Portland

Urban workshop completes Ukraine plan

Thanks to four years of transnational efforts by UO in Portland architecture students, the first two buildings of a new campus for Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) recently opened near the historic center of Lviv in western Ukraine.

UO architecture Associate Professor Gerald Gast and graduate students from the Urban Projects Workshop of the Department of Architecture in Portland developed the master plan for UCU’s new Stryiskiyi Park campus.

Students refine cup design for campus

A student-designed and created drinking cup from the ARTC 410 “Prototyping and Manufacturing” course may end up on a table in Carson Dining Hall or the A&AA Willcox Hearth in the future.

The experimental course, under way in winter 2014, combines the disciplines of product design and ceramics and introduces students to social practice, design, and manufacturing. The class instructs students to formulate a design for a cup that is suitable for UO campus food vendors.

THA Architecture, founded by Thomas Hacker, named AIA winner

THA Architecture has been named the 2013 Region Firm Award winner by the American Institute of Architects Northwest & Pacific Region. The award recognizes one firm in the region that has made extraordinary contributions to the architectural profession and continuously elevates the quality of the built environment in the community.

A Machine is a Wetland for Parking in

“A machine is a wetland for parking in.”

The name for the winter 2014 term’s ARCH 484/584 course plays on the aphorism “A house is a machine for living in,” coined by 20th century Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier.

“It’s sort of an inside joke for architects,” said Brook Muller, A&AA associate dean and associate professor in the Department of Architecture.

Class takes on challenge of condom design

Bulging bags of used condoms adorned tables less than an hour after students arrived. Comments including “Oh wow, that is really gross, it looks like a worm,” and “That’s, like, no lubrication, it’s already dry” could be heard as forty-five students clustered in small groups, laptops open to spreadsheets, iPhone stopwatches primed, cobalt blue plastic phalluses upright on tables before them.

‘Monuments Men’ movie has direct link to UO

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.

Artists exchange takes sculptor to U.K.

MFA candidate Stephen Nachtigall is Canadian. He’s also a proficient sculptor. These two concurrent realities meant he could be invited to exhibit his art in Glasgow, Scotland, this winter as part of an exchange between Canadian and Scottish artists. His work was accepted, and in late January Nachtigall was on a flight to Glasgow, his work safely tucked in the overhead bin.

Nachtigall is one of twelve artists participating in a Canadian-Scottish cross-cultural exchange that began in summer 2013.