Eugene weekly., March 08, 2018, Page 13, Image 13

FRANK VISCONTI
Urban Delight
A NEW YORK ARCHITECT SEES EUGENE WITH FRESH EYES
By Bob Keefer
riting sometime around the
year 30 B.C., the Roman ar-
chitect Marcus Vitruvius Pol-
lio — Vitruvius, to his friends
— laid out, in his founda-
tional work De Architectura,
three principles that should
inform all architecture: firmitas, utilitas and venustas.
More than 2,000 years later, Eugene architect Frank
Visconti translates those Latin terms as “firmness,” mean-
ing that a building is structurally sound; “commodity,”
meaning that it’s functional; and “delight.”
“That’s the joy that one gets out of it,” Visconti says.
W
Visconti, who works at Rowell Brokaw Architects in
Eugene, came here two and a half years ago from New York
City, drawn by that Vitruvian factor he found here in Oregon.
“I am a New Yorker in every sense of the word,” he
says. “And I think Eugene is very delightful. It has all the
elements of an urban experience, but on such a tiny scale
— 160,000 people versus 11 million. Everything here is
only 15 minutes away.”
I called Visconti to ask him a couple questions about
design in general and about the quality of architecture he
sees in Eugene.
Is design generally appreciated by the public? I wanted
to know.
STUDENT HOUSING
EYESORES
the effect that 13th & Olive has had on downtown. When
Capstone sought the MUPTE tax break, it agreed to create
a mixed-use building and create sidewalks that matched
the rest of the city.
Anyone who walks past the building knows that
the sidewalks are made of strange rubber squares that
are stapled to the ground. They can be easily lifted and
removed and, indeed, some of them have gone missing.
The lowest floor is made up of apartments — not offices
or businesses that could revitalize downtown, but the
bedrooms of hapless college students who will never get
true privacy.
This blight of a building radiates heat in summer,
creating an inhospitable environment for pedestrians.
It’s often best to go around the building to avoid the
heat rays.
The 515 has also created a bit of a traf-
fic problem because of its posi-
tion on the north side of busy
Broadway. Instead of a pe-
destrian bridge,
there’s now
Years ago, the city of Eugene implemented a tax break
in an effort to create more affordable housing. The Multi-
Unit Property Tax Exemption (MUPTE) was put in place
in 1978. It gave multi-unit housing projects in the center
of Eugene a tax exemption — a solid effort to address an
affordable housing crisis in our town.
But instead of affordable housing units, we got ugly
and unaffordable student housing.
Projects like Capstone’s 13th & Olive, and The 515
(formerly Hub Eugene) created massive, cheaply produced
eyesores instead of affordable housing. What’s more,
these complexes have very expensive rent and charge per
person instead of per lease. The 515 charges $1,099 for a
studio apartment “per installment/per person,” according
to its website. 13th & Olive charges $1,590 to $1,690 for
a two bedroom apartment — far higher than the average
cost of such an apartment in Eugene.
And these exorbitant costs don’t even begin to address
To my surprise, he says “yes.”
“I do think it’s appreciated on many levels,” he
says. “Some of them might be more subversive or more
obvious.”
On the largest scale, he says, architecture defines the
entire urban experience. “It influences the amount of
sunlight that comes into the streets and the open spaces,”
he says. “It has to do with the quality of materials. And
it has been important since the built environment was
conceived as a bigger idea.”
On a smaller scale, he says, architecture influences
what you see out your bedroom window. “You want light
and air,” he says. “You want the window facing a certain
direction. Something as simple as orientation to the sun is
important to design.”
The killer question: Is Eugene ugly, as so many critics
claim?
“I find it a vibrant place,” he says. “Though there’s
certainly lots of potential.”
Visconti expanded on that idea in an interesting
direction.
Eugene has long lived with the legacy of 1970s
redevelopment, in which many older downtown buildings
were demolished to make way for what would ultimately
be a failed pedestrian mall.
In most accounts, that was an architectural disaster,
replacing the elegance of history with the prefab look of
more-modern buildings. Not so for Visconti.
Eugene, he says, “is a time capsule of the ’70s in some
ways. It’s very clean and well taken care of. It’s a slice of
time rooted in 30 or 40 years ago.”
More broadly, he describes Eugene as embracing a
style that might be called “optimistic modern.”
“It’s a start-up city,” he says, and then mentions the
best-selling 1989 computer game SimCity, in which the
player controls the development of a virtual city. “Eugene
is the early stage of a Sim city.”
The city does have potential yet unrealized.
“It has a vibrancy that’s rooted in Broadway and
Willamette Street and the Hult Center,” he says. “And
it has the Whit — a fantastic neighborhood, a classic
bohemian edgy part of town where there is a lot of culture
and personal expression.”
The biggest issue that needs solving, he says, is
housing.
“The city should do whatever it can to promote more
market-rate and affordable housing so that more people
live downtown.” ■
a crosswalk across the five lanes of traffic. The metallic
building appears to have astroturf rectangles stapled to the
side of it.
Thankfully, the Eugene City Council revised MUPTE
in 2015, excluding student housing from the program. The
ugliness of Eugene’s student housing, however, is here to
stay. — Kelly Kenoyer
eugeneweekly.com • March 8, 2018
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