Silver Linings

It may take us some time to fully assess the socioeconomic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. Many sectors of the economy have clearly suffered—the virus has been particularly cruel to the personal services, restaurant, tourism, and entertainment industries—but others have fared remarkably well.  Based more on my own observations and anecdotal experience than facts I can point to, it does seem design & construction activity in Lane County has been surprisingly robust. Indeed, if the shortages of skilled construction labor and high levels of bidding activity we are seeing are any indication, a combination of restarting and new projects continue to push a hot market to its limits. 

Much of the activity is associated with developments that were already in the pipeline when the COVID-19 outbreak first occurred. Last summer, I wrote about some of these “essential” projects and how things were continuing to plug along despite an overriding fear and uncertainty about the future. Since that post, I reported on the completion of The Market Expansion and the Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact. Today, I’ll provide an update on another recently completed one of those projects, plus describe the current status of two of the new Eugene School District 4J schools funded by the 2018 school bond measure. 

The Midtown

The Midtown (still from Eugene Ballet Building Tour video)

One of the spacious new dance studios (still from Eugene Ballet Building Tour video)

The Midtown is newly finished, and stands as an outstanding example of a creative, mixed-use development. Maybe it’s just me, but the elapsed time from its inception though completion seemed much longer than might normally be expected for a project of this type. No matter, the wait certainly appears to have been worth it. In its completed form, The Midtown fulfills the vision of the developer (a team that included ADH Development, LLC, Paradigm Properties, and the Eugene Ballet) and its designers (Dustrud Architecture) Its presence injects vibrancy and will attract complementary developments to Eugene’s blossoming “Midtown” district. 

Despite being 7-stories in height (the residences on the upper floors commanding some outstanding views) and built to fill the entirety of its quarter-block site, I don’t find The Midtown to be an oppressive presence when viewed from Pearl Street or 16^th Avenue. Admirably simple in form, it possesses just the right amount of variation in color, scale, and detail. It is a background building, belying its importance as a hub for nonprofit arts groups. As I declared a couple of years ago, Eugene can well afford more buildings of its type, ones that comprise the urban fabric, shape the public realm, and collectively define the character of the community.(1)

Check out the Eugene Ballet Building tour below. The new home for the EB and the Eugene Ballet Academy is a dream come true for both groups: large, lofty studio spaces, capacious storage and set preparation rooms, and state-of-the-art video teleconferencing and recording facilities (permitting “visiting” choreographers to work with the dancers virtually) will allow them to fully realize their potential. 

Eugene Ballet Building Tour (experienceballet.org)

North Eugene High School

Aerial view of the proposed North Eugene High School

View of proposed Commons

Construction of the new North Eugene High School will soon be underway in earnest on the site of the former Corridor Elementary/Yujin Gakuen Elementary School. The design by Rowell Brokaw Architects and Opsis Architecture features a centralized building layout intended to strengthen the sense of school community and aid in wayfinding and security, while also providing quality usable outdoor spaces. Overall, the 2-story scheme seems remarkably compact for a facility capable of accommodating an enrollment of up to 1,200 students. As is the trend today with the design of high schools, the architects were attentive not only to creating an efficient and cost-effective solution, but also to developing a positive community asset that minimizes impacts upon neighbors, features clear site circulation, and provides a safe, inclusive, and sustainable setting for education. Additionally, the new school will be capable of serving as an emergency shelter in the event of a natural disaster, with key areas built to an upgraded seismic standard among other resiliency upgrades. 

Lease Crutcher Lewis is the construction manager/general contractor (CM/GC) for the project. The new North Eugene High School will be ready to open its doors in fall 2023. 

Virtual Tour of North Eugene High School on Vimeo 

Camas Ridge Elementary School 

Aerial view of the proposed Camas Ridge Elementary School

Site Plan

I attended a virtual open house this past Wednesday evening to learn about the design of the new Camas Ridge Elementary School. Organized by District 4J and presented by members of the PIVOT Architecture deign team, the well-attended event presented both an update on the project’s progress and breakout sessions allowing participants to ask questions and provide feedback. 

This update was the second opportunity for the public to help inform the design effort. I did not attend the earlier design meeting, so I was eager to learn about the new Camas Ridge and compare its public engagement process with that employed by the Edison Elementary School project (which I was thoroughly familiar with as a part of the Edison design team). 

Presently, the Camas Ridge project is in the Design Development phase. PIVOT’s response to the specifics of the project—the educational specifications, its site, and the available budget—appears straightforward. The building will straddle its full block from north to south, while the associated outdoor spaces will terrace downward from the namesake ridge planted with camas along University Street to the school’s parking lot fronting the building, then to a zone of hardscape play areas on the west side of the proposed building, and finally to a level, grass-covered field accessed through a planted berm on its east flank. 29th Avenue will accommodate school bus drop-off and pick-up, segregating this traffic from parents’ vehicles. The two-story plan organizes classroom clusters, the cafeteria, gymnasium, media center, administrative offices in eminently logical fashion.

Construction work at the Camas Ridge site will begin in summer 2022 and the new building will open in fall 2024.  

 *     *     *     *    *

The pandemic has been devastating, but for those of us in the design & construction industries there have been silver linings. Architects, engineers, and builders have been busy. Will our good fortune continue? Perhaps. Many factors are in play, including pent-up demand, continued low interest rates, and the infrastructure stimulus plan. We’re not likely to entirely return to life as we knew it B.C. (before COVID). Undoubtedly, the success of future projects will rely in part upon a recalibration of what the marketplace and our communities demand. Possible trends may include an increased desire for flexible environments, more space for people (facilitating social distancing when necessary), repurposing of surplus office space for new uses that add value to our communities (think affordable and alternative housing options), and the development of pedestrian, parklet, and patio experiences in our outdoor public spaces.

Like we have in the past, we have learned and evolved when confronted by unexpected challenges, and we will do so again.   

(1)    The subject of my 2019 post was 5-over-1 buildings, whereas The Midtown is creatively comprised of 5 stories of wood-framed construction over a 2-story concrete podium.

 

Headaches

 

The Headache, by George Cruickshank, 1819

This week’s blog post is a short one. I’ve been suffering from persistent, low-grade headaches for some time now. They’re making it tough for me to concentrate (and write a blog post), and pain relievers (acetaminophen, aspirin, ibuprofen) have not helped. Sleeping has not provided relief either, as pulsating pain greets me each morning when I wake up. It was bad enough yesterday (Friday) that I could not focus on my work at all, so I called it quits early and spent much of the day in bed.

I coincidentally had an appointment on Thursday with my doctor for my annual wellness exam. Generally good news all around, but we did discuss my headaches. His diagnosis was tension headaches, most likely attributable to stress, which is what I figured. Another possible cause: dehydration. I do need to remind myself to drink more water every day. While experts say coffee is unlikely to dehydrate you, my experience tells me my love of coffee is dehydrating because of the frequent bathroom visits even a single cup will prompt.

So, I'll work on managing my stress and drinking more water. Hopefully, my headaches will diminish soon.     

Women Who Design

Yolanda Lettieri, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, is Principal and CEO of YSL Architecture, but also a member of the Women Who Design steering committee. Women Who Design is a group that exists to examine through storytelling the lived experience and contributions of women in architecture. Yolanda and I are acquaintances through our connections with the AIA Northwest & Pacific Region back in 2008-2010 when I served on the AIA Oregon Board as one of the directors representing the Southwestern Oregon Chapter, and Yolanda was the Regional Associate Director. She recently brought Women Who Design to my attention, and I’m happy to share the organization’s story and mission here on my blog. 

A glass ceiling preventing women from achieving elevated professional success in the architectural profession persists despite real progress in recent decades. Even today, the social constructs of gender roles and biases continue to occupationally segregate women, often preventing them from achieving their full potential as architects. Women remain underrepresented at the top levels in our field, and they continue to command lower pay than their male peers. The problem is more than the architectural profession alone can fix—it is a complex societal dilemma for which solutions remain elusive. Certainly, one key is for all of us to hear from the lived experiences of those who have dealt very personally with the career challenges they have faced. 

Providing a platform to ask what it means to be a woman pursuing a career in architecture is precisely the objective of Women Who Design. By inviting female architects and designers to tell their stories and lived experiences, Women Who Design believes these collective voices can contribute toward a broader exploration of the subject. The medium for this exploration will be a juried (virtual) exhibit of the most compelling and thought-provoking stories, entitled The Life Cycles of Women in Architecture. Additionally, Women Who Design produced a series of live workshops, discussion panels, and artist talks earlier this spring, with hopes for more to come. 

Fundamentally, Women Who Design seeks to: 

• Amplify the voices of women to bring a fresh perspective to the status quo
• Situate the input of contributors within the larger contemporary discourse about women in society
• Inspire ongoing reflection and change through honesty, specificity, and diversity of content
• Empower current and future generations 

The intended audience for The Life Cycles of Women in Architecture exhibit is all of us, but particularly young and future generations of women who may have an interest in pursuing a career in the design professions. While there are other groups who advocate on behalf of women architects and share knowledge, advice, and support development of emerging professionals(1), Women Who Design is unique in its focus upon encouraging women in architecture to openly share their individual, personal experiences. By reading their stories, we may all learn, empathize, and come to recognize the common threads between them. These will undoubtedly prompt further discussions, all of which will be essential to furthering our progress toward equity on all fronts within the architectural profession. 

Check out Women Who Design’s website for more information about the organization’s unique approach to lifting the voices of women in architecture and design. If the goals and mission of Women Who Design resonate with you, download the sponsorship package from the link below and consider supporting their efforts with your donation. 

https://app.box.com/s/dwai1nc18dnoijykno2c9zzq7mgii3am 

(1)    These include the Organization of Women Architects & Design Professionals, Equityby Design, and the American Institute of Architects’ National Diversity Council and Women in Architecture (WIA) Committee.

 

Eugene/Architecture/Alphabet: D

University (Deady) Hall in the snow (my photo)

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

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

This week’s selection begins with the letter D, for which my selection, which is not free of controversy, is the formerly named Deady Hall.

University (Deady) Hall

The first building on the campus of what would become the University of Oregon still stands today, 148 years after its builder, W.H. Abrams, laid the cornerstone. Though architect William W. Piper designed the three-story structure in the then-popular Second Empire Style, its relative lack of ornamentation and absence of polychromy evokes nothing if not the mystery and portent we associate with the old castles, abbeys, and towering gray manors of a Gothic horror novel. True to this impression, the formerly named Deady Hall is haunted by its history. 

As reported in a 2012 Daily Emerald piece, that dark history includes the finding in 1877 by Professor Thomas Condon of a well-preserved human skeleton in the building’s basement (later identified as belonging to a man from New York who had been missing; no explanation exists of how his remains ended up in the basement). Additionally, Deady Hall’s toll claimed William Piper, the architect, who following the university’s failure to compensate him fully for his services and his ensuing financial travails, committed suicide by jumping off a train. 

Unnamed upon its opening in 1876, photographs from that time show “The Building” standing alone on the campus, in stark contrast to its setting today amid paths lined by mature conifers and big leaf maples. Until the completion of Villard Hall in 1886, it would be the university’s sole building, hosting not only classes for UO’s complete enrollment but also for a preparatory school (Eugene would not have its own high school until 1901). The university informally named its oldest building “Deady Hall,” in honor of Matthew P. Deady, judge of the Territorial Supreme Court from 1853 to 1859 and president of the UO’s Board of Regents from 1873 to 1883. The university officially conferred the name “Deady Hall” in 1926 on the 50^th anniversary of the building’s opening. 

Though an accomplished politician and jurist, Matthew Deady clearly held racist views. He supported slavery and helped draft the state’s constitution, which initially barred black people from residing in Oregon. Damningly, he wrote “If we are compelled to have the colored race amongst us, they should be slaves.” Notwithstanding the context of his time, and indeed the complexity and contradictions of his views (which admirably included his efforts to protect Chinese workers from discrimination and racially motivated violence), Deady never entirely disavowed his stance toward African Americans, even after supporting the Thirteenth Amendment (which banned slavery in 1864). 

In response to a set of demands presented by the Black Student Task Force in 2015, University of Oregon president Michael Schill initially decided to not recommend renaming Deady Hall, but did endorse removing Fredrick Dunn’s name from the wing of the Hamilton residence complex that bore it. Dunn, though head of the Department of Classics at UO, was also “Exalted Cyclops” of the Eugene branch of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s. As I wrote upon the renaming of the wing in honor of DeNorval Unthank, it was clear to a majority in the university community that honoring an avowed racist has no place today at a public institution of higher learning. President Schill’s reasons for not choosing to do the same for Deady Hall were nuanced but have since been rendered moot in the wake of the racially charged social upheaval we witnessed over the past year. Deady Hall—now University Hall—will be renamed. 

University (Deady) Hall, circa 1900.

In a well-balanced and researched essay for the Oregon Historical Quarterly, Matthew Dennis and Samuel Reis-Dennis address the complicated questions about history, public memory, ethical judgment, and American society and political culture raised by renaming controversies: 

“If, say, in the case of Matthew Deady, one wished to preserve his name on Deady Hall so as to honestly confront the past, acknowledge the ugliness of Oregon’s history, and register how it has violated university values, then are we not associating Deady with reputation-destroying “ignominy” in the process? Ironically, taking the opposite step—de-naming Deady Hall—would remove the spotlight from Deady. And it would seem to eliminate any need for Deady to publicly defend himself from the grave. Namesake buildings do not speak in complex and nuanced ways about the men or women they celebrate —if they resonate at all, they offer praise, they edify. Should the University of Oregon wish to remember Deady and the early history of Oregon, in all its shame and ugliness, then it could do so through other means—via a historical plaque, for example, that assesses Deady as a complicated historical figure without lionizing him.” 

Buildings alone can only do so much to influence our behavior and beliefs. On the other hand, should our architecture be resilient no matter how much the sands of public memory shift? Proponents for the autonomy of architecture argue that social, cultural, economic, and political factors should not play a role in the production of form. I have a hard time separating architecture from the entire context of which it is a part. Our buildings do reflect how we see ourselves, and in part we do view our world through the lens of architecture. Meaning also inheres from the history lived within our buildings and by the encumbrances of the values that history accrues. 

I support the de-naming of Deady Hall because choosing not to would perpetuate a campus environment of cultural insensitivity a historical plaque alone cannot redress. Try to imagine the feelings of African American students upon first learning of Matthew Deady’s beliefs. Sitting within an unrepentantly named Deady Hall would be discomforting and hurtful. If the building continued to bear his name, many of these students can only then conclude the university chooses to turn a blind eye toward the persistent structural inequities of our society and the historic plight of the black community. The intent of renaming is not to gloss over the historical record by imposing a fraught set of current beliefs and worldviews but rather to acknowledge the past forthrightly.  

 

Springfield Motors (Buick) Redevelopment

Springfield Motors (Buick) Redevelopment concept (rendering as presented during the 4-26-21 meeting of the Springfield Economic Development Agency)

I attended last Monday’s Springfield Economic Development Agency (SEDA) meeting expecting to find who the agency chose for the massive Glenwood revitalization project I reported on a couple of weeks ago. Instead, the members of the SEDA board retreated to an executive session to mull over the Glenwood proposals(1); however, they did not do so before I learned about an entirely different project. I found that project—the proposed redevelopment of the former Springfield Motors (Buick) site located at 702 A Street in downtown—of great interest, in many respects of equal significance to the future of Springfield as either of the massive Glenwood proposals. 

The Scherer family—owners of the property and former operators of the Buick dealership before closing the business in 2019—wishes to see the site sustain its legacy as a positive and vibrant part of downtown Springfield. They have worked with SEDA since the closure of the dealership to identify mutually beneficial goals, particularly the desirability of introducing market-rate housing as part of a mixed-use project on the site. SEDA introduced the Scherers to Northwest Sustainable Properties (NWSP), a Portland developer with a successful track record of thoughtful projects supportive of the ethos and cultural scene of the Portland neighborhoods in which it has built. The Scherer family and NWSP are now working together under the banner of Blue McKenzie, LLC with the hope of replicating Northwest Sustainable Properties’ Portland successes in downtown Springfield. 

SEDA furnished Blue McKenzie with a grant in 2019, which funded a necessary feasibility assessment. Blue McKenzie settled upon a proposal involving the 8-story, mixed-use mass timber building concept depicted in the rendering above. Blue McKenzie estimates the project’s development cost to be approximately $27 million. The new building would occupy tax lot 2300 (which served as a parking lot for the former dealership—see the map below) and include ground-floor commercial space (approximately 5,000 sf) with 7 stories of apartments above (approximately 85 units). Based solely on what I see in the rendering, it seems the shuttered dealership’s Streamline Moderne showroom building will be repurposed, perhaps as an eatery or drinking establishment. Blue McKenzie anticipates a mid-2022 construction start, with completion occurring the following year. 

The proposed development site is Lot 2300. The former Buick dealership's showroom building occupies Lot 2200.

Monday’s meeting included an affirmative vote by the Board authorizing the City Manager to negotiate and execute an agreement to loan $2,000,000 to Blue McKenzie LLC for acquisition and predevelopment work. The execution of a memorandum of understanding between SEDA and Blue McKenzie in March preceded this vote. In addition to outlining the structure of the initial $2 million loan, the MOU further proposes a second, long-term SEDA loan of up to $10 million to assist with construction funding. The terms of the second loan agreement would include immediate repayment of the initial $2 million loan ($8 million net). Additionally, the project would be fully taxable upon completion, as opposed to any deferral of property tax payments (such as that offered by the City of Eugene through its Multi-Unit Property Tax Exemption program). 

City staff recommended SEDA’s participation in the financing of the project for several reasons: 

• The introduction of a new construction type and residential product lacking comparables in the downtown Springfield real estate market. 
• Current rental rates, which lag both the escalation in development costs and Springfield’s growth in population. 
• Recent data for comparable projects in other communities indicating a trend toward higher rents. 

These factors contribute to perceptions of investment risk by commercial lenders. SEDA’s backing would help mitigate these concerns. 

The project may be subject to State prevailing wage laws if its funding includes the second, $10 million construction loan. 

I wasn’t paying enough attention during the meeting to exactly remember, but I believe the design team includes LRS Architects of Portland and the San Antonio, Texas firm of Lake/Flato Architects. Additionally, Siteworks Design/Build—which is led by JP Veillet, who also founded Northwest Sustainable Properties—has a hand in the proposed plan. That’s a lot of design firepower for what in the grand scheme of things is a relatively modest project. 

Whether the concept will pencil out is an issue. The past year’s alarming rise in the price of building materials threatens the viability of not only Blue McKenzie’s proposal but other prospective developments as well. 

I’m encouraged by SEDA’s enlightened support of the Blue McKenzie proposal as well by the desire of the Scherer family to reinvest in downtown Springfield after operating their landmark business there for so many decades. This mixed-use concept is precisely the kind of development the City of Springfield should welcome with open arms: smart, urban, mixed-use projects adding much-needed housing stock and amenities that contribute positively toward walkable communities and compact growth. If it is successful, it will undoubtedly beget similar projects attracted by the steady rejuvenation of Springfield’s historical core. 

(1)    To the best of my knowledge, the SEDA board has not announced their choice between the proposals submitted by Glenwood Development, LLC and LOCALIS Partners.