Portland’s Skylab Architecture has perhaps the most distinctive fingerprint of any local firm, its diverse projects united by eye-catching angles, futuristic style and an embrace of landscape.

Founded by architect Jeff Kovel in 1999, Skylab initially designed hot-spot restaurants and clubs, including 2004’s retro-chic Doug Fir in the Central Eastside, then 2009’s Departure Lounge, a contemporary penthouse added to downtown’s historic Meier & Frank building. Bigger and more prominent projects followed, such as 2012’s award-winning Columbia Building for the City of Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services, with its origami-like roof channeling stormwater, and 2018’s Yard, the 21-story apartment tower beside the Burnside Bridge, nicknamed the Darth Vader Building for its atmospheric presence.

No Skylab design has attracted more attention than 2007’s Hoke House, in Northwest Portland near Forest Park, featured in the Twilight movie series as the home of vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). This year, the house became immortalized in a new way: as a LEGO set (where it’s known as the Cullen House).

In recent years have come Skylab’s biggest projects yet, among them 2022’s Serena Williams Building at the Nike World Headquarters, with more than one million square feet of space for 2,750 employees. Last year saw the launch of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, the world’s largest cruise ship, which Skylab co-designed.

Beyond any one project, Skylab is a kind of emporium for creativity. Last year the firm renovated as its new headquarters a circa-1947 Quonset, with bookending glass walls, a distinctive Mylar-festooned ceiling, and an outdoor courtyard for hosting events. Adjacent huts host the firm’s new fabrication space (where Skylab staff can build furniture and explore prototypes) and a new home for longtime Pearl District gallery PDX Contemporary Art.

Recently Kovel talked at Skylab’s headquarters about the firm’s reach beyond architecture, from children’s toys to the high seas to urban design for Portland’s ailing downtown.

Brian Libby: In 2023 a book about Skylab was published by Thames & Hudson called The Nature of Buildings, but recently the firm’s design reach has extended beyond that definition. Even the book itself was presented like a seventies rock album. The new Skylab headquarters also seems to play a role. What does it tell about the firm?

Jeff Kovel: We try to be playful and diverse, for sure. The manifestation of our headquarters was just such a big deal in terms of creating a mirror for our way of working. It’s our creative compound: this hive of creativity. More and more, Skylab is this, sort of like, design label and vessel that can do many things and is less tied to one endeavor. It reflects the diversity of the portfolio, and hopefully it’ll help us gestate more of that. We’re working on a logo for Skylab, and it’s a perspective of the Quonset hut, which is kind of like an arc: a really powerful symbol in its simplicity. We’ve kind of landed on this idea of calling this place “The Arc.” Maybe at some point we don’t even have to say Skylab anymore.

Libby: Seeing your Hoke House immortalized in the Twilight movies and now a LEGO set is certainly great for Skylab. But I’d imagine it can also become a burden, like the hit song a band gets tired of playing at every show. What’s it been like to see this house have a lasting place in pop culture, with fans gathering outside every day?

Kovel: I actually live across the street from the Hoke now, so the irony is, I’m the one that suffers most from all of the traffic that comes to seek it out. We moved in during the pandemic, and even then, there would be 80 to 90 Hoke visitors on a single day: lines of cars up the street with whole families getting out, and people going to the bathroom in the bushes. People would ask us what time the house opened and we’re just like, ‘No! This is a private residence.’ So if anybody knows like about the impact that this thing has had, it’s me.

Libby: We associate it with a Nike executive, John Hoke, who long owned the house, but wasn’t it originally speculative?

Kovel: Yes. The first ground-up Skylab project was 1680, a spec house I developed, designed and constructed. I wore all the hats. And then Charlie Metcalf, a contractor friend, asked if I would do another one for him, on the lot that became the Hoke. He didn’t put it on the market until it was 100 percent complete, and then John bought it within about 48 hours. We ended up doing three or four renovations for John and working on the house for about 10 years altogether.

Libby: What do you recall about the first Twilight production?

Kovel: Pretty early after the house’s completion, I heard that they were filming some kind of vegan-vampire movie there. Honestly, I thought it was funny. I remember when the movie came out, Skylab was only about 10 people at the time, and we all went to the theater on opening night. We sat in the front row and it was this really fun experience to see the house featured.

Libby: And it turned out to be not one movie but five!

Kovel: For the third film, they built a replica of the house on a soundstage in Vancouver, British Columbia, at a one-to-one scale: a full mockup. We negotiated a license for them to do that. I literally have pictures of the fake Hoke house with a fake old growth forest around it. It just was really amazing.

Libby: When did you first learn about the LEGO version?

Kovel: It was not of our volition. We actually heard that this fan had submitted it [as part of the Ideas series, drawn from fan suggestions]. Then we reached out to them [LEGO] and said, “Hey, if you guys want to do that, we should talk.” We negotiated an agreement with them, but we didn’t have anything to do with the design. So it’s kind of a funny object. I look at it as very cartoonish, and I kind of wish they did a more accurate version. But at the same time, I just think it’s an honor. There’s very few architects that have had their projects made into LEGO products: the Louvre pyramid by I.M. Pei, the Taj Mahal, Taliesin by Frank Lloyd Wright. There’s not really a lot of contemporary architecture featured. So from that point of view, it’s fascinating.

Libby: Were you much of a LEGO fan as a kid?

Kovel: I was known as kind of a LEGO savant as a kid. It’s what I did growing up. People around me think it’s really interesting that that passion has now turned into a physical manifestation.

Libby: What was it like to get your hands on the actual LEGO version of the house?

Kovel: We had a party here for Skylab and put it together. It was fascinating to see the house translated and see the instruction kit and drawings, with a little history of the house and the movie. I mean, I drew this house by hand, myself, almost 20 years ago. I can remember sitting in my studio, drawing and erasing and drawing and erasing, so to see the house in that form was really unique.

Libby: Does John Hoke still live there?

Kovel: No, he sold it about two years ago. And the folks that bought it figured out that at the end of the road, there was a portion of the street that was on private property. So they put a gate up, and that’s really helped mitigate quite a bit of the issues. Still, a lot of people come visit, but they can’t really see anything [inside] now, so I think it’s helped make it a little bit more peaceful around there.

Libby: Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas is the opposite scale of the LEGO house: a quarter-mile long and 21 stories high. But it’s another Skylab project that’s not a building, at least not a land-based one. And like the LEGO house, it has an outsized cultural footprint, including frequent TV commercials. What’s it been like for you since the ship launched last year?

Kovel: What’s interesting is now they are mass-reproducing it. They’re going to build four or more, and each one is a multi-billion-dollar construction effort. So it’s pretty fascinating just to see it kind of deploy globally. We still work with the brand, doing creative brainstorming and visualization exercises, just to help them try to find open doors to things that haven’t been done yet at sea.

Libby: How did the commission come about?

Kovel: We got invited through a creative director we had worked with on a W Hotel project, who then got hired by Royal Caribbean. They were struggling in this project because they set out to build the most innovative ship in the world, and there was a point where the executives felt like it wasn’t innovative enough. So they brought in a handful of firms; we were one of them. They gave us a monthly stipend to sort of free-reign brainstorm. We started really learning about the shipbuilding process and the engineering factors, and we were able to integrate into their team.

Our role was to push the envelope, but also find ways to do that that were actually buildable. They had design competitions for different neighborhoods of the ship, as they called them. We were asked to participate in the main entry, and then the open decks. We won the competition for the open decks, and that was really the cherry commission, in my opinion, because it’s really the architectural piece.

Libby: What did Royal Caribbean respond to in your design?

Kovel: We wanted to design a ship that was informed by and could compete with land-based resorts in terms of the experience. Ships before this were dead-symmetrical. What was happening on the left side, port, was happening on right side, starboard. They weren’t that interesting to walk around, because it was a bit of a cookie-cutter experience.

We set out to create this more organic layout that unfolded on multiple decks and multiple levels. So it’s the most three-dimensional, asymmetrical ship design in the world, at least at that scale. To go back to Skylab’s three-ingredient recipe, that was the construction-innovation piece. The regenerative piece is, there’s live-plant atriums in the middle of these ships, which we wanted to bring up onto the open decks. Things won’t normally live up there; there’s too much salt in the air. But we created these tree-sculptures: a lot of elements that feel more like landscape than ship. And then we worked with Royal Caribbean, obviously, to integrate the experience into their narratives.

Libby: I tend to think of cruise ships as either chaotic zoos for families or stodgy places for old people. Kudos to you for bringing a different feel.

Kovel: There’s a lot of stuff on the ship that I couldn’t have designed and is not my aesthetic necessarily. They’re so loud and so boisterous as a brand. The ship is a theme park, kind of a carnival aesthetic on some level. But then there’s things that we really are proud of. It’s actually quite structurally innovative. It has cantilevered steel beams that are almost like bridge-scale, civil-engineering scale, elements that just kind of hover. That is all about sort of establishing the [top deck as the] fifth facade and trying to create visual impact.

Libby: Switching gears to one more Skylab design that isn’t a building, could you talk about the proposal for a pedestrian-only Harvey Milk Street that you unveiled at the event “Bold Visions For Portland,” as part of the City of Possibility exhibit?

Kovel: It’s called the Harvey Milk Tributary. I feel like we could be doing a lot more in Portland to kind of embrace the moment of pedestrianizing more streets.

Libby: Yes! It’s happening in other cities of the world, like Paris and New York. How did you get involved with this idea?

Kovel: This actually goes back to my thesis at Cornell. I had gone to summer school in Portland, which prompted me to select a site in Northwest Portland for my thesis project: at the intersection of Forest Park, the residential neighborhood, and the industrial district: this trefoil of residential, pure nature and industry coming to a point. My premise was that Portland was growing and development would inevitably push into the industrial area. How could you regenerate it? I realized that all the streams had been diverted into an underground culvert, so my project was essentially to resurface them and create this natural stream.

Libby: How did you wind up applying that to Harvey Milk Street all these years later?

Kovel: A few years ago, when Skylab’s headquarters was still on Burnside and Harvey Milk, there had been a proposal at that time to turn the first three blocks [between Southwest 10^th and 13^th avenues] into a festival street. We were super-excited. Harvey Milk is very interesting because it’s small and pedestrian-scaled, it connects you to the river, and it connects downtown to the Pearl. But the idea kind of died on the vine.

Then a year and a half ago, we got asked by a developer to come up with some new uses for the JK Gill Building [at SW Fifth Avenue and Harvey Milk Street]. We always like starting big-picture, so we zoomed out and very quickly said, “Is there some opportunity here from a bigger urban-master-planning point of view?’ This was when the Washington Center building [next door] was ground zero for the fentanyl crisis. It was scary to be down there.

I think most would say the crisis downtown is our biggest challenge. I just started going, “How can you create something successful?” It feels like a bunch of people opening up businesses in a shotgun-approach way is not going to be successful in taking back downtown. The idea here is a way to focus that stream and create something that people could build energy around.

A time like this is also an opportunity for big ideas, right?  So we proposed turning Harvey Milk into pedestrian segments, and maybe using a water, like with storm water, to lead you down to the river,   which downtown doesn’t connect to. We have this great park [Tom McCall Waterfront Park], but nothing leads you there. And vice-versa: Nothing really leads you from the waterfront to downtown. So there’d be great benefit in creating this focal point, in strengthening this connection between the riverfront and downtown.

Right about that same time, we got asked to do a studio at PSU. [Skylab associate principal] Reiko Igarashi led it, and I was along for the ride. We chose Washington Center as our site and had students do a master-planning phase, to look at this idea of a pedestrian street and see what else we could discover and explore.

So when Randy [Gragg] was asking about submissions for City of Possibility and “Bold Visions,” it all came together.

Libby: Do you think the idea has any chance of getting built?

Kovel: People are interested in it. I wouldn’t say it has legs yet, but there is interest in this type of thing now within city government. I want to see if we can get a groundswell of interest. Even if Harvey Milk isn’t the right site, it’s still a time for us to be having dialogue about ideas like this that could actually accelerate redevelopment downtown, to help focus that and create some better outcomes than the track we’re on right now.

Libby: What’s an upcoming Skylab building project you’re excited about?

Kovel: We have a pretty diverse array of work going on right now, but there is also a significant vein of mountain resort-town projects that we’re working on that are urban-scale developments: one in Girdwood, Alaska and one in Park City, Utah.

The Park City project [Deer Valley Resort] is 1.6 million square feet: a whole village, basically. It’s a half-mile-long site. It’s like if you took our two largest previous projects, Nike [Serena Williams Building] and the [Royal Caribbean] ship, and combined them into one super project. It used to be a meadow and it got turned into surface parking. We’re building underground parking and a new village above that is inspired by pedestrian-scaled, car-free European villages. We’re also designing gondolas that connect this development to adjacent villages, so there’s quite an innovative transportation network side to it. There’s an underground transit center and drop-off that is the nerve center for all of the people arriving from this resort, which is almost in like an airport in scale.

So it’s a massive, massive project. Our team has doubled in size to make the project happen, and we’re working with Place landscape architecture studio, our design partner for Nike. It’s going to be finished in 2030 for the [2034 Winter] Olympics in Utah and there’ll be Olympic events held at this facility. It’ll be the premier ski resort in the United States.

We’re doing something similar in Alaska that’s starting construction this summer, not quite at the same scale, but a community with three zones. What’s great about that project is it’s seven or eight building types within this master-plan setting. The first phase includes workforce housing for employees, an aquatic center and hockey rink, a daycare and some retail. Then we’re doing a market-rate condominium village and a community of single-family homes nestled in the forest.