Message from the AIA Eugene Section Director-Elect

Andrew Scheidt, AIA
Eugene Section Director-Elect

Member Re-engagement

As the new Section-Director Elect for the Eugene Section of AIAO, I would like to take this opportunity to give you some information about myself and my motivation for taking on this position.  I primarily strive to be an architect focusing on design respectful towards and reflective of place.  With that in mind, I have found the local AIA sections to be the best avenue for discovering the factors/persons affecting the design of the places where I find myself.

In my undergraduate experience at the University of Virginia (‘02), I learned to design buildings from an artistic standpoint.  We learned how to take an idea and translate it into a built form. In my graduate studies at the University of Oregon (‘06), I was first exposed towards critical regionalism, and those studies provided me with the technical skills to analyze a site and make an informed response with my design proposal to create a building that will have a benefit to its environment. 

I worked for 7 years post graduate school primarily with other architects and designers at The Sea Ranch in coastal CA, designing custom mid-sized single-family residences, both for owner occupied and rental use.  Ten years ago, I moved back to Eugene where I have worked in local offices doing small commercial/retail work.  In the past 2 years I have picked back up and reopened my full-service architectural firm working primarily in residential and low-rise commercial/retail. 

My design philosophy is based around two main influences: client and site.  The conditions and goals placed on the project by the client and the opportunities presented by the site allow the project design to take a unique form, which I view as my definition of the ‘Ecology of Place’.  I feel design projects that relate to the ecology of their place and quantify environmental variables and their influences on the design result in holistic structures.  Structures that maximize the available functions, energy efficiency, longevity, sense of appropriateness and the physical and mental well-being of the occupants.  I believe in passive design strategies as a solution to the issues of excessive energy consumption, indoor air sickness, and as a method to reconnect building inhabitants to the natural world.

Prior to COVID I was participating in various AIA-SWO activities, of note were my participation in the most recent re-envisioning of the Eugene COLA group circa 2012/13, acting as the local Design Spring (Emerging Professionals) lead for Eugene for 2 years, and participation in and hope to take on as leading, (then COVID) of the local Small Firms group. These experiences have helped me expand the knowledge, expertise, and awareness of the factors and possibilities of our local design community.

However, during my educational experience I was not involved in AIAS and my early professional carrier I did not see the value in participating in the local AIA chapters.  It was only upon coming to Eugene and looking for professional networking that I began to reach out.

It quickly became evident to me the value of the local AIA.  If I can convey one message today it is that your local Sections value is commiserate with the effort one puts into it.  This is a volunteer organization; it runs on local members giving of their time.

My vision and goal for my time as a future leader in this organization is for it to facilitate your needs.  This includes both being a resource, but also a venue for you to be able to make your ideas happen.  Do you wish there was more peer to peer networking, GREAT come help us make that happen for you and the community.  Do you wish you could have a discussion around what the local market is like for designers and who is the real competition for what you want to achieve, GREAT, come to the AIA with that idea and we will help you facilitate that gathering.  If you need information on a particular topic, I would like your local section to be your go to source.  If you want to know how to become licensed, I would like your local section to foster, support, and help to provide the resources for you to be able to succeed in that.   

What this vision requires is participation.  In the coming months I will be looking towards Member Re-engagement.  Coming out of COVID and all remote worlds, what does the AIA look like in a way that will get you to come out and participate?  What events would you like to see?  What resources should we focus on making locally available.  These are items I would like to focus on so that coming out of a statewide reorganization followed by a Pandemic we can focus on what will get members to make their own value out of AIAO

Message from the AIAO Executive Vice President/CEO

Heather Wilson
AIAO EVP/CEO

As I am writing this message, I am listening to the Honorable Judge Ketanji Brown defend her stellar resume and exceptional personal work ethic before a confirmation panel for the Supreme Court, and I am struck by the poised, calm, peaceful woman I see prevailing in front of me. She reminds me of another poised and peaceful soul I have had the pleasure to meet, Elizabeth Smart.

When I met Elizabeth Smart, her story of abduction and return had long passed; here she was a grown woman, ethereally beautiful, literally almost glowing as she entered the Utah State Legislative chambers. She gave testimony regarding her experience, and made a pointed argument: proper sexual education in Utah public schools may have saved her at least some of her anguish, and she asked the body to consider how important it might be to educate young girls – without attempting to sway them toward premature activity – to genuinely know their bodies, and perhaps their own value.

She was politely listened to, and when her testimony was finished, the room erupted in applause.

Then, after she left the room, they voted. Her measure failed, nearly unanimously. It did so each year I saw her present it to that body. I thought I was struck by her strength, by her beauty and poise while persisting despite the known outcome. Then I realized there was a much better word for it: resilience.

We – AIA, its practitioners, its allied partners, employees and colleagues – have been using this term now to start to explore what it means to persist despite the challenges of your environment. As I watch Ketanji, and remember Elizabeth, I am also thinking of my graduating senior son, headed out into a post-pandemic world that has not yet set itself back on a normalized course. What he and his graduating class have endured will be unique to them, and they are the lucky ones. There are hundreds of thousands of children who were both left without a caregiver and without a chance to say a proper goodbye who are in every age from preschool to senior year, and we’d better start thinking about how we design for their well-being.

Because I am blessed to have my grandmothers’ journals, I know that she was one of these pandemic children, left by a father who died in the 1919 flu epidemic before she was born. My Nana, as a result, carried a trauma that I can tell you reverberated her entire life. It linked her every step to the next. In fact, without the trauma, she would not have become the resilient and resourceful grandmother I knew her to be, and she told me that many times. Her strength laid in her continued gratitude for her supports - her neighbors, her church, her siblings, her children. Her community.

We are a community. We have agreements that we honor to create safe spaces for all of our members, and I hope you’ll take them with you wherever we meet; indeed, wherever you go. As we re-enter in person settings and gather in (hopefully well designed) spaces, let us remember what resilience really means: the ability to absorb or avoid damage without suffering complete failure – and continue to grow back toward something we can call normal, but will hopefully cherish in extraordinary ways.

Yours in Design,

Heather Wilson

Message from the AIA Bend Section Director-Elect

Ian Schmidt, AIA
Section Director-Elect, AIA Bend

I am excited to be joining the AIA Bend chapter leadership group as the 2022 Director-Elect. I am looking forward to meeting more colleagues and providing design opportunities to colleagues at all levels of experience. The majority of my volunteering in the last 5 years has been with community organizations focused on housing; so, while this is my first official role with the AIA I’ve had many opportunities to be a voice for architects within our business community. I believe that architects and designers have an important role to play in shaping our communities through activism as well as our professional work.

I see myself as a pretty average resident of Bend Oregon, which is another way of saying “I like being outside, and I didn’t start out here.” I grew up in a mid-sized city in the northern Andes mountains of Peru and then a few miles away from the Pacific Ocean in the southern border city of Peru and Chile. My parents moved back to central Kansas in the mid-90s, and I lived there until going to the college of architecture at Kansas State University. While in architecture school I was heavily influenced by the social housing models of pioneered in Scandinavia in the 1970s and was fortunate to study for parts of my last two years of undergrad in Denmark and Norway. The centrality of modern design and support for community-based approaches to caring for our neighbors made a deep impression on me, and I’ve been pursuing those two things ever since.

My first foray into community involvement as an architect came in 2015 with a healthy push from the director of Bend 2030 who -fortuitously for me- shared a space with the architectural office I worked at. I loved being part of the Middle Market Housing Workgroup and helping shape the community dialogue around housing. I am proud to have served for 4 years on the Affordable Housing Advisory Council in Bend and love the opportunity to bring an AEC perspective to local policy deliberations. There are more organizations that have shaped me than I can name here, but I will say that my appreciation for our Central Oregon community easily doubled during my time in Leadership Bend.

My current role in the industry is as a Partner and Architect at COLE Architects, and I love getting to work a wide range of projects across central & eastern Oregon and Idaho. Easily the most fun part of my position is getting to indulge my joint passions for mentoring and writing good contracts.

In my year as Director-Elect I am going to try to meet all our local members, reach out to every firm in Bend to understand what each of you are passionate about, and ask how I can open doors for the opportunities each of you dream about. Our local AIA chapter is a collaborative democracy – and my role in that democracy is to provide opportunities for growth, self-expression, and supporting the current and future leaders in our profession.

I believe that our local community and region will be its best when a diverse range of buildings are available to meet our diverse population. Historically Central Oregon has had a high percentage of single-family homes, but as housing continues to soar in price and our state land use laws both require further densification and constrain the buildable land supply, other approaches can help address those challenges. As more people move the American West each year, a critical mass is growing to consider options including but not limited to the traditional model of single-family detached homes, walk-up apartments, and car-centric business areas. I am excited to find local opportunities for advocacy in the built environment and even more excited to do it with colleagues and friends.