In 1995, when Mark Lakeman returned to Portland, Oregon, from the Guatemalan rain forest, he decided to build a teahouse. The 34-year-old designer had moved to the Sellwood neighborhood, near a nondescript intersection. One day, he decided to create a sort of communal space there, combining salvaged materials he’d been collecting for some time and weaving walls from branches, flowering vines, and salvaged lumber. The structure stretched from the sidewalk into an overgrown lot. Fabric and fiberglass formed a translucent roof. Cushions and overstuffed chairs furnished the space. On Mondays, neighbors gathered in the evening for tea and potluck suppers. Everyone used it but no one truly owned it. When the city finally pulled the plug, Lakeman dismantled the quirky structure and redistributed the parts to more permanent buildings.

This is the story Lakeman tells when asked about his design for the brand-new 40,000-square-foot store for Portland’s sustainable emporium known as the ReBuilding Center: “The design really started when I met Shane.” Shane Endicott, who founded the center (which is a nonprofit project under the umbrella of Our United Villages), had been managing a wood depot at the nearby St. Vincent de Paul’s, when he visited the teahouse. Lakeman’s use of salvaged material to bring together a community echoed Endicott’s continuing work in the salvage business, and the two began a friendship that deepened in 1998, when the wood depot outgrew St. Vincent’s and Endicott started the ReBuilding Center.

Portland writer Randy Gragg calls the vast store “a Crate & Barrel for a parallel universe.” The ReBuilding Center is a graceful, economical piece of architecture, but as Lakeman’s tale makes clear, it is also the face of a much more profound kind of design. “Buildings are the material expression of a community,” Lakeman says. “To design a building I cultivate friendships. I help communities talk about their problems and the plans emerge from there.”

Lakeman is no anomaly in Portland. The city’s long-standing interest in sustainable economies—which includes a 30-year legacy of strong urban-growth boundaries, robust bike and mass transit, and progressive green initiatives—has recently been irrigated by a huge influx of younger designers, many attracted by the city’s burgeoning green and recycling initiatives. (Portland has more LEED-certified green buildings than any other U.S. city.) Lakeman came from Eugene, where he had trained as an architect with Alcibiades Tsolakis and Thomas Hacker at the University of Oregon. He then joined Portland’s signature big firm, ZGF, in 1987. He bounced from there to an even larger commercial firm, and then quit in order to travel. After eight years, and a life-changing stay in Guatemala (“I learned how to listen and be still”) he returned to Portland.

After the teahouse disappeared, Lakeman’s Sellwood neighbors wanted to harness the community atmosphere, and so Lakeman founded City Repair, a community-organizing nonprofit, to help them trans-form the intersection into a piazza. “City Repair kind of grew hand-in-hand with the ReBuilding Center,” says Lakeman. “We’d go into a new neighborhood and get everyone talking about their hopes, and from that we’d generate a project that everyone could work on. Shane always had the materials we needed, plus he was running the ReBuilding Center the same way. It not only supplied materials for the neighborhood, but it gave jobs to the community and became a real public resource.”

Within City Repair (with its mission to “help others to creatively transform the places where they live”) Lakeman structured a design offshoot he calls Communitecture. Under this name he and a handful of collaborators—including Christine Young, who along with architectural intern Jon Cherry produced all the building documents for the ReBuilding Center—established a design collective that offers architectural services to those willing to engage their unusually dispersed method. “What we mostly do is sit around and drink wine or coffee, and talk and listen,” Lakeman says. “I don’t charge for my time. I’m in it for the friendships. The fees kick in only after a project goes into the computer and I have to start paying someone to work.” Communitecture pays Lakeman a salary and he donates his time to the all-volunteer City Repair.

This question of money and its movement is not peripheral to the story of the ReBuilding Center. It is essential. Endicott expressly asks that all ReBuilding Center materials be sold at less than half of “new” cost; prices are dropped if a buyer needs something but can’t afford it. “We’ll turn down offers two or three times higher if it means getting the stuff to someone in the nearby community,” Endicott says. His early encounter with Lakeman reinforced his vision of what the ReBuilding Center could become. “Mark understood the community dimensions,” Endicott says. “He saw that it’s about building a strong social fabric. It’s not just about selling recycled scraps. You can do this with anything.”

Lakeman says the most productive City Repair projects begin where there is no money. “When everybody volunteers and you get resources moving around without money, you form some really lasting bonds. If there’s no liquid capital, social capital grows to fill the void.” At the center, this same ethic of volunteerism resulted in astonishingly low square-footage costs. The new building came in at under $45 per square foot, including the cost of a seismic upgrade for an existing 25,000-square-foot structure. This is the project’s most radical element: If money is a kind of power that is licensed and controlled by a central authority, the power inherent in other forms of capital—labor, affiliation, materials, intelligence—provides a radically unrestricted reserve. Grow that and you grow the power of the disenfranchised.

Every American city could use a ReBuilding Center or a City Repair, and many already have them. In Palo Alto, California, for instance, Whole House Building Supply & Salvage resells salvaged materials from their building demolitions at a sprawling warehouse, while in Washington, D.C., GreenHOME works with Habitat for Humanity to recycle old building materials into new affordable housing.

Given its founders’ commitment to community, it’s not surprising to find that the ReBuilding Center displays some of the openness and democratic clarity of a giant modernist shed. Although Lakeman first imagined “a kind of gothic forest of columns” composed of two-by-fours, he ultimately chose to open the space up with long spans of recycled steel supporting a shed roof. “The building’s function is essential to the mission of the center,” explains Lakeman. “We weren’t about to sacrifice functionality in order to forward the aesthetic.”

Lakeman worked only with recycled materials, making exceptions for concrete and some polymer-based trans-lucent roofing. “The trade-off was the light. The building can function almost entirely without electricity during the day because the light coming through the roof is so substantial.” Lakeman also added an element that he admits “really was part of my agenda”: a tall cob entryway made of hand-packed mud, sand, and straw at the center of the front façade, a piece of natural architecture by Lydia Doleman that Lakeman believes is consonant with the ReBuilding Center’s commitment to sustainability, and foregrounds a practice that will ultimately empower disenfranchised communities. “It’s made of dirt with your hands,” he explains. “No one can take that from you.”