Discovering a brand new path in a pandemic: How one Seattle architect went from mansions to tiny properties

Juliette Dubroca recalls that it happened on a Monday morning at the end of March.

She was called to her office on the same day. Governor Jay Inslee urged unneeded workers to stay home. The architectural firm where Dubroca designed multi-million dollar houses for six months in Seattle had to let her go, she said. Too many employees for such an uncertain time.

She packed up her things, tidied up her files, and returned home at lunchtime, too bad to eat.

“Why don’t you go out and take a walk,” said her husband. “You come back when you feel better.”

As she was walking down 22nd Avenue in the Central District – Dubrocas Street – she spotted a group of men having lunch at a new construction site. The work was surprising, she said, because it was kind of an empty lot next to a gas station where people threw their rubbish.

Bradford Gerber remembers going to the construction site and looking around. He led the project for the Low Income Housing Institute, which was part of a new, accelerated plan by the City of Seattle to create more temporary projects Housing options for the homeless in Seattle at the start of the coronavirus crisis. The goal of the project was to build a tiny house village faster than anything the affordable housing nonprofit had done before, Gerber said, and due to COVID-19, they had to do it with far fewer volunteers.

“Hey, I was just released this morning,” Dubroca said to the Crew. “What are you guys doing?”

The Seattle Times Homeless Project is funded by the BECU, Bernier McCaw Foundation, Campion Foundation, Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, Raikes Foundation, Schultz Family Foundation, Seattle Foundation, Starbucks, and the University of Washington. The Seattle Times retains editorial control over the content of Project Homeless.

Soon the group shared with Dubroca design problems and installation problems. They had to find a solution to a design problem before a plumber arrived the next morning, and luckily that architect’s schedule had recently been cleared up.

That March morning, COVID-19 took Dubroca’s job away. But that afternoon when she ran home to get her tape measure and sketch pad, it offered her a new direction.

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Dubroca designed her first affordable housing project in Rome for her master architect Thesis project at Cornell University.

“I had to convince a lot in my school to talk about low-income housing in a city that is as valuable to architects as Rome,” she said.

She wanted to steer the conversation away from the ruins of the Pantheon and the Romans, to instead focus on the housing needs of the workers trying to live and survive in the city.

“It has always been on the back of my mind,” Dubroca said of working in affordable housing. “Well, could I find offices where I could do that [work] was another matter. “

After that first day at the tiny house in the central district, Dubroca began volunteering four mornings a week – putting on paneling, assembling furniture, caulking, painting, and more.

Before his release, Dubroca designed $ 7 million worth of single-family homes, scrutinizing the smallest details. Customers visited floor tiles or chose a railing every two weeks. It was a bespoke job that sometimes still didn’t turn out to be right.

On one job, a customer didn’t like the way the poured concrete looked, Dubroca said, and hired a concrete artist to “make the concrete look more like concrete.”

The transition from railings and concrete artists to building 96-square-foot houses “was a very large 180”. Dubroca said in May. “I worked for the super rich until a few weeks ago, and now I work for the super poor.”

For the project she was involved in that first day in March, she designed a master plan to figure out how two toilets fit into a salvaged trailer. She has learned a great deal about problem solving by watching the carpenters and plumbers at the Low Income Housing Institute, especially lead carpenter Guy Astley.

“They don’t necessarily rely on all types of drawings by architects. They tend to find out on the field so they are very resourceful people, ”said Dubroca.

When Dubroca was designing a master plan, Astley said he could show her in real time the changes to the plan he needed to make to bring the design to life. “I took her under my wing and teamed up with her,” he said.

Working together at the start of a pandemic, when there was still so much they knew nothing about the virus, helped create a special relationship with the central district volunteer team and institute staff, Gerber said.

“We worked 100 hours a week, seven days a week, trying to fix these things,” Gerber said. “It felt like we were together at this special moment in history.”

On the day the TC Spirit Village officially opened, Pastor Willie Seals of The Christ Spirit Church, who owns the property, met with a Native American Healer Ray Williams to bless the land.

The ceremony meant a lot to the crew that had built it and to the mostly Native American, Alaskan, and black people who would soon have a roof over their heads.

When designing multi-million dollar homes, Dubroca said, sometimes clients questioned their intent – if she was really determined to work for them.

But after living outside, the new residents of TC Spirit Village were grateful for the work they had done, Dubroca said.

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In the past few months, Dubroca’s relationship with affordable housing providers has entered a new phase.

She recently started her own business. Dubroca opened the Central Collective, an architecture firm owned by women. The company is based in the Central District and focuses on an untraditional approach to architecture, installations, town planning and design.

“We also hope to make a change and work on different scales for different communities,” said Dubroca. “Not just those who can afford our services.”

Central Collective recently gained a new client: the Low Income Housing Institute. As a paid consultant, Central Collective has completed the site planning for a new small house village in Tacoma that will be home to 40 small houses and 60 residents. Dubroca also helps streamline the Low Income Housing Institute’s volunteering work by creating roadmaps – like an Ikea gathering guide – to explain how certain things can be put together.

“The more we do design, the more these villages reflect intent and conscientious thought,” said Gerber.

Dubroca has wondered aloud what the world would be like, what the Seattle homelessness crisis would be like if every professional in his field invested as much time in affordable housing as he did in multi-million dollar buildings and houses.

“It’s up to us to choose who to work for,” she said. “We often decide we want to work for those who can pay us more.”