Viewfinder Affordable Housing Art Integration

Art integration encourages community, connects with nature

Viewfinder is an affordable multi-family development in the Tigard Triangle zone, an area currently undergoing urban revitalization. The design centers around creating a positive human experience by responding to present housing needs, reflecting on the site’s history, and setting benchmarks for the future. SEA’s understanding of this neighborhood in transition inspired an approach that integrated art, architecture, and interior design from the beginning, developing all in tandem to tell the same design story. At Viewfinder, art is used to foster community, as wayfinding, and inspire engagement with local places and nature, supporting the larger project vision to prioritize holistic resident well-being.

Client
Community Development Partners

Location
Portland, OR

Year
2021

A vibrant color palette energizes the communal areas at Viewfinder. The interior palette was inspired by graphic interpretations of nature and is accentuated by saturated color pops. The elevator lobbies and community spaces use color saturation as wayfinding and to signify places of gathering. This approach is paired with neutral, gallery-like corridors featuring the work of local artists, creating a home for residents where art is part of daily life.

Like the interior design, the art uses playful colors and is meant to engage children and adults alike. A consistent color story ties the artwork and interiors together while speaking to the larger concept of community-based design. A large entryway piece is indicative of the art found throughout the building—natural elements, people, and animals are the focus, and the subject matter is often at an unexpected scale. The piece is printed on porcelain panels and stretches from the exterior to the interior of the lobby to draw residents inside.

Each floor’s artwork has a theme: Discovering Home, Tigard, Pathways, Forests, Fields, and Sky. SEA commissioned work from three artists that speak to this concept on multiple levels.

Viewfinder’s community room opens onto an outdoor courtyard. The courtyard has (3) 9’-10’x6’ pieces by Foushee that feature landscapes in Oregon. The photographs serve as a backdrop to the native plants in the courtyard’s planters.

Michael Foushee is a photographer who grew up in Tigard and whose work focuses on how Tigard and the surrounding landscape are at present. We were drawn to use his work in this space because of the accessibility of the photograph locations to Viewfinder residents. Places like a local skatepark and The Tigard House are near enough to inspire people to visit and evoke a sense of opportunity and community.

Littlebird’s land acknowledgment piece is placed in a transparent flex space connected to the lobby, ensuring visibility.

Steph Littlebird is a Native American artist who created a land acknowledgment piece for the building. Her piece depicts Wapato, a plant harvested and consumed by Indigenous cultures in the Pacific Northwest for generations. Littlebird uses traditional forms in the painting while modernizing it with bright colors.

During the project, Laura Weiler led an art class for future resident children. She demonstrated how to create collages using materials they may already have on hand. From this class, they made the large collage piece that hangs in the community room, a visual reminder of the home residents are making together.

Viewfinder’s third artist is Laura Weiler, a collage artist who had recently moved to Tigard and is building a future in the city. Her work pulls from the past and present to create something new. The team understands the transformative nature of stable housing to a person’s life and was moved by how Weiler’s work expresses the themes of transformation, growth, and seeing from a new perspective in a thought-provoking way. Foushee and Weiler collaborated on many pieces throughout the building, including the 14’5” x 12’ lobby entrance art.