Department of Architecture News

Last term, a partnership with Bora Architecture & Interiors put students at the center of one of civic architecture’s most complex design challenges. This special partnership between the Library Design Studio with Bora Architecture and Interiors, a prominent Portland-based firm working to reimagine community-centered civic design, challenged graduate and upper-level bachelor students to design community libraries from the inside out, working alongside industry professionals on questions that go far beyond aesthetics.

The Planning Magazine profiles how "The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook", published by Routledge in 2024, is being used to help demystify sustainability in the built environment. Co-authored by Nico Larco, AIA, professor of architecture and urban design at the School of Architecture & Environment at the University of Oregon and principal of the consulting firm ELEMENT Urban Design, and Kaarin Knudson, AIA, a licensed architect, urban designer, instructor and non-tenured staff at the College of Design at the University of Oregon, and the mayor of Eugene, Oregon, the handbook organizes 50-plus elements into five core sustainability topics and four project scales.

Sixteen UO juniors wielding tape measures and sketchbooks trudge through a grassy field with the property owner, taking in and jotting down all they survey. That 3-acre site will serve as a blank canvas for the students in assistant professor Christina Bollo’s architecture studio as they work to solve pressing housing problems facing the city. Bollo’s studio is one course of many in the UO’s Sustainable City Year Program, an idea spawned at the College of Design in 2009.

The Institute for Health and the Built Environment at the University of Oregon is on the cutting edge of making sure healthy microbes are in our buildings. Co-Director Mark Fretz speaks with Oregon Grapevine host, Barbara Dellenback, about the connection between buildings and nature. What is beyond framing and windows? He emphasizes the importance of fresh air and light to our health.

The testing facility is part of the Port of Portland’s larger plans to convert Terminal 2 into a Mass Timber and Housing Innovation Campus. Once complete, the campus will encompass 39 acres and include a new factory for building modular housing and other mass timber structures, research and new product development and workforce training.

Professor of Architecture and Environmental Studies Erin Moore and Matt Wittman discuss the overlaps between their very different practices, with a focus on their shared attention to the physical line between buildings and ground, or between soil and atmosphere.

Michael Zaretsky was awarded one of the 2025 outstanding department head awards from the Office of the Provost. Every year, the office recognizes two department heads and awards each with $5,000 payable at their discretion as either a stipend or to their Academic Support Account (ASA).

Justin Fowler, director of UO Portland Architecture, and his colleagues talk with Architectural Record on the potential of the new Portland campus and how Lever Architecture helped bring it to life.

School of Architecture & Environment students recently created models for the hospital of tomorrow for their end-of-term reviews, using mass timber as a base for the projects.