Architecture

Two exhibits currently on display through winter term at libraries on the UO campus are of special interest to the A&AA community.

“Drawn to Design: Selections from the UO Architecture Student Drawing Collection” is at the Knight Library. In honor of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts, this exhibit displays student drawings created during the first years of the UO school. Selected from A&AA Library holdings, different drawings will be exhibited throughout winter term.

Several research projects under way by University of Oregon faculty members have been slated for funding by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities.

These include public transit research programs created by UO faculty members in the Department of Architecture, the Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management, and the Community Service Center.

The movie “Monuments Men,” which opens in theaters across the country Thursday, February 6, has a direct connection to the University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts. The movie tells the story of nearly 350 architects, artists, art historians, curators, and museum directors who joined the U.S. military specifically to save cultural treasures from destruction by the Third Reich in the waning days of World War II. Two of these “art heroes” spent significant time in A&AA: Gordon Gilkey, MFA ’36, and Mark Sponenburgh, who taught art at A&AA from 1946-1957.

Two University of Oregon alumni, Bill Leddy and Marsha Maytum, are founders and principals at the award-winning San Francisco-based architecture firm Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects, named three years running as the No.1 sustainable architecture firm nationwide.

Read more on A&AA's 100 Stories blog.

Four faculty members and students from A&AA have collaborated on a book about transforming streets that were originally designed more to accommodate motor vehicles rather than pedestrians and bicyclists.

Rethinking Streets: An Evidence-Based Guide to 25 Complete Street Transformations, documents twenty-five case studies from around the country that helped facilitate more walking, biking, and transit use while enhancing commercial activity, with minimal to no negative impact on automobile access. The book was released December 2013.

For relaxation, Sonia Dhillon Marty looks at architecture books. That’s how she encountered architect Erin Moore, assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at UO, who had a project showcased in a book Dhillon Marty was reading, Tiny Houses. The way the little building fit into its natural surroundings piqued Dhillon Marty’s interest. “So I Googled ‘Erin Moore’ and found her— except she was in Rome” directing the UO summer architecture program.

When Amy Aswell accepted an invitation to attend a Sacramento meet-and-greet for A&AA alumni in fall 2012, little did she know it would be a life- and career-changing event. As a result of that gathering, within a year Aswell, MIArch ’07, and business partner Kaljit “KJ” Singh, MArch ‘07, had commissions to redesign three upscale restaurants that garnered glowing reviews in the likes of Remodelista.

The eighty-five flags gracing the ceiling in the “Track Town Studio” this term aren’t mere decoration. They set the tone for the product design and architecture students collaborating beneath the banners, helping them gauge how and where to display 175 flags from participating countries in the 2014 International Association of Athletics Federation’s (IAAF) World Junior Championships.

The architectural publication DesignIntelligence has named Frances Bronet, dean of the UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts, and Anne Godfrey, career instructor in landscape architecture, as members of its 30 Most Admired Educators of the year.

Students in Assistant Professor Philip Speranza’s “Place Branding for Public Services” architecture studio have installed “Bridging,” an urban installation fabricated from 4 x 4 boards in the North Park Blocks in Portland between Davis and Everett streets. The boards slide in and out to form places to sit near a companion or places to be next to a stranger. The students intend the structure as an object to inspire “an urban intervention and evoke a conversation of the values of a city….that are based on the very compassion for one’s fellow citizen.”