Message from the AIAO Communications Committee Chair

John Flynn, AIA
Communications Committee Chair

Hello, Colleagues –

I’m writing this week to give you all an update on AIA Oregon Communications.  As always, the Communications Committee endeavors to provide our members with the most useful, helpful, and meaningful content through all our platforms.  We continue to improve our communications strategies and methods – and that has never been more important than in the past year.

Let me pause to acknowledge that the heavy lifting for the Communications Committee is done by the great staff at AIA Oregon.  So, a big thank you to Kathy, Adrienne, Colleen, and Curt for all your hard work!  Keep in mind that since last year’s pandemic-induced shutdown, almost all AIA programs, meetings, and special events have been conducted virtually.  I think that, in a way, this has promoted our goal of building a strong and united architecture community statewide.

As an integral component of AIAO’s member services, our communications content and platforms have continued to deliver on the pressing issues of the day – be it navigating the pandemic landscape, addressing the struggle for Social Justice, or responding to climate change/natural disasters.  In addition to the Covid-19 resources available on our website, we have published our Social Justice Action Plan and important related resources.  As well, recent Thursdays @ Three messages and today’s Thursday Roundtable address preparedness and recovery as our state navigates natural disasters such as wildfires and power outages.  I encourage you to visit our Resources page for many links to useful information on these topics and more.

For the Communications Committee, one carry-over “to do” item from 2020 is the development and launch of the “Find an Architect” page of our website.  During this first quarter of 2021, we have restarted our work on this outreach component.  Note that the AIA Oregon Profile Directory, available through our website, continues to serve in its capacity as a link to member firms.  However, a new searchable database, with categorized filters, that includes member firms from throughout the state has been a goal since we transitioned to a single statewide Chapter.  Two weeks ago, our weekly Thursday Roundtable hosted a discussion on how best to formulate this search tool.  We know that all member firms will be represented – it’s the categorizations and filters that need to be fine-tuned.

Our main goal as we develop our search tool is, obviously, to promote member architects and firms.  But we are committed to doing this in a fair and inclusive way.  For reference, we have been looking at some of our peer organizations (AIA Austin, AIA Colorado) to gauge the effectiveness of how their search pages are organized. We want to look carefully at the typical filter categories – firm size, geographic location, project types – to yield effective short lists of firms.  We are challenging ourselves to find means of organizing search results (for example, non-alphabetical listings) so that all firms get a fair chance at showing up at the top of a search listing.  And we’re sensitive to the fact that each member firm offers a unique set of attributes to potential clients; so perhaps there’s a “spotlight” filter that allows users to find firms that are differentiated by characteristics such as minority-/women-ownership, design-build capacity, or experience with non-profits.

That's a tall set of tasks but we’re confident that all firms will be equitably and fairly represented.  As we sort through our decisions, we have engaged a web development specialty consultant who will provide the coding and plug-ins that will make the page functional.  It’s going to be a great feature on the website!  Stay tuned to Thursdays @ Three for notification that “Find an Architect” has gone live.

Thanks and best wishes to everyone!

Message from the AIA Oregon Grassroots Delegation

Report from Grassroots 2021
By Kathy Austin and Curt Wilson, on behalf Amy Vohs, Kaley Fought, Colin Dean, and Sam Uccello

AIA Grassroots 2021 is occurring this week as a virtual conference from Feb 16 to 18.  The AIA Oregon delegation includes board members from each section; Amy Vohs (President, Portland), Kaley Fought, Treasurer, Salem), Colin Dean (Director, Eugene), Samuel Uccello (Director, Southern Oregon), Katherine Austin (Director, Bend) and Curt Wilson (EVP, Eugene)  This is our collected update on the highlights.

Grassroots 2021 is AIA’s premier leadership and advocacy event for chapter staff and volunteers. The theme, “Bring It Home,” will address critical issues facing the architecture profession, including COVID-19, racial injustice, and climate change.

Day 1 – Feb 16

Federal Legislation.  Grassroots Day 1 is when AIA members from across the country take over the halls of congress to advocate on behalf of issues important to architects.  This year we invaded, through Zoom, the apartment of congressional staffers working from home.  Meetings were held with all seven of the Oregon delegation, although Rep. Susan Bonamici was the only elected official that was available.  Nonetheless, it was an impactful day to discuss our priority of Green Building Infrastructure. This is an initiative that aligns climate action, COVID response, and a boost to the economy to dedicate infrastructure spending on buildings and to prioritize projects that meet IECC Reach Code goals.

Day 2 – Feb 17

Design Thinking.  The day kicked off with a keynote presentation by Dan Roam, an author/speaker that focuses on visual and design thinking.  We participated in a diagramming exercise based on the question “As an AIA chapter leader, what do you want to accomplish in 2021”.  This was a super fun session as we were exposed to a wonderful format of organizing our thoughts through diagrams.  See below for some of the results.

EDI and Belonging.  The midday session was a presentation by the inspirational event headliner, Stacey Abrams, on Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging. Having interacted with Architects when Stacy worked in the Office of the Mayor of Atlanta, she identified our profession as better suited to understand the needs of underrepresented communities more than anyone. As Creatives, we are in an ideal position to address the health safety and welfare of marginalized communities and move to find solutions that benefit all.

One of the afternoon sessions focused on organizations in our profession with initiatives addressing the intersection of the pandemic and social justice.  Most of us are aware of NOMA, but it was a good overview of their Project Pipeline Mission to “..empower young people to affect change in their community through design”.  We also learned about an organization dedicated to helping members of our profession are that limited by little to no hearing, World Deaf Architecture, and the activities of the American Indian Council of Architects and Engineers (AICEA).  This group is most active in the Southwest, but looking to connect with students and practitioners in the Pacific Northwest.

Day 3 – Feb 18

COTE. The day started off with Katherine Hayhoe, Internationally renowned climate scientist from Texas addressing the critical issue of communication. She identified that everyone has certain values and that just identifying facts will not change minds. The urgency of today's problems from Covid-19, keeping one’s job and home, feeding one’s family, to freezing to death in Texas are all connected to Climate Change. To engage everyone to agree on the need for action we must address our shared values.…

C3 Architects as Climate Activists. This was a densely packed breakout session with multiple excellent presenters from Philadelphia and Berkeley California. All were members of COTE at the local and national level. All spoke about the many ways each were reaching out to their members, advocating at the local and state level. Highly recommend watching the recording when it becomes available, there was simply too much to summarize. We can all take action and work together to improve our built environment on many levels.

Equity sessions

The last session of the day was an update on the Regions Task Force Report.  The AIA Board of Directors is recommending that we move from a Regions-based governance model to a State-based governance model, and we expect to vote on this change at the June 2021 business meeting.  It the resolution is successful, we can expect some of the changes will happen before the end of this year, including selecting the AIA Oregon Strategic Council representative.  Our transition to a single state chapter means that the transition to the state governance model should be fairly smooth for us.  If you want to learn more, contact Curt Wilson at cwilson@aiaoregon.org.

Design Thinking Exercises

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Message from a Member of the City of Eugene Sustainability Commission

Kelsey Zlevor
Planning Consultant, Cameron McCarthy Landscape Architecture and Planning
Member of the City of Eugene Sustainability Commission

“Lessons from Oregon's Historic Wildfire Season”

Originally published as a Viewpoint on the American Planning Association website 

If someone told me a year ago I would spend part of 2020 masked and door-knocking in a pandemic, carrying my inhaler to combat smoke irritation, I would have thought that sounded more like a dystopian novel than real life. And yet, that was my memory of September: delivering meals at the Graduate Hotel in Eugene, Oregon, to families and seniors who had been evacuated from their homes.

That month, the Holiday Farm wildfire ravaged the ancestral land of the Kalapuya, Molalla, Winefelly, and Yoncalla tribes, as well as land of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, otherwise known as part of the Willamette Valley.  The fire, one of several, was a disaster fueled in part by reduced rainfall and suppression of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) in current forest and fire management practices. The fire—much like the COVID pandemic—had disastrous impacts because it hinged on vulnerability.  A disaster, in the words of Lori Peek, Director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, “happens when a natural hazard collides with vulnerable people and vulnerable infrastructure.” Vulnerability is a spectrum, and September underscored that increasingly more of us sit on it.

Americans are often indoctrinated to imagine environmental refugees as “other”: people we don’t know living in faraway places. But the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research defines environmental refugees as “people who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat because of a marked environmental disruption that jeopardizes their existence and/or seriously effects the quality of their life.” Environmental refugees are our neighbors, friends, and families. In the Willamette Valley community, the Holiday Farm wildfire displaced ~2,500 people, resulting in a wave of environmental refugees, some unhoused temporarily and some permanently.

Planning with those populations is no far-off challenge. It is here, and it is now. And with the compounding national challenges of a pandemic, an economic recession, and a shortage of affordable housing stock, the added layer of environmental displacement will only continue to put a strain on the ability of individuals and families to achieve stability in all its forms. These barriers are even more significant for the communities society has long since disenfranchised because of their race, class, and ability.

Responding to all of these pressures will be an immense job—but it is also an invitation to drastically reimagine who we are as planners, and what it means to serve communities in the Anthropocene. 

 A new era of planning

In the wake of the Willamette Valley’s trauma, a group of architects, AIA Eugene and community leaders formed  the Holiday Farm Advisory Committee. Made of architects, planners, landscape architects, engineers, professors, and allied professionals, we are currently working with leaders of the McKenzie Community Development Corporation in a pro bono capacity to help re-establish communities impacted by the fires.  Coming off of my weekends with the Red Cross and supporting mutual aid efforts in September, I felt overwhelmed and lost as to how to move beyond triage and sustain momentum towards long-term recovery as a young professional and community member looking to volunteer.  Learning about the formation of and subsequently joining the Advisory Committee helped me piece together what I felt in the moment: we needed a place where agile professionals could strategically pair key skills with local needs outside of the typical contract-based construct.  The needs are constantly evolving, and the Committee’s response is based on the leveraged abilities, resources, and relationships of those who are present.

While still in the early stages of partnership, this committee highlights the professional response needed at local levels, especially from private practitioners and academia. And we are not alone—many small towns across the U.S. have formed systems for providing professional aid in the wake of increasing disaster.

I hope these responses are indicative of a new era of radical grassroots planning, one that is grounded in collaborative activism. Planning that not only prioritizes the most vulnerable in the face of climate change, but also seeks to build systems of support beyond fee-for-service structures. That honors and relationally incorporates Indigenous knowledge for stewarding the land we occupy, and acknowledges that everyday land-use action is climate action, because where and how we develop land impacts community resiliency.

How these principles manifest in each community will be determined by the people who live there, but my experience highlights that we must ask ourselves what we can give, and how we can get started. I am neither a refugee, nor a climate change expert. But I am a planner that has entered a profession with a weighty inheritance: the moral imperative to creatively seek ways to root social justice and climate activism into the bedrock of our profession in the post-2020 world. Just as we must adapt to our new climate, our profession’s way of serving must adapt, too.

It’s been several months since I was pushing food carts down the halls of the Graduate Hotel. In all that time, I’ve never stopped thinking about the future of planning, and a question posed by author and activist Naomi Klein: “History knocked on your door… Did you answer?”

Kelsey Zlevor is a planning consultant at Cameron McCarthy Landscape Architecture and Planning, and appointed member of the City of Eugene Sustainability Commission