This Friday begins a ten-day architectural conference in Portland that’s off the radar of most people in the local design community.
The Village Building Convergence is described as a “localization event” and is being put in by the City Repair Project. Led by architect Mark Lakeman, they have sponsored activities all over Portland for several years that are geared toward fostering a greater sense of communities at the neighborhood level. Perhaps you’ve come across one of their events in neighborhoods like Belmont or Sellwood, easily identified by a four-way intersection that’s been painted and gussied up in an effort to claim a sense of place for the people who live there and not just the cars driving by or parked outside. City Repair also operates something called the Tea Horse, which is a mobile structure for serving food and drink at such activities.
Like City Repair, the Village Building Convergence has a decidedly hippy vibe to it. As a result, some of us who, say for example, don’t wear tie-dye or white dreadlocks and choose to shower regularly, have not taken the efforts of this organization and its conference as seriously as they deserve.
As Miles Hochstein, an advocate for the VBC, told me, “Where else in the US or on the planet do non-architects gather for a 10-day conference on issues of space, urban design, and community? Sure there is a big crunchy granola feel to this festival, but it is notable that right here in Portland there is a whole community of people who are not architects or design professionals who are holding an event that attracts people from up and down the west coast and around the country to learn about how they can be participants in the design of their environments. We've got a ‘popular architecture’ movement going here in Portland right under our noses. Of course its perspectives are different from those of the big firms and big contractors. You'd expect that. But many of its concerns are related to the very issues that inspired design professionals to go into their profession in the first place... a desire to work with space and materials to create places that people can live in and enjoy being a part of."
The Village Building Convergence begins Friday evening with a lecture by Randal Schmidt called “On The Nature of Order: Structure-Preserving Transformations, and the Creation of an Urban Housing Village.” There will be lectures each evening during the May 20-29 conference as well as numerous daytime workshops with titles like, ”Physical Basics of Good Social Spaces” and “Creating Sacred Spaces Using your Natural Environment to Attract the Seen & Unseen Community”.
Kudos to Mark Lakeman and his friends/colleagues for engaging communities and bringing architecture outside the sometimes-insular world of CAD drawings and Dockers.
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