Category: planning
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Historic Portland Maps: 1852 Survey Map
Following up on the previous post, one of my all time favorite maps is the reproduction of the 1852 Survey Map offers not only development and trails, but information on soils, disappeared streams, topographic and other natural features. The map used to be available via a link to the BES website, but I can’t seem…
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Historic Portland Maps: 1845-1852
The discussions of Portland Urban Form (here, here) got me thinking about a series of posts I originally posted to Free Association Design of a collection of historic Portland maps that I thought worthy of reposting here. It’s great to see the origins of the urban form begin to take shape, and it provides a…
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Suburban Still Life
Another upcoming highlight to our class will include a visit by Linda K. Johnson, a dancer and performance artist most known locally for both the work recently at South Waterfront and the ongoing series of dances that celebrate the local legacy of Anna and Lawrence Halprin and Portland fountains entitle “The City Dance of Lawrence…
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Quest for the Livable City
For an upcoming seminar class that myself and my colleague Brett Milligan are teaching in the Winter Quarter at the University of Oregon Architecture Program here in Portland, I’ve been doing a good bit of research on our local planning. Look for some upcoming posts here and at Brett’s blog FAD on the topic of…
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Urban Crude
One the most fascinating passages of the book ‘The Infrastructural City’ was the chapter on oil production that still existed in a variety of forms throughout the urban form. The fabulous Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) has done some investigations, which are captured on a post in the Places portion of the Design Observer…
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Portland Grid, revisited
The question of the efficacy of the grid system is continually interesting, and there have been some interesting conversations about this with a range of folks locally. Another resource to throw some information into this discussion is the recently released background documents in support of the Portland Plan. One worth checking out for any Portland-phile…
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Size Does Matter, or Not
An interesting article in Planetizen called “Beloved and Abandoned: A Platting Named Portland” investigates one of the unique, frustrating and beloved quirks of Portland. This is, our slicework of 200 foot square blocks… making for a lot of roads, and development of tiny blocks. It’s our burden to bear. The article is a fascinating ride…
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Big Box Surplus Space
One of the major ‘big ideas’ of our Integrating Habitats competition, or the idea of reinventing suburbia in general, is the reduced parking need over time – and what to do with the leftover paved areas. An article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows this idea isn’t merely peak oil induced futurism, but a more current…
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Remembering Lawrence Halprin (or at least some of his projects)
In the blogosphere, this is old news now. It’s been a week since I heard about the death of landscape architectural icon Lawrence Halprin – actually the day after while in a meeting where part of the topic was discussing the iconic nature of his park sequence in Portland as inspiration for a small plaza…