Message from the AFO Executive Director

Claire Blaylock
Executive Director, AFO

My name is Claire Blaylock and I am the Executive Director of the Architecture Foundation of Oregon. The best part of this job is making connections with communities across the state of Oregon, and getting to collaborate with innovative, dedicated, and passionate members of the AEC field. Seriously, where else can you find a room full of professionals who geek out over CLT, debate the technologies of biophilic design, and which Pac-12 football team has the best shot at the Rose Bowl? When I’m not at work discussing the aforementioned topics, I enjoy taking long walks on the beach, sipping coffee, and reading The New Yorker magazine cover-to-cover. Just kidding! I do enjoy these things, I also have 3 kids who are 9,7 and 2.5 years old- so my walks on the beach involve frantic running to keep children from being swept away by sneaker waves.

The last time we were able to gather in a large group for Honored Citizen was 2019 BC (Before Covid). Last year we honored Oregon’s Teachers virtually for our event, but this year we are finally able to gather in person. We know that some folks may feel nervous about gathering in a larger group at Honored Citizen but rest assured that we are taking safety protocols seriously. We will be requiring proof of vaccination, masking when not eating or drinking, and reducing the number of guests per table.

Honored Citizen is one of our field’s most cherished evenings for good reason - not only do we all get to come together and see friends and colleagues but we get to honor a great contributor to our community. This year we are honoring that fantastic and amazing Interiors Architect Carol Edelman. As one of the first female leaders of an Architecture firm in Oregon, Carol embodies so many of the values that we hold at AFO but also that we hold as a community. Over the course of her career and her life in Oregon, Carol has cemented her legacy by highly valuing mentorship, community commitment, education, and creativity. From the famed Uncle Chen’s Restaurant in Portland to the visitor center at Mt. St. Helens, Carol’s work spans our region. As the youths these days say – “If You Know-You Know”- but if you don’t know, come to Honored Citizen and leave truly inspired and moved by Carol’s work and her story.

Honored Citizen is also a chance for us to gather and celebrate our accomplishments and look toward the future. I am the first person to admit that our field has work to do in order to work toward greater industry diversity, social equity, and broader inclusion - but we have started to take important steps. NOMA-PDX, AIAO, AFO, NAMC, Room for More and others have started sharing knowledge and coordinating to form a coalition of organizations dedicated to creating inclusive and diverse internship opportunities for high school students. The focus of the group is to provide student-centered experiences and ensure that the professionals and teams working with the students have been trained to work with youths from diverse backgrounds. In creating supportive opportunities for students of all kinds, we – as a field- are taking huge steps towards making our work more accessible to a wide variety of students.

There have not been many opportunities to celebrate anything together over the past 22 months. But now we are starting to get on the other side of our great period of social distancing. We hope you are able to join us for Honored Citizen, and if you can’t come in person we have a streaming option as well. But if you are unable to participate this year, I hope you feel inspired to join one of the amazing groups who are working hard to increase access to our field and strengthen our community.  

Message from a Director at Colloqate Design PDX

Sophia Xiao-fan Austrins
Director, Colloqate Design PDX

In the face of everything that feels broken and everything that needs doing in the world, do you ever feel small? inconsequential?

I came into the field of Architecture wanting to have an impact. I was inspired by the power of built spaces to shape life. In school, I was constantly taught that this life shaping power was to be held in the hands of individual Architects, but as I look out at the injustice in our society and the destruction of our planet, I have, in the past, felt at a loss at what I could possibly do. Early 2020 was certainly a moment of feeling small, but as I’ve moved forward from there, these few crazy years have also given me great hope.

In the midst of increasingly visible racist attacks at the beginning of the pandemic, I co-founded an artivist initiative called #MaskOutHate, creating relationships with BI-POC artists and communities to build opportunities for dialogue, wealth, and celebration through the design of culturally affirming masks. I went into that experience feeling inadequate. I had never organized anything comparable, never printed fabric or made masks. And though I hungered to connect with people of color after the culture shock of arriving into a predominantly white career in a predominantly white town, I had never connected with many of the communities of color in Portland, including my own.

Despite all of that, I was energized by the support of others who gathered around the vision. By positioning myself as a facilitator to a larger process, the artists who came on board led the way in connecting with their communities and creating spaces of joy and connection that were beyond what I could have created alone. Instead of assuming that participants did not know what they were doing and needed an expert to take the first pass, I saw artists put questions and tools into their workshop participants’ hands to experience the delight of designing for themselves. So much potential comes in spreading the power to create and think about design.

Through #MaskOutHate, I realized that I did not need to be afraid of being small. Yes, I am small. Yes, I am inconsequential. But we can do bigger things together by enabling one another to be larger than ourselves.

I am taking one more step in my journey. The future we started to imagine through #MaskOutHate is not one I want to continue to seek through extracurriculars alone. It has been time for a career change. Karim Hassanein and I are joining forces with Colloqate Design to open a Portland Design Justice studio serving the Pacific Northwest. Colloqate has already been working around the country towards a radical vision for racial, social and cultural justice in the built environment. The Portland Studio is a first step in a dream to support emerging Design Justice practices across the country.

By combining our expertise in architecture, communications and storytelling, Karim and I hope to expand the role of design to create the relationships and systems that our communities need to thrive within their built environments. In addition to accessible design services; grassroots organizing and advocacy are essential to change the power dynamics that surround our work. As an Architect, I want to see the power of the built environment shared with communities who have been left out of our design processes to create their own futures and find delight.

Let’s be consequential together.

Message from an Emerging Professional

Ryan Al-Schamma
Associate AIA

My name is Ryan Al-Schamma, I’m a recent graduate of the University of Oregon’s B.Arch program (Grad 2020), and have just completed my first year in the profession.. During working hours I focus on Federal urban planning and architecture projects around the country, but during my free time I love road and mountain biking (hit me up, I’m looking for riding buddies), cooking, and installation design. For this installment of Message From, I’m going to be writing about a recent installation I completed with a small team, called Stay ON the Grass.

Stay ON the Grass was birthed from a medical article I read last winter that pointed out the decline in mental health for individuals in dense urban areas during the novel COVID-19 pandemic, versus individuals in more rural areas. On separate occasions phoning friends in larger cities than Eugene, I learned about the universal frustration over the lack of green space, and feelings of depression and isolation due to the inaccessibility to usable green space, and thus the lack of opportunities to just EXIST outside comfortably. In the face of a global pandemic, the urban design and architecture that is supposed to serve us proved to be futile, and even hostile towards those in dense urban areas, and it was costing many their mental well-being. 

Stay ON the Grass (SOTG) gave me and my team the chance to respond to this need for more usable green space in dense urban areas, opening up a discussion about our current state of urban design and planning which seems to prioritize building austere and uncomfortable paved hardscape instead of usable and calming landscape. 

The concept and form of the installation is derived from the highly instagrammed chalk bubbles outlined in grassy parks in bustling cities in the US such as San Francisco, San Antonio, and New York. The six-foot chalk bubbles separated by six foot aisles act as recreational social distancing bubbles. SOTG is intended to take the place of these bubbles in heavily paved urban areas where grass isn’t easily accessible. The dish of grass and wood rocks and sways when being used due to its concave form, while matching the ideal curvature of our human anatomy when laying in it–a living urban hammock, if you will.

This has been such an enriching experience, and I’m thankful I can think about these things as an architect. While I’m uncertain what the next part of this great adventure will look like, the one thing that I have been steadfast in throughout this process is that we need to design urban settings better. We have taken the easy road so far in relying predominantly on paving to fill the non-essential spaces between structures, so much so that it is engrained in the DNA of how we design; how we think about in-between spaces. Like Frankenstein’s monster, our own creations - the infrastructure and spaces that we use daily - are going to be the things that kill us. That is, if we don’t change the DNA of our designs to incorporate nature in a more interactive and meaningful way. 

Imagine any paved plaza, courtyard, or large urban gathering space–sure, Kezey Square here in downtown Eugene. Now imagine it covered in grass. A comfortable oasis. While I would love to see a million rocking grass pods strewn across cities everywhere, wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t need a raised patch of grass to fix our problems, but rather designed spaces to be comfortable and accommodating to begin with?

Stay ON the Grass will be displayed at the 5th Street Market extension, in front of the Gordon Hotel, until October 13. You’re welcome to leave feedback on the installation here https://forms.gle/uGoQJ2kzLdrfSLf49, or can reach me at by email. More importantly, I hope this keeps the discussion about the DNA of design active and available, because we have so much to work on together. I am looking forward to hearing from my colleagues and potential partners in tackling our issues of sustainability and resilience.

How are you changing the DNA of design?