Conversation Series Fall 2025 Sofa Issues
A Ripple Effect: Public Architecture and Building Collective Futures
Gwen Hoeffgen in conversation with Sergio Palleroni.
“Replicability is understanding, and analyzing, the system rather than thinking that the system doesn’t work. How do we make the system work to serve the people? And how do we rethink it so that it can be repeated?” – Sergio Palleroni
I first started thinking more deeply about architecture after reading In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado over the summer. In the memoir, Machado uses the house as a metaphor for her body, telling the story of an abusive relationship through the shifting rooms of a “dream house.” Reading it made me think differently about what a home can represent. I began reflecting on my own relationship to home, thinking about it as something intimate and embodied—almost like an extension of the body itself. I started wondering about what happens inside domestic spaces, who holds power there, and what the walls of these spaces hide.
This curiosity led me down a larger rabbit hole around architecture of the body and the idea of building together. I became especially interested in how people collectively create, lose, and return to “home.” While working on If We Could Talk, a project focused on displacement in Portland and the experiences of people who have returned to the area through housing bonds, I started thinking more seriously about the role architects play in these processes of negative and positive change in neighborhood communities. I became interested in what it might look like for architects to truly listen to communities, rather than design from a distance. I wanted to interview Sergio Palleroni because of his long history of public architecture projects that center community voices and socially engaged design. His work approaches buildings not just as objects, but as systems shaped through conversation, care, and collaboration, and his methodology mimics socially engaged practices that inform my own art practice. In this interview, we talk about architecture as a way of deeply listening, storytelling, and building the future with rather than for communities, and how a building can be more than an object– it can produce positive social change and strengthen relationships.
Gwen Hoeffgen: I researched many of the projects that Center For Public Interest Design has worked on, which led me to research the many projects in your portfolio. There are times in your work where you have described architectural structures, like buildings, as systems. I thought it was interesting because I think of socially engaged art projects, especially through a social justice lens, as being a way to create systems. Could you talk about that language, and how a building could also be a system?
Sergio Palleroni: You can think about architecture or the building in the environment being so dominated by a series of very structured hurdles to go through. There becomes an emphasis on building this one object. But, when you put this object in a community, it has a huge impact. For us, the thinking about the system is that the building will have a ripple effect. As a building is introduced, even if it conforms to aesthetic and expected values, will still have this ripple effect on a community. That, for us, is the system.
Also a building generates and activates all sorts of non-monetary assets in a community. So, a particular building will provide X number of jobs, or it will provide security, or cultural activities which can be important to the health and wellbeing of the community. So we are trying to rethink the field in order to educate people on how architecture could be a way to address social problems. Not just in the programming, but even in the way it’s built. Potentially in the discussion and process of building, the community can guide its investments so that there is a greater impact on the needs of the community.
When I got out of architecture school, I wasn’t even taught how to talk to a client. The drawings and models and everything you do are very beautiful, but they’re also only addressing a certain segment of the community that can understand those drawings. Really, 95% of all the drawings are impenetrable for anybody but an architect. So, it’s an exclusionary act. And we haven’t been very good about figuring out ways that we can embed ourselves in the communities and discuss its needs and things like that. How can we become more of public architects?
So we think about the system as a way to bring in all that we’ve left out of the process. Through discussions, you can affect what you have an impact on.
Gwen: The processes you’re talking about seem so similar to those in socially engaged art processes, which rely on deep listening and response to people. I listened to a podcast you spoke on, and you talked about this process of an architect as a “curator”. How are these “systems” as buildings developed using response to community?
Sergio: Let me give you an example. We are looking at housing very deeply. We spent like 30 years looking at informal settlements, in Mexico City or Africa– all over the world. We would go in and if the community needed a school, we would sit down with the community and figure out: what is a school to this community? And then we would try to figure out if the community may not have the traditional means to get the school done, but what assets does it have? And with those assets, how do we get the building that they want? So it might have been produced in unconventional ways– maybe people would collect bricks. And maybe the classroom is not the kind of thing that shuts down at three, but then has a second life as a community center. If a community is going to invest so much money to build a school, it has to address more than just education. So we’ve had instances where the school becomes a women’s center, where women have micro industries. Or we’ve even had schools that have become the infrastructure for the immediate neighbors–they’re providing waste and water, electricity, and everything else. Or we’ve had schools where the gardens become a way to protect the local species and native environments. And, in doing so, the landscape becomes both a playground for kids, but also a place to teach environmental education and cultural values and things like that.
Gwen: The way you’re describing this sounds like a form of creative problem solving, and also it sounds very imaginative. We have such strict and narrow categories for the function of architectural spaces in which we normally abide by – a school has to be for children, and we shouldn’t live in cars– but I like the idea of reimagining and literally building a new reality, and a new way of how these spaces can function.
Sergio: We have a seminar in the graduate certificate, where we go through and we look at the different challenges– like issues of inclusivity, or issues of how to do public practice in states of emergency, or when you have to reimagine society. So in our coursework, we try to expose students to different strategies so that they become aware that the role of an architect is broader. You were talking earlier about the creative process, and the process of doing architecture, and art as well, is maybe the most powerful tool. So now, Stanford, Yale, and MIT’s business schools all have design schools within them. That’s because design thinking can unite and cross between disciplinary boundaries. An economic issue and a social issue can be put on the table, and they can both be relevant to the act of creating a building. Even if you decide to become a filmmaker, you’ll carry over this idea that everything is somehow connected and taking things out of the basket may not be the best process. At first you may just have to throw out a broad net and see what all these things are and how they’re related, and figure out a way that we can see the interrelationship between them. And then, with the community, you can begin to weed out what’s unnecessary.
Gwen: Speaking of your pedagogical practices, can you talk about the importance of replicability in your work? And how teaching these socially engaged methods of building could lead to replication?
Sergio: Sometimes they’re one off, like this community center for the Mongolians, and it ends up inspiring others. The villages through Northern China, Central China, and Mongolia, are all suffering from the agricultural system becoming industrialized like ours. 30 years ago, 80% of the population was agrarian, and a lot of people are moving into cities to become industrial workers in China. But most of the population are either too old to make that adaptation, or culturally they can’t adapt to that. The idea was to rethink these villages and keep people in place in a sustainable way, and they could keep their relationships to the land. This was considered a successful experiment, because the cultural values to the land and deep philosophies of sustainability were represented in this effort. We asked, how could we embody this? And how could we rethink these villages so that they stay viable in the future. It has been repeated because there’s a way for the villages to remain–or maybe it’s a vessel in a way– where sustainability is their bridge to that, and their culture is a bridge to the future. So replicability sometimes happens because we clearly state the values, we involve the community, and the community understands those values– and they will then become proponents for future work. That’s one way they replicate.
The other way they replicate is, for instance: we did this process around homeless housing that led to the villages. We were approached by the coalition of the homeless, they called themselves a congress, and they were meeting at the Rebuilding Center. There were representatives of the major communities and street families, and they said we need to change the narrative on this, and we need the government to step in. And, they said it shouldn’t be just the housing thing, because the problems are more complex. And they had begun to have some experiments which were successful– They had built the first village with the support of a series of activists. And we knew that that was beginning to be a solution. But they wanted a solution that the city would’ve considered. So we said, what we need to do is we need to create a process of doing this that will begin to bring the normal actors involved in this into this problem. So we invited the Congress, which was made up of like 150 homeless people representing the community, and we invited the 12 largest and best known firms in the city, through relationships we had personally, to the gallery below Mercy Corps. We told them you’re going to come to an unconventional thing– you’re not going to be sitting around for investment money, you’re going to be sitting with the homeless. Artists and architects are utopian; we are believers that it would work, you know. So we sat them down for a weekend. We ended up coming up with his design and then we invited the mayor. And, he didn’t know what he was getting into. He walked in there and there were like 500 people in this beautiful building– and we ambushed him, poor guy. We presented the designs and of course he was asked to be part of the final review. We said, wouldn’t it be great if the city did something, after you’ve acknowledged that there’s a crisis in housing. The governor had declared a state of emergency, and here’s an opportunity with all of the key planners and architects in the city. So we forced them to fund the building of this first village. And, he said that there was a whole bunch of land at the city warehouses for future development. Because they were going to be temporary structures, I had a brilliant student at the time, and she figured out that if we kept them to the size of the food carts, then we didn’t have to get a permit as long as we didn’t have bathrooms and as long as they were mobile. We triangulated all that and we came up with a kind of approach to temporary emergency housing. And we found the holes in the code to allow us to do this. And we decided that the first people to deserve it should be women, because women living on the streets are most impacted. And then at Christmas, we decided to have a street of dreams right on the North Park blocks and then we invited people, and thousands of people came out to see all these beautiful houses done. And, the mayor had given us a site and he said, let’s just put ’em up. And I said, well, no, because we want to create a replicable process, so we need to engage the community, which was the Kenton neighborhood– a lovely neighborhood and middle class– not rich, but full of a lot of assets. So we’re going to engage them in this discussion of what it would be like to have a community of homeless living together. So for over three months we sat down with the community and said, okay, we are going to introduce this site– What does that feel like? We started to form the motions. And we discussed that they are people in need, but they also are bringing assets. We could have a site for a Saturday market, and community gardens introduced, which would allow you to meet and collaborate over garden plots with each other. And it was right across from their main square, which they were very proud of. So we took them through this whole process and then we invited the mayor in for a discussion and the mayor said, we don’t have to have a vote. But we insisted on having a vote because the land is owned by this city. Because it was a temporary installation, we didn’t need to be permitted for it, but we insisted on formalizing the voice of the community. So we took what would be traditional planning and everything, but made a public version of it where more people would be involved, the community would be involved in harmony, which normally would just be the city behind closed doors. When we came to a vote, I thought we were going to lose the vote because people were so angry and frustrated, and I think this was mostly due to the system in which the government operated. But when it came to the vote, it was 168 family units against 93. So it was a strong vote. And we said in a year, we’ll revisit the vote, we’ll see how it goes and how the services play out and everything. A year later we did the same vote and only three families were against it. 312 against three. So the success was the community accepting, but when they formalized it, the community was up in arms. They said, we love having the homeless community here. They fought for, and they bought, a piece of land in the community so they could have a permanent home for the homeless village. So, it moved down like two blocks. So to me, replicability is understanding, and analyzing, the system rather than thinking that the system doesn’t work. It’s how do we make the system work to serve the people? And how do we rethink it so that it can be repeated? It’s not that the permitting process is avoided– it works, but you just haven’t thought about it in terms of the situation.
Gwen: I think I have another question regarding architecture and repetition– specifically in regards to Portland’s history of urban renewal, racist land policies, and gentrification, which have occurred multiple times in Portland’s history. I see some architectural attempts to produce community movement to bring people back to areas where they were previously pushed from. For example, in the Northeast, where Albina became greatly gentrified, there are new housing developments prioritizing Black families that have historical ties to the area– they are bringing people “back home”. I am interested in what your thoughts are about harmful urban renewal, like the 5 freeway, but also in this idea of the return to community that is very different than it once was.
Sergio: Yeah. Going backwards is hard. We did the initial public profits for the Albina Trust. We called it Right2Root. We had these meetings where we inscribed abstract trees in plywood. Below were all the things that they carried value and the branches and the tree above ground became what their future was going to be. They got to put in their ideas, then we would talk about their future, week after week. I was very hopeful because, we’re thinking, we’re gonna return. Returning is very powerful, but what does it take to return? These buildings are being done, which are the outcome of Right2Root. But the problem that the community is having is that you can’t just build a community. You have to include the community in the process. It can’t be just the people that are gonna be served by that building, but how would those buildings serve the larger community. Right now, it’s a moment where more consensus building needs to happen and there are powerful forces behind Albina’s processes toward that future. We started the Afro Village– that was our baby. They were decommissioning the light rail cars. They came to us and said, we have 52– What can you do with them? They knew we did a lot of mobile urbanism. So, keeping everybody aware and connected and participating in the Afro Village as it moves forward has been a challenge. It’s a discussion that needs to be had. It can’t just happen at the beginning. It has to continue through the whole process. Maintaining that discussion, especially in highly contested environments, is really what determines whether our project will have long term success.
Gwen: I read this book over the summer– it was called In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, and it was really wonderful. It’s a memoir and she is recalling traumatic experiences that she had in her past, and she’s using the house as a metaphor for her body. The way it’s written is fragmented, and disjointed, and uses the spectrum of themes I’m interested in– like domestic spaces, privacy, and power dynamics. And that led me down this rabbit hole of researching the home, and building as storytelling. What are your thoughts on the art of storytelling through building a house?
Sergio: Well, you know, next quarter, there’s a big focus on housing in the curriculum. And that’s why I teach a housing studio. A home, or a house, is significant to every culture, right? ‘Cause it’s not only a functional element of a society and the building block of any community. But it’s also a memory and dream palace. It represents and connects all your dreams into a narrative. We’ve done a lot of Native American housing for different tribes. American tribes have been displaced from their traditional way, so we had to bring back decent housing back in the central states of Dakotas and Montana and Washington– the Yakama, the Cheyenne.
And we started out by just having them begin to map the different things in the home. You know, where and in which ways are their cultural values normally mapped in a house. Like the Native Americans in Alaska, they have a room which includes all the mementos, and it has to be the first space– It’s almost like an archive. So in the beginning, it’s almost like the storytelling is wound around the different ways that the family is construed, and the different ways that the people who inhabit it relate to each other and relate to the community at large. And then we think of the building–we try to take people through this exercise of talking about what their relationships are like. How do both the familial and the the community and all of these kinds of relationships begin–it is a series of stories. And you look at how all of these things relate to each other. A home is actually maybe the most complex construct that there is because it involves all the layers of a society– From the individual to the society. And because in the end, your house is part of a community, so it constructs both the individual story, and the collective narrative.
You know, once in a while somebody gets it just right, and you go, oh, that’s fantastic. And sometimes the best description of a house is not a beautiful rendering, but it might be a story that talks about what happened in that house, or how the family interacted with each other in the space of this shared, collective construct. Even in design, sometimes writing becomes more important than drawing. And then sometimes a filmic vision becomes important. If we’re designing this right here– this is actually part of the Alaska tundra that’s melting. And so there’s a village here. If I’m designing a building here, I’ll have the students begin to make a film that starts here and determine what might be three different filmic moments about what your home is like. You’ll write the storyline of the film. For a film, every page in a storyboard tells you a lot of significant things. Not only does it tell you what’s happening, but it tells you what the mood is. Is it dark? Is there a sense of connection? Do you feel connected to the houses? Do people have porches? Can you see them? And so every frame of that is establishing a story in itself. And so if my house is here, I ask the students, include yourself in three film walkthroughs and tell me the story of your house. And to do that, you start to tell the story of these houses and how they relate to the street and what the nature of the street is. And when you get there, how does the street continue? And what’s different about it? And who is the character? Now your house is part, but only part, of the community’s narrative. So yeah, there are many ways to think of a house because a house is like a Lego piece, which belongs to all the puzzles.
Gwen: I also love what you said about the house being a site of memory, of dwelling, of dreaming. These are themes I’m really interested in.
Sergio: And, and the other thing is that it’s dynamic, right? So you want to build something that is dynamic enough so that in times of hardship for the community, and in times of affluence and success, it can play a role.
Gwen: Yeah. That’s interesting to think of how a house could adapt to community, or personal changes. And then I’m also thinking about, in storytelling through the home, who has the power to narrate the story? I think that’s the other aspect I’m thinking about in relation to socially engaged practices in architecture. It’s usually the “builder” that holds the narrative power.
I’ve been thinking about these themes in relation to my work, and my studio art processes, and I’m trying to think of ways to also create functionality and community spaces.
Sergio: I will tell you about the Gateway Pavilion, this giant chrysalis we created, that looks something like your pieces. The Gateway Park area is ethnically the most diverse part of Portland. It is home to Russian communities that came here in the fifties, and there are also around 200 Somalian families living there. We had like eight different translators come in, and that’s why people were voting with Origamis. When the design process ended, they were talking to each other after never speaking before– they asked us what happens next? They wanted to continue working on the process, even though it was done. So we came up with this beautiful idea. We folded all of the origami paper that had fertilizer on it, and we put seeds for plants. They planted seeds in a large part of the park, and that night we had a big music festival, and everyone got to take three origamis with little pots so that the plants will grow.
Professor Sergio Palleroni is a faculty member and director of the Center for Public Interest Design in the School of Architecture at Portland State University and co-founder of PSU’s Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative. He also serves as a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Sustainable Solutions and is a founding member and faculty of the federally funded Green Building Research Lab at Portland State University. Professor Palleroni received his M.S. in Architectural Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Oregon. His research and fieldwork for the last two decades has been in the methods of integrating sustainable practices to improve the lives of underserved communities worldwide. In 1988, to serve the needs of these communities he founded an academic outreach program that would later become the BASIC Initiative (www.basicinitiative.org), a service-learning fieldwork program. Today, the BASIC Initiative continues to serve the poor in Asia, Latin America, Africa and the U.S. In addition, Professor Palleroni has worked and been a consultant on sustainable architecture and development in the developing world since the 1980s, for both not-for-profit agencies and governmental and international agencies such as UNESCO, World Bank, and the governments of China, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nicaragua and Taiwan.
Gwen is a visual and social practice artist who currently investigates the physicality of emotional experiences, and how those experiences live within the body waiting to be released. After receiving her bachelor’s degree in psychology, she worked as a social worker in the mental health, addiction, and cognitive health fields, and then received her MA in Drawing at Paris College of Art. Currently, as an Art and Social Practice MFA student at Portland State University, she use mediums of painting, drawing, photography, sound, and conversation to explore how we find stories within pieces, creases, breaks, and bends.