Willow Krois Final Paper
Farmers Market Pavilion and Hostile Design in Eugene
Farmers Market Pavilion and plaza, located on 8th and Oak Street.
Eugene has one of the highest houseless populations per capita in the U.S. And the built local environment puts great effort in design that rejects them. It seems that the city has been trying to design in correlation to a narrative that attempts to keep the unhoused unwelcome in certain spaces so they remain unseen, through urban design and public areas. One of these spaces includes the new Farmers Market Pavilion Building. The Pavilion is a public structure that is opened exclusively for events. It also has a huge uncovered outdoor plaza that is always open. The building is made out of cross laminated timber panels, and all windows are garage doors that are present on all sides of the building. Complete with a shed roof it is open and oriented towards the East, which is facing the plaza. All the materials are locally sourced and there is a sustainable drainage system in the plaza to efficiently deal with the amount of rainfall Eugene experiences. It includes public restrooms, a trash room, a storage room, and a space for kitchen/cooking demos. This building allows the Farmers Market to happen year round and bring the community together more than ever, but it also keeps the unhoused unwelcome, and has designs in place to make them feel displaced.
This building is only open during the hours of community events. It is only a shell of a structure, providing the bare minimum of a modernist style shelter. The interior is always completely empty, allowing it to be transformed for any event. As my classmate vmenamor and egarret3 mentions in their analysis comparing it to Hilde Heynen’s peice, “Leaving Traces’: Anonymity in the Modernist House,” it can be compared to a modernist house. One that has no ornament or decoration, which induces a cold atmosphere that is unwelcoming and cold. This certainly makes the unhoused feel unwelcome, because arguably the only way to make people feel like they belong in that space is when event holders fill the space with their events/booths. Most events are something the houseless dont have the privilege to contribute to, therefore making them feel like they don’t belong.
This comparison supports the argument that this space only creates a sense of belonging when booths are there temporarily.
Hpeters4 explains in her analysis of this building and its relation to the reading by Peter Jones, “Building the Empire of The Gaze: The Modern Movement and the Surveillance Society,” that this building has a lot of transparent qualities. There is glazing on the whole upper half of the building and every wall has various glazed garage doors that open up to the outside. And while the public might feel this transparency to be a lovely way to enjoy a covered event with an outdoor feel, the houseless might not feel the same. She explains that the wood material used, makes the interior a warm atmosphere, and I may argue, that might be the only warming quality about this architecture.
The empty interior of the Farmers Market Pavilion, with emphasis on the warm tones of the timber ceiling.
The lack of privacy is another important aspect of this building that deters the houseless population. Because of the transparency and the wide open interior space, there is almost no privacy in this building. As Jesper Braun describes in his piece that is also compared to Heynen’s, “Leaving Traces’: Anonymity in the Modernist House,” that the houseless struggle when there is not a lot of distinction between what is inside and what is outside. This is because they mostly exist in the public eye, with no private personal space to call their own. The fact that there is no private space in this building and that the public can see everything and everyone in this building because of its level of transparency, provides a level of surveillance that houseless people might try to avoid.
This shows the amount of garage doors on the plaza facing facade that are able to open up. The many openings and glazed upper facade defines the transparency of the pavilion.
I think that the city wanted to create a space that was easily adaptable for whatever event, it is able to spill from outside in, and inside out, and allow for a type of transparency that acts as a built-in surveillance technique. I think they also wanted a modern simple architecture that provided no houseless person a welcoming space that allowed them any kind of privacy or feel of belonging to keep them out of the community space, and unseen in the narrative. They wanted to create a space that was perfect for community events and connection, but the houseless are not a part of that image that they are trying to create.
This is the image that the city is trying to create, and as you can see, there are no obviously houseless people bumming around.
This “keeping the houseless unseen” is an effort seen all over Eugene, and sometimes inconspicuously through design with hostile intentions. Just around the corner in downtown Eugene, there are two hostile design examples, pointed out by Jesper Braun. Both are attempts to keep the houseless from sleeping on the edges of the streets, in an area where a lot of houseless people congregate. The first example is a rope and planters around the trees planted on the sidewalks. The trees provide shelter and to not encourage using that shelter to set up camp or sleep the city has instilled big planters and a rope to ensure that doesn’t happen. The second example is the use of bike racks that line almost an entire block. This may be overlooked but if you think more about it, it is completely unnecessary to have this many bike racks for one city block. This design was surely only put in place to keep the houseless from setting up camp on that edge, under the trees. The public walking by these designs don’t see them to be hostile, they, in general, look normal.
The roped off trees and planters and the long row of bike racks that exist downtown.
Another local example of hostile design is found at the Fifth Street Alley, a public space filled with high end shopping and entertainment and adjacent to a fancy hotel. Houseless people definitely do not fit into this narrative, and there are design efforts to keep them from going to this area. Not providing any type of privacy could be one aspect. As well as some designs like hpeters4 points out, including ground surfaces that prevent houseless from wanting to go there to sleep; bumps on the ground, the fact that the grade is slightly slanted, and the use of plaza furniture to take up space around the edges.
The ground quality and dense furniture arrangement of the Fifth Street Alley.
Rilynnz observed another form of hostile design near a church. There is a warming center by this church and in an attempt to keep the houseless from populating the church there have been ropes and signs put out front to prevent them from doing so. This is not an inconspicuous or disguised hostile design but a very blunt message that implies that they are not welcome in that area.
The sign up at the First Christian Church on Oak Street
On Fifth St. there is a storefront with an awning over the public sidewalk. This awning can be seen as a potential shelter for the houseless especially because of the rainy weather conditions of Eugene. To insure that the houseless don’t sleep, set up camp or loiter, danbiek has explained that the business put potted plants in front. And although this is an intentional design to discriminate against the houseless, it looks like a lovely addition to the sidewalk and provides interior privacy from the public streetscape for the business.
The storefront on Fifth Street that has an awning for its potted plants.
A nearby bench design also supports the hostile design trend, one that bekahe pointed out (the first bench shown below). This bench has a divider in the middle, so houseless people can use it to sleep on. This type of bench design is very common to see in Eugene, and unless you really think about what its intentions could be, you would never think of it as explicitly hostile. Although that is the kind of design that keeps the local cityscape looking nice and the houseless unseen.
Some examples of local bench designs that prevent people from being able to lay down on them.
Bibliography:
Jones, Peter. 1999. “Building the Empire of The Gaze: The Modern Movement and the Surveillance Society. ” Architectural Theory Review 4 (2): 1–14.
Heynen, Hilde. 2009. “‘Leaving Traces’: Anonymity in the Modernist House.” In Designing the Modern Interior: From the Victorians to Today., edited by Clive Edwards, Trevor Keeble, Penny Sparke, and Anne Massey, 22:119–28. Oxford; New York.
Building Analysis Blogs:
Vmenamor, https://blogs.uoregon.edu/h3s23/2023/05/10/the-homeless-small-businesses-the-farmers-market-pavilion-and-plaza/
Egarret3, https://blogs.uoregon.edu/h3s23/2023/05/10/todays-transparency-farmers-market-pavilion-the-unhoused/
Jesper Braun, https://blogs.uoregon.edu/h3s23/2023/05/10/leaving-traces-farmers-market-pavilion/
Hpeters4, https://blogs.uoregon.edu/h3s23/2023/05/03/modern-day-corbusier-in-the-right-light/
Hostile Design Analysis Blogs:
Jesper Braun,
https://blogs.uoregon.edu/h3s23/2023/05/30/hostile-design-in-downtown-eugene/comment-page-1/#comment-131
https://blogs.uoregon.edu/h3s23/2023/05/30/hostile-design-in-downtown-eugene-2/comment-page-1/#comment-130
Hpeters4,https://blogs.uoregon.edu/h3s23/2023/05/30/designing-out-in-eugene/comment-page-1/#comment-128
Rilynnz,https://blogs.uoregon.edu/h3s23/2023/05/30/public-private-and-a-place-to-sleep/comment-page-1/#comment-126
Danbiek,https://blogs.uoregon.edu/h3s23/2023/05/30/the-hidden-hostile-designs-around-us/comment-page-1/#comment-129
Bekahe,https://blogs.uoregon.edu/h3s23/2023/05/30/hostile-design-furniture-targeting-the-unhoused/comment-page-1/#comment-127
