Category: Blog
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Urban Interventions
I am becoming increasingly interested in public interest design which looks to provide design for the 98%. While my focus in on architecture, Thor ter Kulve, a Dutch artist, is doing this as urban hacks which are playful and stimulating. A plus is that he is respectful of the buildings and infrastructure he is using,…
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Oregon’s Most Endangered Places
I often write about the dangers of a Cascadia earthquake since it will, among other things, damage the historic buildings I have come to know and love. I also help with preserving these historic buildings from more prosaic risks. As a regional advisor for the Historic League of Oregon I participate in the review of…
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Patterns and earthquakes
The article “Earthquakes, Patterns and Predictions” appeared in Wired Magazine. It points out that one attribute of being human is seeing patterns, even ones that don’t actually exist. This has something to do with the fact that it paid our ancestors to see patterns that even if some of them didn’t pan out. You can…
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Dr. Harvey Award
The City of Astoria has it own historic preservation awards, the Dr. Edward Harvey Historic Preservation Award, named after Dr. Harvey, who was instrumental in creating the historic preservation movement in Astoria. The award is presented each year to recognize property owners who have completed exterior restoration or beautification of a building which exemplifies the…
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Albany Central Elementary School Retrofit
Oregon voter’s showed their concern about making children safe in their schools by approving $500 millions of bonding for seismic upgrades of schools a few years back. The Legislature has been slow to allocate funding for the project, but some projects are being funded. Recently, one such project was completed for the Central Elementary School…
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Trinity Place Apartments Seismic Upgrade
I had the pleasure of touring the Trinity Place Apartments the other day with members of HPLO who had worked on the Resilient Masonry Buildings Roundtable. The owner of the Trinity Apartments is both an aficionado of Portland’s masonry apartment buildings and very committed to seismically upgrading them. Motivated not only to protect his tenants,…
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Design and exercise
An article with a catchy title, Office Building encourages exercise by creating more appealing stairways, from PSFK talks about the Bullitt Center, a carbon neutral office building being built in Seattle. Inculded in the latest energy and sustainability innovations is making the stairs attractive so people will use them. They are spacious, with plenty of…
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The future of cars and cities
For someone who has lamented the negative impacts that cars have had on cities, a fundamental change appears in the offing, with implications as large as those when cars first appeared. This change is made up of different elements. One element is the changing relationship people have with cars, from being a reflection of who…
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The Oregon Resilience Plan: A call to expand the sustainability conversation
Edward Wolf has laid down a challenge to the sustainability community to include resilience as part of sustainability in an article in Sustainable Business Oregon. Ted, a writer on environmental issues, was drawn into seismic and resiliency when he discovered how seismically suspect the schools his child was attending in Portland were. He has become…
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New York Mag and Astoria
The New York Magazine had a recent article extolling the virtues of Astoria. The said Astoria, a “…former industrial town two hours from Portland has transformed into a stylish weekend destination while honoring its maritime history”. I agree with the article and was pleased that it mentioned a number of places that I have done design…