Stuff I Stumbled Upon

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

*    *    *    *    *    *

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

The Arithmetic of Downtown Housing

1055 Willamette (Rowell Brokaw Architects)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rendering of The Station House (Obie Companies)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Duty to Observe, Revisited

Photo by Olek Buzunov on Unsplash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Encounters with Architecture - Insights from a Hundred Places

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Architecture is Awesome: #43 Market Halls and the Bustle of Commerce

Reading Terminal Market (all photos by me unless noted otherwise).

This is another in my series of posts inspired by 1000 Awesome Things, the Webby Award-winning blog written by Neil Pasricha. The series is my meditation on the awesome reasons why I was and continue to be attracted to the art of architecture. 

Step through the threshold of a great market hall and the city changes register. Outside, traffic and sidewalks. Inside, a hundred small, competing voices: fishmongers and flower sellers, the clatter of crates, the smell of bread and brine mixing in the air. It should feel like chaos. Most of the time, it doesn't. Something is holding it together, and that something is architecture — a spatial discipline that turns bustle into legibility. 

Market halls earn a place in this series because they are one of the few building types where architecture, commerce, and community refuse to separate from one another. The building doesn't just shelter the market. It disciplines it, gathering a chaotic diversity of independent vendors into a single legible place. That discipline is precisely what allows the market to function as something more than a shopping trip: an authentic community hub, rooted in a specific city, offering an alternative to the placeless sameness of standard retail. 

Reading Terminal Market (photo by ajay_suresh, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market is a useful place to start, though its architecture works a little differently than a postcard image might suggest. The soaring arched train shed above — now the Pennsylvania Convention Center's Grand Hall and Ballroom — belonged to the Reading Railroad's locomotives and tracks, not to the market. Since 1893, the market has occupied the ground floor and basement instead, the practical undercroft beneath the elevated train deck. Its columns and low ceiling weren't designed with retail in mind at all; they were sized to carry the load of a railroad overhead. But that engineering, not any deliberate design intent, is what produces the spatial legibility the market needed. The discipline arrived by accident. 

And yet that undercroft still does the same disciplining work. Its grid of columns and low, even ceiling height impose a legible order on 78,000 square feet and more than 80 independent merchants: Amish dairy stands, a century-old ice cream counter, butchers next to booksellers, none of them told what to sell or how to dress their stall. Walk the market's wide central corridors, and you can't see every vendor at once, but you can always see the shape of the whole. That's the market hall's architecture at work. It doesn't standardize the vendors; it standardizes the container. Each stall stays idiosyncratic, with hand-lettered signs, mismatched displays, a hundred small acts of local enterprise, while the columns and aisles impose just enough order that the whole reads as one place rather than a hundred unrelated ones. Take away that discipline, and you have a flea market. Add it back, and you have an institution. 

Granville Island Public Market.

Vancouver's Granville Island Public Market makes the same argument from a different angle. Where Reading Terminal encloses, Granville Island opens. It's a low-slung, industrial-vernacular market hall built from the bones of a 1917 industrial site, its corrugated siding and exposed structure left frankly utilitarian. The architecture here isn't a grand civic gesture. It's deferential to its setting: a working waterfront wedged between the bridge and False Creek.

That deference is the point. Granville Island's power comes less from its structure than from where the structure sits: deep in the urban and geographic fabric of Vancouver, reachable from downtown by a five-minute ferry hop across the creek, framed by the bridge, the boat repair yards, and the artists' studios that share the island. The market doesn't just serve the city; it is legible as Vancouver in a way a generic pavilion, dropped anywhere, could never be. Urban embeddedness is its own kind of architectural discipline. Siting, scale, and context do the work here that the grid of columns does at Reading Terminal. 

Lonsdale Quay Market.

North Vancouver's Lonsdale Quay Market and Montreal's Jean Talon Market each add their own variation on the same theme. Lonsdale Quay pairs a working SeaBus terminal with a market hall, so commuting and shopping share the same waterfront threshold. It's architecture again holding two functions, and two publics, in one frame. Worth noting: Lonsdale Quay doesn't dress itself up as something older than it is. Built in the mid-1980s on a former waterfront industrial brownfield alongside the SeaBus terminal, its architecture is frankly of its own era rather than a costume borrowed from history. Authenticity here isn't a matter of age. It's a matter of the building being honest about what it is and when it was made. 

Jean Talon Market

Jean Talon, sheltered under roofs but open at the sides to the street, shows that the discipline doesn't require full enclosure. A strong roofline and a well-defined edge are enough, even without walls. Closer to home, Eugene's own Saturday Market pushes that idea further still. There's no building at all, just temporary tents and a plaza, and yet it's as central to the city's sense of itself as any market hall is to Philadelphia or Vancouver. Placeness doesn't always require a building. 

What these marketplaces have in common is what that architectural discipline, in whatever form it takes, makes possible: independent makers instead of chain retail, experiential encounters instead of transactions, a place that reflects the specific culture and economy of its region rather than a franchise formula that could be dropped into any city in North America. These are festival marketplaces in the original sense. Commerce, entertainment, and local identity fuse into a single building type, revitalizing the urban districts around them and giving regional producers a stage they couldn't build alone. 

I'd stop short of calling the market hall a rare building type, though. If anything, its very success is its risk. The "festival marketplace" formula — reclaimed industrial shed, curated local vendors, artisanal signage — has proliferated widely enough that it now has its own imitators: market halls built from scratch to look authentic rather than grown from an actual place and its actual history. The architecture can be copied. The roof, the columns, the exposed brick are all reproducible. Harder to fake is the accumulated specificity: decades of a particular city's vendors, habits, and produce settling into a particular building until the two are inseparable. A market hall built yesterday to resemble Reading Terminal is not Reading Terminal, no matter how faithfully it borrows the silhouette. 

The good ones, the real ones, still earn the label. A market hall that holds a hundred small, competing acts of local enterprise together under one disciplined roof, in a place specific enough that it couldn't be anywhere else, is architecture doing something no other building type quite manages: making commerce feel like community. That's AWESOME.

Next Architecture is Awesome: #44 The Architecture of Waiting

The Suburban Dream and the Civic Ledger

 

Salinas_mcMansion.jpg: Brendelderivative work: NVO, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons

Mark Zweig posted something on LinkedIn recently that brought a familiar tension back into view: the mismatch between the suburban dream many people still hold and the fiscal realities cities face in trying to support it.

He opened with a jab we've all heard before: architects sneering at “McMansions,” from the vantage point of homes that reflect their own tastes—mid‑century, Victorian, bungalow, or something they designed themselves—many of them with small closets and electrical systems that show their age at inconvenient moments.

My wife and I know this condition well. Our 1,000‑square‑foot house on 34th Avenue was built in 1952, and until last year our electrical system did exactly what he describes. We finally upgraded it as part of a deferred maintenance project, but for decades we lived with the quirks and compromises of an older home. Our neighborhood is an early, modest version of suburbia: small houses on small lots, built when 34th Avenue was near Eugene’s southern edge. Today, miles of similar neighborhoods extend farther south, but the underlying pattern remains low‑density, single‑family, and residential.

That’s important context. I don’t live in a McMansion, but I do live within the development pattern that has shaped this debate. I understand the appeal of space, privacy, and a quiet street. It’s part of my daily life.

Mark’s larger point is straightforward. Millions of people love the suburban ideal: the cul‑de‑sac, the walk‑in closet, the bonus room, the fenced yard, the predictable streets where children can ride their bikes. These preferences aren’t moral failings. They're simply human. They’ve been reinforced for generations by culture, mortgage financing, transportation investments, and zoning codes that made this version of the American Dream seem both normal and attainable.

The dream itself has become more varied in recent years. Housing costs, changing demographics, and shifting priorities have broadened what many people want from a neighborhood. Even so, Mark’s post reminds us of an enduring cultural truth: people value space, privacy, comfort, and a measure of separation from the activity around them.

The civic ledger tells a different story. 

This is where Joe Minicozzi’s work becomes relevant. Joe, founder of Urban3, has spent years showing how patterns of development affect a city's long-term finances. Back in 2015, I wrote about his presentation for the Making Great Cities series, where he showed that compact downtown parcels typically generate dramatically more tax revenue per acre than low‑density suburban development while requiring proportionally less infrastructure to serve them. 

His work reveals something that isn’t obvious when we’re choosing where to live: every development pattern is also an entry in a city’s balance sheet. Streets, water lines, sewer systems, parks, and public services all carry long‑term costs, and those costs don’t necessarily align with our personal preferences. That’s the tension. 

People want space, privacy, and comfort. 

Cities need development patterns they can afford to maintain.

Neither truth invalidates the other. In fact, the debate becomes more productive once we acknowledge that both are legitimate. 

Architects often find themselves caught in the middle, criticized as elitists for questioning suburban expansion while recognizing the fiscal realities cities eventually confront. Yet the real issue isn’t architectural taste. Whether we prefer walk‑in closets or walkable neighborhoods tells us very little about what a city can afford over the long run. 

Perhaps that’s the lesson hiding beneath this familiar debate. We naturally evaluate housing choices at the scale of our own lives. Do we need the extra bedroom, the larger yard, the quieter street? Cities must evaluate those same choices at another scale entirely, where thousands of individual decisions accumulate into miles of pavement, acres of infrastructure, and decades of public obligations. 

The suburban dream and the civic ledger are not opposing visions. They are two ways of seeing the same landscape—one at the scale of individual lives, the other at the scale of the community that sustains them. The challenge isn't choosing between them. It's learning to see through both lenses at once. 

College Hill Cottages Tour and Housing Discussion

At the invitation of the City of Eugene, I joined roughly thirty participants on June 11 for a tour of the College Hill Cottages, followed by dinner and a discussion at Tsunami Books. The evening was part of the City’s ongoing Urban Growth Strategies work and its central question: how can Eugene provide affordable, attainable, and accessible housing over the next twenty years? 

The tour was led by Dylan Lamar of Cultivate, the architect‑developer behind the project. The College Hill Cottages occupy a standard residential lot at 45 W 27th Avenue, but the design intent is unusually focused. Cultivate describes the project as “workforce‑affordable homeownership in a walkable neighborhood”—six compact, zero‑energy‑ready cottages arranged around a south‑facing courtyard. Each one‑bedroom home offers about 800 square feet of living space, with a well‑organized first floor, exposed timbers, a vaulted upper‑level bedroom, an office nook, and a full‑height loft that can flex as a studio or additional sleeping space. 

View of the cluster from the street (my photo).

The cottages are individually owned, with recent pricing around $380,000 per unit. There is no off‑street parking, a deliberate choice supported by Eugene’s middle‑housing code, which does not require parking for cottage clusters. The absence of driveways and garages allows the courtyard to become the defining feature of the site: landscaped and intended for casual social connection, whether through outdoor dining or tending garden beds alongside neighbors. 

Dylan also addressed the tradeoffs inherent in the cottage‑cluster typology. Because Oregon House Bill 2001 defines cottage clusters as groupings of detached dwellings, shared walls are not permitted. The resulting high surface‑area‑to‑volume ratio is less efficient than townhouses, but Cultivate compensates with building‑science rigor: airtight 2x8 walls, operable cedar shutters for solar control, heat-pump space and water heating, and solar‑ready metal roofs. The homes are certified “Zero Energy Ready” by the U.S. Department of Energy. 

One of the cottages (my photo).

After the site visit, we reconvened at Tsunami Books for dinner (provided by Subo Sushi Burritos and El Super Burrito) and a conversation with City staff. The discussion centered on Eugene’s projected need for nearly 26,000 new homes over the next twenty years, as identified in the 2026 Oregon Housing Needs Analysis. Meeting that target would require producing roughly 1,600 dwellings per year—a 70 percent increase over current output. 

City staff outlined the first set of actions heading to Council as “Adoption Package #1,” a group of time‑sensitive land‑use code amendments. These include new development standards for micro‑village housing and single‑room occupancies (SROs), both of which would be permitted in all zones that allow housing. The package also proposes updates to middle‑housing and land‑division standards to reduce cost and complexity, improve clarity during plan review, and align local code with recent state legislation and the State’s Model Housing Code for Large Cities. 

Kitchen (my photo).

The College Hill Cottages served as a useful case study for how one form of middle housing is currently being implemented. Cottage clusters are allowed throughout Eugene’s residential zones but come with strict dimensional and design requirements: minimum lot sizes, limits on building footprints and heights, mandatory shared courtyards, and the requirement that all units be fully detached. The intent is to preserve small‑scale massing and maintain the appearance of individual homes, even as density increases. 

The evening offered a grounded look at how policy, design, and community expectations intersect. Eugene’s housing needs are substantial, and the City is moving quickly to align its code with state requirements while encouraging a broader mix of housing types. The College Hill Cottages illustrate one path forward—small in scale, community‑oriented, and designed to fit within the fabric of established neighborhoods.

AIA Eugene Section Meeting: Friendly Hall and the Northwest Center for Architecture

Friendly Hall Renovation, June 18, 2026 (my photo).

Last Wednesday's meeting of the American Institute of Architects - Eugene Section offered a clear look at two noteworthy efforts in our region: the ongoing renovation of the University of Oregon’s Friendly Hall and the work of the Northwest Center for Architecture. The evening began with a construction site tour and concluded with a presentation in Lawrence Hall 115, each providing a concise update on projects that continue to reshape both the campus and the regional architectural record.

Restoring Friendly Hall 

Friendly Hall, designed by Whidden & Lewis in 1893 with additions in 1909 and 1914, stands as the University of Oregon’s third oldest building and the future home of the Schnitzer School of Global Studies and Languages. The current work delivers a comprehensive deferred‑maintenance and modernization effort through the CM/GC method with Bremik Construction. As Stone Rose, Bremik’s Senior Superintendent, noted, the Guaranteed Maximum Price sits at approximately $72 million, a figure that captures both the building’s age and the enormous scope of the rehabilitation. According to the university, the total project cost is presently $82.97 million.

The team is tackling a substantial range of improvements. Bremik has excavated portions of the basement to create new programmable space and plans to relocate rooftop mechanical equipment underground to restore the building’s historic profile. They are adding reinforced shotcrete at the exterior walls and installing a new roof diaphragm to improve seismic performance and support the conversion of outdated 1960s dormers into usable office space. They are also addressing long‑standing accessibility, life‑safety, and security issues in a coordinated way.

During early design, the team studied whether a full basement excavation could provide the additional area the program required. They ultimately chose a northeast expansion instead, which offered more efficient and flexible floor plates at a lower cost. Inside, they are reorganizing spaces around openness and adaptability, with new student hubs intended to support cross‑cultural engagement.

As often happens with buildings of this age, the team has encountered numerous unforeseen conditions. They spoke plainly about the surprises uncovered during demolition and excavation — the kind of challenges that make historic rehabilitation both demanding and instructive.

My thanks to the project participants who shared their perspectives during the tour:

• Elisa Rocha (Associate Principal, TVA Architects)
• Stone Rose (Senior Superintendent, Bremik Construction)
• Martina Oxoby (Senior Owner’s Representative, University of Oregon)
• Mike Astrella (Associate, Catena Consulting Engineers)
• Caitlin Pierce Cranley (Associate, Architectural Resources Group)
• Charlie White (Project Delivery Lead, Systems West Engineers)

The project team expects to complete the Friendly Hall renovation in Fall 2027, a timeline that acknowledges the complexity of the work and the care required to rehabilitate a building of this vintage.

South Park Building rendering, Herbert & Keller Architects, 1977 (Image courtesy of Northwest Center for Architecture Archive. http://www.nwc4a.org)

The Northwest Center for Architecture

After the site tour, we moved to Lawrence Hall 115 for a presentation by Abraham Kelso, Board President of the Northwest Center for Architecture (NWC4A). Based in Eugene, the organization works to preserve and interpret the architectural legacy of the Pacific Northwest, from Oregon to British Columbia, at a moment when numerous original archives face the risk of disappearing.

Abe described the urgency clearly. Many influential 20th‑century architects have passed, and their firms have closed, leaving drawings and documents scattered in garages and storage units. Without intervention, the region could lose the record of a distinctly Northwest architectural ethos — one that is uniquely contextual, climate responsive, and civic minded.

The Northwest Center for Architecture continues to process collections from firms and individuals. They have already or are currently digitally preserving and curating the archives of Unthank Seder Poticha Architects, Daniel Herbert, John and Jonathan Stafford, Equinox Design (John Reynolds & G.Z. Brown), and others. The organization has produced exhibitions and publications, including Interaction! Unthank Seder Poticha Architects, and plans to onboard its first summer intern and volunteer cohort. Long‑term plans include acquiring the Stafford Office/Residence as a permanent home, for which the organization will soon undertake a capital fundraising campaign.

Abe’s presentation underscored how much regional architectural history remains uncatalogued and how valuable a dedicated institution will be in preserving and interpreting it. Please consider supporting the Northwest Center for Architecture and its efforts by making a tax‑deductible donation. The Center is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization: EIN 99‑42889508.

* * * * *

The evening reminded me of the value of staying connected to the local architectural community. I appreciated the chance to catch up with former colleagues and collaborators, many of whom I had not seen in quite a while. The combination of substantive project updates and familiar professional faces gave me a good prompt to attend future meetings more regularly.

Taking Downtown Seriously as a Place to Live

Students and reviewers gather around the downtown Eugene context model in Lawrence Hall, Friday, June 5, 2026 (my photo).

On Friday, June 5, I took part in the final review for University of Oregon professor Clay Neal’s Arch 486/586 terminal design studio, Downtown Housing. The students’ task was direct and ambitious: to design aspirationally dense urban housing on one of nine downtown Eugene sites, each ranging from a quarter‑acre to nearly two acres and located within a sixteen‑block study area centered on the intersection of Broadway and Willamette Street. 

The final review stood out for the consistently high quality of the students’ presentations—polished, thoughtful, and well‑defended. Equally impressive was the diversity of the reviewers: emeritus and current faculty, active practitioners, contractors, developers, city officials, downtown property owners, and a retired architect (me!). This mix brought a rich range of perspectives to the table as we discussed how these projects could genuinely contribute to a more lived‑in downtown. 

Only after establishing the concrete design problem did Clay frame the review with broader questions: How do the projects encourage positive social interaction? How do they address energy conservation and climate change? What do they contribute to a vibrant public realm? And how do they make living downtown healthy, desirable, and fun? The projects themselves were speculative but grounded, imagining a more active downtown through roughly a thousand new dwellings and a mix of supporting uses. 

The student work was impressive, as it was uniformly careful, inventive, and attuned to the constraints of real development. But it was not any single project that stayed with me—it was the density math. Among the studio materials prepared by Clay was a concise summary of existing housing conditions downtown, and the numbers are difficult to ignore. The entire Downtown Plan Area presently contains 2,511 housing units across 306 acres, or 8.2 units per acre. The sixteen‑block study area at the center of downtown has only 140 units across 59 acres, or 2.4 units per acre. That last figure is the one that stops you: 2.4 units per acre in the heart of downtown Eugene. 

The design studio's nine sites are the parcels highlighted in red.

For comparison, the studio also provided densities for three R‑1 neighborhoods in Eugene: Bethel at 3.6 units per acre, Friendly at 3.8, and River Road at 2.9. The paradox is obvious. Eugene’s downtown core is less housing-dense than its single‑family neighborhoods. Friendly, often thought of as a leafy, low‑rise district, is more than fifty percent denser than the center of the city. This is not a criticism of downtown; it is simply a description of its current condition. Decades of surface parking, single‑use commercial buildings, and benign neglect have left the core residentially sparse. In a city like Eugene, where the downtown should carry significant symbolic weight, adding housing is one of the most reliable ways to generate the everyday activity people associate with a healthy urban center. 

To put Eugene’s numbers in context, it helps to look at typical units‑per‑acre ranges in some major North American downtowns. Vancouver’s downtown peninsula commonly reaches 80 to 200 units per acre. Manhattan’s residential blocks range from 100 to 300. Chicago’s Loop and Near North Side fall between 40 and 150. Philadelphia’s Center City ranges from 20 to 120. Closer to home and scale, Boise’s downtown has achieved densities around 42 units per acre. Against that backdrop, Eugene’s downtown sits at 2.4 units per acre in the core and 8.2 across the broader plan area. Even the lowest densities in these examples exceed Eugene’s core by a large margin. The comparison is not meant to be aspirational—Eugene is not Manhattan, or even Boise—but it does reveal how much latent capacity sits in the center of the city. 

A simple table makes the contrast clear: 

(Density ranges for cities as reported in municipal planning documents and census data.)

The City of Eugene is not unaware of this opportunity. The Downtown Core Housing Initiative (DCHI) is an attempt to lower the barriers to building downtown through an accelerated MUPTE process, fee assistance using urban renewal funds, and strategic property acquisition and disposition by the Urban Renewal Agency. These tools are meant to address the same challenge the students confronted: how to make a downtown project pencil out in a market where construction costs are high and rents are comparatively low. 

A concrete real-world example is the North Butterfly Lot, where the Urban Renewal Agency has selected Paradigm Properties to develop a mixed‑use housing project on the half‑acre site north of the Farmers Market Pavilion. The proposal calls for a minimum of eighty new units, along with an active ground floor that strengthens the connection between the downtown core, the Market District, and the riverfront. It is a modest but meaningful step toward the kind of density the students were exploring. 

What I appreciated most about the studio was its clarity. By placing fifteen projects on nine sites, the students inadvertently produced a kind of density atlas for downtown Eugene. They showed how much housing could fit on sites we barely notice now, how mixed‑use programming could enliven the public realm, how massing, daylight, and circulation can be handled pragmatically, and how the city’s own incentives might bridge the gap between aspiration and feasibility. The work was speculative, but the underlying message was not: downtown Eugene has the capacity to house far more people than it currently does. 

Rendering of a project by Holly Needham for the site located on Broadway at Pearl Street (the current parking lot east of Ambrosia Restaurant & Bar).

It is the familiar arithmetic of development: land cost, construction cost, financing, rents, and the thin margins that make or break a project. The students’ proposals made the opportunity visible, and the City’s current initiatives—DCHI, the North Butterfly Lot, and the broader urban renewal strategy—suggest that the policy environment is beginning to align with that opportunity. 

I left the review encouraged. Not because the students solved downtown Eugene, but because they revealed its potential with unusual clarity. Their work made the low density of the core impossible to ignore, and it made the case, implicitly but persuasively, that a more lived‑in downtown is both desirable and achievable. The sites are there. The policies are taking shape. And the students have shown what’s possible when we take downtown seriously as a place to live, not just a place to pass through.