The Butsudan

A butsudan; not ours, but similar (photo credit: CC BY 2.1 jp, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1801262)

The house I grew up in included a piece of furniture found in many Japanese homes. It was a butsudan—a household Buddhist altar—comprised of a dark-lacquered wooden cabinet with doors and shiny brass fittings that served as a personal shrine for memorializing ancestors and honoring the Buddha. Ours stood about four-and-a-half feet tall by two-and-a-half feet wide and occupied a corner of our formal dining room. The pair of outer doors opened to reveal fabric screens behind them. These folded out of the way, in turn revealing several ornately decorated tiered platforms for offerings and incense burners. I’ve come to think of our butsudan not only as a devotional object but as an architecture of remembrance scaled to domestic life.
 
Butsudans trace back to an edict issued by Emperor Tenmu in 685, encouraging every family to keep a Buddha image and sutras in the home. The traditional lacquered cabinet form we recognize today developed gradually and eventually became a standard across ordinary households during the Tokugawa period (roughly the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries). By then, the butsudan had settled into a recognizable architectural typology: a cabinet with doors, thresholds, and an internal hierarchy of spaces. A butsudan commonly holds a Buddha image appropriate to the family's sect alongside ihai (memorial tablets for the dead), serving two purposes at once: as a site for daily devotion, and as a fixed place where a family's dead remain, in a sense, present in the house rather than confined to a cemetery or a temple's care. Its form is not incidental; it is a domestic micro‑architecture built to house devotion and memory.
 
That underlying impulse, as a fixed place in the home where the dead remain present through offering and ritual, isn't uniquely Japanese; households across China, Korea, and Vietnam keep their own versions of the same idea, each shaped by its own blend of Buddhist practice and ancestor veneration. The object itself is another matter. The cabinet form (the doors, screens, and the internal hierarchy of platforms) is a distinctly Japanese elaboration. Even the relationship to memory differs: in Korea and China, a memorial tablet is often treated as temporary, ceremonially retired after a few years as a specific person is folded into a more general ancestral memory, while the Japanese practice tends to keep the ihai in place indefinitely. These differences matter because they show how Japan gave architectural permanence to a practice that elsewhere has been more fluid: the butsudan fixes remembrance in a built form.
 
Speaking architecturally, a butsudan is in many ways a miniature building. The ancient Romans constructed analogous structures: the aediculae, literally Latin for “small house” or “small temples.” These were classically a niche flanked by columns or pilasters and capped with a pediment or entablature, built to house and honor a sacred image or statue. And Charles Moore often used the “geode” as a conceptual metaphor for design that parallels the butsudan morphology: a building that appears plain on the outside like a rough rock, but opens up to a vibrant, colorful, and richly textured inner universe of crystals. He built the idea into his own work more than once. Our butsudan was a geode in the truest sense: a dark, silent shell that yielded upon opening to a radiant, sacred interior of gleaming brass and gold leaf.
 
Whoever crafted our butsudan understood, as any architect should, that a small object can organize the space around it if it's given enough formal authority. Ours was, without question, a focal point of our dining room.
 
My grandmother tended it daily. I don't know the full content of her practice; I was familiar with its rhythm: she placed offerings (usually fresh water, rice, seasonal fruit), lit candles and incense, and followed with solemn chanting and prayer. My father took up tending to the butsudan after, though only on special occasions, New Year's chief among them. His custodianship was lighter than my grandmother’s had been. Even as the intensity of practice shifted, the butsudan’s authority in the room never did.
 
I don't know the butsudan’s provenance. I suspect my grandmother’s parents brought it with them when they immigrated to Canada. It certainly predated anything else our family owned. It was older than the house it sat in, even older than the country my great-grandparents chose as their new home.
 
One of my cousins is now the custodian of our butsudan. I don't know if it occupies a corner as commanding as the one it held in ours. I also don’t know if she tends it the way my grandmother once did. But a butsudan doesn’t just stop being what it is. The doors still open the same way, the platforms still hold whatever is placed on them, and the hierarchy inside remains legible. Well-designed buildings outlast the intentions that first organized them too, and we don't think changes of use necessarily diminish them. Above all, a butsudan embodies a domestic architecture of remembrance by virtue of its form. Its architecture is one that quietly persists, even if the rituals that once animated it have thinned.

Stuff I Stumbled Upon

I sometimes find it tough to decide what to write about for my next blog post. This week was one of those times — that is, until I found inspiration reading a recent piece by my friend and fellow blogger, Mrs. Random. Her blog is a loose, good-natured chronicle of her daily life, on occasion focused on small discoveries she’s made. That recent entry was a simple and fittingly “random” collection of web links she thought her readers might find interesting.  

  
My interests have always been catholic, and I tend to be ADD to boot. This explains the wide-ranging links below; on any given day, I will flit between seemingly random subjects. All that connects these is my wandering curiosity. I’ve hyperlinked the headings, which will open the corresponding website in a separate tab:     
 

AI-designed house, from the Design Intent YouTube channel.

AI Designed This House . . . And It's Weird
If you’ve been a reader of my blog, you probably know I’m fascinated by the implications of artificial intelligence for the architectural profession. I came across this video on the Design Intent YouTube channel, produced by Ryan, an architect who works primarily in the commercial project sector. Like me, he’s inquisitive about AI. Among other things, his channel documents his creative experimentation with 3D modeling and visualizations; in this instance, he lets an AI LLM (Google Gemini) take control over the design of his next house. What he got wasn’t anything he expected.  

 

Anthropeum
I must also give credit to Mrs. Random for turning me on to Anthropeum, an online daily geography‑and‑chronology guessing game built around artifacts from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s open‑access collection. The way Anthropeum works is that it shows you several pieces of art from the Met, and you must guess approximately where in the world and when it was created. It’s addicting, and my wife and I are now hooked. That doesn’t mean we’re good at it; it’s humbling to encounter the limits of our knowledge every day. Give it a try yourself. 

The New Cholesterol Guideline: What to Know
I’m trying to focus more on my health to help forestall age-related ailments. Unfortunately, my latest lipid panel blood tests show my cholesterol and triglyceride numbers are heading in the wrong direction. Consequently, I’ve become more attentive than ever to the latest developments associated with screening and risk assessment for cardiovascular disease. The web page linked in the header above reports on the latest update to the cholesterol‑management guidelines from the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association. The updates emphasize earlier screening and more personalized risk assessment for cardiovascular disease (using the PREVENT risk calculator for 10‑ and 30‑year outcomes). They also recommend childhood screening for familial hypercholesterolemia and one‑time Lp(a) testing. The updates outline new LDL‑C targets and treatment options, including statins and newer lipid‑lowering therapies.
 

Henry George (photo by Isaiah West Taber, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Georgism 101
I have a limited understanding of Georgism, the economic ideology formed by 19^th-century economist Henry George. For those, like me, who are not wholly familiar with its principles, the YouTube video linked in the header provides a six-minute-long primer. I wanted to learn more about Georgism because some suggest that it can help address housing affordability, primarily through land value taxes. Apparently, such a tax reduces the incentive to sit on unused parcels, makes speculation less profitable, and supports denser, more walkable urban forms. Georgism doesn’t solve zoning, permitting delays, construction costs, or NIMBY politics, but it does attack the speculative layer that inflates land prices. Here in Eugene, a land value tax would likely push more land into productive use and reduce the “empty lot premium” that has driven prices upward. Many people mislabel Georgism as a form of socialism, but it is fundamentally market-oriented and compatible with capitalism. The accusation persists because of sloppy political rhetoric, not because the theory resembles socialism in any meaningful way.
 

*    *    *    *    *    *

So, there you go: four eclectic websites for you to peruse if you’re so inclined. Maybe one or two will catch your interest the way they did mine.

The Arithmetic of Downtown Housing

1055 Willamette (Rowell Brokaw Architects)

After years of vacancy, developers deChase Miksis and Edlen & Co. are set to start construction this fall on a six-story building on the former Lane Community College Downtown Center site at 1055 Willamette Street, across from Eugene Station. The design by Rowell Brokaw Architects will bring 133 mixed-income apartments and ground-floor shops downtown. With help from the City of Eugene, the project promises to transform a long moribund site into active, useful housing. This is good news. That said, its lengthy gestation highlights the challenging economics of building housing in our downtown core.

When the City and its partners outlined the project in 2021, they estimated a total cost of about $30 million. The expectation then was that the city's contribution (primarily urban renewal funding) would total about $1.1 million, roughly four percent of the cost.

Fast forward to this year: the budgeted project cost is now $38.7 million, and the required public contribution increased to $10.5 million, more than 27 percent of the total. The design's scope barely changed; what changed was the math. Construction cost inflation, higher interest rates, financing risk, and prevailing wage requirements all contributed to the shift. None of these factors is unique to Eugene. What is distinctive is the local market in which they operate. New housing can command only the rents and sale prices local households can afford. When the costs of development rise faster than the value the completed project can generate, the gap between investment and return steadily widens.

Public debate has focused largely on the City's Multi-Unit Property Tax Exemption (MUPTE). It is important to understand what the program does. MUPTE does not eliminate property taxes; instead, it exempts for up to ten years only the taxes on new residential construction, while the underlying land remains taxable. Rather than surrendering existing tax revenue, the program temporarily exempts value that would not exist unless the building were constructed. Nor is the exemption automatic. Projects must satisfy the city's Public Benefit Criteria, which include above-code energy performance, moderate-income housing contributions, compatible urban design, and a local economic impact plan. City staff reviews every application, as does an independent panel with neighborhood representatives, developers, and design professionals. The program exchanges a temporary tax benefit for measurable public benefits.

Even with MUPTE, the 1055 Willamette project still needed a one-dollar land sale, millions in urban renewal funding, multiple rounds of financial restructuring, a City Council extension of deadlines while the developers assembled additional financing, and, ultimately, a return trip for further assistance before the remaining gap could be closed—a sequence that, on its own, might read as a story about one stubborn incentive program rather than about the market underneath it. The Lookout Eugene-Springfield editorial board recently asked a more pointed question: if one 133-unit building required nearly $9 million more public assistance than anticipated, what does that imply for the rest of the downtown housing pipeline? The Downtown Riverfront affordable housing project, a planned 75-unit community by Atkins Dame and Homes for Good, ran into the same wall earlier this year, requiring additional urban renewal funding after rising costs reopened its financing gap. Projects that once appeared feasible are no longer penciling out without additional assistance.

The Station House, the Obie Companies' proposed 124-unit development at Fifth Avenue and Oak Street, received a ten-year MUPTE exemption and substantial fee waivers. It cleared the city's entitlement process and later amendments. Yet construction has not begun, and the developer's website still describes the project as "Coming Soon." I don't know why, and perhaps no one outside the development team does. Public incentives are often necessary, but they're not always sufficient. A project can receive every approval and incentive the city can grant and still fail to move forward because the underlying economics aren't working.

Rendering of The Station House (Obie Companies)

Today's discussions differ from those contested over Capstone Communities, the out-of-state developer that proposed 1,234 student beds downtown in 2012. That dispute was mostly about scale rather than subsidy, and about whether one project should reshape so much of downtown at once, not to mention unease that most of the profit would flow to a Birmingham, Alabama, company. Some version of that unease persists. It's easy to read the widening subsidy figures for 1055 Willamette the same way, as evidence that developers are extracting value from a weak market.

I don't think the numbers support that reading. A developer angling for a subsidy does not spend years assembling financing, absorb round after round of cost escalation, and return twice for more assistance before breaking ground. Nor does one sit on a fully entitled, fully incentivized project for the better part of a year, as appears to be happening at The Station House, if incentives alone were the point. MUPTE's public benefit requirements cut against the extraction story too. A developer either meets them or gets nothing. Whatever any developer's motives, the risk runs in both directions, and lately the private side hasn't been walking away with an easy win.

The pressing question is whether existing incentive programs can bridge a financing gap now substantially larger than they were designed to address. My impression is that the City instituted MUPTE to close modest gaps between development costs and market feasibility, like the four percent delta 1055 Willamette originally faced. It wasn't intended to compensate for a market in which production costs have pulled far ahead of the value finished housing can support. As that disparity grows, incentives become less capable of closing the gap. As a result, projects are requiring direct public investment just to reach the starting line.

Abandoning incentives is not the answer. There's no evidence suggesting downtown housing will appear on its own once assistance disappears. The more likely outcome is that vacant buildings remain vacant while everyone waits for conditions to improve. And I don't think MUPTE is the central issue. The program has become the focus largely because "tax exemption" sounds like a giveaway. The structural mismatch behind it is less visible, but far more consequential. If development costs continue to rise faster than Eugene's market can support, every downtown housing project will face essentially the same problem, and most won't clear it without help. No incentive program, by itself, can erase that reality.

None of this settles what, if anything, the city can do about the underlying arithmetic itself—whether through system development charges, permitting timelines, zoning capacity, or something else entirely. That's a harder question than whether any single incentive is fair, and it deserves its own accounting.

For now, I'm happy to hear that 1055 Willamette is moving forward. After standing empty for more than a decade, the old LCC Downtown Center is finally about to become something else. I hope the projects that follow will do the same. Whether they can will depend less on any single incentive than on whether that gap begins to narrow.

The Duty to Observe, Revisited

Photo by Olek Buzunov on Unsplash

One aspect of professional practice I miss in retirement is the architect’s obligation to conduct periodic site observations of projects in construction. Watching a building take shape that I had a hand in designing was always immensely rewarding. In this post, I'll consider what happens to that obligation now that AI tools capable of near-continuous site observation exist. Neither AIA Document A201-2017 nor Oregon  Administrative Rule 806-010-0050 says a word about artificial intelligence, which is understandable; neither document has been substantially rewritten lately. I suspect the "periodic" standard was always a practical accommodation to what a human being could manage, rather than a considered position about what is ideal.

I wrote a piece three years ago about OpenSpace AI, another on the architect’s standard of care, and a third, more speculative post on AI’s broader impact on the profession. I believed OpenSpace is a game-changer because it let me follow a project’s progress from anywhere while virtually touring it as if I were physically present. In today's world, where accountability is paramount, I said that OpenSpace offered a superior solution for documentation of construction progress.

A201-2017 draws a deliberate line between the architect's responsibility for "periodic" presence on the jobsite and the "exhaustive or continuous" inspection it explicitly disclaims, and between "observing" the work and "inspecting" it. Oregon's rule sets a parallel standard: observation on "a periodic basis as is necessary," without the same explicit contrast, but pointing in the same direction.

We tend to talk about “observe versus inspect” as if it were a principled distinction about the architect's proper role. Design intent belongs to the architect, while means and methods belong to the contractor, and so on. This allocation of risk is real and defensible. But underneath all this lies a basic fact: the standard assumed a person could reasonably meet it by driving to the site with a notepad and a camera, at intervals consistent with the project’s scope and complexity. It never claimed to be ideal. It simply reflected what was possible. What AI is capable of is bringing this into question.

With apps like OpenSpace AI, continuous, computer‑vision‑assisted site observation has moved from novelty to a maturing product category. Buildots, a competing example with a growing market share, works much the same way. A worker walks the site regularly wearing a 360‑degree hard‑hat camera; the app processes the imagery, matches it to the design team’s BIM model and the schedule, and generates reports, trade by trade and element by element, documenting what is built against what was supposed to be. It flags deviations, forecasts delays, and produces documentation that once required many hours of a superintendent’s time. Several large and sophisticated builders, such as Fortis Construction (OpenSpace AI), and Turner Construction and JE Dunn (Buildots), already deploy these tools. These contractors have normalized continuous observation for their own risk posture.

In one of its case studies, Buildots reports helping a Danish contractor avoid a potential six-week delay and daily fines of 0.1% of contract value on an 86,000 SF office building project. The company quotes the project's director on the part that matters here: claims are usually a mess of poor documentation, but with continuous data in hand, "we have real numbers and historical data to oppose or validate those claims.”

I cite this case study because it shows what problems this technology was built to solve, and for whom. It wasn’t built for design intent, and not for the architect’s interpretive judgment, but to help address disputes, delay, and claims exposure for the parties who bear that exposure most directly. The physical limitation that once calibrated the “periodic, not continuous” standard no longer constrains anyone. Instead, the issue has become one of cost and adoption, which raises a different kind of question, one the legal system has dealt with before.

In a 1932 ruling, Judge Learned Hand decided a case every first‑year law student becomes familiar with. It involved two tugboats, a storm, and the loss of coal barges. The tugboat owner hadn’t equipped his boats with radio receivers, which by then were cheap, dependable, and reasonably common, though not yet universal, and so missed a storm warning that would have compelled him to seek shelter. He argued that since most tugboats in the area didn’t carry radios either, he’d met the industry standard. Judge Hand disagreed, in language pertinent to this blog post: “A whole calling may have unduly lagged in the adoption of new and available devices . . . Courts must in the end say what is required.” Industry custom, in other words, offers evidence of due care. It does not define it. A whole profession can fall behind, and a court can say so.

I raise this legal precedent not because I think a court is about to hold that architects must deploy or rely on OpenSpace AI, Buildots, or their technological cousins. I raise it because the logic transfers uncomfortably well. If continuous, affordable observation exists, and the contractor down the hall already runs it for their own reasons, “I visited during framing, per my professional judgment” will sound less convincing in a deposition five years from now than it does today. The baseline everyone is measured against is shifting in ways architects do not control.

The architectural profession's response to this shouldn’t be dread. The architect’s standard of care and contractual language deliberately allocate risk. The contractor controls means and methods because the contractor builds the project; as the architect, I controlled design intent because that’s the professional judgment I was licensed to exercise. Having a capability doesn't create an obligation to use it in some new, more exposed way. A full-time project representative doesn't change that either. More eyes on the job would not have relieved me of exercising, and standing behind, my professional judgment.

The American Institute of Architects released a Position Statement on Artificial Intelligence this past January, and a more substantive nine‑point Guidance for the Responsible Use of AI by Architecture and Design Firms last October. Both documents are genuinely current and thoughtful. They affirm that professional judgment is non‑negotiable. But professional judgment is not the same as professional procedure, and this is where a gap now grows. For you architects out there, I recommend reading both the position statement and the guidance document.

What the AIA hasn’t done yet is address the architect’s site visitation obligations in light of rapidly advancing AI technology. Their table of “emerging AI use opportunities” covers design, visualization, business operations, and research. Under project delivery, they offer nothing more specific than “task automation” and “documentation.” They offer even less regarding construction contract administration, observation duty, and the architect’s standard of care in the field.

Notably, when I looked at how platforms like OpenSpace AI and Buildots organize themselves, their websites sort their audience by role into project teams, executives, owners, and construction managers. The architect doesn’t appear in their taxonomy at all. They built their tools to solve the contractor’s and owner’s problems, not the architect’s. Consequently, these rapidly evolving tools do not address the architect’s statutory duty to observe the work in progress. When the architect is absent from the tools’ mental models, others risk defining the architect’s obligations.

There is an actual opportunity here. It isn't that AI will make architects better observers, though it might, but that the rule governing how this technology intersects with our legal obligations is still being written, largely by people who aren’t architects, for purposes that fall outside the profession's domain. AIA has made a real start, but it hasn’t finished. The gap between the studio and the jobsite, in the guidance as it stands, is precisely the gap architects would be wise to fill for themselves before an insurer’s underwriting requirement or a plaintiff’s expert witness fills it for them. The moment for architects to articulate what AI‑assisted observation should and should not mean is now.

I think about the field reports I used to write, the ones I was taught and later taught others to word carefully: observed, never inspected, never approved, unless I meant it. I wonder what those reports would have looked like with the benefit of a continuous, camera‑fed record sitting alongside them. Almost certainly better, and far harder to argue with. Whether that makes AI tools a new obligation or simply a better mousetrap is a question the architectural profession will spend the next few years answering. If I were a young architect today, I would embrace the new technology before a legal decision tells me I’ve negligently fallen behind the standard of care.

Encounters with Architecture - Insights from a Hundred Places

 

I know Howard Davis, and I don't know him, which is a strange thing to admit about someone I first encountered (the word feels apt given what this review is about) as one of a handful of Alexander acolytes on the University of Oregon faculty in the early 1980s. I knew him the way a student knows any respected professor he never quite got to know personally. What I didn't know, until purchasing Encounters with Architecture: Insights from a Hundred Places, was much of anything about the life that produced it: where Howard grew up, what he studied before architecture, how he came to spend a career moving between Berkeley, Austin, Eugene, and fifty countries beyond. So, this review comes from an odd vantage. I have real stakes in getting it right, but I'm still learning, chapter by chapter, more about who Howard is than I knew before.

I began by reading the book straight through, chronologically, the way Howard organized it. I've since abandoned that discipline in favor of jumping around, reading episodically, chasing whichever chapter title catches my eye. This is partly because I wanted to post this review sooner rather than later. The book rewards this kind of reading almost as well as the linear kind. I am not finished. I don't think that disqualifies me from recommending it, and I'll explain why.

Howard organized Encounters with Architecture as a hundred short essays, two or three pages apiece, each built around a specific place that lodged itself in his memory over a career spanning early training in physics, years at Christopher Alexander's Center for Environmental Structure, decades of teaching at Berkeley, Texas, and Oregon, and fieldwork on six continents. The book runs chronologically in seven parts of uneven length, from a childhood memory of four shops on St. Johns Place in Brooklyn to encounters as recent as 2024. Early on, reading straight through, I started to suspect the book isn't really a hundred essays about architecture. It reads more like a memoir organized around a hundred places, each entry depending on the ones that came before it, even when Howard never says so outright.

I enjoy Howard's writing style, which is not academic, despite a career spent producing the journal articles and conference papers that might have trained the habit into him. I don't find a trace of that vocabulary here. The prose is plain and direct but still evocative, and it avoids the jargon so much architectural writing reaches for when it wants to sound serious. I suspect the book's own structure has something to do with this, since two or three pages per encounter leaves little room for throat-clearing, and Howard has to arrive at what mattered about a place quickly. Whatever the reason, the result is a book I can pick up for ten minutes or an hour, in whatever order suits me that day, and come away from either with something worth keeping.

Take the chapter on the Inner Shrine at Ise, in Japan, which is the best one I've read so far. Howard describes the whole approach on a day of drizzle: the long train ride down from Kyoto, the stands of cypress and cedar, the bridges, the stairs, the succession of gateways that keep the innermost shrine perpetually out of reach. He counts it among the two or three most powerful encounters in the book, and the chapter earns that claim through sheer particularity: a specific day, a specific stretch of weather, a route walked in a specific order, rather than anything Howard tells the reader to think about it. That particularity is, I suspect, the book's real method when the method is working; Howard doesn't explain a place so much as walk you through arriving at it. 

A chapter on a neighborhood in Cairo, by contrast, is the weakest one I've come across so far. The neighborhood itself barely appears in any specificity. Howard writes instead about a more general feeling for the city, which he extends outward to "all great cities" rather than keeping it tied to the specific streets he set out to describe. It's the one entry I've read so far where the book turns abstract.

One small thing worth noting, more as an aside than an argument: Howard gives each chapter a subtitle that distills its lesson into a phrase, "The sacred over the profane," "Sheltering daily life," and so on. It reminded me of the pattern-naming he must have done firsthand during his years working alongside Alexander.

I warmly recommend this book, partly because of Howard's like-mindedness with concerns I've long circled: place, memory, what a life's worth of attention leaves behind. And partly because of where I am in my own life right now: retired, with the leisure to read a book like this the way it deserves to be read, and enough architecture behind me of my own to recognize someone who views architecture as I do. I'm not sure this is a book for everyone. If pressed to pass it on to only one actual person I know, it wouldn't be an architect. It'd be a young twenty-something friend of mine, a philosophy graduate, who asks better questions about buildings than most people who get paid to design them. That says less about who's likely to buy the book than about the kind of mind it rewards, which is one with a disposition toward noticing.