Seeding Sustainability With Equity

August 4, 2022

The Architect’s Newspaper

Adre is a Portland, Oregon–based development company that is less than two years old. Under the guidance of its founder Anyeley Hallová, it has quickly made its presence felt.

At the AIA’s annual conference in Chicago last month, Adre’s upcoming Killingsworth office building was named one of six winning proposals in the Mass Timber Competition: Building to Net-Zero Carbon, organized by the U.S. Forest Service and the Softwood Lumber Board. Killingsworth will promote social equity through its goal of working with 30 percent BIPOC- and women-owned subcontractors and securing 50 percent of its equity from women and/or people of color. That same month, the Oregon Land Conservation and Development Commission made Hallová its first-ever Black female chair.

In April, the Meyer Memorial Trust headquarters in Portland, designed by LEVER Architecture, which Hallová helped oversee as a partner at her previous firm Project^, was named to the AIA Committee on the Environment’s prestigious Top Ten Green Projects list. In July, this project was named one of ten winners in the Urban Land Institute’s 2022 ULI Americas Awards for Excellence and advances as a finalist in the organization’s 2022 ULI Global Awards for Excellence.

“Development is usually about making money for your investors or creating value for your nonprofit organization. That’s fundamental,” Hallová told AN. “None of these ideas exist outside of the market sector, and that’s what’s actually interested me with the new company.”

You might say Hallová is feeling lucky. After all, Adre takes its name from the number seven in the West African language of Ewe. Even so, this developer makes her own luck—not just with a portfolio of pioneering sustainable design projects but with a mission-driven approach. In Portland, with one of the smallest Black populations of any large American city, as well as a state-wide legacy of racial exclusion, that kind of leadership is even more noteworthy.

“Anyeley uses development to build community,” Michelle J. DePass, former CEO of the Meyer Memorial Trust, said. “She is a very proud Black female developer in the Pacific Northwest who knows that she is rare. She doesn’t shy away from holding that mantle and allowing other people to dream about the world that they want.”