LEVER Architecture

LEVER Architecture is a Portland, Oregon, practice founded in 2009 by Thomas Robinson and Pamela Kislak, with a second office in Los Angeles. It’s best known for mass timber work, and it has pulled in more than $3 million in grant funding to test new timber assemblies. Clients range from adidas, whose North American headquarters expansion it designed, to The Nature Conservancy and universities. LEVER designed Timberlab’s 192,000-square-foot CLT plant in Millersburg, Oregon, with DCI Engineers. Timberlab pressed its first panels there this month and sent samples for APA certification.

Several of the firsts in American mass timber sit in LEVER’s project list. Albina Yard is described as the first US building made from domestically produced cross-laminated timber. Framework was the first wood high-rise design to receive construction approval in the United States. Sandy Pine, at twelve stories, is set to be the tallest mass timber building in Portland when it completes. Taken together they trace the material’s path from proof of concept to ordinary high-rise construction, with one practice involved at each step.

The portfolio is filtered by typology rather than by client size: institutional, cultural, housing, creative office, mass timber, residences and adaptive reuse. Housing work includes Albina One, a 94-unit affordable development framed around rerooting Portland’s Black community in the Albina neighborhood. Higher education runs to the University of Oregon’s Highland Hall and Portland State’s Jordan Schnitzer School of Art + Design. In Los Angeles, 843 N Spring Street is a mass timber creative office development downtown.

Not all of the output is buildings. LEVER has designed exhibitions for the Portland Art Museum, including Africa Fashion and Quest for Beauty, and won the competition to expand the Portland Museum of Art on a brief built around equity and access to the arts. Research sits alongside the design work rather than being treated as a side activity.

The practice describes itself as mid-sized, working from a Portland studio at 4713 N Albina Avenue and a Los Angeles studio at 360 E 2nd Street. For a client weighing a timber scheme, the useful question is less whether the firm has done mass timber and more which part of the learning curve a given project sits on, because LEVER’s own catalog spans most of it.