Holst Architecture, Adjaye Associates and MultiCultural Collaboration have been selected to design Multnomah County Library‘s new east county flagship, a 95,000-square-foot facility that will serve the about 40 percent of Multnomah County residents who live east of I-205.

After a multiphase request for proposals facilitated by Multnomah County’s Procurement team, the Library Capital Bond Program Management Office announced the team on Wednesday.

Of nine projects approved by voters in November 2020, the east county flagship will be an entirely new building from the ground up. The building will be on a scale similar to Central Library in downtown Portland, but with the accessibility and ease-of-use for all East County residents.

The prime architect of record is Holst Architecture. Holst has completed 11 major affordable housing and social service projects in East County, including The Nick Fish, which provides quality affordable housing in Portland’s Gateway Urban Renewal Area. Holst also designed the Rockwood Youth Campus, which brings together Open School, Rockwood Boys & Girls Club and New Avenues for Youth in a unique non-profit campus concept that provides vital services to the East County community. Kim Wilson, Holst principal and owner, will serve as the principal-in-charge for the project.

“As a team, we’re passionate about projects that center and highlight the power and wisdom of communities, and we know the new flagship library can fulfill all these possibilities and more,” Wilson said in a news release. “We believe this should be a space that sparks creativity and imagination — a space that, like a good book, continues to give, unlocking new ideas and connections.”

Joining Holst on the project as design architect is Adjaye Associates, an internationally acclaimed architecture firm known for its work on recent projects, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., and the Winter Park Library & 91ĘÓƵ Center in Winter Park, Florida. The team from Adjaye is led by Sir David Adjaye OBE, an award-winning Ghanaian-British architect.

“I am humbled and honored to be selected as design architect for this precedent setting library project,” Adjaye said in the news release. “Together with Holst and MultiCultural Collaborative, we will work together and in close, continued dialogue with the local community of East County to design a lifelong learning facility that instills a sense of collective wonder and pride.”

MultiCultural Collaborative, which helps communities of color amplify their voices in policy and decision-making discussions, will also play a key role on the project. MCC is particularly knowledgeable about the work of the library as it organized and led focus groups for the 2016 Framework for Future Library Spaces, which has closely informed the work for the Library Capital Bond Projects.

The Engagement and Design Integration team from MultiCultural Collaborative includes Anita Yap, engagement and integration lead; Nikoyia Phillips, equity and engagement strategist; and Suenn Ho, design integration lead.

“As a women-owned, BIPOC team we will serve as role models to inspire BIPOC youth and community members to see themselves as the experts in equity focused design,” the MCC team noted in the news release.

On July 8, Multnomah County Library and TriMet announced an initial agreement to begin a due diligence period of 120 days to negotiate the library’s prospective purchase of the Gresham City Hall Park and Ride as the site for the East County Flagship.

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Designing buildings that will change a community for decades to come is never an easy endeavor. Doing so when without speaking many residents’ languages or knowing their cultures can be exponentially tougher.

“Fundamentally, in any community, if you ask them a set of questions, there is a commonality that can be brought out,” said Suenn Ho, principal and urban designer at RESOLVE Architecture + Planning. “What makes the difference is the cultural diversity of the neighborhood. There are some subtle nuances that are often missed.”

Ho has worked on a variety of projects in ethnically diverse communities. Creating designs that appreciate those nuances can be a time-consuming and expensive proposition. Typically, project teams hold town hall events and meet with neighborhood associations to gain residents’ input. But in communities with a variety of ethnicities, that might not be enough.

“If they make time to go to open house, sometimes the minorities don’t speak up in a public forum,” Ho said. “Then (developers) say no one spoke up in the events, so everything is good. Then their building is not reflecting what the community wants.”

Language can present a big chasm to cross. In 2016, the city of Tigard decided to turn Metzger Elementary School athletic fields into a public park. While working on the project, RESOLVE Architecture + Planning had to get input from community members who came from different parts of the world and spoke various languages.

“That school has very diverse demographics,” Ho said. “There were large numbers of Somalians, African-Americans and Muslims that we needed to reach. We had outreach in five different languages. It was very eye-opening.”

For that project, the team held three open house events. But designers also took the extra step of sending community members surveys in languages such as Marshallese, Arabic, Chuukese and Spanish. Ho worked with the MultiCultural Collaborative to bring in as many different views as possible.

That effort required time and money and is one that many architecture firms struggle to plan for, according to Ankrom Moisan Architects principal Scott Thayer.

“Our firms typically shortchange that whole topic,” he said. “When it comes to the identity of a cultural group or entity, that is where it becomes obvious that some special attention is needed.”

Outreach to communities can lead to subtle project changes that have significant meaning to residents, Thayer said. For instance, for a housing project in a largely African-American area, he said, designers found that porches and stoops were preferred so that residents had places to congregate and socialize. In other parts of the city, porches were largely seen as merely decorative additions.

“It’s important to be able to understand what the lesser understood values are,” he said.

Other subtle changes can be something as simple as a sidewalk upgrade. While working on a series of projects in the area of Division Street between Southeast 117th and 151st avenues, Ho found that residents were unhappy with the states of area sidewalks.

“They felt there were not enough sidewalk lights (and) they weren’t wide enough,” she said. “The area had always been treated like the suburbs. What do you do in suburbs? You drive everywhere.”

What hadn’t been taken into account was the area’s significant Laotian and Burmese populations. Even when traveling by car is an option, many people within those communities would choose to walk.

“They walk around as families,” Ho said. “They are walking because that is what they do. Yet to people and planners who are working in downtown Portland, it is not seen as downtown Portland, so why do they need large sidewalks? You can’t understand how they navigate.”

Ho has found that who designers talk to is as important as the number of people they find. During efforts to redesign the streetscape on Northwest Third and Fourth avenues in Portland’s Chinatown, Ho and her team reached out to the Asian community.

“We did extensive press coverage in the local Chinese Times,” she said. “We also went out and went to meetings with property owners.”

Oftentimes, the small restaurant owner or shopkeeper was the best resource for finding out what a particular community wanted to see in a new development, Ho said.

“Some of these ideas are brushed off by so-called experts,” she said. “These ideas are coming from people not in the mainstream circle. Because no one knows who they are, we are not really paying attention to these voices. As a design team we tried to encapsulate these ideas into the project.”

Portland’s extensive network of neighborhood associations can make the job of gaining public input somewhat easier than in other places.

“People, in general, like to be heard,” said Cameron Hyde, president of Soderstrom Architects. “Sometimes, they aren’t as skilled in describing what they want. It takes more effort to hear them.”

When residents aren’t familiar with dealing with the built environment, and a language or cultural barrier is present, learning what they want can be a challenge, Hyde said.

“You have to sort of interpret what people are saying,” he said.

Sometimes architects find it helpful to hire an interpreter. Design+Culture Lab, for instance, has worked with Ankrom Moisan on outreach in ethnically diverse neighborhoods.

“We will design outreach to allow architects to build relationships,” Design+Culture Lab CEO Joy Davis said. “People want to be involved in shaping their community.”

However, to be effective, outreach must be sincere.

“You have to have quality outreach,” she said. “Designers can’t go in thinking (they) can check a box. People know if it’s thrown in as a token gesture.”

Davis said that the biggest aspect a company like hers brings is trust from minority and disadvantaged communities. Often that effort means walking the streets and involving nonprofits that are active in the community. Davis’ company tries to make sure that the outreach becomes a conversation and not simply a one-note explanation of what a project is going to look like.

“It takes more than a one-size-fits-all approach,” Davis said. “Architects need to spend more time researching beyond their specific area. Get to know the community beyond just the built environment.”

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The Jade District, in Southeast Portland, could look a lot different if ideas presented in an urban design charette come to fruition.

The event came about after MultiCultural Collaborative, a self-described team of planning and business professionals, secured a $100,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency. Then the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO) last week brought together Prosper Portland (formerly the Portland Development Commission), the Oregon Department of Transportation, the Portland Bureau of Transportation, TriMet and Metro as well as community members to participate in the charette. Designers from Resolve Architecture + Planning, Qamar & Associates Inc. and Green Girl Land Development Solutions LLC showed attendees ideas to “Green the Jade.”

“This is to generate the vision plan,” said Anita Yap, partner in the MultiCultural Collaborative. “It is a conceptual master plan.”

Now that stakeholders’ input has been collected, a final report will be submitted to the EPA this fall.

“Only five communities in the country got grants, so this is a big deal for us,” said Suenn Ho, principal at Resolve Architecture + Planning. “We were able to bring in really strong presence from the Vietnamese community. We got that voice in front of the jurisdiction representatives.”

The designers focused on areas around Southeast 89th Avenue and Brooklyn Street, Southeast 82nd Avenue and Woodward Street, and Southeast 85th Avenue and Division Street.

Organizers had four main goals for the charette. Designers were asked to minimize gentrification, make streets safer, foster development of small businesses and increase parks and green space.

“What was so inspiring was that they hit all four goals,” said Khanh Pham, programs and strategy manager at APANO.

Many of the proposed projects focused on creating parks and slowing traffic in the area. But the focus on small business development was one aspect that helped broaden the audience of the charette, Pham said.

“As community members we originally envisioned it as an entirely environmental project,” she said. “What we found most valuable was the interconnections of how greening the Jade is about small businesses. Trees are nice, but jobs – that is something that piqued people’s interest.”

Charette organizers hope that economic development will help minimize gentrification. Land values in the area have increased, and many parcels are now more valuable than the structures that sit on them.

With neighborhoods zoned for multifamily units, the area is primed for redevelopment.

“It’s about local economic development,” Pham said. “On 82nd (Avenue) and beyond, we are seeing a lot of gentrification issues. We are looking at how we can keep some land permanently affordable.”

Giving the community a voice in that redevelopment and the path it takes was a key aspect of the charette.

“When we team up with designers and they listen to the neighborhood (residents), they tend to be very surprised,” Yap said. “The design is much more complex and thoughtful.”

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