Campfire Collaborative Wins 2020 AIA NW+PR Region Award

Jenna Fribley, AIA celebrates the announcement of her firm being awarded the 2020 AIA Northwest & Pacific Region Emerging Firm Award (photos from Campfire Collaborative's Facebook page) 

I'm super busy this weekend with work commitments, so I was happy to hear good news I can share for this week’s blog post: as reported by AIA Eugene, local firm Campfire Collaborative received the 2020 AIA Northwest & Pacific Region Emerging Firm Award! AIA NW+PR bestowed the award during its virtual 2020 Region Awards event this past Thursday evening. 

Campfire co-owner Jenna Fribley, AIA likewise announced the selection on her firm’s Facebook page: 

“We are so humbled, honored, and ecstatic to have received the AIA Northwest & Pacific Region Emerging Firms Award last night!!!! It’s still hard to believe that our little firm in Springfield was chosen for this award from a field of candidates across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Alaska, Hawaii, and Guam/Micronesia. 

“A lot of our work focuses on revitalization within our community, and while we have an awesome design team, our efforts wouldn’t be possible without the amazing partnerships and support from our clients, colleagues, the city, and local developers. We’re also lucky to be part of an amazing community of design professionals with at active AIA presence and the architecture program at the University of Oregon.  

Thanks everyone!!!!”

 

As the AIANW+PR website states, the Emerging Firm Award seeks to recognize new practices that are challenging traditional perceptions and methods of architecture. For sure, Campfire Collaborative is increasingly making its mark on the local architectural scene, especially in Springfield, where the firm’s office is located.

 

Congratulations to Jenna, co-owner Kelsey Buzzell, and the entire Campfire Collaborative team!

 

Interaction

Photo by Khamkéo Vilaysing on Unsplash

The SARS-CoV-2 virus required us to accept dramatic and sudden changes in societal behavior, most notably social distancing. While self-isolation or quarantining is necessary to minimize viral transmission, social distancing amplifies the risk of adverse emotional and psychological effects. Humans are social beings, so the closure or reduced access to areas of interaction between people has increased loneliness, anxiety, stress, fear, and boredom. Psychological harm has been the toxic corollary of our COVID-19 existence.

The following excerpt from the late Bill Kleinsasser’s self-published textbook SYNTHESIS stressed his belief in the importance of built environments supportive of human interaction. In Bill’s mind, such places were nothing less than a mental health imperative. He deemed the considerations associated with designing spaces supportive of gracious, inclusive, and life-affirming interactions between people to be essential to the making of good architecture. Fundamentally, he believed it was the architect’s duty to prioritize how the designed environment accommodates healthful societal interactions. This responsibility has never been so evident as it is now.

Interaction

It is possible and desirable to make conditions and supports in the built environment that help people achieve (and continue to achieve) significant interactions with one another. 

This frame of reference concerns the development of those places where people already collect because of activity patterns or necessity. Slight additions or adjustments often make such places supportive of important interaction. At the same time, it is recognized that built conditions in any environment may have little or nothing to do with interaction among people.

Interaction with other human beings (if it is significant, rational, and constructive) is apparently necessary if one is to establish a complete self-image which is in accord with reality. An individual cannot always, through introspection, see what and who he really is.

Conditions of modern life seem to reduce seriously the number of opportunities for meaningful interaction among people. Many sociologists and anthropologists have expressed great concern about the destruction caused by modern life to “primary groups,” which were previously the main framework for human associations and cooperation, and to the quality of interactions among people. Others warn about the workings of our natural defense mechanisms which tend to perpetuate incomplete and untrue views of self and life. 

The study of interaction clearly must involve the study of various kinds of interaction, various needs that are manifest when interaction does not happen, variables that particularize the meaning of interaction in any situation, groups, and group dynamics, etc. 

There are many forms of human interaction. We commonly are not discerning enough (specific enough) when we use the term, and as usual our lack of precision leads to design trouble—at least, it doesn’t help us in the generation of design responses. Consequently, our good intentions do not result in better environmental conditions. Without pretenses about completeness, some kinds of human interaction are as follows:

• Being with others . . . in the presence of others.
• Sharing the same space.
• Sharing the same routine.
• Doing something with others over an extended period of time—a hard job or an ordeal—like the army, school, community projects.
• Doing more casual things with others . . . infrequently.
• Daily meeting . . . casual exchange.
• Being exposed to new ideas, styles, attitudes, etc.
• Receiving messages that reveal the presence of people.
• Expression of self.
• Sharing experience of an event of any kind, whether in daily life, in literature, in poetry, music, etc. especially hard times or adversity.
• Forthright, “hair down,” frank, relaxed, non-role-playing times . . . where normal barriers are removed.
• Physical touching.
• Just talking to someone . . . telling someone something . . . teaching someone something.
• Finding one’s own inner, infrequently known self.
• Overseeing, overhearing, watching . . . vicarious contact . . . watching people play, watching events . . . being in touch.

Some forms of interaction cause the need to withdraw or retreat, to break off from interaction. This happens when there are too many people, or when it becomes too hot or too hard to breathe, or too crowded . . . when interaction is relentless and out of control, or when it is too sudden or too prolonged.

Some forms of interaction lead to relaxed relationships: openness, long-lasting friendship, and love.

Some forms of interaction lead to comfortable relationships: temporary ones, not deep, but significant and positive.

It is not possible to always predict the consequences of the various forms of interaction. People’s circumstances, states of mind, and dependencies all vary, and the physical environment doesn’t always matter. 

Nevertheless, we can establish a variety of conditions to encourage interaction and hope for the best. The physical environment around us often lacks these conditions. It often discourages constructive interaction among people and sometimes prevents it. 

Some conditions that can be established in response are:

1. The development of sunny spots, shady spots, edges, activity nodes, entries, stairs, heavily used spaces . . . so that people are invited to gather there . . . simply taking advantage of an already existing situation.
2. Establishing places that are events, or that cause or invite events—open places—that are not overly designated for use.
3. Overlapping and /or reinforcing uses.
4. Structure of organizing systems that break down normal barriers.
5. Places that push people together . . . or places that collect people.
6. Places that can be shared by small groups (because large groups diffuse possession) . . . size, position, and visual contact are crucial.
7. Places that allow those who live there to communicate about themselves . . . their ideas, feelings, and their care and concern about how their place was/is made.
8. Places that are in touch with people’s sounds, words, inflections, expressions, gestures . . . connected intimately.

Summary:

Observation of places in which people interact (interact in a variety of ways) suggests that designers should consider the following actions in the design of places that offer opportunities for interaction:

• Making places that push people together (judiciously).
• Developing sunny and shady places (people like to be there).
• Making places that allow people to do things together.
• Developing spatial invitations to pause, linger, stay.
• Developing groups of needed facilities.
• Making places that allow people to show or express themselves (allowing a choice of different degrees of making themselves accessible).
• Developing activity nodes where people will be anyway (entries, stairways, intersections, heavily used places) so they are invited to stay.
• Developing edge, in-between, and leftover spaces (they usually have potential for spontaneous use inasmuch as they usually don’t’ belong to anyone, any group, or any purpose) . . . “open” spaces.
• Establishing places that are events in themselves (interesting, important, engaging).
• Establishing laces that invite many events (“open” places that are neither over- or under-designated).
• Developing places of overlapping or reinforcing uses (one activity needs or supports another, thereby collecting more people to a group of places).
• Organizing or structuring places in ways that break down normal barriers to interaction.

WK / 1981

Oregon is Burning

Smoke from Oregon wildfires as seen from space (photo credit: NASA)

Once again, an event beyond our immediate control has turned the world we live in upside down. Wildfires here in Oregon have wreaked havoc. They have forced tens of thousands to flee their homes; hundreds of thousands of others are ready to evacuate from zones under imminent threat. Dozens of people are currently missing with fears their numbers may add to a growing death tally. More than a million acres across the state have burned, consuming entire small communities. Here in Lane County, the Holiday Farm Fire has devasted the scenic McKenzie River Valley, wholly destroying the town of Blue River and blackening extensive forest lands. Numerous friends and acquaintances of mine have been directly impacted; in at least one instance, this has included losing a home. Across the state, the property loss has been staggering.

 

Thus far, my wife and I are fortunate not to be among those who are truly suffering. While we are safe, Eugene has been cloaked within an apocalyptic orange haze for days now. The air quality is so poor and unhealthy it rated as the worst in the entire world on Friday. Ash has been falling like snow, coating our cars, yard, and house. Everything smells like a campfire. We are staying inside as much as possible.

 

Today's air quality in Eugene, per AccuWeather.

Oregon’s governor Kate Brown characterized the fire emergency a consequence of wind dynamics and unstable air conditions creating unpredictable firestorm behaviors. “This will not be a onetime event,” she said. “Unfortunately, it is the bellwether of the future. We are feeling the acute impacts of climate change.“ And as California governor Gavin Newsom recently said, the fires throughout the western states are evidence that “climate change is an existential threat,” leaving no doubt it is here and happening faster than most people anticipated.

 

Politicians may increasingly be sounding the alarm, but the truth is leading climatologists have been predicting for decades what we’re clearly seeing evidence of now. As I wrote twelve long years ago, we are now well past the tipping point whereby large-scale climate change due to anthropogenic pollutants is inevitable. Oregonians are witnessing firsthand just one result of its exponential acceleration and the resultant destabilization of our ecosystems.

 

The rise in global temperatures is not linear but rather has been progressing in a non-linear, chaotic fashion. Positive feedback loops—such as the shrinking of polar ice caps resulting in lowered surface albedo, and in turn more absorbed heat promoting further melting—move the Earth’s climate system further away from equilibrium. As Wikipedia states, “the effects of a perturbation on a system include an increase in the magnitude of the perturbation,” meaning positive feedback amplifies the effect by influencing the process which gave rise to it. Global warming begets further global warming.

 

The catastrophic wildfires are just one harbinger. Many of the root causes of climate change also increase the risk of pandemics, so it’s conceivable scientists may ultimately attribute rising global temperatures with some role in the advent of COVID-19. Deforestation and loss of habitat have forced species to encounter other animals they normally would not, resulting in an unprecedented spread of pathogens. Certainly, people exposed to more air pollution and smoke fare worse with respiratory infections than those who breathe cleaner air. Studies in China indicate poor air quality may increase transmission of infections that cause influenza-like illnesses.

 

We’re seeing other predicted effects of climate occur in real time: rising sea levels, changing precipitation patterns, greater ocean acidity, increasing drought and heat waves, and stronger, more intense weather events. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we have the increased risk of wildfires, parasite infestations, and tree diseases resulting in widespread tree die-off. The impacts on society include the threat to resources upon which local economies depend, loss of food security, and exacerbation of social inequities. The poorest among us will suffer the most.  

A smoky Eugene from Skinner's Butte (photo from the City of Eugene)

The past week’s wildfire devastation will leave a lasting mark upon all of us, particularly those displaced and traumatized. Will they/we rebuild? Many will, yes. Unfortunately, we’re transitioning to a new normal—a new reality wherein catastrophic wildfires will occur with escalating frequency. Naturally, our response will be to reconstruct impacted communities in as fire-resistant a manner as possible. I expect future editions of our building codes will increasingly mandate best practices associated with design for wildfire-resistance. It will be important to view the challenges of designing from as broad and encompassing a perspective as possible. Certainly, the debate about how best to manage forest lands so they are more fire resilient will grow in the aftermath of this year’s deadly conflagrations.  

From my perspective as an architect, the challenge moving forward is the burgeoning set of issues I must address on every comprehensive building project my firm and I undertake. During my 40-year career, I have witnessed recognition and then codification of matters related to energy conservation and sustainability, removal of barriers to accessibility, seismic resilience, and equity in the architecture profession. This year has brought social justice, designing for a world ravaged by a pandemic, and now wildfire resilience to the forefront. Every one of these concerns is important and essential to consider. Unfortunately, it too often takes tragic events to spur us to action.

 

Architects must keep this growing list of issues in mind while also endeavoring to design beautiful, practical, and life-affirming places. The purpose of architecture is to empower people and provide them with a reflection of who they are as a culture. Architecture is future-building. It would be a shame if we succumbed to viewing the future and our work exclusively through a dystopian lens.

 

This has been a year for the ages, on many fronts. If we have an ounce of humility, humankind will finally resolve to face reality. Climate change is indeed an existential threat. Oregon is burning.

The Complex Effects of COVID-19 on Cities

Photo by Morning Brew on Unsplash

 

Before COVID-19, most people couldn’t imagine how the outbreak would upend our lives. For many around the world, the pandemic has been horrific. They watched loved ones die or become debilitated by the virus or fell ill themselves. Others lost their jobs or suffered reductions in their hours of work and levels of income. Overall, the wide-ranging effects of the public health threat have been devastating, with unprecedented, adverse social and economic consequences. These effects include their influence upon the future of our urban environments.

 

This past spring, everyone adjusted as governments enacted lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders. Many were fortunate to continue working, albeit from home. One immediate result was a dramatic reduction in the number of vehicle trips in large population centers around the country. The Eugene-Springfield metro area was no exception. Traffic congestion during peak hours disappeared overnight, as did visible smog and air pollution. Our streets were cleaner, quieter, and safer.  

 

Perhaps, we thought, COVID-19 harbored a silver lining. Notable urbanists regarded the upheaval wrought by the SARS-CoV-2 virus as an opening for greater prioritization of paradigm-shifting policies favoring walking, biking and transit, and high-quality public realms. Perhaps, finally, everyone would open their eyes to the benefits of decreased reliance upon the automobile and the value of walkable, mixed-use developments. Perhaps real, rapid, and lasting changes would occur.

 

The reality is people reverted to their previous driving habits as the economy cautiously reopened through the course of the summer. If anything, some who had relied upon riding LTD buses or ridesharing for their daily commutes chose to use their cars instead out of fear of interacting with potentially infected individuals. Though my observations are purely anecdotal, I believe the volume of traffic on our streets has been on the upswing since early summer and is approaching pre-COVID-19 levels. More objectively, ODOT maintains statistics for observed statewide traffic on Oregon’s highways. While the statewide weekday average traffic volumes this past March were reduced by as much as 43% compared to the year before, as of late-August the average weekday reduction was only 9%.

 

In response to the virus, the Lane Transit District suspended collecting fares from riders to eliminate lingering between them and the drivers. To further lessen person-to-person exposure, riders enter the buses through the rear doors. Those measures notwithstanding, LTD also reduced service by eliminating some routes and cutting frequency along others to minimize its losses.

 

The pandemic will eventually be behind us; however, bus ridership may take years to rebound, if ever. This would be an unfortunate outcome of the systemic shock delivered by COVID-19. Even if the virus’s days are numbered, it may have essentially hampered future prioritization of funding for improvements to public transit infrastructure, such as further expansion of LTD’s EmX bus rapid transit network.

 

While public transit may be destined to suffer a lingering impact, it’s likely many companies will continue to accept or favor working-from-home by their employees, or at least allow more flexible work arrangements combining telecommuting with in-office days and staggered work times. Many of us able to work remotely have enjoyed positive experiences. A continued change in our work behaviors will influence the morphology of our cities (i.e. a move away from continued concentration of office space in downtown cores). Despite the current uptick in daily vehicle trips, it’s conceivable there will be a lessening in traffic as a shift toward a new and different “normal” for office work continues to evolve. It could be a future of car-dependency isn’t our fate and that “15-minute neighborhoods” and hyper-localization may be.

 

We’re only beginning to imagine the far-reaching effects of the pandemic. It has demonstrated how truly precarious an illusion of balance and normalcy is for something as complex and dynamic as an entire city, to say nothing of our entire civilization. Emergence within a complex system means it exhibits aggregate properties that are more than the sum of its constituent elements (thus looking for comprehensive solutions through a limited and singularly focused lens will always be fruitless). A complex system exhibits self-organization, non-linear dynamics, with each level within a given system following its own rules. The effect of interventions on outcomes in a complex system—let alone the force of something as disruptive as a pandemic—is largely unpredictable.

 

Though cities are big and complex, they are orders of magnitude more granular and adaptive than countries. In her prescient book Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs posited that cities are the most active and important economic entities. Ample evidence increasingly supports her thesis. The Global Mayors COVID-19 Recovery Task Force regards cities as the “engines of the recovery,” believing investing in their resilience is the best way to avoid economic disaster. That said, returning to business as usual is not in the cards, especially as the urgency of addressing accelerating climate change and its ominous cascade of effects continues to mount. Cities are more apt than nations to effectively evolve and acclimatize (pardon the pun) to rapid changes in our environment.

 

COVID-19 has pushed us out of whatever comfort zones we occupied before its unwelcome visit. Moving forward, we will need to gauge our behaviors in response to what it has loosed upon us. How Eugene and Springfield adapt will be a function of how well the implicit rules that govern their ongoing progression toward desired future states perform in response to emerging system properties. Because so much of this cannot be foreseen, the key for planners and urbanists is to develop a practical understanding of the non-linear dynamics that lie beneath all complex systems. Doing so at a very basic, local level offers me some hope for the future we all will share.

Wakanda

Image source: https://marvelcinematicuniverse.fandom.com/wiki/Golden_City?file=Wakandan_City.png

Sadly, we lost the talented actor Chadwick Boseman on Friday following his protracted fight with colon cancer (doctors diagnosed the cancer back in 2016 but Boseman never spoke publicly about his illness). He achieved critical acclaim in several roles, notably portraying baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson in the film 42; however, his fans are likely to remember him first for starring as the Marvel Comics character T’Challa, aka the Black Panther. The 2018 film Black Panther was a box office smash, with Boseman becoming an inspirational cultural hero to many people of color.

I have not yet watched Black Panther, but I will do so this evening (ABC is airing the movie at 8:00 PM Pacific Time). Besides the opportunity to see and honor Chadwick Boseman, I will also enjoy being immersed in the imagined world of Wakanda, the fictional African country in which the movie is set. When the film debuted in 2018, many architects and urbanists praised the detailed integration of African cultural references and aesthetics within a utopian and futuristic depiction of the Wakandan capital of Birnin Zana, also known as The Golden City.

When I take the movie in, I’ll credit the vividness of the imaginary metropolis to the movie’s director, Ryan Coogler, and its Academy Award-winning production designer, Hannah Beachler. Critics have compared the fruit of their cinematic labors to other absorbing (albeit dystopian) visions of urban life, most notably Metropolis (1927), Blade Runner (1982), and Brazil (1985). Groundbreaking in their time, these efforts are notable because of their coupling of believability within the stories they told with high production values and virtuoso art direction.

I’ll reserve judgment of Black Panther until after viewing it. That said, based on reviews and the buzz that accompanied the movie, I expect to find it enjoyable and enthralling. Some of the comments by the architectural and urbanist press at the time of the movie’s release in 2018 were especially intriguing; here’s a sampling:

Curbed.com:

“In fact, Wakanda’s capital of Birnin Zana, is like no other city of the future depicted on screen: It’s lush, textural, and tactical, with a rich variety of architectural styles, building densities, and transportation systems, envisioned by production designer Hannah Beachler.

“But instead of the typical tropes seen in cinematic cities of the future—sleek glass towers of uniform height—Wakanda shows not a master-planned, top-down metropolis but a type of grassroots urbanism where the residents have customized their structures and their communities to fit their needs.

“There was also great praise for human-scale streets, walkable urbanism, and a rapid transit system that closely resembles a hyperloop—or maybe a mag-lev train.”

Brent Toderian:

"Probably no movie has been more discussed in the context of utopian or dystopian city-making than 1982's Blade Runner. It’s still being discussed decades later. Blade Runner wasn’t a positive vision of Los Angeles, but it was an interesting vision. It was a cautionary tale, but also a fun conversation starter. I think Black Panther's Wakanda can be that new conversation.

 

There’s density in Wakanda, but it doesn't seem oppressive. I immediately saw urbanism at all scales. I saw tall towers, I saw midrise towers, and I saw human-scale urbanism. It looks like regional architecture as opposed to this anywhere-ness that we seem to have in our global architecture these days. I saw architectural expression that was not only organic, but of its place and of its culture.”

Architectural Digest:

“Wakanda is not full of the sleek modern glass buildings audiences have come to expect when they imagine the future. Instead, it has a variety of architectural styles, many heavily inspired by traditional African architecture, but it also incorporates modern urban technology seamlessly. This is what makes the place, from the buildings to the transportation systems, so appealing (and surprising) to viewers.”

Jenn Fujikawa:

“What separates Wakanda from other places in the Marvel Universe is the fact that while it’s the most technically advanced civilization it has a strong history of culture as its foundation. As Moore explained, “So imagine a place that still has standing monuments that are centuries old, next to the most modern skyscrapers in the world. In the same way, they haven’t lost a lot of their cultural touchstones that other places have. They still worship, potentially the same gods they did when they first started. They still have rituals that are centuries old because they never had that sort of cultural imperialism that you’ve seen across the world. So it’s a place that really sits between being technologically advanced but also having a high value on their traditions.”

 

“Finding the value in traditional architecture but shaping it with a futuristic slant was the running vein for creating the world of “Black Panther.” “It was important for us to keep that tradition, because we wanted to honor and have reverence for the continent,” said Beachler, “and bring it to the screen in a way that you haven’t seen before, as being a prosperous place.”

*      *      *      *      *      *

Our cities reflect who we are as people and as a society, and our buildings are the physical manifestation of our culture. It’s natural for us to be hopeful when presented with lavishly optimistic and utopian visions. When these visions are particularly compelling and revelatory, we have something to learn from them. For me, it’s enough that Black Panther’s at-once both futuristic and traditional Wakanda has prompted serious discussions about the nature of our real-world cities and the culture and technology that shape them. A good movie prompts us to think about and reconsider the status quo, while simultaneously stimulating and entertaining us. This is the power of art.