towards implementation. After helping out with trial projects; Alexander left the Oregon campus. The Dean of Architecture and Allied Arts at the time, Bob Harris, felt this made sense, "he said 'look, if the only architect who can make the Oregon Experiment work is Chris Alexander, it won't mean anything."' Over the next decades, Alexander developed an international reputation for fighting cold and insensitive architecture, promoting instead a more satisfying and ecologically sound system of design and construction. His demonstrations of low-cost, high-quality, user-designed homes still set the standard for housing development. In 1991, he was asked back to the University to facilitate the design of major new student housing. He knew that the Experiment hadn't turned out quite as intended, but assumed that the wor~ environment "would be pretty comfortable." He received quite a shock. Fundamental pieces were missing from the plan he set in motion. He soon became one of the most recent victims of these omissions. Today, most people on campus have no idea that an Experiment exists. The .democratic safeguards, the annual reviews and diagnoses, have disappeared. Campus planners blame this on a lack of resources, but these events could be easily organized by faculty and students. Only a handful of people are now involved in what's left of the , process. Some·find it empowering, but others quickly find its limits. Most users never look at the plan itself, published by Oxford University Press as a concise, easy-to-read book. The Oregon Experiment is a planning classic, still in print after nearly two decades. Many users imagine the book to be merely a philosophicai statement. In fact, it describes a working system in great detail. Alexander designed this process to protect users from power, money and bureaucratic inertia. But ·over the years those forces have swallowed the notion of the user group, and allowed the protection mechanisms to atrophy. Admin- .istrators and participants use some patterns, mildly engag- . ing in user desi~, but community control does not exist. The planning office was never politically able to implement this, and so has forgotten it. The University President's office does ~ot see any problem: they feel the Experiment· "evolved" for pragmatic reasons. This self-deception, not coincidentally, gives the administration unilateral control with a useftil gloss of community responsibility. Campus planners created dozens of buildings under the Experiment, and under norm~l conditions users were satisfied, happy to be involved at any level. But according to a former stu~ent of Alexander's, Jerry Finrow, now Dean of the UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts: "project funding is a politicized process that has only limited concern for overall campus quality." Many projects were rushed, some were huge, and a few suffered from battles over money. Most seriously, some were removed from the Experiment altogether to satisfy the whims of donors.or administrators. One example, a new high-tech Research Park, is a pet project that is, according to Finrow, "of inappropriate scale and complexity, ignoring .: · significant campus open space concerns". Many also Most ofthe nicest spots recently appearing on campus were to,ken rewards offered by big, tf:amaging projects: the pleasant corner ofbenches at left sits by a lake-sized parking lot. A big new science complex took the former site ofthe Museum ofNatural History, which received pocket change to build the beautiful building above. Below, new art studios designed with the help ofstudents. Page 16 RAIN Summer 1994 Volume XIV, Number 4
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