Holst Completes Mass-Timber Oregon Library Once Led by Adjaye

By Tom Whitfield

US architecture studio Holst has completed the East County Library in Gresham, Oregon — a mass-timber civic building it carried to completion after the county dropped Adjaye Associates following sexual misconduct allegations against founder David Adjaye.

The building keeps the bones of the original Adjaye design. A trapezoidal roof structure sits on a mostly square envelope, creating multi-storey covered entry programmes on each side, lined with tall glued-laminated timber columns and anchored by a central atrium.

What changed after Adjaye's exit?

The misconduct allegations surfaced in a Financial Times investigation in July 2023. Adjaye denies them. The studio was released from this project, among others; Holst, which had been architect of record from the start, took over the design.

Holst principal and creative director Brittany Shreiner told Dezeen the biggest changes were the removal of screens meant to overhang the covered entryways and a tower extending past the roof plane.

"There was still a lot of design to be done [at that time], but the bones of the building were there. The community buy-in was there. The stakeholder buy-in was there," said Shreiner.

"So, the county was definitely clear in their intention that they did not want to proceed with Adjaye as part of our team, and that they basically trusted us to bring the project forward, but they didn't want to see a total redesign by any means."

Note what the county did not ask for: a fresh start. The finished building remains, in appearance, close to the original Adjaye Associates submission — a decision Shreiner frames as continuity, though it leaves the disgraced architect's imprint visibly intact.

How does the building work?

"One of our major main vision points of the project was this idea of awe and accessibility," Shreiner told Dezeen. Accessibility comes through dual entry programmes: one opens to a plaza built on space taken from a converted street, the other is an elevated entryway with ramps. A rail line runs along one side of the site and a bus line along the other.

The structure mixes concrete and mass timber: mostly wooden floorplates and some walls, with concrete-and-steel cores. Holst worked with local supplier TimberLab on materials, having previously built a tall mass-timber building in Portland.

Notches in the timber columns and beams give the interior a cabin-like, residential feel at monumental scale — and hide mechanical systems and lighting in the ceiling plane, so the detail earns its keep.

Inside, vestibules compress the entrance before the plan opens into a double-height central atrium with a wood-slatted spiral staircase. Shreiner calls this middle space a "clearing" in the forest — the awe the studio pursued, in her telling, was forest-like rather than palatial. Green carpets continue the metaphor. Book storage surrounds the central core; breakout rooms and classrooms sit mostly on the perimeter.

The facade mixes vertical timber elements, scalloped high-performance concrete bands and vertical bands of glass. Grey-toned concrete panelling marks the semi-circular protrusion housing an amphitheatre. On the roof, sawtooth lightwells diffuse daylight into the central space, and a rooftop patio looks toward the mountains.

What does this change for architecture's Adjaye reckoning?

It adds another completed building to the list of projects finished by others after the allegations: the Princeton Art Museum was completed by executive architect Cooper Robertson after Princeton University distanced itself from Adjaye's studio. The Gresham library shows clients can sever the architect yet keep the architecture — a pragmatic middle path that raises its own questions about authorship the source leaves unanswered.