The Clarity Project: How We Work
A unifying goal across all projects can be summarized in a word:
Clarity. Through research, inquiry and focused design investigation, we work with our clients and collaborators to guide projects from conception through construction.
One of Waechter’s core projects has been to capture the utility and clarity of earlier eras of building and translate these into efficient and ecological mass timber construction. The goal has been, in essence, to create a highly sustainable, durable, and all-purpose building typology for the 21st Century.
Our breakthrough arrived with the design, development and construction of Mississippi Workshop, our mixed-use headquarters in Portland, Oregon. The entirety of the building’s structure, perimeter and interior walls is composed of engineered Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT), resulting in spaces with an uncommon warmth, solidity, and durability, as well as exceptional environmental performance.
This Graduate Studio was conducted at the University of Oregon as part of Waechter Architecture’s ongoing work identifying a series of All-Wood design vocabularies. Over the course of three months, students identified individualized approaches to All-Wood design and helped expand a matrix of potential assembly, structural and MEP approaches.
This studio was a speculative and experiential exercise offered at the University of Oregon to explore aspects of Waechter Architecture’s unqiue design process. Students carried out a series of studies of singular rooms progressing to full building proposals through the use of hand-made physical models.