Archinect City Guide: Get Your Portland Travel Tips from Chris Brown of Observation Studio | Features

Illustration by Archinect (background photo courtesy Zach Savinar/Unsplash)

Archinect City Guide dives into Portland, Oregon, today, featuring some of the favorite spots for dining, gallery-hopping, and discovery shared by Observation Studio founding principal Chris Brown. (Avid Archinect readers will remember him from our Studio Snapshot of Linden, Brown Architecture, which rebranded as Observation Studio in 2024.) 

In true Pacific Northwest spirit, Brown has several authentic and rooted spots in and around Portland to recommend for architects and designers visiting the city. Is he keeping it weird? Let’s find out.

Are you a Portland local with your own go-to spots? Or have a city you think we should cover next? Share your thoughts, suggestions, and favorite places in the comments.

Favorite
restaurant?

It’s
hard to do better than Luce on East Burnside. They’ve been a
Portland staple for years and have yet to have an off night. The food
is simple and beautiful — particularly the Cappelletti in brodo and
shaved fennel salad; it’s mind-blowing. 

Favorite
bar?

Yur’s is a classic dive bar in the neighborhood that we go to as a studio
to shoot pool and drink cheap beer. The booths are generous, and the
staff is prickly; just what you want.

Favorite
café?

Division Street Stumptown. This is the very first Stumptown Coffee cafe and
the original roastery, which has remained relatively unchanged over
the years, even as Stumptown has become an international brand. I
love this cafe because it stands as an enduring example of the
promise of Portland and its entrepreneurial spirit, and the
space has an undeniable intimacy and warmth. 

Favorite
bookstore?

Powell’s Books for anything and everything, of course. It’s a well-known
Portland institution and continues to impress decade after decade.
Also, Chess Club, which just opened in Chinatown, does an incredible
job with small press magazines and quarterlies. The owners work
tirelessly to promote printed media and to really highlight the
magical work of writers, photographers, producers, and more. We feel
like kindred creative spirits in terms of that artistic emphasis, and
have begun to produce books and other printed media internally within
our studio. Thinking through the making of books has had a remarkable
influence on how we approach materiality and technique with our
architectural work. 

Favorite
museum?

Portland
is more of a gallery than a museum town — we have a number of
outstanding galleries that show really remarkable work. A few of my
favorites are PDX Contemporary (just around the corner from our
studio), Adams and Ollman, Lumber Room, Landdd, Spartan Shop, and
Nationale, which shares a building with Luce and shows some of the
fiercest work in Portland. We were proud to help May Barruel, the
founder of Nationale, realize the current space, and we take great
pride in seeing it flourish as an example of rigorous, creative,
thoughtful artistic presentation. 

Favorite
public space?

The
Keller Fountain Park in Downtown is a world-class icon. It’s a set of
fountains, designed by Lawrence Halprin; they exist as part of larger
sequence of open spaces throughout the City as part of Halprin’s
vision. That kind of civic-wide approach is an enduring reminder of
how powerful good and thoughtful urban planning and landscape design
can be. 

Most
underrated building?

Maya Lin
designed a bird blind that overlooks a wetland along the Sandy River
just outside of town, which is an incredible structure — and nobody
knows about it!

Favorite
new architecture?

The
visitor pavilion at the Japanese Garden by Kengo Kuma is a great
example of sensitive, place-based public work. 

New
or upcoming projects by your firm in the city?

Lots of
exciting stuff on the horizon. We have a ground-up residence
just completing in the Tualatin Mountains — the house sits high on
the site and overlooks the Willamette Valley and out to the Coast
Range. It’s clad in copper and has been fascinating to watch the
metal age and evolve into the color palette of the natural site.
We’re also putting finishing touches on a winery (we love doing that
typology after finishing Sequitur). Closer to the City Center, we’re
currently designing a small pavilion building that will utilize CLT,
which has been an exciting introduction for us to that construction
typology and will hopefully become an example of how it can be
utilized economically at a very small scale. Finally, we’re just
beginning an exciting renovation project to give a local presence to
an iconic brand.

Archinectors, what are your personal favorite picks for Portland? Let us know in the comments!