Rick Potestio was perhaps born to be a noted contemporary Portland architect. Raised in a mid-century modern home in the Hillsdale neighborhood, he remembers stacking blocks at the age of six trying to build houses. A source of inspiration at such an age was likely his mother, who had studied architecture and art history at the University of Oregon, and encouraged Rick’s curiosity about design.
Later in his childhood, the future architect would ride his bicycle all over the Portland area with his friends, looking at houses of all styles from Craftsman and Victorians to Queen Anne and modern--especially modern. “We’d launch these day long explorations of the city,” he remembers. “Our goal would be to see if we could get lost, which we rarely did. It really became this big search for all the cool houses. We were in Lake Oswego, Dunthorpe, the West Hills, all over. I had found every house by John Yeon, John Storrs, Pietro Belluschi, Saul Zaik, Zimmer. Then I’d walk right up and knock on the door. The owner would open up and here’s this 12 year old kid on his Huffy bike going, ‘I like your house. Can I come in?’”
Biking also got young Rick involved in civic affairs at an early age. “I had read that the parks department was considering logging Forest Park to raise money,” he recalls. “I sent a letter to the mayor opposing the idea and was named to the committee to review options for Forest Park. I was about 12 years old.”
In addition to studying the houses of Portland, Potestio also visited San Francisco on family vacations, and also would stay in the summertime at Storrs’ Salishan resort on the Oregon coast near Lincoln City. Six days a week back at home, Potestio attended both school and church in Pietro Belluschi’s St. Thomas Moore. They’re all documented in drawings on notebook paper the aspiring designer made, and keeps to this day. “In school, I used to doodle instead of doing my homework,” he laughs. “Or I’d fold notebook paper almost like origami to make models.“
Potestio arrived for his freshman year at the University of Oregon’s School of Architecture in 1974. At that time, there were multiple faculty members such as Thomas Hacker and Richard Garfield who had studied and worked under the legendary architect Louis Kahn, and passed on his practice of soulful modern design driven by a constant searching for the proper expression of a building. “There were opposing factions, but they were the most influential at the school,” Potestio remembers.
A generation of Portland architects working prominently today were there at UO with Potestio in the late 1970s, such as Brad Cloepfil, John Cava, Nancy Merryman, and Liz Williams.
After graduating in 1980, the young architect spent much of the next decade outside Oregon. First he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts and worked for three firms, most notably Graham Gund Architects. In 1985 he relocated to New York City and worked for FX Fowle. Next the nomadic 1980s took Potestio to Syracuse University for studies in the masters of architecture program, and 15 months of traveling and study in Italy. Finally, in 1988 he returned to Portland, where Potestio went to work for his old University of Oregon professor, Thomas Hacker.
Work with Thomas Hacker
Now one of the most acclaimed and respected architects in Portland, Hacker’s firm served as a reunion for some of the other talented member’s of Potestio’s time at UO. Brad Cloepfil and John Cava were both there when Rick arrived, and they worked together on projects such as Oregon Health & Science University’s Biomedical Information Communication Center.The BICC project was the first fully-computerized research library in the United States. The 81,000 square foot facility also gave Rick the chance to work on the kinds of public and institutional buildings he’d sought. And when Cloepfil departed the firm, Rick was able to jump in. “The design work had been started before I got there and I jumped in on schematics,” he remembers. “Brad left at the beginning of design development, so I became essentially the project architect.”
At the building's center is a two-story reading room, with computer training and conference rooms below. The bays on the third and fourth floors are faced with glass block to provide the main reading room with diffused light and views into the natural landscape beyond. The north side of the BICC is clad in limestone and marble with strong vertical openings that reflect the neo-classical design of the historic campus buildings across the street. The glass block and aluminum window system he designed as infill to the building’s concrete frame had not been attempted before. Potestio recalls that both Kawneer and PPG Glass sent engineers to the office to review the plans. They confirmed that the details allowing for expansion/contraction and deflection in the design were on target. He also engineered the bridge that spans from the old campus to the new building. He interpreted Thomas Hacker's concept sketches into a steel structure. The collaborating engineer at KPFF challenged his work, and ultimately lost a bet that the structure would need to be altered from the original design. After all, the architect’s grandfather was a bridge engineer for railroads in Alaska.
“Of all the young designers that were students of mine Rick was the most natural artist,” Thomas Hacker says today. “He thinks and works like a fine artist and has an exceptionally gifted hand. His work in architecture reflects the depth of this talent. While it is always simple and disciplined, its essential spirit is in the visual beauty and balance of form, light and material...which he is always able to transform into a unified sculptural whole. “
“He is also an astute student of the history of architecture and this gives his work an added depth of human complexity,” Hacker goes on. “ Although he is certainly a modernist, his work has a classical serenity that allows it to transcend any particular style.”
The building was an immediate success. “The BICC and School of Nursing derive strength from their finely tailored, structural integrity, which sets them apart from the current fashion for fragmented designs,” wrote Architecture Magazine editor Deborah Dietsch. “Thomas Hacker's buildings at OHSU not only offer a sign of health within their university setting, but within contemporary architectural design.
But the BICC project also sowed the seeds of Potestio’s departure from Thomas Hacker Architects. “They didn’t want me to go onsite as a construction supervisor,” he recalls. “It was clear at the time Thom wanted me to stay in and be a kind of design assist to him. I kind of regret not doing that. But I wanted to be part of the construction process. I just felt like the thing to do was to start out on my own.”
Striking out on his own
And that’s what Potestio did. After working on freelance for Hacker’s firm, SERA Architects and others, he formed Potestio Architect in 1992. About that time, he was also overseeing final construction on what would become the firm’s first project, the O’Hanlon House in coastal Canon Beach, Oregon, which he had actually designed while still living on the East Coast.
“The house is version of a Lou Kahn idea about hearth as the center of the house, a structural integrity that expresses the elements of the building in a really honest, straightforward way,” Potestio explains. There is also generous natural light, and a precise attention to proportion and detail that would become the architect’s trademarks. In keeping with coastal homes, the O’Hanlon House is also clad in lots of wood. “My uncle in Coos Bay was a woodworker and miller for fine furniture,” Rick says. “His house was his huge exercise in wood. I really grew up with that kind of appreciation.”
As one enters the 3,000 square foot O‘Hanlon House situated on a prominent hill, the procession goes up a winding staircase in the middle of the house to a vaulted roof volume in the main living area. Each window corresponds to a particular framed view of the beach, Haystack Rock, or a small cove. The house is also broken down into two pavilions that help break up its mass. The larger pavilion has a corner balcony cut into one portion of the façade. “It has a more windswept, eroded feel that I think its appropriate for the beach,” the architect adds. “Instead of having a formal front, I wanted to dissolve it a little into the landscape. When you look at it, you turn around to see what it’s looking at.“
With a masonry center, the house’s exterior walls and ceiling beams became the structural bracing, allowing ample spans of glass. “It’s very formal in its allusions to classical architecture, but also the post-and-beam Japanese sort of attitude,” Potestio explains. “There’s nothing that projects out from the house. It’s the idea that you sit back inside your house and let it come to you. Man is a visitor to such a grand expanse of landscape and should remain within his confines. A more Japanese idea of staying within the architectural boundaries, and observing nature from a framed and contained vantage point, rather than the Wrightian idea of organic architecture in which the building attempts to merge into the landscape.”
involved in civic concerns
Around this time, Potestio was also busy working with Portland’s planning and transportation bureaus and for mass transit agency TRI-MET. He organized a series of regional rail summit charrettes that went on to be part of a national program called “Railvolution”. He was the founder and a co-organizer of the Portland “City Life” housing design competition, partnering with state and city government, the AIA, Portland Gerneral Electric, the Metro Homebuilders Association and Reach Development. The competition enouraged high density, affordable infill housing for families. The result was that 32 units in the Brooklyn neighborhood were built, went to market and were sold. City Life won numerous planning and design awards and perhaps encouraged the city of Portland to open up its zoning code to allow for innovative housing configurations. Potestio also served on the Oregon Department of Transportation Urban Mobility Committee where, in 1988-89 he championed the bicycle as a not only viable but inevitable piece of a long term solution --this in an administrative environment not as enamoured of the bicycle as it is today. He was a board member of S.T.O.P. (Sensible Transportation Options for People), fought alongside a chorus of architects joining to stop a west-side bypass highway, and co-chaired an AIA lecture series that included urban visionaries such as Peter Calthorpe, Andres Duany and Anthony Downs.
Staley House
The Staley is a taller house than the O’Hanlon without a pitched roof. In order to see over the houses between it and the beach, the house had to use its full height allowance, resulting in a condition which would not allow a gabled or pitched roof. Half of the structure is post-and-beam construction and the other half is conventionally framed and wrapped in cedar rain screens. But it’s also the concrete block of this project that stands out: a very simple, utilitarian material Potestio embraced. “They wanted to cover it,” he remembers of the concrete. “I said, ‘Let’s live with it first.’ It’s a pretty modest material, so the masonry and craftsmanship has to be perfect. You have to make clear to the mason you’re elevating this material to the status of marble, but they get it. They rise to the occasion.” It wasn’t a seamless process, though. The general contractor originally built the ceilings a foot too low and had to replace them all.
Birch House
One of the most successful built projects Rick Potestio ever designed was the Birch House in Vancouver, Washington, completed in 1999. It was built as a second home for the then head of athletics apparel giant Reebok’s Asia region in Hong Kong. Like the O’Hanlon House, the project won top honors at both the AIA/Portland and the Northwest & Pacific Rim region AIA awards.“This house to date is still the most sophisticated and completely executed project I’ve done,” Potestio says. “It was truly an inspired client who as a businessman was very specific about budget and what he wanted. He wanted it to be evocative of an Asian aesthetic and to be able to bring people from around the world to see it was a work of art.”
Potestio conceived the house to play with the Venetian notion of a plaza on the water. But on the side it becomes more of a sculptural fragmented piece in order to frame different views. “This is a 50x80 subdivision lot located on the banks of the Columbia River and surrounded by park space as well as very mediocre tract houses,” he explains, “so the question was how to grab hold of something physically in this landscape when we couldn’t actually touch it. How can we get it to relate only to the sky, the water, and the trees? So we designed it from the inside out, manipulating the view to see trees and sky. That’s what explains the cutouts and the recesses.”
Most of all, the house is designed to capture views of the Columbia River, and to make it feel even closer than it appears. “We used proportion and modulation of space to create optical illusions,” he adds. “When you’re approaching the house through a very narrow space to an entry court at the center of the house, you see this wall of blue at the other end. The layering of screens and other grids of windows create the optical illusion of flattening out the space. By the time you get out to the deck, you’re so encompassed in the space, you don’t want to leave.”
The Birch House also features exquisite craftsmanship, which Potestio worked closely with contractors to carry out. “There was one day where I requested that a wall was pulled down because the cedar siding wasn’t lined up properly,” he remembers. “It just had to be aligned perfectly. It got redone. It was the most spot-on work I’d ever seen. They took pride in what they did. They would come and picnic on site on the weekends with their families while they were building it.” The work was executed with such detail that finish carpenters were using carving tools to execute reveals and using splines and dowels to secure joints.
Potestio is a throwback to local legends like Yeon and Belluschi in that, while working in a language of modern architecture, it remains built on basic notions of mathematics and proportion as well as the traditions of classical design. “That kind of education isn’t part of architectural study,” he laments. “Even for me, I had to study it on my own. But The Parthenon, for example, you could spend an entire year learning about proportional systems and mathematical systems used to manipulate the spatial perception of that space. Most architects have completely lost or disregard it. But we know from studies people tend to like certain shapes and fields and color tones. In ancient Greece and in the Renaissance, people tried to understand what the proportions are of an ideal room, or of a city street or a public square. Corbusier was looking at a lot of this too: the ideal proportions of the human body.”
In Potestio’s own architecture, for example, he would often favor using the golden rectangle or other rectangular forms devised with an 8:9 proportion. “I derived it from measuring a William Wurster house’s spacing of columns, he explains. “It has the energy of a rectangle and the gravity of a square. I always went with the sketch first, and then would try to lay out the geometry and see how the shapes fit and respond. Now everyone’s saying, ‘Fractal this, fractal that.’ I sort of feel sorry for somebody like Frank Gehry putting paper together exploring forms and then finally saying, ‘That’s it!’ It seems to me there’s nothing underlying his search. What’s he looking for: what looks cool? Instead of doing a million guesses, why not narrow that down by having an order or system?”
In more recent years since the turn of the 21st century, Potestio developed an additional specialty with art galleries. Some of the city’s most respected dealers, such as Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery, Bluesky Gallery and the New American Art Union have turned to his firm. In this sense, his strategy has been a kind of anti-Ghery one. At these galleries, the design yields completely to the art in pristine, minimal environments enlivened by simple warm materials.
Hollander Watkins House
Meanwhile, the houses continued. The Hollander Watkins House was built on a 50-acre site outside McMinnville, Oregon in a landscape of gently rolling hills and oak trees where farmlands of the Willamette Valley give way to the Coast Range. The client asked for a house reminiscent of a Richard Meier design. Without diverting from his own manner or ideas, Potestio crafted a prismatic white sculpture looking out at the pastoral view, with a particular focus on three symbolic elements: the hills and Mt. Hood, representing the land; a nearby farmhouse, representing the pioneer; and a historic country church, representing the community.
“When you come into the living room you get all three elements,” the architect says. “First there’s landscape, then there’s the settler, then the community. You understand each one independently and together.” Legend holds that the native peoples met under the 100-foot branches of the old oak tree that the house frames. The walk from the visitor parking to the house is on a bridge that traverses this meeting ground and is staggered to create pausing places focused on the three view elements. “In this way,” he adds, “I sought to reconcile the history of the habitation of landscape and speak to the passage of time and the meaning of place-making and habitation.”
Ganz Residence
The Ganz Residence offered another hillside site, but this time in the more urban terrain of Portland. For this house, Potestio again favored simple concrete block with successful results. The Northwest Masonry Institute selected the house as the best masonry building in the region. Inside, the floors are clad in a rich Brazilian black slate. “It’s again a story of the view,” he explains. “Not bluntly turning to look at the view, but a sophisticated series of arrival points.” As one approaches the house, it keeps a low profile, hunkered down into the hill to frame a view of Mt. hood.
Entering the middle portion of the decade, Potestio yearned to move beyond single-family houses into designing larger buildings. He would eventually close his small office and join a larger firm that works throughout the region: Mahlum Architects. But first, Potestio received what would become his eponymous firm’s last, biggest, and arguably most accomplished project yet: the Lair Condominiums in Portland.
Lair Condominiums
The Lair successfully embraces and overcomes multiple challenges of its context. It is located in the historic Lair hill district, with numerous remaining original Victorian era houses on the same dead-end street. Lair Hill has also been the victim of 1970s urban renewal that severed the neighborhood from the nearby Willamette River and adjacent downtown Portland with freeways on two sides. The terrain itself was also challenging: a steep inclining hill that was previously used as a dump. From garbage, though, Potestio created a gem.
In a nod to revitalizing the community, the Lair Condos are organized around a central courtyard that is completely open to the rest of the neighborhood. While it is the route for cars from the street to private parking spaces, the courtyard also doubles as a public space, with cobblestone paving and carefully designed entries to the units such that the car presence is not dominant. The courtyard is also oriented to a view of downtown. A stairway extends down the hill towards the city center, inviting the neighborhood to cut through the building.
The building also takes its form from the hillside, in order to diminish its mass; condominium projects in historic Portland neighborhoods have been controversial because they can tower over single-family homes But the Lair doesn‘t. “It was inspired by the agglomeration of houses characteristic of Italian hill towns where streets become stairs and houses interlock in organic ways not readily discernible from the street,” the architect explains.
The Lair was conceived and built by one of Portland’s most acclaimed contractors: Don Tankersley, who also worked with Potestio on the Humbertson residence and has collaborated with Brad Cloepfil numerous times. "I wanted the Lair to be a jewel, something modern and beautiful," Tankersly told the Portland Monthly magazine in 2007, "but also a real community." Detailing on the exterior façade takes its clues from the neighboring Victorian houses, with bay windows and trim details abstracting those of the historic precedents. It features a rain-screen exterior wall and roof system, fully vented with cast aluminum venting. The window supplier told Potestio it was the most exacting and challenging project they had ever encountered.
About the same time construction on The Lair Condominiums was completed in the fall of 2006, Potestio made the jump to Mahlum, a Seattle-based firm with offices in Portland. The resources of a larger firm now behind him, the architect delved into a greater variety of projects than he had ever worked on before, such as elementary schools in McMinnville and Aloha, Oregon and the North Portland Clinic for Providence Health System. He also secured work with Portland State University including studies for its new rec center and the school of business. He was hired by developer Trammel Crow for a massive housing project on North Mississippi in Portland. Potestio also began as the principal designer for Mahlum on a landmark Pearl District headquarters in Portland for award-winning industrial design firm Ziba Design. The commission was later moved to Holst Architecture about the time Potestio decided to leave Mahlum after his first two years.
Moving Forward
Now at a crossroads in his career, the 52-year-old architect remains involved in a host of civic and architectural goings on as he weighs whether to re-start his eponymous firm or join another company here in Portland or in another city.And after all these years, the one-time kid who rode his bicycle all over town looking at architecture still can be seen, some forty years later, as an avid cyclist threading every street of the city on two wheels. He founded the Cross Crusade Cyclocross series that has become the largest bike race series in the United States. He was recently named to the Metro Blue Ribbon Committee for Trails. Composed of civic, elected and business leaders, it is charged with proposing a funding strategy to complete the region's network of bike and walking trails.
Rick takes a certain pride and pleasure in being a cyclist in a city crowded with like minded riders. But you won’t find any spandex or Lycra on him, rather a defiantly formal suit. Such formality shows not Potestio’s ego, for his designs are often about yielding from the obvious gesture. But an immaculately tailored suit is a fitting emblem for this architect of Italian descent for whom a passion about quality and beauty are inseparable from every aspect of life.
Yet, Potestio is also a quintessential Portlander and Portland architect as well, whose buildings rise not in competition with nature, the landscape, and basic tenets of scale and proportion, but instead with graceful harmony.
