Eugene/Architecture/Alphabet: Y

Ya-Po-Ah Terrace (my photos)

This is the penultimate entry in my Eugene/Architecture/Alphabet series of blog posts, the focus of each being a landmark building here in Eugene. Many of these will be familiar to most who live here, but there are likely to be a few buildings that are less so. My selection criteria for each will be threefold:
 

1. The building must be of architectural interest, local importance, or historically significant.
2. The building must be extant, so you or I can visit it in person.
3. Each building’s name will begin with a particular letter of the alphabet, and I must select one (and only one) for each of the twenty-six letters. This is easier said than done for some letters, whereas for other characters there is a surfeit of worthy candidates (so I’ll be discriminating and explain my choice in those instances).

This entry’s selection begins with the letter Y, for which my choice is Ya-Po-Ah Terrace, Eugene’s tallest building. Much of the source material for this post comes from the yapoah+terrace+interpretive+panel-7+(002).pdf, the authorship of which I am unsure. I draw on that document to provide historical context, while the reflections that follow are my own attempt to situate Ya-Po-Ah Terrace within Eugene’s architectural alphabet.
 
Ya-Po-Ah Terrace
Ya-Po-Ah Terrace, designed in 1968 by Greybrook & Bradbury Architects of Vancouver, Washington, rises 18 stories at the foot of Skinner Butte. Its name comes from a Kalapuya word meaning “high place,” a fitting description for Eugene’s tallest building.
 
The project began with organized labor. Local unions wanted affordable housing for retirees, a place where members could age in dignity within sight of the city’s core. That impetus gave the tower a social foundation as well as an architectural one. Built with union support and financed through cooperative effort, Ya-Po-Ah Terrace embodied civic purpose alongside the modernist confidence of the day.
 
Construction used the lift-slab method. Floor plates were poured at grade and then hydraulically raised into place. The technique allowed the building to rise quickly despite its unusual scale for Eugene. Its design is characteristic of the modernist “International Style”: rectilinear, unadorned, efficient, and innovative.
 
At the time, many Eugene residents objected to its height. They worried that a tower of such scale would dominate the butte and overwhelm the skyline. Over time, the community adjusted. The tower now stands as part of Eugene’s identity, paired with the butte beside it. Together they form a silhouette that marks the city’s center. The building recalls a campanile, while the butte serves as its church, earthbound and enduring.

 

Each December, the building carries a seasonal message. A large illuminated sign at the top reads “PEACE ON EARTH.” The words shine over downtown, visible from the butte and beyond. The gesture is simple, yet it reinforces the tower’s role as a civic marker. It speaks to the community at large, not only to those who live inside.
 
Ya-Po-Ah Terrace tells a story about change and memory. Communities often resist new scale, then later absorb it into their sense of place. What once drew protest now feels familiar. The tower shows how meaning in the built environment evolves with use, acceptance, and imagination.
 
“Y” is for Ya-Po-Ah Terrace: a high place, a union-rooted project, a bell tower without bells, a seasonal beacon, and a reminder that architecture and community together shape the city’s identity.

My Own Season of Christmas

Photo by Elist Nguyen on Unsplash

The Christmas holiday season matters to me, though not for reasons of doctrine. I have always felt its pull—how it gathers families, neighborhoods, even strangers in shops and streets in celebration and good cheer. I value the season and its rituals and stories that sustain community.
 
I was born in 1959 and raised in a working-class neighborhood in Vancouver, often loosely referred to as “East Van.” Ours was not a churchgoing household, but like many families of the time, we were immersed in the family-oriented, conformist, consumerist culture of mid‑20th‑century North America. Christmas was everywhere, found on porches and in living rooms, in shop windows, and on television. It was less about belief than about belonging. The holiday’s rituals were woven into the fabric of our community, and they became part of my own formation.
 
Even now, I find myself drawn to the season’s festivity: the lights strung against winter’s darkness, the decorations that transform ordinary spaces, the merriment that softens daily routines. These are human inventions, rather than divine mandates. They push back against isolation, create warmth in the cold months, and remind us that joy can be cultivated even when the days are short. In this sense, Christmas is less about heaven above than about light against the long night.
 
The stories we tell at Christmas reinforce this meaning. Each year, my wife and I revisit the old animated specials—A Charlie Brown Christmas, Rudolph the Red‑Nosed Reindeer, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and Frosty the Snowman. We watch the classic films—It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, and A Christmas Story. These narratives endure because they speak to human concerns: generosity, unseen goodness, redemption, and innocence. They are moral tales, not just theological ones, reminding us that kindness and community are worth cultivating regardless of metaphysical certainty.
 
Of course, the cultural environment has changed since my childhood. The conformity of the 1950s and 1960s has given way to a more inclusive society, where Christmas is celebrated in diverse ways and often alongside other traditions. I welcome that evolution. It shows that the holiday is adaptable, that its meaning is shaped less by doctrine than by human needs. Christmas can be Christian, secular, interfaith, or simply communal. Its resilience lies in its capacity to gather people together around collective rituals of wonder and reflection.
 
That’s why Christmas matters to me, an agnostic. Its rituals sustain memory, community, and shared traditions. It connects me to my childhood in Vancouver, to the cultural currents of my generation, to the stories that continue to shape our ethical landscape, and to the inclusive present in which the holiday has broadened beyond its original boundaries. Christmas endures not only because of its spiritual significance, but also because it addresses perennial human needs: for light in darkness, for joy in community, and for stories that remind us of kindness and hope.
 
In my own season of Christmas, what endures is not certainty but continuity in the way memory, ritual, and tradition carry forward even when belief may not. The holiday gathers fragments of childhood, the warmth of community, and the moral imagination of its tales, shaping a season that still matters to me. Meaning can be made and cherished, even when ultimate answers remain unknown.

Robert A.M. Stern and Frank O. Gehry Remembered

Robert A.M. Stern (1939-2025)

Frank O. Gehry (1929-2025)

In just the past few days, two figures synonymous with the architectural culture of the past half-century died: Robert A.M. Stern (1939-2025) and Frank Gehry (1929-2025). Their deaths, so close together, invite reflection—not because they directly influenced my career, but because they figured so prominently in the architectural landscape during my formative years. Those years—roughly the decade between 1977 and 1987, encompassing my university studies and early years in the profession—would see the work of both men achieve prominence.

Gehry’s own home in Santa Monica provoked debate, dismantling domestic form and announcing a new architectural language. Around the same time, he completed the Information and Computer Science/Engineering Research Facility (ICS/ERF) at UC Irvine. I was working on another project for the university then, and I remember how cheap the building looked—which, in fact, it was, consistent with his raw, deliberately provisional aesthetic of that period. When the university demolished it in 2007, a mere twenty-one years after its completion, the decision confirmed my impression that the ICS/ERF functioned more as an experiment than an enduring contribution.

Gehry Residence, Santa Monica, CA (photo by IK's World Trip, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

ICS/ERF, UC Irvine (photo source: https://11011110.github.io/blog/2007/01/22/gehry-gone.html).

Gehry drew on an idiosyncratic vision shaped by the Los Angeles art scene. He stood as a dominant personality within avant-garde architecture of the day, an iconoclast whose originality commanded attention even as his influence remained limited by how personal it was to him. That individuality gave his buildings force, but it also made them difficult to emulate without sliding into imitation.

Stern’s work in those years followed a different path. His Shingle Style houses, such as the Wiseman House in Montauk, carried forward a historical lineage with studied care. At the same time, his more mannered Post-Modern efforts reflected Robert Venturi’s teachings during Stern’s time at Yale. Stern also stepped into the “Whites vs. Grays” debate of the 1970s, giving voice to the Grays—those who argued for historical reference and contextualism against the abstract modernism of the New York Five. His writings and advocacy gave coherence to that position, showing him not only as a designer but also as a polemicist in one of the era’s defining conversations.

Wiseman House, Montauk, NY

Lang House, Washington, CT (photo source: Meet This Year's CTC&G IDA Innovator Award Recipient, Robert A.M. Stern - Cottages & Gardens)

I met Stern during my graduate studies at UCLA. He visited Los Angeles and joined a small group of us for an interactive session. He carried himself with polish and approachability, more professor than provocateur. Gehry, by contrast, earned a reputation for bluntness and ill temper, qualities that matched the rough edges of his early work. Their personalities mirrored their architectural philosophies: Stern as the cultivated historian, Gehry as the restless experimenter.

Neither man directly shaped my development. Their philosophies stood far apart, and I found my path elsewhere. Yet as a student I fell under the thrall of the starchitect phenomenon. Architecture in those years revolved around celebrity, around the idea that a single figure could embody the discipline’s aspirations. Stern and Gehry ranked among the most visible of those figures.

Duo Dickinson, in his essay The Twilight of the Starchitect, argued that this era is ending. I share that view, though I believe the decline began long ago. In 2016, when Zaha Hadid died, I wrote that the starchitect phenomenon was already fading. The deaths of Stern and Gehry feel less like continuation than conclusion. Who among their contemporaries remains? Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster, Thom Mayne, perhaps a few others—but the celebrity of these architects today has diminished. Bjarke Ingels has cultivated a kind of stardom, but he belongs to a younger generation, and his fame seems the exception rather than the rule.

Where once a plurality of schools of thought gave architecture its coherence—Modernism, Post-Modernism, Deconstructivism, High-Tech—today the profession confronts a tangle of competing urgencies: climate change, equity, technology, housing, and economic precarity among them. During the starchitect era, aesthetics carried weight because they were embedded in those schools, which together defined the architectural zeitgeist. Today, no single school commands that kind of influence. The starchitect era, with its focus on personality and spectacle, has ended. Architecture now reflects a spectrum of overlapping concerns rather than a single, unified cultural narrative.

I acknowledge Stern and Gehry as presences in my education, unavoidable figures in the architectural conversation of their time. They were not direct influences, yet they informed the period during which I learned to think about architecture. Their passing closes a chapter and underscores the unsettled terrain the profession now inhabits.

The Sub-Critical City

A system held below its critical slope: grains settle quietly, avalanches rare. Eugene’s growth boundary has shaped a city that resists sudden cascades.

Cities often drift toward what complexity science calls the critical slope, where countless small choices accumulate into patterns of sudden avalanches—some minor, some transformative. Eugene has resisted that drift, making it a useful case for thinking about self‑organized criticality in urban form. 

I first encountered the idea of self‑organized criticality in 2008, in discussions of emergent urbanism and systems thinking under the tutelage of Alder Fuller. A recent Veritasium video on power laws reignited my interest and prompted me to consider how these ideas apply to Eugene’s development. 

Self‑organized criticality describes the way certain systems—sandpiles, forests, stock markets, earthquakes—drift toward a balance point where tiny disturbances can produce anything from nothing to catastrophe. At that balance point, the size of events follows a power‑law distribution: countless small events, far fewer medium ones, and a rare but inevitable handful of giants. These “heavy tails” mark a critical system. The same mathematical signatures appear across wildly different domains, a phenomenon physicists call universality. Cities belong to that list, and Eugene’s exception makes the concept especially revealing. 

No large city grows in a vacuum. All face shaping by topography, zoning, land prices, infrastructure budgets, and political decisions. Yet worldwide, power‑law patterns appear with remarkable consistency: in street lengths, traffic congestion, building heights, rates of innovation, even the spacing of coffee shops. The driver lies not in the absence of rules, but in the presence of millions of small, local, decentralized choices: where to build a house, extend a road, or open a business. Those choices act like grains of sand dropped onto a pile. Over time, cities tune themselves toward a threshold slope, even if aspects of that slope are far from perfectly free. 

Eugene’s growth has been pressed by constraints tighter than those shaping many other cities. The Willamette and McKenzie rivers, the Coburg Hills, and Spencer Butte already form a natural bowl. Oregon’s statewide land‑use program, enacted in 1973, was the first of its kind in the nation. It required every city to draw an urban growth boundary, a bold experiment in curbing sprawl and preserving farmland. Typically, a city’s boundary expands in response to population growth; in Eugene, such expansions have been small and infrequent. From the air, the city still shows a discernible edge: roofs and streetlights give way to fields and oak savanna more abruptly than in most American cities of comparable size and wealth, though ragged in places. 

A walk from the downtown grid toward the South Hills reveals streets that begin to branch and loop like tributaries. Cul‑de‑sacs and winding lanes mark a departure into branching patterns that resemble fractals. One accident on the Beltline at rush hour can paralyze half the city. Housing prices jump in ways that feel disproportionate to the trigger. Even in sub‑critical systems, small avalanches still occur. 

Explosive rings of subdivisions and sudden satellite towns have been kept at bay, leaving Eugene’s sandpile noticeably flatter than most cities of comparable size and wealth. In the language of complexity science, the city qualifies as sub‑critical: orderly, green, bikeable, and still livable. Most other cities, even with their own zoning codes, greenbelts, and natural barriers, live closer to the slope that complexity science describes. 

Eugene's urban growth boundary.

Whether such restraint proves beneficial remains uncertain. The gains are clear: farmland and wetlands preserved, infrastructure costs contained, weekend rides across town that still feel relaxed. Most residents value these outcomes and would not trade them for the unchecked suburban expansion visible in other regions. 

The concerns are less visible. Critical systems acquire remarkable properties—rapid adaptation, outsized creativity—precisely because they tolerate extremes. When a city holds back more forcefully than most, it intervenes in a process that has proved robust at finding its own balance. In Eugene, the muted tails stand out in housing: supply has lagged demand, and affordability has eroded more sharply than in cities that allowed broader expansion. 

Complexity science offers no prescription; it only reminds us that every path carries its own heavy‑tailed consequence. One set of consequences is visible now: open fields west of Bertelsen Road, a skyline that ends where the hills begin. Another set may lie ahead: reduced adaptability, economic stagnation, or exclusion dressed up as preservation. 

The urban growth boundary undergoes periodic review, and the same public process that set it can still adjust it. Eugene has not become locked into permanent sub‑criticality, only into a prolonged and unusually deliberate constraint as the region decides what it values more: the known benefits of containment or the unknown potentials that most cities, despite their own rules, still manage to reach. 

Eugene’s growth boundary has kept the city flatter than the slope that complexity science describes. Whether this restraint preserves resilience or erodes adaptability remains uncertain. Self‑organized criticality only reminds us that even deliberate interventions cannot escape heavy‑tailed consequences.

Architecture is Awesome: #42 Framing Long Views

Villa Rotunda (photo by Andrew Hopkins from his essay Neither Perfect Nor Ideal: Palladio's Villa Rotonda)

Framing a long view is choreography, not accident. Good architecture composes foreground, middleground, and distant horizon so that seeing becomes an intentional act: a measured approach, a threshold, a framed aperture, or a dissolving boundary. Let’s consider four strategies—classical porticoes, sequential garden choreography, glass pavilion, and intimate apertures—each a different way buildings make long views legible and memorable.

Villa Rotunda (photo by Marco Bagarella, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Perched on a gentle rise with a perfectly centered plan, Andrea Palladio’s Villa Rotonda turns each portico into a picture frame. The portico sets up a designed foreground and a measured interval before the countryside. Terrace, approach, and panorama read as a deliberate triptych. The experience is ordered: the building does not merely reveal the land; it arranges the act of looking into classical perspective. 

Katsura Imperial Villa (photo by Raphael Azevedo Franca - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1527734) 

The Katsura Imperial Villa stages long views through movement and sequence. Rooms, engawa verandas, sliding screens, and planted sightlines craft a collection of composed tableaux. Each threshold recasts the foreground and repositions focal points so distant features and garden elements become destinations in a carefully paced visual narrative. 

Farnsworth House (photo by Victor Grigas - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42288805)

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House pursues the opposite move: panoramic extension. A thin slab elevated above the floodplain, featuring full-height glass walls and a minimal structural frame, dissolves the threshold between the interior and the landscape. Instead of isolating discrete images, the house produces a continuous picture plane; its power lies in letting the eye move unbroken to the horizon and treeline, amplifying distance and continuity. 

Mount Angel Abbey Library (photo source: The Aalto Architecture - Mount Angel Abbey)

Alvar Aalto’s Mount Angel Abbey Library near Silverton, here in Oregon, resists spectacle in favor of intimate, painting-like views. Small, carefully placed windows and carrels frame clipped foregrounds, middle fields, and distant ridges, each opening embraced by warm, tactile surrounds. The building choreographs slow looking: the landscape becomes a sequence of shaped images to be read over time rather than consumed at once. 

Together, these examples describe a compositional spectrum. Palladio and Katsura use borders, thresholds, and procession to create discrete, framed vistas; Farnsworth dissolves the border to produce an immersive panorama; Aalto occupies a middle ground, shaping compact, outward-facing views that remain intimate. Each choice shapes attention differently—how long we look, what we remember, and how distant places enter the life of a building. 

Notice framed views in ordinary places: a porch that offers an agreeable perspective, a hallway that narrows the horizon, a small window that turns a distant ridge into a painted scene. Those everyday framings are the same compositional moves architects use at larger scales. Recognize them, and architecture becomes a reliable tool for making the world more legible—and, yes, AWESOME. 

Next Architecture is Awesome: #43 Market Halls and the Bustle of Commerce