Brad Cloepfil

Brad Cloepfil is the founding principal of Allied Works Architecture. After more than a decade of working and teaching in Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, and Switzerland, Cloepfil founded Allied Works in his native Portland, Oregon, in 1994; the New York City office followed in 2002.

Cloepfil's earliest influences lay outside the field of architecture. While studying at the University of Oregon, he drew inspiration from the vast landscape and monumental works of civil engineering in the Pacific Northwest. While studying in New York he was introduced to the simple yet profoundly resonant gestures of land and installation artists of that time. His body of work is as informed by the land and the history of place as it is by formal training, and it is one that cuts a clear line through much of the infatuation with rhetoric and formal novelty surrounding the practice today. The approach to design combines a research-intensive focus on the specific character of each project with an understanding of the profoundly affecting possibilities of building.

Cloepfil studied architecture at the University of Oregon and went on to earn an advanced degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.

Classes (Selected)

  • Arch 4101/4102/5101 Option Studio: Amplifier – Three Acts of Immanent Architecture

Exhibitions and Presentations (Selected)

  • Art Centre Basel, traveling group exhibition, Museums of the 21st Century (2007–13)
  • PDX Gallery, Drawing I Making (2007)
  • AIA New York, Allied Works: 3 Museums (2005)

Publications (Selected)

  • Allied Works Architecture, Clyfford Still Museum, Berlin: Hatje Cantz (2012)
  • Allied Works Architecture Brad Cloepfil: Occupation, New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co. (2011)
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