We are embarking on a journey and a process that will take about five years of steady work to create a future home for the UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts in Eugene.

Your participation, creative ideas, information sharing, and perspective gathering are important to our mutual goal.  We invite all our school’s enterprising and engaged faculty members, staff and students to participate and to visit the blog to stay informed of the progress along the way. Your input will help shape our future.

The first project is the A&AA visioning work.  The team assembled from Bruce Mau Design of Toronto and Chicago in collaboration with Yazdani Studio of Cannon Design and ARUP are poised to assist us develop a strategic vision plan for the school that will facilitate the development of new building facilities appropriate to our mission and ambitions.

Future steps will involve site selection and additional RFPs for consultants for the programming phase and, eventually, the facility design phase.  The vision emerging from this current study will form the framework for the planning of the school.

The questions we need to explore now, include, and are not limited to these:

• How might the school design environments that nurture and promote critical inquiry, creativity, and collaboration?
• Is the school looking for new modes of learning and research, and what kind of environments will be flexible enough to accommodate them?
• How can the school develop an environment supportive of the highest aspirations that may emerge in our community over the next generation?
• What will curricula, programs and organizations that deliver learning look like and how will we create more engaging educational, research and social experiences?
• How will we address systemic challenges in education and the context at large?

Please send your ideas and questions to the Dean’s Office at aaarecep@uoregon.edu. We will direct your questions to the appropriate consultant or team member.

Thank you.