May is Bike Month! Schemata has formed a team to compete in the commute-challenge, and is consistenly ranking among the top teams.

Bike Month has been a great opportunity to share cycling knowledge amongst ourselves here in the office. Below, our resident bike-nut John Feit shares the finer points of handlebar geometry with Peggy Heim (with a scale, no-less).

Another new commuter in the office, James Underwood, has recently updated his ‘trusty steed’ for Seattle’s tough hills. Check out that snazzy steel:

Bike on, Biking Bullfrogs!

Part of the agenda for Saturday afternoon at the 2012 Oregon Design Conference was set aside as a forum for audience-promoted ideas and interests. Joseph Readdy of Schemata Workshop organized a facilitated two hour discussion using Open Space Technology. Initiatives raised by conference attendees were actively discussed in small groups and summarized with a short wrap-up discussion of the work completed that preceded the conference’s closing reception. The conference organizers identified four themes for consideration:
Design Excellence – community adaptations;
The New Now – individual and firm adaptations;
The Academy – educational adaptations: and
Beyond the Norm – breaking free of traditional adaptations
But everyone was encouraged to bring their best ideas forward for discussion, regardless of how they might be categorized. And that’s exactly what happened as multiple individuals raised topics important to their practice and attracted others with similar interests into very lively discussions – discussions that we hope will continue long after the conference closed.
Open Space Technology
Open Space allows groups –large or small– to self-organize and effectively deal with complex issues within a limited time.
Open Space is a fast, cheap, and simple way to better, more productive meetings. It enables people to experience a very different quality of organization where self-managed work groups are the norm, leadership is constantly shared, diversity is a resource to be used instead of a problem to be overcome, and personal empowerment is a shared experience.
Who, What, When…
Whoever comes is the right person;
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened—you let go of expectations and work with whatever unfolds in the moment;
When it’s over, it’s over—if you find a solution in twenty minutes,…

The heritage structures along Capitol Hill’s Pike-Pine corridor house mixed use, residential, and commercial tenants. The most prominent and best preserved of these buildings are the large number of former auto showrooms, the so-called auto-row buildings that are comprised of large-span ground floor spaces with high ceilings. Some heritage structures originally housed, as they do today, a mix of uses with ground floor retail and housing above. Some are strictly residential. These original patterns of development, or more specifically the pattern or planning for the building’s use, are reflected in their elevations. In those buildings along Pike-Pine that were originally commercial, the ground floor has expansive amounts of glass which are crisply framed by the building’s structure, with the resulting clarity carried out on the upper floors with little variation. A typical example of this rational, commercial frame expression can be seen along Pine Street, between Crawford Place and Summit Avenue.

Typical Pike-Pine Heritage Commercial Building

Capitol Hill’s residential buildings too, have a similar uniformity of expression between the ground and upper floors. In residential buildings, the expression was one of smaller, individually framed or so-called ‘punched’ windows, with the apartment building on Pine Street and Belmont being a fine example.

Typical Pike-Pine Heritage Apartment Building

A unified expression between a building’s base and top was clearly not the primary goal for the designers of Pine Street’s Pinevue Apartments, making it a rarity among our heritage buildings. Next to the Melrose Building (home to Bauhaus), and threatened by the same re-development project,…

Design matters.  In the design of cohousing, intention also matters. What sets cohousing apart from other types of conventional housing models – whether it is single family neighborhood, condominiums, or apartments – is that in cohousing, there is a physical space that is the heart of the community, and that space is the Common House.  It is the stage in which community life (and intention) plays itself out.

While most common houses have the same programmatic elements – a dining room, kitchen, kids play room, and laundry, I would argue that they are not all created equal.  The success of a Common House results from the careful juxtaposition of the above programmatic spaces and how they relate to each other.  And the intentionality behind the design of each room also lends to the success.  After having visited over 80 cohousing communities in the past 8 years my measure of a successful common house is how often its rooms are used by the community.  During my visits to cohousing communities I have seen some rooms that were seemingly well designed, but were reported by residents to have received little usage due to poor acoustics, lack of visual connection, uncomfortable furniture, poor lighting, etc.

I have also seen rooms that were clearly designed as a “multi-purpose” space – and therefore, it serves no single purpose well.  I acknowledge that space is often a premium in cohousing (either due to physical constraints or budget) and that the Common House needs to support a diversity of programmatic uses – large events, community dinners,…