Winter/Spring People can plan and build their community in a participatory, democratic manner, even if that community is responsible to a much larger system. Twenty years ago, at the largest institution in Eugene, Oregon, a University administration gave up some of its power to test this idea. In 1970, students at the University of Oregon showed keen interest in the Academic Program: they tried to force the Reserve Officers' Training Corps off campus. They changed the landscape, blockading and permanently closing a major street running through the campus. They occupied the administration building and called for a General Strike in order to move current events to the top of the curriculum. The University at first tried to use force to quiet the students. But after the invasion of Cambodia led to the killing of student protesters at Kent State, a shocked administration reversed its policy. The University' President shut down regular classes in order to hold campus-wide discussions on the US war against Indochina. The administrators were changing the way they ran their institution. One clear need was for a change in campus planning, which steered construction. By the end of 1970, they were using the consulting services of the Berkeley Center for Environmental Structure and its chief architect Christopher Alexander, one of an emerging generation of radical and innovative planners. The University administration worked with Alexander and his colleagues to plan an ideal Institution, where broad democratic participation and interaction would be the key to campus harmony, and campus construction. New buildings would be small, innovative, and carefully designed by their future users. There would be no dominating campus Master Plan. Instead, everyone would help to construct patterns, or collective policies, that would guide changes and check destructive growth. The campus would grow into a wholesome community, and over the years would take on the physical likeness and well-worn appeal of older European Universities. The institution would be healed, turned into a robust and healthy organism. After testing these ideas in pilot projects, Oregon officials adopted them formally in 1974. Alexander then published "The Oregon Experiment" (1975, Oxford University Press) [see RAIN August/September 1980], which became one of the best selling planning books of all time. Since then, what has happened to The Experiment? and Profits One of Alexander's first targets was the Master Plan. An actual map of the future is frustrating to everyone, even to old-fashioned administrators who try to use them to maintain control. Forceful drawings of a future campus are far removed from the detailed needs of its The Master Plan was buried here. The verdant Odd Fellows' cemetery adjacent to campus was for decades on the Campus Master Plan as a site for construction. A broad protest removed the cemetery from the plan, rendering the map meaningless.
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