Page 34 RAIN Winter/Spring 1991 the campus community. Departments collected power, and isolated themselves in huge building complexes. The Oregon Experiment has given interdisciplinary faculty a bigger voice in design, reflected well in the clustered departments woven together in the new science buildings. The campus planning committee now puts in their place departments that are too pushy, as in a recent case where the athletic department tried to change plans for an outdoor center on territory it considered its own. So, in addition to putting down domination and encouraging cooperation, The Experiment can claim that the planning office now builds for people, permanence, conservative spending, continuous modification and repair. This system works best when projects are kept small. Small, useful growth When building projects are smaller, mistakes are smaller. Perhaps it is inappropriate to call them mistakes...they are just small modifications that need additional adjustments later, part of dynamic growth and repair. Small projects are easier to design properly- our intuition works better on them because they are closer to our experience as small creatures. Alexander wanted to stimulate thousands of small, local campus projects through The Oregon Experiment. Making projects small at a state-run institution is very hard. The State Board of Higher Education is many miles away in the State Capital. It has to approve all construction projects. The board members need to review new projects carefully - so they tend to spend their time on the most prominent projects. All State Universities then compete to construct larger, more important sounding projects, typically wasteful ones. But since the University of Oregon is experimenting with small projects, it cannot compete with big projects in this game. This motivates University officials to push Alexander's new ideas into the consciousness of the State Board, since otherwise they would get no money. This is another success of The Experiment: influence. The State Board is slowly getting used to the idea of conservation - allocating some funds to keep up and modify existing buildings rather than opting only for the construction of new multiplestory monsters. The board has even instructed the City and County governments to respect and adapt to the scale and participatory nature of The Experiment. Streisinger Hall, named after a local developmental geneticist (a fruit fly bust and a school of zebra fish watch over the courtyard), has , unfortunately, no public entrance. Its place was taken late in the design by high-security research animal housing. A campus vote on animal research might have resolved the problem. Below: The crosshatched building and the pit both date from before the Oregon Experiment.
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