The Oregon Experiment
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The Oregon Experiment is a 1975 book by Christopher Alexander and collaborators Murray Silverstein, Shlomo Angel, Sara Ishikawa, and Denny Abrams. It describes an experimental approach to campus community planning at the University of Oregon, in Eugene, Oregon which resulted in a theory of architecture and planning described in the group's later published and better-known volumes A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, students and faculty at the University of Oregon protested against log trucks driving through campus; against the destruction of a 19th century cemetery; against the military draft and the invasions and occupations in Southeast Asia; and against the idea that the University was acting in loco parentis, in place of students' parents. On top of this, buildings created since the end of World War II were increasingly brutal and dystopian.
The campus community wanted more control over their lives, and their environment. The University administration took the conciliatory measure of hiring an award-winning, but radical, professor from Berkeley to design a process by which the community of the university could create its own space.
This process was Alexander's first journey into community-based design and construction. The University of Oregon became the experimental testbed for material that later became the bestselling book A Pattern Language.
The book prescribed that "feeling" should be the primary criteria used for making changes to any place. Improvements to the campus should be made first to those places that needed the most help. Patterns, or good solutions to generic problems, should be available in a community encyclopedia. Care should be taken to curb the economic and political power of large monolithic projects. Places should be shaped for people, to make them feel more whole, and to nourish them. And people should be involved in the construction of their community.
[edit] Today
Although the University planning office still uses some of the principles expressed in the Oregon Experiment, architectural bravura and contractor influence has warped the process beyond recognition. To push its agenda, the University administration regularly removes projects from community participation. On the other hand, most new campus buildings reflect user group influence in their large-scale structure.
