Eugene/Architecture/Alphabet: Y

Ya-Po-Ah Terrace (my photos)

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

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

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

 

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

My Own Season of Christmas

Photo by Elist Nguyen on Unsplash

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

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

Robert A.M. Stern (1939-2025)

Frank O. Gehry (1929-2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wiseman House, Montauk, NY

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

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

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

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

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

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