Salem Reinvented:
Two Big Fantastic Ideas from the UO/City of Salem Sustainable City Year Program!
Noon - Friday, April 22, 2011
Register Online,
RSVP to rsvp@salemcityclub.com
or 503-370-2808
by Wednesday, April 20th at Noon
It is rare that any city gets an opportunity to be sweepingly re-envisioned at one go. Over the past eight months this is exactly what has happened in
Salem through a unique collaboration between the City of Salem and the
University of Oregon
’s multiple award-winning Sustainable Cities Initiative. Join us Friday, April 22nd at noon when we hear and see first hand what has been envisioned.
Salem City Club presents two exciting, exemplary design projects from Sustainable City Year (
Salem
): the Civic Center and Police Facility Options Project and the North Downtown Waterfront design project. They are among 16 high priority projects designated by the city that have involved over 500 upper-level and graduate students participating in 28 classes during the 2010-2011 academic year.
Salem City Manager Linda Norris will speak on the value of the collaboration to our city, while UO Professor Nico Larco and UO students Molly Rogers, Matthew Linn, and Will Smith will provide presentations on the two featured design projects and the Sustainable Cities Initiative.
The Civic Center and Police Facility Options Project is a 2011 winner of an NCARB Prize for Creative Integration of Practice and Education in the Academy – a prestigious award conferred by National Council of Architecture Registration Boards. Forty Architecture and Interiors Architecture students investigated whether and where a new Police Department headquarters facility could fit onto the present
Civic Center
campus. This work resulted in several design ideas that will be presented at the session. Student designs incorporate the operational security needs of the Police Department facility with enhanced public access to the community spaces on
Civic Center
grounds, Council Chambers, and other gathering areas. The
Civic Center
design is variously reconfigured to develop collaborative workspaces and to promote interaction between departments. This spring a Council Subcommittee will recommend whether Council should pursue a bond measure to support the construction of the new Police facility.
The North Downtown Waterfront design project envisions a new urban design framework for the industrial area north of downtown. With an eye toward a 30-year planning horizon, students break up north downtown’s large blocks with new east/west streets, move the rail line to the west of
Front Street
with trees separating traffic from pedestrians. The scheme integrates Vision 2020 community preference by featuring such valued amenities as bicycle, pedestrian, and other transportation connections. New building concepts for the area are offered, including breweries and wine facilities, an urban river research center, cultural and recreational facilities (such as museums celebrating the area’s heritage, a movie house), housing and an extended stay hotel. The long-range design reflects Salem’s evolving embrace of its greatest natural asset – the
Willamette River
.
Linda Norris is
Salem
’s City Manager, appointed in June 2008. Her public career began in Colorado and took her to the City of
Eugene
in 1988 where she worked as a department director and assistant city manager. She worked for an international semiconductor manufacturer and in owned a business before being hired by
Salem
in 2004. She has a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Colorado State University and completed course work for an executive master’s degree in public administration from the University of Colorado at Denver before moving to
Oregon
. She led Salem’s successful competitive SCI bid that has brought hundreds of University of Oregon students and their professors to
Salem
.
Nico Larco is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the
University of Oregon
, and Associate Director of the UO Sustainable Cities Initiative. He holds master’s degrees in both architecture and urban planning from UC Berkeley and is a licensed and practicing architect. The focus of Professor Larco’s work is on urban design; he has become a national expert on retrofitting suburbia, concentrating on the urban nodes of multifamily housing and commercial districts within suburban areas. His work offers ground breaking, and simple, guidelines for transitioning sprawled, automobile-dominated suburbia into human-scaled and exquisitely livable communities.
Matthew Linn is a 2011 graduate of the
University of Oregon
's Bachelor of Architecture program with an emphasis in environmental design. Growing up in Oregon along the
McKenzie River
made Matthew an avid lover of the outdoors. This sensitivity to nature is reflected his architectural designs. Along with incorporating the natural environment in his work, Matthew also includes an educational component in his designs as a way to link the natural and manmade environments with people.
Molly Rogers graduated from
Texas A&M University
with a degree in Mechanical Engineering and began her career practicing product design. She found her dream job as a professional snowboarder for
K2
. Eventually she was hired to design and manage production for all K2 snowboards resulting in a move from the deep South to the
Pacific Northwest
. After suffering a life changing injury she elected to pursue her Master of Architecture degree to make the built environment a better place for people of all abilities.
Will Smith is a third year architecture student at the
University of Oregon
who seeks a responsive and sustainable architecture through involvement in programs such as the Sustainable Cities Initiative and the student architecture group designBridge. Will is currently the project manager for a local organic agricultural project and will travel to
Borneo
in May for the design and construction of an outdoor education center classroom.