The Discipline of Attention

 

Photo by Neelabh Raj on Unsplash

I've been thinking about attention. Not concentration, and certainly not the productivity-book variety, but the attention we give to the places we inhabit.

During more than forty years in architecture, I gave a great deal of attention to buildings and the places they occupy. Much of that attention was directed toward understanding how things worked and what might inform a design decision. Since retiring, I've had more time to look without a particular purpose in mind. The difference isn't that I've suddenly become more perceptive; it's largely a matter of available time.

I was reminded of the value of simply being in a place this past summer when Lynne and I went to the Hult Center for a show. We arrived early to spend time in the lobby, one of Eugene's most appealing public interiors. Its soaring volume, balconies, and cantilevered stair landings offer multiple vantage points from which to watch the activity below. As the evening progressed, the lobby became increasingly crowded. The volume of conversation rose, lines formed at the restrooms, and people had claimed the limited seating in the lobby. Lynne found a place to sit while I continued exploring. The daylight coming through the east-facing glass had softened as the sun moved toward the western horizon. I wasn't searching for anything in particular, or analyzing details for a project. I was enjoying being there.

Sometimes, though, I stay in a place because I sense there is more to notice than first meets the eye. On a recent visit to Fern Ridge Reservoir, I stopped to watch a pair of grebes on water that seemed almost motionless. The light was flat, and little appeared to be happening. I could have moved on, but I stayed. After a while, I began to notice the spacing of the reeds, the paths the birds traced across the water, and the subtle movement of the wind on its surface. I wasn't waiting for something spectacular to happen; I was content to see what was already there.

It is easier for me to move on than to remain with an experience that hasn't yet given me a reason to stay. I recognize that tendency in myself. I am inclined to divide my attention, often moving between several things at once and anticipating what might come next. Even when I know that doing so diminishes my engagement with any one thing, the habit persists.

Travel provided opportunities to look without a project in mind during my working years. At the 2009 AIA National Convention in San Francisco, I set aside a day to walk the city and visit buildings I had read about. One stop was the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. I had been prepared to dislike it, having seen photographs and read the criticism that greeted its design. Seeing it in person changed my mind. I was taken by the way its courtyards bring the surrounding landscape into the building, and by the copper skin, meant to weather to green over time. But an itinerary, even one of my own making, tends to keep me moving. I would have liked to spend longer at the de Young, but I had other places on my list.

The word discipline in this essay's title may suggest a more rigorous undertaking than I have in mind. I don't think attention can be summoned on demand, nor do I believe that every experience needs to be examined closely. Sometimes the experience itself is sufficient.  

Writing has become one way I try to give attention a more deliberate place in my life. I've kept a fairly regular weekly routine since starting this blog in 2008. Choosing a subject and writing about it often requires me to look more carefully than I otherwise might. A building or a familiar part of Eugene may prompt a post, but writing about it obliges me to look again, to consider why it interests me and what I might have overlooked.

I am also conscious that the time available to pursue these interests is finite. When I first visited Taliesin West in 1988, I was already an architect, but I came away with relatively few lasting impressions of the place. I have only a handful of photographs from that visit, and my recollection of its particulars is limited. I will return soon, spend more time there than I did the first time, and be more attentive. I've visited other places and had experiences I remember only vaguely. I can't recover those occasions, but I can be more deliberate about the ones still ahead.

I don't know that I've become particularly good at this. I still find myself distracted, and I still move through places without seeing them. During my career, attention usually had to serve the demands of a building or a deadline. Now I have more freedom to give it time without necessarily needing to arrive at a conclusion or produce something useful. Of course, I often end up writing about what I've noticed. Perhaps I haven't entirely escaped the need to produce something after all.

Before I Go Back to Taliesin West

My wife, Lynne, and I visited Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home and studio in Scottsdale, in early May 1988. We had married on April 23 and spent our two-week honeymoon driving through the Four Corners states; Scottsdale came near the end. I took the photograph above from across the lawn southwest of the main building. It shows the long, low roof of the drafting studio: a band of pale, ribbed panels between red beams, with the McDowell Mountains behind. I remember almost nothing of the visit beyond the fact that we were there, and Lynne, I can report, remembers even less. 

I had planned to go back this month. Then, on October 16, a visitor was killed there. 

Brother Rogério Renato Mateucci, 55, rector of the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná in Brazil, was on a walking tour that afternoon when the wind tore a piece of roofing loose and it struck him. He died at the scene. Scottsdale police called it a weather-related accident and confirmed to The Arizona Republic that a piece of acrylic struck him. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation closed the site, inspected the roofing, added on-site weather monitoring, and reopened on October 24. 

My first reaction was awkwardness about my own plans. I'm going to Scottsdale to visit close friends, and a side trip to Taliesin West seemed a good way to spend some of our time together. Is there a respectful length of time to wait before touring a place where someone has just died? No number of days answers that. The calendar isn't really the issue; the reason for going is. To visit in search of the spot, or to photograph where it happened, would be ghoulish. To see the architecture again, and this time to pay attention, seems to me something else. I have decided to go. 

Am I worried for my own safety? Not really. The Foundation has inspected the roofing and introduced weather monitoring, and the odds of a similar accident during my particular hour on the grounds are small. November in Scottsdale is usually calm. That is not what bothers me. 

On the afternoon Brother Mateucci died, the National Weather Service reported winds of 22 mph in the area, with gusts to 32 mph. CNN later reported gusts of up to 38 mph at Scottsdale Airport that day, also according to the National Weather Service (CNN, via CP24). Neither measurement was taken at Taliesin West itself. Wind is a design load, and the City of Scottsdale's current building code specifies a minimum ultimate design wind speed of 105 mph for Risk Category II buildings. That figure doesn't tell us what any particular roof panel was designed to resist, nor what criteria governed the panels' installation in the 1990s. I don't know whether the work was engineered and permitted, or how the panels were fastened. I would like to know why one came loose. 

Two other things bear on that question. A former employee, speaking anonymously to Arizona's Family, said he had seen two other pieces of roofing break loose. I can't verify that and offer it only as his account. Last March, the Foundation's director of preservation, Rebecca Barron, said in an interview on its own website that the acrylic roof system "is nearing the end of its serviceable life". That statement doesn't establish the condition of the panel that came loose, but it makes the question of maintenance difficult to ignore. 

I have written before about Wright's influence on me, and nothing here diminishes my admiration for his work. I have no evidence of negligence. But calling the death "weather-related" doesn't explain the failure. Monitoring the weather governs when people may stand under the roof; it does nothing to the roof itself. The Foundation says it inspected the roofing before reopening, but as of this writing, I have seen nothing explaining whether it has refastened or replaced the panels, or what it has concluded about the cause. 

The roof I photographed in 1988 is not the roof there today. According to the Historic American Buildings Survey, Wright's canvas gave way to fiberglass in the 1960s, and the fiberglass to acrylic in the 1990s.(1) The panels in my photograph were almost certainly fiberglass. Our guide surely explained the change from Wright's canvas, which was too consequential to gloss over; I don't remember a word of it. 

As visitors to a house museum, we place complete and unexamined trust in the people who maintain it. We walk where we're led, and it never occurs to us to ask how the roof is fastened. We shouldn't have to. Lynne and I walked under that roof without a second thought, as every visitor should be able to. 

I'll be in Scottsdale next week. I hope to find the spot on the lawn where I stood in 1988 and take the same picture again, then look up at the roof more carefully than I did 38 years ago. I doubt I'll be able to tell if anything has changed. I'll report back anyway. 

 

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(1) The HABS record documents Wright's office specifically. Canvas gave Wright the diffused light he wanted but couldn't survive Arizona summers and needed frequent replacement. Other accounts date the first fiberglass to the late 1950s. The current acrylic panels sit over interior canvas. 

Rooms in an Age of Open Plans

Rose Main Reading Room, New York Public Library—perspective corrected wide shot (my photo)

 

Louis Kahn believed that the room is the beginning of architecture. I quoted him on that point in 2023, when the Eugene Public Library Foundation asked me to speak at the main branch's twentieth anniversary. Kahn held that each room deserves its own light, its own structure, and boundaries a person can clearly perceive. He doubted that anyone could truly inhabit the undivided space of the open column grid.

Libraries make the case for rooms better than any other building type I know. Consider the Salle Labrouste in Paris(1), with its slender cast-iron columns and terracotta domes; the octagonal Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress; the Rose Main Reading Room at the New York Public Library; or the circular reading room of the Library of Parliament in Ottawa. Each is unmistakably a room, with a center, defined edges, and a ceiling that gathers the space beneath it. When I sit in one, I know exactly where I am.

Contemporary libraries haven't abandoned large reading spaces, but their ambitions have shifted. Helsinki's Oodi has its top-floor "Book Heaven," an interior expanse under an undulating, cloud-like ceiling. Seattle's Central Library has its reading room beneath OMA's tilted glass. These are generous spaces, but they are open floor plates more than rooms, defined largely by a ceiling rather than by a clear sense of enclosure. In Seattle's reading room, I felt more adrift than situated. Many new libraries share this character; their interiors sometimes have more in common with airport terminals than with the reading rooms that once anchored the type.

Helsinki Central Library Oodi, third-floor "Book Heaven" (photo by Ninaras, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

The exceptions tend to be national and research libraries, where sustained reading remains the central activity. The National Library of Israel in Jerusalem (Herzog & de Meuron with Mann-Shinar, 2023) organizes its main reading hall around a void rising through three levels to a great circular skylight. Galleries, a café, an auditorium, and a bookstore surround the room rather than dissolve it.

Public libraries, recasting themselves as quintessential third places, have mostly chosen the open floor. The usual explanation is that libraries now do far more than lend books, and flexibility rewards the open plan. I've never fully bought this explanation. The downtown Eugene library is an exception, one I know from the inside. When our team (Robertson/Sherwood/Architects, with SBRA, now Shepley Bulfinch, as design partners) planned it, the program was hardly simple, yet we chose to make the building an ordered collection of rooms: large, two-story reading rooms, with the top-lit rotunda centering the plan. Programs change; that's a given. Since the library opened, it has added a "library of things" and a maker space, neither part of the original program, and both found homes within the building's fabric of secondary spaces. The principal rooms remain intact. I may be the least objective judge of what that proves architecturally.

Eugene Public Library, west reading room (photo by Eckert & Eckert)

Christian Norberg-Schulz argued that our sense of existential space begins with a center, the fixed point from which paths and domains take their meaning.(2) A great reading room supplies that center literally. An open plan asks me to supply my own. A well-defined room does more than locate me; it frames me. When I sat in the New York Library's Rose Main Reading Room, I became, for as long as I stayed, someone who reads and studies, a participant in a civic ritual of learning.

Perhaps a library meant to be everyone's living room can't afford to be anyone's center. Certainly, an open, un-walled library floor plan does serve a distinct political purpose by signaling absolute public ownership and radical inclusivity. People filling these open floors on a weekday afternoon don't seem to miss what I miss, so maybe the loss is mine alone. Regardless, I suspect rooms do a kind of work that open plans rarely do: they tell us where we are, and, while we're there, who we are.

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(1) The Salle Labrouste no longer serves the national collection. The Bibliothèque nationale moved its main holdings to Dominique Perrault's Tolbiac site, which opened in 1996 and whose long reading halls wrap a sunken garden. Whether those halls qualify as rooms in Kahn's sense is a question for another day.

(2) I'm conscious that Norberg-Schulz's idea of the center may be a Western one. Traditional Japanese architecture, which early modernists admired for its flowing, apparently centerless space, complicates the picture, though perhaps less than they believed. The Japanese house is organized around rooms measured in tatami, each with its own ceiling, which can be combined or separated with sliding screens as the season and occasion require. Formal rooms are often oriented toward the tokonoma, while traditional farmhouses gather around the hearth. Modernists borrowed the module and the sliding screen but often left the alcove behind. Perhaps the center that matters is less a geometric middle than a point of focus.

Missing The Mark

 

Construction of The Mark at Eugene, in progress, October 17, 2026 (my photo).

The old PeaceHealth University District hospital buildings came down quickly, and The Mark at Eugene, a five-story student housing project by Landmark Properties of Athens, Georgia, is going up in their place nearly as fast. Now that its first-floor walls are framed, I can see that the building will offer little to the streets around it beyond bedrooms behind windows. I had hoped for something more ambitious.  

The Mark will be wood-framed from top to bottom, with no concrete podium (the base level that commonly holds parking and shops) beneath it.(1)  Landmark could have included shops or a café at street level without changing the construction type. The architects already list offices and gathering spaces in the code summary. It chose not to, and the project provides virtually no parking on site.(2)  Landmark does promise 5,785 square feet of ground-floor retail in its announcement, but it sits “within the [existing] parking deck located at 13th and Hilyard, which is included as part of the property acquisition,” and residents’ cars will go to the same garage. In effect, The Mark’s podium is across the street, already built. 

Along Hilyard Street, 13th Avenue, and Alder Street, the ground floor will be almost entirely apartments: 47 units containing 172 bedrooms.(3) These units will have plenty of windows, more than the code requires;(4) the trouble is that bedrooms will lie behind them. The floor sits close to sidewalk level, and Landmark plans only a narrow strip of planting between the building and passersby. There are none of the deeper landscaped setbacks, low garden walls, porches, or recessed entries that can help ground-floor apartments maintain privacy along busy streets. A city's street life depends in part on how buildings meet the sidewalk. Would I want one of these units if I were a student? No. I would keep the blinds closed for privacy, and the façade would become a row of drawn shades. 

Landmark asked the City to waive its articulation standards, which are meant to break up long, flat walls. The standards require at least two design features (such as windows, balconies, projections or recesses, entries, awnings, or a change of material) every 40 feet horizontally and 25 feet vertically. Projections or recesses must be at least two feet deep. The requirements are modest; windows and sufficiently deep balconies could provide the two features required at the prescribed intervals. The Mark’s vertical rows of balconies will be roughly 42 to 55 feet apart, wider than the prescribed 40-foot interval. 

Rendering of The Mark at Eugene, submitted as part of the adjustment review application by ESG Architecture & Design.

The applicant was candid about why: relief from the articulation standards “reduces design and construction costs by simplifying building design and permitting the use of more standardized detailing and construction materials. These cost savings can be passed on to reduce the sale or rental price per unit.” Note the verb: can be. As drawn, the exterior will have a dark brick base, fiber cement panels in two grays above it, and wood-look planks at the balconies. The architects caution on the elevations, however, that the materials “may change at the time of building permit submittal.” 

The City had no discretion to enforce the articulation standards. SB 1537, Oregon’s 2024 housing bill, requires local governments to exempt qualifying housing projects from certain design and development standards. The City’s December 2, 2025, approval is a four-page checklist confirming that The Mark qualified.(5) 

The building’s length was a different matter. Within 40 feet of a street, Eugene limits a building’s length to 150 feet; The Mark’s façades exceed that on all three streets, and the one facing 13th Avenue is 431 feet long. Under the code, the City may approve a longer building only if it will “create a vibrant street facade with visual detail” and “provide multiple entrances to building or yards.” On December 15, thirteen days after waiving the articulation standards, City planning staff found both criteria met. Their evidence of vibrancy included “extensive window openings,” balconies “that provide a projecting building element and contrasting exterior finish materials,” and ground-level masonry, which the drawings acknowledge may change.(6) The City had just waived the requirement that those features occur at 40-foot intervals. Now it counted the same features toward the building's vibrancy. As for multiple entrances, staff identified three, only one of which faces 13th Avenue. 

The obvious comparison is The Hayward, which opened in 2013 and 2014 as 13th & Olive (the notorious Capstone development), several blocks west on 13th. When local officials found the finished complex far plainer than its renderings, and the ground-floor retail its developer had loosely promised never appeared, the project became a cautionary example of what can go wrong when the built result falls short of expectations. The City later froze its Multi-Unit Property Tax Exemption program and eventually barred student housing from it. Both The Hayward and The Mark are large, wood-frame student housing blocks with little at street level besides apartments and, in The Hayward's case, parking garages.(7) 

Eugene did try to learn from 13th & Olive. In 2020, I participated in a focus group the City convened to shape new commercial setback standards, and 13th & Olive was the example we all cited of how not to meet a street. The City Council adopted the amendments in 2021, requiring buildings in commercial zones like this one to stand back from the sidewalk and fill that space with landscaping or “enhanced pedestrian spaces.”(8) 

The Hayward Student Living complex (aka 13th and Olive) as viewed along Willamette Street (Google Street view). Originally developed by Capstone Collegiate Communities and now owned by Timberline Real Estate Ventures, the roundly criticized development did not provide the initially promised street-level retail storefronts when completed in 2014. 

In approving The Mark’s length, staff referenced those very features: landscaping between the building and every street, and an “enhanced pedestrian area” along Alder. Yet as designed, its relationship to the sidewalk will be much like 13th & Olive’s. As I wrote at the time, “it is doubtful any tweaking of the setback requirements alone would have spared us from this blight upon downtown.” I see nothing in The Mark to make me think otherwise. 

I don’t fault staff for the articulation waiver. Their conclusion that The Mark’s façades will “create a vibrant street facade” is harder to accept, though I suspect the deeper fault lies with a criterion so loosely defined that almost any building with windows and balconies could meet it. I don’t fault ESG, the architects, either; they are a capable firm that worked within its client’s budget and the rules that remained. 

Housing advocates will say SB 1537 is doing its job: a thousand beds, built quickly and more cheaply, easing pressure on older rentals across town. Fair enough. But that goal never required bedrooms at the sidewalk with only a narrow strip of planting in between. Landmark could have given those apartments some distance from the street. Students will fill these sidewalks on their way to campus, but along flat panel walls, drawn blinds, and a 431-foot run of bedrooms, few will have reason to slow down. 

How many more student-targeted megaprojects can Eugene absorb? And how many before the blocks around campus become a monoculture? I have argued before for incremental growth, for cities that evolve through small, adaptive steps rather than monolithic interventions. Developers keep building these projects, though I wonder how sustainable the demand will be. University of Oregon enrollment has been essentially flat; the university projects undergraduate numbers to decline through 2031, and this fall it shuttered Barnhart Hall, one of its off-campus residence halls. None of those facts establishes that demand for student housing is falling. But if demand does soften, any owner could find a building laid out for student roommates, with bedrooms along every sidewalk, difficult to adapt for other uses. 

No one involved broke a rule, and that is the problem. Eugene is getting a thousand student beds facing three well-traveled streets. Landmark plans a second phase on the land just to the north. Perhaps the question now is whether Eugene will ask more of it. 

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(1)  According to the submitted application documents, the building will be Type III-A construction. Its code summary lists residential (R-2) as the main occupancy, with business (B), assembly (A-2, A-3), and storage (S-2) occupancies. The site is zoned C-2 Community Commercial with a Transit Oriented Development overlay. 

(2)  The site plan includes a single parking stall, an accessible one.

(3)  The project’s first phase will include 272 units and 1,004 bedrooms. Landmark says the two phases together will deliver 2,275 beds. 

(4)  Windows will cover 22 to 29 percent of the ground floor on each street façade, comfortably above Eugene’s 15 percent minimum. 

(5)  To qualify for an exemption, The Mark needed at least ten units per net acre; the first phase proposes 272 units on 2.62 acres, nearly 104 per acre. 

(6)  No one submitted public testimony during the application’s comment period.

(7)  The Hayward (13th & Olive) complex has 1,004 parking spaces in two large garages and about 1,300 bedrooms. Its fiber-cement siding panels have cracked and been patched with caulk.

(8)  The City Council adopted the amendments, which apply to the C-2 Community Commercial zone among others, as Ordinance No. 20657 on July 26, 2021. Our focus group also urged the City to encourage well-designed ground-floor residential units.

 

Seams and Walls

UCLA and Oregon fans on their way to Autzen Stadium to cheer on their respective teams, Saturday, October 10, 2026 (all photos by me).
 

On home game Saturdays, I park in the lot at Eugene City Hall (the former EWEB headquarters), cross the Willamette on the Peter DeFazio pedestrian bridge, and follow the path through Alton Baker Park to Autzen Stadium. Somewhere past the bridge, scattered pedestrians turn into a procession: fans clad in green and yellow(1), all moving in one direction, with the giant Oregon “O” on the stadium’s south elevation in prominent view.
 
Christian Norberg-Schulz wrote that meaningful places arise from concrete things and from the ways we move among them. Paths and destinations, routes and goals, help give a place its character. My gameday trek to Autzen offers both quite literally: a route, a destination, and a shared sense of arrival. Yesterday, I joined a temporary alignment of strangers headed toward the same concrete bowl to cheer for our team and root against the visiting UCLA Bruins.
 
I’ve held season tickets for many years. My seat is in Section 17, Row 14, low and near the east end zone. Many of the people around me have likewise been longtime season‑ticket holders. A section of season‑ticket holders like us forms a tribe within the tribe, assembled by nothing more than where each of us landed when we chose our seats.
 
On paper, UCLA’s visit should have tugged at my loyalties. I attended graduate school there but never became a Bruin the way I was, and remain, a Duck. I was older, I lived off campus, and the team played its home games at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, a long drive from Westwood. So, the Bruin tribe never stood much of a chance. Oregon claimed me as an undergraduate, during the formative, coming‑of‑age years when such affiliations are set. Which tribe claims us turns on place and on timing, often both at once.
 
Every tribe cultivates its rituals, and one of Autzen’s best grew out of a rule. Before each home game, public address announcer Don Essig, the voice of Ducks football for more than half a century, delivers the weather report and closes with a line the crowd now shouts with him: It never rains in Autzen Stadium. In a 2014 oral history interview, Don traced the line to athletic director Bill Byrne’s 1990 decision to ban smoking and umbrellas in the stands. An umbrella suits whoever sits beneath it; the fans behind catch the runoff. Announcing the ban each week, he gradually turned it into the claim that no one needed an umbrella anyway, because it never rains here. A long run of dry home games made the joke seem prophetic. Years later, Don considered retiring the line. He was told it had nothing to do with the weather anymore. By then the phrase belonged to the crowd rather than its author. A rule about the building created a ritual, and the ritual created a fiction everyone inside the bowl agrees to share for an afternoon. Visitors hear an inaccurate weather report. Ducks fans hear a password.
 

The Ducks take the field before the start of the contest. UCLA fans, identifiable by their powder blue garb, occupy the visitors' section.

Why does this kind of tribalism strike me as healthy when so much of what goes by that name does not? I see four conditions. It is voluntary. It stays bounded in space and time, gathering in a vessel built for the purpose and dispersing when the clock runs out. The game operates under rules that both sides agree to play by, however loudly we dispute their application. And its loyalties nest. Don, an Oregon State graduate and one-time Beaver rally king, put it plainly in the same interview: “When the Beavers are playing the Ducks, I’m a Duck.” Otherwise, he roots for the Beavers.
 
Christopher Alexander made the case for something close to healthy tribalism, though he would have bristled at the word; in A Pattern Language, he wanted the city’s subcultures distinct but not “tribal or closed” (Pattern 8: Mosaic of Subcultures). He envisioned a city that accommodates varied ways of life, each with room to flourish, separated by boundaries that also serve as places where neighbors meet. He explicitly rejected ghettos and enforced segregation. Yet the distinction between a boundary that protects a community and one that excludes others depends on more than design. His mosaic presumes that people can choose their affiliations and that the boundaries between them remain permeable. As I’ll come to, Eugene's history reminds us that neither condition can be taken for granted. A boundary may give a community room to be itself, or it may enforce a separation that those on the outside never chose.
 
Of course, the tribe falters at times. Against UCLA, as Oregon turned the ball over seven times and saw its running game stuffed again and again, the crowd booed, and I can’t say the frustration was unearned. After the loss to Oklahoma State earlier this season, online message boards turned on head coach Dan Lanning. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the worst behavior surfaces outside the stadium. Booing is frustration voiced inside the bowl, and it ends with the game. The tribe sours when it slips its bounds and follows its animosities home.
 
My walk to Autzen passes near the site of a community that lived under very different, far harsher terms. In the 1940s, five Black families (the Reynolds, Mims, Nettles, Washington, and Johnson families) built homes on the north bank of the Willamette, just outside Eugene’s city limits, because they were not allowed to live within them. The settlement became known as Ferry Street Village, or Across the Bridge. In 1949, Lane County razed it to make way for the Ferry Street Bridge. At least 65 Black residents and 36 white residents had to relocate. Most moved to the West 11th Avenue area, which was largely undeveloped and lacked access to sewers or running water. Others moved to Glenwood and the base of Skinner Butte.
 
Racially restrictive covenants were one instrument of the exclusion that helped force Black families to live beyond Eugene's city limits. The deed to the house Lynne and I bought in 1989 had one, restricting its sale to "Caucasians." Our real estate agent brought the covenant to our attention, assuring us a 1948 Supreme Court decision rendered such exclusionary restrictions unenforceable. But that didn’t erase the words on our deed; they reminded us that people once built a wall meant to keep me out of their neighborhood.

Ducks and Bruins leave Autzen together after the game.

 
My other alma mater won, 17–15. After the game, as I walked back through Alton Baker Park, I watched a group of UCLA fans pause on the DeFazio Bridge to take photos against the backdrop of the Willamette River and autumn leaves. A pair of Oregon fans, fresh from a deflating loss, offered to snap their picture. For a moment, the boundaries between the tribes seemed to disappear. I wish the lesson here translated to neighborhoods, but it doesn’t easily. Neighborhoods don’t end at a final whistle. Perhaps the question for those who design and govern cities is not whether to make room for tribes, since people will form them regardless, but whether the edges we draw function as seams or walls, and who gets to decide. 

 
(1)  Oregon is notorious for its sartorial diversity. For the game against UCLA, the UO directed fans to wear black, decidedly not an official school color, but whatever.