The Eugene in My Head

Ferry Street Bridge viaduct, looking south (Google Streetview)

 

My parents drove me down to Eugene to drop me off for my first year at the University of Oregon in September of 1980. I remember crossing the Ferry Street Bridge, then the viaduct, and seeing Eugene’s modest downtown skyline ahead of us. As we crested the viaduct at the end of our eight-hour drive, my hungry father spotted Hoots (the old 24-hour diner at 8th and Mill) and decided that was where we would have a late lunch. Nothing about that moment was dramatic or postcard-worthy; its ordinariness is exactly what fixed it in my memory.
 
At the time, I had no reason to think that Hoots would eventually disappear, or that a massive student housing development would occupy its site decades later. I sometimes wonder what my 20-year-old self would think if I could somehow put him back in the same place today. He might be surprised by the new luxury student housing towers that now punctuate the vista, or by the downtown riverfront transformation (once EWEB’s utility operations yard, now becoming an active and accessible new neighborhood and park). Still, I suspect he would recognize Eugene immediately. If anything, he would be surprised that, years later, the city would become his permanent home.
 
My first Eugene was actually a very small place. I didn't have a car, so I got around by bicycle. I lived at the University Inn (now Barnhart Hall) on Patterson Street and spent most of my time on campus or in the West University neighborhood. The pedestrian-scaled stretch of 13th Avenue was part of that early orbit, although it has since been razed twice, first for Sacred Heart Hospital and more recently for a new student housing development. I considered anything beyond that vicinity relatively remote. Once classes began, I had few reasons to leave the immediate area. Visiting far corners of the city, or even downtown, felt like traveling to another planet.
 
I left in 1983 following graduation and eventually returned in 1988. By then I had been back to Vancouver, gone to UCLA, worked in Los Angeles, returned to Canada, married, and accumulated enough intervening life that I might reasonably have expected Eugene to feel like a place I only had once known. Instead, I felt like I'd never left. I went back to work, settled into a house, and resumed spending time around the University. It felt less like returning to a former home than continuing something that had merely been interrupted.
 
I don't remember a particular moment when Eugene began to feel like where I truly belonged. It happened gradually, and I think I first noticed it after one of my visits to Vancouver: I remember returning to Eugene and being struck by how calm the traffic seemed. What counted as rush hour in Eugene would barely have registered in Vancouver, where driving could often be a white-knuckle exercise. At some point, without thinking about it consciously, I had come to appreciate Eugene's relative quiet and smallness. What had initially seemed somewhat underwhelming had become familiar, and familiarity had gradually become attachment.
 
Lynne and I have lived in the same house since 1989, and the street we’re on has changed very little. The most obvious change is the maple tree in our front yard that was barely more than a sapling when we moved in. Today it is a substantial tree with a broad canopy. The house and the street have remained almost unchanged while the tree has recorded the passage of time. Obviously, the city has changed. Buildings have come and gone, the population has grown, and places that were part of my early Eugene have disappeared while others have been altered beyond recognition. Traffic is heavier, and some of the city’s problems are more visible than they once were. Yet, to me, the city doesn't feel fundamentally different.
 
I think that has something to do with the mental map I formed in 1980. It has never really been replaced; it has simply been added to. New buildings and businesses have become new layers on top of the old map. Streets have acquired different buildings, businesses have disappeared, neighborhoods have changed, and new places have become familiar, but the underlying sense of where things are has remained remarkably persistent. Willamette Street, for example, still feels central to me, much as it did when it was the “Gut” back in the day. That doesn't mean I know every corner of the city. After all these years, Lynne and I recently found ourselves driving Goodpasture Loop for the first time simply because we'd never bothered to see where it went. It turned out to be a pleasant discovery.
 
Vancouver has taught me something similar, although in a somewhat stranger way. I have been away from it since 1988, and the city has changed enormously since then, yet whenever I return, I still experience the odd sensation of being home. In recent years, Lynne hasn't accompanied me on my trips north, which makes the sensation even more pronounced. For a few days, I seem to slip back into another version of my life, one in which Vancouver is where I live and Eugene is somewhere else. Then I return to Eugene and the arrangement reverses itself. It is almost as though I occupy two alternate universes, each of which feels completely real while I'm in it.
 
That may be part of what makes a place familiar. The Eugene I first met at twenty is not the Eugene that exists today, nor am I exactly the person I was then. But neither feels entirely separate from what I remember. The years have accumulated, the city has changed, and the earlier Eugene is still there in the way I experience the place. Maybe that's why, after all these years, the Eugene in my head still feels so much like the place I first saw from the Ferry Street Bridge.

S Tier Sewers, F Tier Feelings

I spent plenty of time during my working years sitting in hearing rooms where citizens stood at a microphone to explain at length why a project should not be built. Eventually, their objections fell into recognizable patterns, which I now realize I can sort into tiers, not unlike the ranking meme teenagers use for video game characters. I offer this metric half-jokingly and half-earnestly; I think I’ve earned the right to use it here to highlight an issue endemic to public hearing processes.

 
Tier lists run from S ("Superior") down to F ("Worst"). I’m ranking the objections neighbors raise against urban infill not by how sympathetic they sound but by how much they reveal about real issues. A B‑tier objection can be perfectly valid and still serve as cover for something further down the list.
 
Here are the tiers:
 
S Tier: Infrastructure Capacity
Sanitary sewer, water mains, stormwater management. When someone says the existing line can't handle the load, that's a testable engineering claim, not a feeling dressed up as a fact. These arguments can kill projects, and sometimes they should. Real historic preservation belongs here too, but only if there's a documented resource at stake, not simply something old.
 
A Tier: Documented Safety
Traffic conflicts, pedestrian risk, and genuine scale transitions at zone edges. These objections point to intersections with actual crash histories or to proposals that drop five stories onto a block of single-story houses with no buffer. They warrant real debate; neighbors are often in the right.
 
B Tier: Real Issues, Routinely Misapplied
Parking, shadow studies, tree canopy loss. These are legitimate design considerations, but detractors deploy them as categorical vetoes regardless of whether the specific project deserves rejection. The concern is real in the abstract and often misapplied in practice.
 
C Tier: Dressed-Up Preference
"Neighborhood character." Unlike parking, character rarely gets defined before someone invokes it. In my experience, the definition shifts depending on who proposes what: a duplex threatens character; a McMansion, somehow, does not.
 
D Tier: Coded Objections
The "wrong kind of people," phrased as politely as possible. These objections are rarely said outright. More often, it’s cloaked by whatever euphemism fits the day.
 
F Tier: Property Values, Undisguised
No argument attached. Just fear. Occasionally someone outright admits this is the sole basis for their objection; more often it rides inside one of the tiers above.
 
The tier list is neat on paper. In practice, the tiers converge. I learned that firsthand on one of my projects.
 
Back in 2013–2014, I worked on a developer’s proposal for nearly fifty student-housing buildings across a steep, tree-covered hillside under the city's discretionary PUD process. My firm's assignment was narrow: design the buildings and testify on visual impact, scale, and compatibility with the property’s hillside setting. It's easy to prosecute NIMBYs from the outside; it's harder to admit that I sometimes served as counsel for the defense. My role put me at the microphone to answer the neighborhood's strongest objections. They argued the project violated hillside protection goals, encroached on a protected ridgeline, and required clear-cutting century-old oaks and Douglas firs. I testified that our team arrayed the buildings sensitively, mitigated visual impact, and respected the ridgeline.
 
Did I believe every word of my testimony? Yes, on that day, I thought it was defensible. Whether I offered the most candid answers, I'm less sure now. The neighbors did bring substantive concerns about geology and canopy loss. I remember feeling a mix of professional obligation and faint unease as I listened, unsure whether I was hearing genuine alarm or simply the familiar cadence of public opposition. The Hearings Official weighed every voice against the PUD criteria and ultimately denied the project. On the merits that really mattered, the neighbors were right, and the process worked.
 
But alongside those legitimate arguments, a more specious complaint surfaced about the kind of residents the project would bring: fewer families, more students. That coded objection belongs squarely in D tier. It wouldn't have survived scrutiny on its own. The reality is it didn't need to because it traveled beside arguments backed by real science and policy, and nobody in the room—me included—separated it from those valid concerns.
 
Public hearings compress every argument into the same few minutes at the same microphone. A Hearings Official can weigh a claim about slope stability against the record and rule on it. The hillside objections deserved and received a full hearing. Should anyone in that room have separated the coded objection from the legitimate ones? I didn’t, and I’m not sure the structure of a public hearing allows it.
 

A Diagram's Work

The Vancouver House by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), a diagrammatic form rendered at full scale and in real life (my photo).

I participated in a review of student work this past Wednesday at the University of Oregon, one of several summer studio reviews I've sat in on this year. A faculty member and I reviewed a pair of projects—an admittedly small sample—that between them captured two versions of the same issue. One student's presentation had no site analysis or parti diagrams of any kind. The other's did, but they read as an afterthought, drawings that explained the finished design rather than ones that had helped generate it. I've noticed the same in previous reviews; even when an instructor explicitly requires process diagrams, what is pinned up still looks reverse-engineered. The problem lies in the diagrams' provenance—a reality that holds true whether they are the work of students or some of today's most celebrated firms.

Stan Allen, the architect, theorist, and former dean of Princeton's architecture program, drew a useful distinction in a 1998 essay: a diagram's job isn't to depict a building. It's to work out relationships—between program and form, between one space and another—before the building exists to depict. As Allen puts it, diagrams are "architecture's best means to engage the complexity of the real." Much of what gets called a diagram does the opposite: it reverse-engineers a graphic summary after a decision has been made, rather than helping to discover it. A generative diagram precedes the decision. It doesn't explain the building afterward; it's part of the process by which the architect finds the building's basic idea in the first place.

There's a simple test for telling the difference. Point to a particular move in the finished design and ask the student to trace it back to the diagram. Not necessarily to an identical mark, but to something in the diagram that participated in the sequence of decisions that produced it. If they can do that, the diagram probably played a generative role. If they instead begin explaining the diagram in terms of the finished building, the odds are good that the diagram came later. A generative diagram doesn't have to predict the finished design, only to have been capable of changing its direction.

Early design diagram for the VA Roseburg Protective Care Unit. The courtyard organization survived; the entry gesture did not.

The old sketch above passes this test, with qualifications. I drew it during my earliest analyses for the design of the VA Roseburg Protective Care Unit, as I attempted to match site, program, and intent. (I covered this project's design process in my "A Case Study" series of posts.) It's clearly rough: hatched masses standing in for building volumes, a loose unhatched void at the center indicating a courtyard, and an arrow driving in from outside the frame toward one corner.

The courtyard organization held. It became the wrapped, mirrored heart of the finished design, anchored by a huge mimosa tree that I likened to the proverbial Tree of Life. The arrow, on the other hand, didn't hold. It was a stand-in for a real, unresolved question: how to control entry into the secure courtyard. What ultimately emerged wasn't a refinement of the arrow's gesture. It became an entry pavilion, akin to the Propylaea at the Acropolis.

Site plan for the VA Roseburg Protective Care Unit.

That's the important distinction. The diagram didn't predict the building. It put a problem into play while the design was still unsettled enough for the problem to matter. One part of the sketch survived almost intact; another led somewhere I hadn't anticipated. Both were useful because they helped determine what came next.

This tension between diagrammatic exploration and graphic presentation persists in contemporary practice. Bjarke Ingels has described how his firm, BIG, uses diagrams to track the reasoning behind design decisions, a practice he developed in part while working under Rem Koolhaas at OMA. MVRDV's Farmax, published around the same period as Allen's essay, made particularly explicit use of diagrams as instruments of form-finding.  

BIG's series of conceptual diagrams for their Vancouver House project (source: htttps://big.dk/projects/vancouver-house-missing-pictures-7130)  

Yet, there remains a persistent ambiguity in architectural representation: a diagram can document a process, or it can be made to look as though a process existed. Critics have sometimes read BIG's diagrams less as records of discovery than as clever post-rationalization of forms arrived at by other means. The distinction matters because a diagram can be perfectly convincing as a graphic artifact while having had no meaningful role in producing the design.

AI makes that distinction more consequential. Current tools can generate massing alternatives, test code and zoning conditions, manipulate models, and produce images that would once have required considerable effort. Those capabilities may become useful parts of conceptual design. The more immediate problem is simpler: AI can also produce polished, diagram-shaped images on demand. It becomes all too easy to manufacture the appearance of a rigorous design process after the fact.

The issue isn't whether an AI-generated diagram is legitimate because a person didn't draw it by hand. A computer-generated diagram can be every bit as generative as a pencil sketch if it helps identify a consequential relationship, tests an idea, or changes the direction of the design. What matters is what the diagram does in the sequence of thought. A diagram that merely gives graphic form to a conclusion reached some other way is still an afterthought, regardless of who, or what, made it.

Generative diagram by MVRDV for The Modernist, a mixed-use project in Rotterdam (image source: https://www.mvrdv.com/projects/308/the-modernist)  

This is also why a diagram's graphic appearance can be misleading. Arrows, bubbles, hatching, color coding, and other conventions can make a drawing look diagrammatic without telling us anything about its role in the design process. Resembling a diagram isn't the same as having done a diagram's work.

The student who left diagrams out of the presentation wasn't hiding anything, and the one whose diagrams read as afterthoughts wasn't trying to pass off invented process as real. Both, I suspect, simply hadn't yet learned the purpose of diagramming during the early phase of project conceptualization. That's a lesson AI tools may make easier to skip, in a studio or in a firm, because they can cleanly simulate the appearance of analysis without requiring the heavy cognitive lift of the analysis itself.

The afterthought diagram is the more instructive case because it looks like it's doing a job it isn't. Whatever insight it might have delivered—what relationship was worth testing, which constraint should organize the plan—was available only while the design was still unsettled enough to need testing. It can still look flawless on a presentation board, but what it ultimately lacks is a place in the sequence where it still had the power to change the outcome.

2.MO: A Progress Report

Oregon Football's new indoor practice facility, under construction (all photos by me).
 

I’ve followed the construction of the University of Oregon’s new indoor practice facility, “2.MO,” since its groundbreaking in early 2025. With yesterday being the 2026 season opener against Boise State, I decided to walk around the construction fencing beforehand and photograph the project.
 
The curved steel roof structure is complete, and workers have already installed about a quarter of the associated wood decking. The steel ribs and timber framing will remain exposed in the completed building, contributing significantly to its architectural character. The installation of the reflective glass curtain wall on the east elevation is nearly finished. Other parts of the exterior remain at earlier stages of enclosure, but the overall size and form of the massive building have been clear for months now.
 

Site development has also progressed. The major moves—realignment of Leo Harris Parkway and reconfiguration of parking serving the Eugene Science Center—were completed last winter. Given that the current construction perimeter essentially corresponds with the eventual boundaries of the practice complex, pedestrian movement around the site should have worked well on game day.

 

As of this writing, University of Oregon Athletics has not announced an official name for the latest addition to Oregon Football’s Hatfield-Dowlin Complex. Nor has it revealed the project's cost, as it generally has not for its other major donor-funded developments.
 
If I am lucky enough to tour the facility following its completion in 2027, I’ll record that visit as well.

What If? The Emerald Canal

Emerald Canal model between Oak & Pearl to the Amazon channel (image source: pages.uoregon.edu/diethelm/CanalImages.html)
 

During my University of Oregon days, I became aware of a visionary plan to create an eleven-block-long canal through the heart of Eugene that would connect the eastern end of the old Millrace that courses along the backside of the fraternity and sorority houses north of 11th Avenue to the concrete drainage channel extension of Amazon Creek at 17th and Oak. This plan proposed, in the words of its champions, “a rich, local blend of historic millrace and San Antonio Riverwalk.” If realized, the project, which they dubbed “The Emerald Canal,” would be a 35’–40’ wide waterway with broad promenades on both sides meandering beneath native trees within an urban garden.
 
A related but formally separate proposal from the same era envisioned restoring the Millrace’s own downtown dead end near Ferry Street as the anchor for a new riverside district.(1) 
 
I thought the Emerald Canal concept was brilliant. Portions of the Millrace as it existed were navigable by canoe. How great would it be if my friends and I could row further through the city, perhaps pulling ashore along the way at a canal-side café for lattes? How much would such a linear water park and urban village add to Eugene’s identity and sense of place? I found the prospect of the project being realized someday incredibly attractive.
 
Chief among the plan’s proponents was Jerry Diethelm, now Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture & Community Service at the University of Oregon and both a registered architect and a registered landscape architect. The Emerald Canal was his decades-long personal campaign. Its origin story dates back to a 1977 graduate studio he taught called “The Amazon Corridor.” Community interest soon led to the formation in 1982 of a joint City of Eugene/Lane County Emerald Canal Feasibility Task Force, chaired by state senator Margie Hendriksen, with Jerry serving as the principal planning consultant. The task force studied the project for six months and determined it was feasible. The estimated cost back then to make it a reality? $22 million.(2) 
 
After I returned to settle in Eugene in 1988, I was excited to read further news about the Emerald Canal concept. Jerry continued to build the case for the project through the mid-1990s, teaching new design studios around the concept and conducting a series of associated planning studies for the City of Eugene and EWEB, which featured a restored millrace and a Millrace Park at the river confluence. Along with Charlie Porter and Jerry Rust, he formed the Emerald Waterways Citizens Committee, Inc. They had two large, elaborate models built to show around town, garnering support for the project. The wealthy Gloria Teichert became an enthusiastic patron, primed to invest in a water-related project after helping bankroll water-conservation work in Africa. With her backing, the committee rented a storefront space on West Broadway to show off their Emerald Canal models.(3) Then, in what Jerry called his favorite near-miss, Teichert and her brother fell seriously ill and moved to Canada, and the funding vanished with them.

 

Reversing the Canal for Amazon flood release (image source: pages.uoregon.edu/diethelm/reversible.html)

The pitch for the Emerald Canal was never just aesthetic; it promised hydrological benefits as a small but critical link in a regional water circuit: Willamette into the Millrace, through the Emerald Canal to the Amazon, past the Fairgrounds to Fern Ridge Lake, over the dam into the Long Tom River, and back into the Willamette north of Monroe. This circuit would be important for area farming, wetland habitat, and recreational boating access to Fern Ridge. The relatively short in-town connection would create a very large waterway system with benefits for the community everywhere along its course. That’s a testament to how comprehensive Jerry’s vision was.

 
The flood-control argument was the most concrete of the bunch, and probably the one that came closest to actually unlocking money. During a major flood in the Amazon Basin, when an overwhelmed Amazon Creek would back up into the city, a reversible Emerald Canal could carry the excess directly to the Willamette. Engineers at the time argued it was a cheaper fix than building dams upstream.(4) That argument has since been overtaken by events. Since the 1990s, the Amazon Basin’s flood-storage problem has largely been addressed a different way, through the West Eugene Wetlands Plan and the ongoing naturalization of sections of Amazon Creek, including the stretch between 19th and 24th avenues. The federal dollars that might once have built a canal went to restoring wetlands instead.
 
During the years that followed the initial bloom of public enthusiasm, Jerry wrote several pieces for The Register-Guard and Eugene Weekly about the concept. Undaunted but increasingly wry, these included a jab at the City of Eugene, calling it the “Home of the Historic Eugene Millrace Cover-Up,” and later, sardonically ranking the Emerald Canal and Millrace restoration as “No. 8” on the city’s perpetual to-do list.
 
Jerry’s doggedness has gone unrewarded. The Emerald Waterways Citizens Committee is no more, and there’s no next-generation advocate to reopen the conversation. In 2026, he is the plan’s sole institutional memory.
 
The disappointing part of this story, besides the fact that the Emerald Canal is not a reality today, is what it says about ambition and its limitations in Eugene. I want to believe that imaginative, farsighted people can, with popular support, still make dreams come true. That this is increasingly difficult goes without saying. Regardless, I can lament the shrinking of our ambitions while still retaining hope that realizing them remains possible.
 
Chicago architect Daniel Burnham (1846–1912) famously said the following about visionary ideas:

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood, and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.”(5)

Burnham wished to inspire large-scale civic planning and bold thinking. This was more attainable in his day than it is now. The reality is that grand visions and big projects aren’t financed the Burnham way anymore, through a single civic will imposing itself on private land. The post-war urban renewal era caused real damage, including here in Eugene. That era’s legacy fueled the apparatus of environmental review, historic preservation law, mandatory public comment, and eminent domain restrictions. This apparatus is necessary, but it has handcuffed those community leaders who have harbored ambitious dreams.

San Antonio's Riverwalk (image source: Library of Congress - public domain)

 

The city can still build big things, but typically only on ground it already controls, with private-sector partners. The Downtown Riverfront development is the case in point. That site was a vacant industrial brownfield: one owner, EWEB, and no other properties to buy out. The Emerald Canal, by contrast, would have run through built-up urban fabric. Digging an open waterway through eleven or twelve blocks of the West University neighborhood would have meant acquiring dozens of parcels, relocating infrastructure, and disrupting a part of town that’s only gotten denser and more expensive since Jerry first proposed the project nearly fifty years ago. Lacking an overwhelming public mandate, the city can no longer draw a diagram through occupied city blocks and proclaim eminent domain. And, tellingly, the Downtown Riverfront’s own master plan, for all its ambition, includes no reopened millrace, no daylighted canal, no flowing water at all beyond the river’s own edge.  
 
Money was and is always an issue, too. The Emerald Canal’s funding path largely depended on passage of a countywide general obligation bond measure, which never occurred. Tax-increment financing wasn’t an option, either, since much of the proposed route lay outside the Downtown Urban Renewal District.
 
The one piece of Jerry’s vision still alive today is the University of Oregon’s own millrace restoration, a concept plan for a bio-habitat-focused Millrace Natural Area, with implementation still in the planning and incremental restoration stage rather than full construction. It’s a worthy project on its own terms. It is also, unmistakably, the shrunken remnant of something much larger: campus-bound, ecological rather than civic, with no ambition to reconnect to downtown at all.
 
Eugene once had the imagination for a project like the Emerald Canal but lacked the means. Today, it is a case study that reads less like a missed chance than a measure of how far Eugene’s civic capacities have contracted. Jerry’s idea was sound, its benefits clear, and his advocacy persisted for nearly fifty years. The problem is that the machinery that might once have carried a project of its scale no longer exists here. My “what if” isn’t a prompt for nostalgia so much as a note on the distance between the Eugene some could imagine and the Eugene that could never build it.

(1) The Emerald Canal plan proper ran from the Millrace’s blunted end near 10th and Ferry to Amazon Creek at 17th and Oak. The separate Millrace Park / lower-Millrace restoration idea, tied to the mid-1990s Ferry Street Corridor and South Bank planning process, would have daylighted the Millrace down to the Willamette on EWEB-owned land, the same parcel now redeveloped as Eugene’s Downtown Riverfront district.

(2) Figure and task force account per Jerry's own 1998 Register-Guard commentary, “Millrace for the Millennium.” Accounting for inflation alone, $22 million is about $70 million today. This understates the current reality, as urban construction and right-of-way costs in a dense, developed corridor have outpaced general inflation for decades. A 2026 estimate that prices in property acquisition would probably run into hundreds of millions.

(3) Sourced to Jerry's own retelling in “Emerald Canal Diary,” Eugene Weekly, June 30, 2005 (reprinted June 27, 2013).

(4) The hydrology was run by LCOG and confirmed by the Army Corps of Engineers at the time, per Jerry's own account.

(5) The quote’s own provenance is shakier than its fame suggests. It first appeared in print nine years after Burnham’s death, in a 1921 biography, with no citation, and historians long suspected an associate had assembled it from letters and speeches rather than recorded it verbatim. A 1910 Chicago newspaper account of a Burnham speech, unearthed in 2019, closes with nearly the same words, which is generally taken as confirming he really did say something close to this.