Our Roots
Our design approach was born out of grassroots campaigns in India and the United States and honed by the economic reality of the 2008 Great Recession.
We are again confronted with political-economic calamities, as the nation reckons with violence against Black people, leading to mass demonstrations and calls to end systemic racism, converging with a years-long global pandemic. Salazar Architect supports the Black Lives Matter movement, and allied organizations, who are needed now more than ever. We understand the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on Black and Brown communities, and because of this, we are retooling how we engage folks moving forward, with a goal to empower community members while advancing equitable, place-based development.
How it Began
Salazar Architect was founded in 2007 by Alex Salazar, a graduate of Cal Poly SLO (1993) and UC Berkeley (1998). He grew up with a politically progressive mother and Ecuadorian father who, in the 1970s, was one of the few Spanish-speaking doctors serving the Bay Area’s Latinx community. The experience taught him about the incredible opportunities and challenges that immigrant communities face. By the end of undergraduate school, he rejected conventional design approaches and became fascinated with design in developing countries. Honored with a Graham Foundation Fellowship in 1993, he lived, worked, and researched with SPARC and ASAG, two innovative Indian Community Based Organizations that developed participatory methods to create culturally and environmentally sound housing after the Marathwada Earthquake. The experience was akin to working in a war zone, with the links between shelter, health care, food security, sustainability, education, and governance laid bare.
Community Organizing
Inspired by the experience, Alex returned to the Bay Area in 1994 and put these lessons to work. Over a 13-year period he apprenticed with affordable housing architects Bob Herman, Mike Pyatok, and Dan Solomon while helping lead numerous homeless and housing rights campaigns for multi-cultural coalitions in his spare time. It was his pro bono Community Benefit Campaign urban design work in the early 2000s — while on the Board of the Directors of the Association for Community Design, Just Cause Oakland, and East Bay Housing Organizations — that helped launch the firm in 2007 (a wonderful year to start had it not been for the 2008 Great Recession!).
Affordable Housing
In the early years Salazar Architect focused on affordable housing renovations, improving the sustainability of properties while modernizing and humanizing them. Small developments like Kenneth Henry Court were handled on our own, while on large developments like Keller Plaza the firm led the design work while teaming with others for production. This enabled our small 3-ish person office to design over 1,000 affordable apartments in seven years. After a brief detour through Washington D.C., collaborating with Torti Gallas and Partners, Alex moved the office out of San Francisco and relocated it to Portland in 2015.
To Portland and Beyond
Re-establishing the firm in a new market was not easy. Alex started out slow, teaching design at Portland State University while growing the firm to three staff, large enough to handle small renovations like Kateri Park Apartments and community design master plans like Right 2 Root. It was in 2016 that the firm had a few lucky breaks: Salazar Architect became the lead designer of Vibrant!, an affordable / permanent supportive housing high rise in Portland’s Pearl District and in 2017 the firm became the architect for Las Adelitas, a major community development in Portland’s Cully neighborhood. Today we have designed nearly 3,000 affordable apartments in Oregon, Washington, and California, and have a robust and diverse staff united by a public interest design ethic.