The Geode:
A creative office space for innovators, inventors and small business entrepreneurs.
Light Blade
About
The Geode on SE Division Street lends itself to attracting a significant new market segment in Portland; the young entrepreneur. It is a perfect location for small, emerging companies that are innovative, technical, creative, and hip.
We offer a unique mix of benefits:
• This is a close-in, exciting, newly developing Portland neighborhood.
• This section of Division has become nationally known for its great dining and drinking establishments.
• It is within the City’s newly formed Innovation Quadrant. It has great access to public transportation, including the new Orange Line, the Tilikum Crossing, OMSI, and major biking routes.
• The facility is centered in a neighborhood that has many young, independent business people living nearby. By making commercial spaces available to this largely residential region we are reducing traffic in our increasingly congested city.
• There are interior and exterior bike parking areas.
• There are men’s and women’s shower facilities.
• The facility is designed to encourage creative intermixing between tenants and to act as a creative hub in this section of Portland.
• The building has a common conference area to help facilitate this.
The Passion Behind the Building
After watching Portland's Pearl District become more and more gentrified around him at his former gallery and studio space, local sculptor, Marty Eichinger, sought a less glossy, more down-to-earth community. He wanted to be where artists were still active. At that time, SE Division was still a bit rough around the edges. When he bought the building at 2516 over ten years ago, he never considered tearing it down, as is so often done in Portland. He liked "the old lady," in his words. Marty envisioned a long-term studio, gallery, and residence for himself there.
The Geode as a nest for creative entrepreneurs will achieve Marty's desire to be among an active, dynamic community of high-level creatives, innovators, thinkers, inventors, and small business entrepreneurs.
With many building development projects in Portland, parking becomes an issue for the residents of the neighborhood. As the Geode will offer creative space for primarily daytime use, rather than residential space, so that overnight parking will not be an issue for the neighbors with whom he has valued relationships. Marty's own apartment within the building will be the Geode's only residential unit.
Marty plans to open the doors to his classical, romantic sculpture gallery, as well as offering studio tours, which will finally allow the community to see what's been going on behind these walls for the past decade.
For more information about Eichinger's work visit eichingersculpture.com.
