village for fow-income students. This is of course a wonderful idea, for both the town and for students: the University is not a very accountable landlord, as bad as many others in Eugene. But it's terribly unfortunate that cooperationminded, ilnpoverished people, struggling to get an education, won't benefit from Alexan<;ler's durable, communityenhancing constructions. They will instead get 50-year-old . temporary housing in ghetto-like condition. The heavy. maintenance needs of the site might destroy a c·ooperative. None of this seems right. It's extremely frustrating to watch. - Given that a brutal battle still rages between administrators and students over the Amazon, this kind of analysis probably.looks like a luxury to the combatants. Many get by with the diplomatic, but not really useful, characterization that everyone is somewhat to blame: students, administration and architect. Others see it as a simple lack of management ability on the part of the University. It's sad that the level of discussion under the Oregon Experiment has degenerated to looking for personality defects. The Experiment persists in n~me because its principles still resonate within the University s. body politic. The situation cries out for deep community discussion. Every major University project in the past decade had serious problems swept under the rug, to the point where a strange, dysfunctional process is endemic. The campus community is abused daily by senseless infrastructural .changes emerging from cloistered compromisys. The fact that the University is owned by the State, and not the city, gives the surrounding community too limited an influence. And faculty, students and staff are so busy in their daily work that they have neither time nor incentive to investigate possibly fundamental problems. It's instructiye to ~ee how these problems fleshed out in Alexander's·delicate housing work. For example, his Berkeley team spent months researching patterns for family student housing, and built full-scale mock-ups of different potential units. Very excited about the results, Alexander wanted to eonstruct the mock-ups, free of charge, in Eugene, to show users. But administrators tried t0 prevent this. Cutting off the architect-facilitator from users would be inconceivable in the Experiment as written. But officials only think hard about the Experiment when it gives them ammunition to defend their immediate political agenda. In the thick of things, Alexander was attacked with a pattern he himself had written, by people who were un- . aware of this. It regarded a call for "small parking lots". Because of site constraints, many little parking lots, and . their access roads, would have permeated the housing , project, destroying much of it. Alexander suggested some alternatives, to protect the community social spaces. Given that people were upset with him for defending nice housing, these suggestions were attacked for being contrary to the · ' Experiment. Certainly, he says, "I didn'tjustjump up, ahd ' salute smartly, every time a pattern was mentioned." In the . decades since he invented patterns, he'd found many ways to re~olve such de_sign problems, but didn't get an opportunity to explain them. Or much else, for that matter. . Since he moves against establishment thinking, Alexander sometimes startles people with his techniques for saving money and increasing qucility. If users were comfortably in control of an "agr~ed upon project, they could openly discuss the value of such methods. "Sut the group had slid back into the standard.world of modern construction, with its ideological certainties. When Alexander's team found beautiful cedar siding at the same price as cheap pine, so outside walls wouldn't need paint for at least a century, officials refused at first to acc.ept it. He could not understand why everyone was making "absolutely certain that ,their preconception's could not be rocked by rea~ity." _ Some of Alexander's techniques for improvjng quality are actually very old-fashioned. Take windows, for example. He has found it preferable to decide window placement while construction is underway. This was common practice before the age of pre-fabrication. T~e view, the light, the effect on space, the connection with the street, the overall feeling, cannot be properly determined until you stand in a half-fin~shed room. Despite his explanation of this, adn;iinistn~tors, at this point looking for a scapegoat, announced that the architect didn't know how to . draw windows into construction plans. Denouncing good ideas through character assassination debases the educational mission of the Experiment, and the University for that matter. In 1970, Alexander was aware that good buildings . couldn't be built without the involvement of ordinary people. He hoped he could just open up the floodgates of democratic design, and inhumane buildings would become . a nightmare of the recent past. But the kind of democracy he was looking for, deeply participatory, careful and broadly empowered, simply didn't exist in this country. That it could develop at ~ large State institution,, unlikely as it may seem iil retrospect, was partiCularly exciting to everyone ~t the time. Unfortunately, administrators are employed to be neitP,er visionarie.s nor · grassroots organizers. Under the daily grind, they couidn't see that a big job was left unfinished. The Experiment 'persists in name be~ause its principles still resonate within the Un,iversity's body politic. So · · although there are no empowered advocates of these remarkable, achievable ideals, they could certainly be revived 'in their birthplace. Students and facul~y could run a real community. Staff might suffer less. And the campus· could be filled with those wonderful places that make · people feel alive. · RAIN. Summer 1994 Volume XIV, Numbe.r 4 Page 23
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