Judging by the speed at which Rocco Luiere arrived at A&AA last July, he’s decisive. The new associate dean for finance and his family packed up their home in Las Vegas and were settled in Eugene just two weeks after he accepted the offer to work at Oregon.

Luiere was ready for a change. Since 2006 he had directed financial operations for gaming, lodging, and entertainment companies in Nevada’s biggest city. Prior to that, he managed finances in the telecom industry in New York. 

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.

Robert Gamblin, artist and business owner of Gamblin Artist Colors, Co., will receive the school’s highest honor, the 2014 Ellis F. Lawrence Medal, at the A&AA commencement ceremony this spring. He is a 1970 graduate of the UO’s Department of Art.

“It was a wonderful phone call to get. I am truly honored, and a bit stunned,” Gamblin said after receiving a call from Frances Bronet, dean of the UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts, to inform him he was selected to receive the Lawrence Medal.

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 city of Eugene, frequently cited as one of the most bike-friendly places in the country, may soon add a new two-way bike lane nine blocks, or one mile, in length.

Following increased concern over the safety for bicycle commuters, members of LiveMove, the University of Oregon Transportation and Livability Student Group, has proposed plans for a two-way bike lane on 13th Avenue between Olive and Alder streets connecting campus and downtown.

Art professor Sylvan Lionni found inspiration for one of his more recent paintings in the unlikely source of a computer database programming language called Structured Query Language.

Lionni’s work “SQL2” was named after the language. It was created as a part of a larger series; each work in the set is designated with a different number.

A significant new edition of Professor Leland Roth’s Understanding Architecture is due out this month by Westview Press, a division of Perseus Books. The revised edition includes a quadrupling of the number of color plates, new black and white illustrations, and six new essays on each of the major non-Western architectural traditions: Indian, Chinese, Japanese, African, Islamic, and the architecture of the Americas.

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.

Professor Rob Ribe of the Department of Landscape Architecture has been selected for a 2013 Oregon ASLA (American Society of Landscape Architects) research and communication honor award for his rigorous, peer-reviewed studies assessing how to design for and improve the scenic quality of harvests in Pacific Northwest federal forests.