homeless population of Portland on the upper floors.

Otte and his team consciously selected 鈥渂eautiful鈥� materials instead of lowest-common-denominator durable ones, he said.

鈥淲e were charged with providing a beautiful building and a dignified space,鈥� he said.

In the public resource center, the Holst team used design and materials to address concerns about sight lines for safety and to prevent drug dealing. But on the floors where people would live and occupants would be a 鈥渒nown quantity,鈥� Otte said the team looked more for beauty and dignity in materials.

He told the AIA tour group that, in its research, the project design team found that people in shelters tended to respect and take care of their own spaces. They took that idea one step further.

鈥淧eople don’t want to damage something that’s beautiful,鈥� he said. 鈥淚t’s part of the collective consciousness.鈥�

鈥淥f course there will always be instances (of graffiti or vandalism). But if we always design to the lowest common denominator, we’ll end up with concrete bunkers and no beauty,鈥� he said.