There was no doubt in Don Prohaska’s mind that he wanted to study architecture when he arrived on the UO campus in 1974. He was going to do whatever it took to enroll at the University of Oregon’s architecture department.
Like the ruins found on a Mediterranean coast, the landscape adjacent to Oregon City’s Willamette Falls rises in layers: the newly bankrupt Blue Heron Paper Mill’s cavernous industrial buildings loom atop the foundations of the Willamette Woolen Mills, first built on a millennia-old salmon and lamprey fishing site—all next to a 20,000-cubic-feet-per-second, 42-foot-high cascade that, in North America, is second in size only to Niagara Falls.
When architect-inventor-visionary R. Buckminster Fuller visited the UO in 1962, he was better known for developing the neo-futuristic geodesic dome than for his Dymaxion Chronofile, a project to document his life every 15 minutes. As he told a gathering at UO about why he devised the Chronofile:
Climate change, population shifts, and many other factors have changed the demands we place on landscape designs.
Gabriel Tan is the 2015 Julie Neupert Stott Visiting Professor for the UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts. Tan, a partner and cofounder of Outofstock, a design studio based in Singapore, Barcelona, and Buenos Aires, will present a lecture, “Design Junction,” at 5:30 p.m. January 21 at the White Stag Block in Portland and at 5:30 p.m. January 23 in Lawrence Hall in Eugene.
Architecture and design firm Studio Ma, whose principals include Tim Keil, ’99, was recently selected by Architectural Record for its annual Design Vanguard issue "showcasing emerging firms from around the world that are expanding the role of the architect and championing new approaches to design and practice."
Professor of Architecture Kevin Nute will appearing on the Channel 29 TV program UO Today early in the new year in a half-hour interview about his research and most recent book, Vital: Using the Weather to Bring Buildings and Sustainability to Life. For the schedule, please check the Oregon Humanities Center website in January.
The Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) recently produced a documentary interview with UO architecture Associate Professor Gerry Gast that reviews the progress of the new UCU campus and its design concepts, which Gast and his students helped bring to fruition. The video was made for Ukraine TV in Lviv, western Ukraine, as well as for UCU.
Professor James Tice presented a paper related to his current research, the GIS Forma Urbis Romae Project, at a conference dedicated to the digital humanities in Washington, D.C., at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts recently.
Professor of Architecture Kevin Nute's new video-animated ebook, Vital: Using the Weather to Bring Buildings and Sustainability to Life, culminates nearly a decade’s work. The book demonstrates how buildings can be designed to reconcile their traditional role of protecting occupants from the elements and reconnecting us with nature.
