Archive for February, 2015

February 23, 2015

Architecture as if People and the Planet Mattered

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Last week I watched a Peruvian documentary on the lives of local musicians called I’m Still, screened as part of the Portland International Film Festival. It displayed stunning imagery of mountain-top villages in remote areas of the country where indigenous musicians played their violins, harps and guitars and sang folk songs. I was struck by the indigenous architecture of these villages, which comprised of hand-built stone masonry walls and clay tile roofs. They were beautiful buildings built by families generations ago, perfectly scaled to Peruvian human proportions and completely fitting of Puruvian native lifestyles. Moreover, they blended in with…

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February 15, 2015

The Future of the Library

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Thanks to Google, e-books, Amazon.com, and book store cafés among other factors, libraries are changing at a breakneck speed. Libraries used to be where you looked things up, and now you can look anything up practically at any time if your smartphone is within easy reach, which for many it is all the time. But what about the community development role of the library in society? By not using the library as a resource in the same way, are we losing a sense of community when so much information is at our fingertips without ever having to get up…

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February 02, 2015

5 Ways to Add Density without Building High-Rises

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Portland and many other cities around the country are facing the problem of adding more housing and infrastructure as more and more people move into the city. In short, they are being forced to densify, to fit more people into a limited amount of space. Portland has an urban growth boundary, so density is a specially pressing problem in the face of a projected population boom of 725,000 additional people in 20 years. The threat of people moving in with nowhere to house them has led to large swaths of the historic fabric of urban neighborhoods to be destroyed and…

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