Here's a very welcome breath of fresh air, especially In the face of so much gentrification that is going on in Portland! This remodel for Sellwood residents shows how you can adapt and reuse our precious historic houses so that they can accommodate more people while also providing more income to support the existing home.


In this case, the resident family loves the neighborhood and intends to continue to live in the home. They asked us to design a way for them to lift up the existing structure and then add a sizeable new living unit underneath. The new space is about four feet underground and four feet above ground, which lifts the existing two level house up just a few feet more, well short of the overall height limit of thirty five feet. 


Unlike the seemingly pervasive method of simply tearing down existing buildings so that new giant ones can be built, this approach achieves upgrades in energy efficient living places and adds density while retaining the continuity of our beloved historical urban environment.

We are seeking to expand our collective office environment in inner Southeast Portland. Our shared office space already includes The City Repair Project and permaculture designers. Our hope is to find an individual who will complement our existing trades, and embrace a shared and collaborative work setting. This is a great fit for someone needing a space in which to use a laptop, but not suited to daily customer visits or drop-in clients. The office is on the second floor and is one large shared room. The building is rustic industrial, but the community within is warm and uplifting, enjoying shared meals and happy hour toasts together in the office.

Amenities & Perks:
- Your own reserved desk
- Utilities & high speed internet included
- Shared use of printer/scanner and/or computing facilities can be negotiated
- Open project space and lounge within shared office
- Large street-front conference room for occasional meetings
- Kitchenette
- Shared use of printer and/or computing facilities can be negotiated
- Indoor bike parking (upstairs)
- Free street parking
- 24-hour access to a secure building
- Conveniently located in inner southeast at SE 9th & Alder
- Close to coffee shops, restaurants, bus lines and the interstates
- Rent $175/month
- Month-to-month agreement

Does this sound like  a great fit for you? Please click HERE to provide your information and we will contact you soon.

Post by Robin Koch

Our team is in the midst of moving to our new location and we're thrilled to be sharing work space with City Repair, Guildworks, and other community-buildin' colleagues.

We will be set up by Tuesday the 1st. In the mean time, please forgive us if there is an interruption in our phone access or if we don't respond to your email right away. We look forward to connecting with you as soon as we're able!

Please note that our new address for all meetings and all mail is: 
840 SE Alder Street
Portland, OR 97214

Post by Mark Lakeman
 
To Begin With:
It seems that tiny homes and tiny home villages are all the rage these days. From individuals to communities, people all over North America are talking about smaller, simpler, more ecological and community-oriented modes of living. They’re not just talking, they are building, attracted to affordable ways to lower their cost of living, while also refusing to work thirty years just to pay for a place to sleep and store stuff. They have numerous motivations, including to simplify their lives while off loading accumulated mountains of stuff, have less debt, and to increase their quality of life by having more free time. Not so much a rejection of the classic “American Dream” as an updated vision for living, this broad movement is gaining ground because it is relevant to the pressures, demands, and realities of modern life. Perhaps more than anything else, though, the overall movement appears to driven by an aesthetic search for meaning, beauty, and liberty.
 
Wait though, because the movement to reduce and simplify is even broader than just tiny home enthusiasts. It actually includes a much wider spectrum of scales of experimentation, design, innovation, and real building projects. All of the scales are driven by similar motivations. For the purposes of this brief article, I will describe some of the options that have emerged, including Shared living, modest homes, humble homes, tiny homes, then getting down to teeny, and then finally eeantsy-beeantsy. Then there are the villages, clusters of these scaled-down palaces where people create entire landscapes of mutual benefits and shared cultures. Here we go!

​Shared Living: Re-inhabiting The Normal
It’s powerful and important to point out that, since before the 1960’s economic pressures and obvious benefits have moved people to combine their incomes and share their living environments. Whether in the popular form of individuals sharing space and costs in previously single family homes, or in the emergence of rural and urban ecovillages, decades ago many people found that they could simplify and reduce costs while improving their quality of life by living with people with whom they found common ground. Such arrangements could occur at almost any scale, from an ordinary home to a mansion. These kinds of local models have certainly emerged organically in a universal way, from city to city, in response to similar pressures that characterize modern life. These pressures include devaluation of the dollar, which erodes individual buying power, which in turn drives up the cost of living even as more and more people increase the overall demand on limited resources. So, sharing has emerged as a natural strategy in reaction to modern economic dynamics. However, there have clearly been enormous benefits in the rediscovery of the benefits of community living. I can personally attest to this story, because I have lived in shared “community houses” since 1976. In fact, as a child living among dozens of young artists, my life was immeasurably enriched and my formative creative life was given quite the leg up because I was surrounded by inspiration.

​Modest Homes: 800 to 1200 square feet
Then there are “Modest Homes”. How to define these, when in the last few decades the average sized new American home has grown from around 900 to somewhere over 2000 square feet? For today, let’s say Modest can range from between 800 square feet (The upper limits of an Accessory Dwelling Unit or ADU) to 1,200 square feet. This scale of home has become an intentional choice by many families and individuals, partly motivated by cost factors, partly by a strong disdain for the grossness of scale that has become common, and mostly by a desire for modesty, personal balance, aesthetics, and a desire to not consume too much. In our architecture studio, the homes that we design in this scale range are happening mostly as part of urban-infill cohousing projects. People who want to inhabit this scale, usually young families and midlife couples, also want the benefits of shared living with neighbors that they can collaborate with in terms of shared community and land stewardship. Usually working with Orange Splot LLC, these very popular and influential cohousing projects include Sabin Green, Peninsula Park, Woolsey Corner, and also Cully Grove where we consulted. The individual homes within these varied projects range from 500 to 1500 square feet.

​Humble homes: The ADU
Until the advent of the Tiny Home, the most frequently invoked alternative, simple-living idea in the common urban vocabulary was the Accessory Dwelling Unit, or ADU. Also known as a Secondary Dwelling Unit (SDU) or “Granny Flat”, in Portland where we do most of our design work, the ADU is usually designed and built from about 400 square feet up to the legal limit of 800 square feet. However, they can also be as small as you might like. The key distinction that qualifies an additional structure on your site as an ADU is that it is considered a distinct, new address and has its’ own separate kitchen. It can have as many bedrooms, bathrooms, and other features as you like, as long as it fits within the size limit and is the second home on a lot. The scale of these projects used to be based upon a scale ratio so that no new ADU could be larger than 1/3 the square foot area of the existing primary home, which would be required to already exist on a given site. No more though, as that limitation has been removed, and any new ADU can be as large as 800 square feet outright. One last bit- ADU’s can be built as separate structures, or they can be located within an existing house, carved out of a basement or a converted second floor. They can also simply be attached to an existing house. There’s a great deal of flex in the way you can approach the design.

​Also Humble: Accessory Buildings
Among all of the possible tools in the urban infill and voluntary simplification toolbox, accessory buildings offer some of the most flexibility. Though this kind of building cannot officially house “habitable” sleeping areas, it should be mentioned here because the activities that can be included are certainly complimentary to sleeping and living. Uses that can be accommodated include home offices, creative or production spaces, play rooms, certified kitchens, workshops, and other functions. These small buildings can be taller (20 feet high) than an ADU, and also up to 800 square feet in size.

Tiny Homes: On or Off Wheels!
Perhaps the most famous version of the tiny home idea is the one on wheels. Much has been written about them, and they are extremely popular. Tiny homes on wheels are not quite like mobile homes. They are usually not aerodynamic, designed to drive around from place to place. Much more sturdy and well-built, tiny homes on wheels are more homey, energy efficient, and meant to stay somewhere for a long while. On the other hand, the built-in mobility allows someone to easily move if they want to. There are lots of upsides to mobility, but there are also limits that include planning and building codes. For instance, most cities will not permit a mobile structure to be slept in as a ‘habitable structure” unless they are located in a zone that allows a trailer park. If they are to be legally habitable they will also need to meet structural and energy codes. These are easy enough to meet, but they usually require a permanent location that costs money. The up-to-code design will cost more money too, as will the land, and then we begin to move away from what motivated the desire for a tiny home to begin with. However, this situation will not last, because as demand increases it becomes more likely that the planning and building code challenges will be resolved. 
 
While this very attractive mobile version can face difficulties, the permanent version is well underway. Many people don’t realize that cities can already have codes that will allow versions of a tiny home to be built. For instance, in Portland, Oregon we have a provision that allows for “detached bedrooms”. These are classified as additions to your existing home, as if you’ve simply added a new bedroom. But they can be separate, as small as can be, have one or more bedrooms, and feature a bathroom. If you’re a little creative you can also shift the sink outside of the bathroom to create a quasi-kitchenette. You can potentially have several of these on your site, as long as all your structures and hardscape fits within your total lot coverage limitation. It’s also true that , using the detached bedroom code, you are able to build a habitable ADU-scale building without triggering “tax reevaluation” based on current value assessments. The main functional difference is that this ADU-like version can’t include a complete kitchen with a range, but it can include a functional kitchenette with a sink, hotplate, refrigerator, dishwasher, and other common appliances.

​Also Tiny: Accessory Structures
These popular structures do not require permits, and have historically been limited to 120 square feet, as is still true in most other cities. However, in Portland the size limit has been raised to 200 square feet, and a typical residential site is able to have as many as three such structures as long as they don’t help to exceed the overall square foot limit for structures and impermeable hardscape. Though not technically “habitable”, these little buildings usually take the form of small studios, saunas, sheds, or storage units. However, this scale has also proven to be an ideal size for ecological experimentation, often used for natural and recycled building demonstration projects. They are also sometimes used for guests when absolutely necessary. That these don’t require permits has made this “type” a more accessible way to build functional, multi-use places.

​Teeny Indeed !
Very simply, “Teeny Homes” are smaller than tiny homes. Teeny seems to begin when you go below 85 square feet. C’mon, now that’s just teeny. There’s pretty much just enough room for one space inside, a do-everything room for sleeping, studying, eating lunch, meditating, or having a guest over. There are a few of them around though, and they are sometimes confused with doll houses or kids playhouses. They are real though, and if they are built to the energy and structural code then people can live in them (legally!), and they are more cozy than anything that is larger in scale. Such projects can also be built without permits, but then they are not technically “habitable”. However they are built, they are the most intimate spatial experience that you can have, the kind of place that gives you sweetest memories like nothing else before in your life.

Eeantsy-Beantsy Homes
Yes, these exist. You may ask yourself “but, but, but how is this even possible?” You may say “no, only in Hong Kong could this be happening, with those sleeping tubes I saw in National Geographic!”, but you’d be wrong. They are around in every town. These are for people who are really clear minded, don’t buy into consumerism, and love to be in nature and get plenty of exercise. They tend to rely on bikes and public transport, and may share a distant relation in Henry David Thoreau. These small structures are big enough to house a bed, cabinets and shelves, some lighting and a guest. They are also small enough to be self-heated by one’s own body, or by simply aiming the windows towards the sun. COZY !!!
 
Yet…ultimately, HOW SMALL CAN WE GO? When I was asked recently whether tiny homes, and villages of tiny homes may be THE answer to affordable housing or even to homelessness, my answer was “yes for sure, for this moment!” Personally, I am absolutely enamored by the idea of simplifying and reducing as an expression of better priorities and personal liberation. But I also answered “no, not in the long term”, because I see these initiatives as only a partial solution in the present time. As building smaller does indeed do all that we want it to do, at the same time we can already see that the powerful pressures driving gentrification and the overall cost of living are systemic and relentless. Unless we can successfully address and resolve the unbearable contradiction of our society’s voracious appetite for “growth” within our Earth’s finite biosphere, nothing we can invent will ultimately prove sustainable. In response to ongoing economic pressure as the cost of land and living only increases, the pressure to reduce in scale will clearly never end. So I’m asking you, the reader to consider the question of “how small can we go?” Can we get shorter, or thinner, or halve our personal scale every few years in response to the cost of living, as we keep making our places smaller, teenier, or even microscopic? How small can we go, and how much are we willing to give up as we try?
 
For now, let’s take the steps that are in front of us, learn as we go, and then see what our next steps will be. This is a powerful movement, one that brings more to everyone through sharing, simplifying, and reducing our individual and combined impact. I’m betting that as building and planning codes adjust in response, so will bureaus and leaders, developers and bankers, and very likely everyone else.

Want to learn more about building small? You may be interested in the upcoming 2015 Build Small Live Large Summit on Friday November 6, 2015. It will be held at the PSU Smith Center. The summit will cover topics like ADUs, cluster cottages and small house communities, space-efficient design strategies, and much more. You can register here.

From Concept to Creation: A Community Message Board
By Tammy Straw-Dunn

Initiated by a small group of neighbors, this community message board was brought to fruition through donations & volunteered time, collaborating with The City Repair Project & the Portland Bureau of Transportation. The design, includes exciting features like living roof, re-purposed hardware, and artistic mosaic work at the foundations, created by neighbors of all ages.
 
The South Burlingame neighborhood is a mix of residents who have lived here since they grew up in the neighborhood in the 1950s, including active senior walkers & gardeners, empty nesters, renting students, and many young, new families. The residents are excited to meet and participate in activities with their neighbors and were looking for better ways to share their interests and hear about planned activities than word-of-mouth or scattered email list serves. 
 
The planning, construction, and continued use of this message board all represent a wonderful and engaging way to foster community… that is easy for any neighborhood to replicate!
 
Here is a fun, pictoral How-To of our process!

​Concrete Foundations
Build form work & structure; pour concrete; remove forms once set.

Mosaic Artwork
Collect, break, & sort tile pieces; mortar design to backer board; mortar designed panels to pair of concrete foundations; grout & sponge-rinse completed tile work.

Living Roof & Sign Board
Mill salvaged wood to build sign board; stain wood surfaces; build roof with waterproof membrane, root barrier, flashing, & drainage openings at lower fascia; line roof bed with moisture blanket & filter fabric;  spread river rocks at lower edge for drainage & roll filter fabric beneath to hold in place; fill roof box with soil mixture; plant with sedum in autumn.  

Beware of Networks Wearing Community’s Clothing!

For most of human history we ran in small, intimate tribes. We’re social animals, and our brains are evolved for life in close groups. We crave the bonds and sense of belonging and stability that communities provide. In the modern age, these vital communities have disappeared, so we have turned to networks to fulfill our social needs.

But networks can never be a fully satisfying replacement for communities. They’re not designed for social intimacy and fulfillment — they’re designed for efficiency and growth.

And yet we continue to hold out hope that networks can perform a function for which they are fundamentally unsuited. And this hope is so tempting to buy into because many networks attempt to provide what Gatto calls “cartoon simulations of communities.” In other words, networks like to dress themselves up in the clothing of community.

For example, the idea of a “global community” has been much ballyhooed in our time (see The World Is Flat), but running it through the above requirements quickly reveals the idea to be an utter farce. If your only obligation to helping other members involves texting a $10 donation to aid tsunami victims every now and again, what you’re part of is a network, not a community.

Another perfect example of networks masquerading as communities is when giant corporations claim that they consider their employees and customers to be “family.” Except in the corporate version of “family,” members are charged for basic services and can be fired if another “brother” or “sister” will work more cheaply from India.

Marketers perpetrate what is perhaps the most insidious form of networks pretending to be communities. Taking a cue from religion — a strong source of community identity for tens of thousands of years — marketers have turned commercial brands into counterfeit communities. In his book Primalbranding, marketing expert Patrick Hanlon shows how businesses can turn their customers into cultish zealots by taking advantage of humanity’s innate desire to believe in something higher than themselves and to belong to a group. According to Hanlon, successful brands should mimic religious faiths by having a creation story, creeds, icons (logos), rituals, a charismatic leader, sacred words, and non-believers who the believers can use as a foil to buttress their identity.

Apple is perhaps the most successful of these pseudo-religious brands. We all know Apple’s creation story, we know their creed (Think Different), their ubiquitous half-eaten apple icon, their charismatic leader (Steve Jobs), and who the non-believers are (those philistine PC users). Apple even has their holy sanctuaries (the Apple Store). People who use Macs feel a connection to one another. Like they’re part of a community. Except they’re not.

The growing fitness industry is another example of the way in which businesses have done an excellent job of gilding what are really networks with the polish of community life. Enterprises like Crossfit and Tough Mudder have managed to make lots of money, while elevating their businesses into “movements” of loyal, zealous followers.

Online entrepreneurs have become especially adept at creating networks that have the veneer of community. Thanks to Seth Godin, many websites and blogs will have a big square in their sidebar saying something like “Join My Tribe! Sign up for my email newsletter!” But the idea of an online tribe completely contradicts what an actual tribe is. Members of true tribes live and work together on a daily basis, see each other face-to-face, are expected to contribute to the well-being of the tribe, and are rooted to a physical place. In online “tribes,” however, you’ll likely never see your fellow “tribesmen” in the flesh, you can drop out anytime, and your only interaction with other members will be about the specific topic that that particular online community is dedicated to, be it fitness or entrepreneurship.

(I should note that the forum section on The Art of Manliness was originally called the “Community.” I gave it that name back in 2009 when I didn’t know better. I naively hoped it could be a place where genuine community was fostered, but like all online forums, it’s definitely just a network. While the URL is still community.artofmanliness.com, instead of calling it the “Community,” I’m just going to start referring to it as the “Forum” because that’s what it is. You live and you learn.)

The façade of community quickly disappears when emergency strikes in your life and you really need somebody. Is the Apple community going to rally behind you and help you out? Of course not. Your fellow online “tribe” members might raise some money for you if they even know about your problem, but they won’t come visit you or provide actual human-to-human services. The fact that the only thing online communities can really do for their members is raise money is a telltale sign that they’re actually just networks and not communities. Community contributions should “pinch” — they should feel like a sacrifice. Lots of people are willing to click on a link to Paypal, but how many will come over to clean out your bedpan? As Gatto puts it, “when people in networks suffer, they suffer alone.”

The lack of genuine care from people in network life isn’t malicious. They are more than likely very caring people. The problem is they’re part of the network, and networks artificially divide us from each other. “I really would like to visit Jim, but you know, we’ve never hung out outside work, so it might be weird if I came by.” The unfortunate result of networked life is that it makes us feel lonely even when we’re surrounded by masses of people. Gatto describes the sad, shallow nature of networked life:

“With a network, what you get at the beginning is all you ever get. Networks don’t get better or worse; their limited purpose keeps them pretty much the same all the time, as there just isn’t much development possible. The pathological state which eventually develops out of these constant repetitions of thin human contact is a feeling that your “friends” and “colleagues” don’t really care about you beyond what you can do for them, that they have no curiosity about the way you manage your life, no curiosity about your hopes, fears, victories, defeats. The real truth is that the “friends” falsely mourned for their indifference were never friends, just fellow networkers from whom in fairness little should be expected beyond attention to the common interest.”

So beware of false tribes, which come to you in community’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening networks.

“Grow where you’re planted,” is a famous saying of the traditional Hopi people. It’s what placemaker Mark Lakeman has done. Mark has spent most of his life planted in Portland, Oregon, where in 1996 he began growing the City Repair Project. 

Through City Repair, communities of volunteers have built over 300 sustainable works in Portland, making places that connect people to each other and their city. City Repair shows a way to reclaim and repopulate public space to help make cities sustainable in the long run. 

Mark’s placemaking is a result of good parenting. I smile when I say that, but it’s true: his father, architect Richard Lakeman, founded the urban design division of Portland’s planning department and helped create Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square. His mother, too, concentrated on design and public space. Architecture professor Sandra Davis Lakeman is famous for her investigations of natural light and the Italian piazza.  

American cities west of the Ohio River were planned by the Continental Congress’ National Land Ordinance of 1785, which organized most of America into a Roman colonial grid. As Americans we have the right to free assembly. But our gridded American cities have fewer public spaces than cities in any other developed country. We have the right to assemble but no place to do it; streets and intersections but no piazzas, plazas, or gathering spaces. In Portland, or Phoenix near where I live, the grid extends as far as you can see. But it’s about cars and separation – not places people can belong to. 

Mark Lakeman is reclaiming street intersections. City Repair has painted them over, planted around them, and even de-paved them, taking up asphalt and replacing it with pavers or bricks. Create a really beautiful place and people will slow down to be part of it. What has followed at these intersections is bulletin boards, meeting places, pop-up tea houses. Here is character, lovability and work that is sustaining to a community. 

In too many locales if you try to organize a community gathering place officials will point out, “That’s public space, no one can use that.” It happened at Lakeman’s first project.  300 projects later, placemaking has proven to be at the core of sustainability.

below: neighbors and community gather annually to repaint Sunnyside Piazza

Published in SOTOKOTO Japanese Magazine, November 2014

Sotokoto is a popular Japanese lifestyle magazine that offers tips on leading a comfortable and fashionable life to those who follow the “Lifestyle Of Health And Sustainability” (LOHAS). The goal of this lifestyle is balancing the coexistence of individual comfort with the sustainability of the entire society.

The target readers of Sotokoto are people who are city-dwellers, respecting the positive aspects of traditional culture while also seeking enrichment through a modern lifestyle of health and sustainability. It is also an in-­flight magazine of Japanese Airlines.

We are pleased to represent one such model lifestyle here in Portland. Mark Lakeman’s community activism and work with the City Repair Project are examples of reviving traditional values through reclaiming the public commons in our contemporary urban grid. 

This is the first year of village-building in Sebastopol, California, as they gear up to change their own part of the world! This small-town convergence was like no other event, with a huge percentage of the local population involved in painting installations in downtown streets, numerous ecological building projects, and lots of ways to engage kids... 

...including the design and creation of an actual Fairie Village among an urban grove of lovely coastal cedar trees! Here's a peek a the creativity and imagination found in almost 40 tiny fairie homes! 

During the Village Building Convergence in Sebastopol, there were tours of various unique and inspiring aspects of this small California town. This particular neighborhood was among the most inspiring of the places we visited in Sebastopol. A beloved, internationally-acclaimed sculptor named Patrick Amiot has been offering his work to dozens of neighbors up and down his own street, and now Florence Avenue is one of the most amazing streets in this galaxy! They are masterful, inspiring, and hilarious!