Architect Jeff Roberts spent years as a designer with blue-chip firm LGA, where he developed the Springs Preserve master plan and designed the Desert Living Center & Gardens, which helped put sustainable design on the map in Las Vegas. He went on to join SERA, a Portland, Oregon, firm specializing in sustainable design, and worked on major projects in Silicon Valley.
Sustainability helped make Roberts’ career, but now he says it’s become the status quo. “Sustainability has been completely transformative to the building industry, but that term is dying,” he says. “It’s running out of steam.”
What will replace it? Roberts aims to find out. In 2022, the architect, who splits his time between Las Vegas and Portland, launched his own firm, Earthwise Design (earthwise.design). He also teaches architecture at UNLV.
In a world of growing ecological crises, leading green architects such as Roberts are turning toward resiliency, which considers not just a building’s energy performance, but also the way it nurtures its human occupants, protects the environment, and enhances its community’s social well-being.
Roberts is also leaning into his Indigenous heritage — he’s an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation — delving deep into ITEK, or Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge. “Indigenous communities maximize all their resources,” he says. “Everything they use, they don’t waste anything. We have to broaden our knowledge base as architects.”
Earthwise has several projects underway in Las Vegas and Portland. The first is a new union hall for IATSE Local 720 (the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees). The union’s current building is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it spot on Valley View just north of Chinatown. Roberts says the union wants the new building to raise its social profile — a place where community groups can rent out the space.
Roberts helped IATSE find the right design firm for the project, assemblageSTUDIO. (It has yet to choose a site.) “He held our hand the whole way,” says Phil Jaynes, president of IATSE Local 720. “He does it in a way that educates you, lets you figure out where you’re going to end up. The way he treats us, he really empowers us. I couldn’t imagine going forward with this project without him.”
Roberts is also revisiting the campus that put him on the map, the Springs Preserve. He’s renovating the Origen Museum with new gallery spaces focused on the increasingly stressed Colorado River.
But the firm’s most ambitious project is the Center for Tribal Nations, a gleaming twin-tower mixed-use project on the Willamette River in downtown Portland. Roberts calls the mass timber building, designed by Indigenous architects, “a United Nations for tribes to have an iconic building that’s not associated with gaming.” The development will feature a hotel, affordable housing, Indigenous food hall, conference center, classrooms, a Native language lab, urban ceremonial grounds, and live/work spaces for artists to craft large art work such as totems and canoes.
Countless Chinatowns and Little Italy neighborhoods dot cities across the United States, but very few celebrate their Indigenous communities. The Center for Tribal Nations, expected to start construction in 2029, will be “probably the capstone of my career,” Roberts says.
Editor’s Note: The print version of this story included the typo, “wash” where it should have said “waste.” Desert Companion regrets the error.
