Architecture

The Sustainable Cities Initiative was featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education on May 20. The story shares the UO’s innovative community engagement model with the nation's higher education community. SCI is a cross-disciplinary program at UO involving architecture, landscape architecture, planning, product design, art, law, journalism and business. While the Sustainable City Year Program (SCYP) pioneered in Oregon, SCI has been training other universities interested in adopting the model and implementing a version of it in their local communities.

The connection between Oregon and the United Kingdom just lost a champion. Architect Rick Mather, 75, who sponsored six UO students as interns in his award-winning firm, Rick Mather Architects (RMA), passed away April 20 after a short illness. Classmates, former faculty members, and colleagues were stunned as news spread.

Architecture Professor James T. Tice has been selected for the 2013 UO Outstanding Research Career Award, sponsored by the Office for Research, Innovation and Graduate Education. The award highlights outstanding research activities at the UO.

Fully ten percent of participants at the 2013 Architectural Research Centers Consortium Spring Conference at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte were A&AA faculty members, current students, or alumni. Given that the theme of the conference was visibility, the UO certainly took the concept to heart. 

Architecture Adjunct Instructor Jolie Kerns has been awarded a $6,000 research grant from the UO Center for the Study of Women in Society for her project "Interrogating Public Space: Architecture of Women's Health Centers."

The new Facade Integrated Technologies (FIT) Testing Facility celebrated its completion April 15 with a “soft opening” that showcased the laboratory’s presence on the entire south face of Onyx Bridge. An "envelope" on the building’s façade is wired with sensors measuring light intensity, solar radiation, wind speed, acoustics and more — all part of an effort to study building performance and how design and systems affect occupants.

Oregon BEST has awarded a commercialization grant to a team of industry-university researchers co-developing a window coating that could cut infrared light and heat transfer through window glass while allowing more visible light to enter—saving millions of dollars in lighting costs. The coating will be tested at the UO’s Energy Studies in Buildings Laboratory, a signature research facility of Oregon BEST headed by UO professor G.Z. “Charlie” Brown.

“Technology and Environment: The Postwar House in Southern California,” an exhibit co-curated by University of Oregon Department of Architecture Head Judith Sheine and Cal Poly Pomona Professor of Architecture Lauren Weiss Bricker, will be at the Kellogg Gallery at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, through July 12.

Sheine and Bricker will present the curator’s gallery lecture Saturday, May 18, at 11 a.m.

Kingston Heath, director of the Historic Preservation Program at UO, will participate in a panel discussion on the future of historic preservation this Friday, April 12, from 12-1 p.m. during the City Club of Eugene weekly meeting at the Eugene Hilton, 66 East 6th Avenue.

Two UO A&AA faculty members have received Small Starts Grants for Sustainable Transportation Research from the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium (OTREC), totaling one third of the $60,000 awarded to eight faculty members at three Oregon universities.