| architecture |
COMMUNITY SPIRIT
A new Southeast apartment building is a model for smart, design-driven development.
Written by COURTNEY FERRIS : Photographed by JOSHUA JAY ELLIOT Portrait by WILLIAM ANTHONY
AN INNOVATIVE PROJECT born amid hardscrabble circumstances, the Langano Apartments, designed by Portland firm Works Partnership Architecture (WPA), is anything but your typical slap-’em-up-and-rent-’em-out new development. Although it was completed in 2015, its story began in 1974, when Ainalem Sultessa and Petros Jarra, an Ethiopian couple, arrived in the Pacific Northwest on student visas. They’d intended to return home after graduating college, but their country’s tumultuous political situation forced a change of plans. The couple set stakes in Portland’s Southeast neighborhood and opened Jarra’s Ethiopian Restaurant in 1983 and, later, Langano Lounge, its popular basement bar. »
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Petros Jarra and Ainalem Sultessa stand in front of the Langano Apartments, their first development project. TOP: A gap between two of the barn forms allows light to enter the center of the building: a low-cost design coup that, as architect Carrie Strickland notes, “makes a huge impact on the impression of the space.”