Justin Fowler

University of Oregon, Architecture, Faculty Member

Princeton University, School of Architecture, Graduate Student

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Justin Fowler is the Director of the Portland Architecture Program at the University of Oregon School of Architecture & Environment in the College of Design, and a PhD Candidate in the history and theory of architecture at Princeton University. He received an M. Arch from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a BA from the College of William and Mary in Virginia. His writing has appeared in publications such as Harvard Design Magazine, Topos, PIN-UP, Thresholds, Domus, Volume, and e-flux Architecture. He is the co-editor of Public Natures: Evolutionary Infrastructures by Weiss/Manfredi and was a Founding Editor of Manifest: A Journal of the Americas. Previously, he worked as a designer with Dick van Gameren Architecten in the Netherlands, and managed research and editorial projects for the Columbia University Lab for Architectural Broadcasting (C-LAB) in New York. His doctoral work centers on Pragmatism and the aesthetics of social and psychological relief in US architecture and urbanism from the late 19th Century to the start of the Second World War, and his contemporary research engages with spatial justice and climate action in the built environment, aesthetic theory, and media practices in architecture.

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Patrick S. O'Donnell

Chris Hartley

Hal Pawson

The University of New South Wales

Christopher Giamarino

University of California, Los Angeles

Erin Dej

Wilfrid Laurier University

Stephen Gaetz

York University

Bart van Leeuwen

Radboud University Nijmegen

Michael S Merry

University of Amsterdam

Karen Pearson

Petia Sice

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Portland in Conversation: The Infrastructure of the Public City: Housing | Los Angeles I Portland

This event, the first in a new series of talks on urban design, brought together Elizabeth Timme ... more This event, the first in a new series of talks on urban design, brought together Elizabeth Timme and Anyeley Hallová for a conversation on housing justice, design, development, and the prospects for an equitable densification of our cities. Recent changes to Oregon’s zoning legislation with HB2001 and HB2003 effectively eliminate exclusive single-family zoning in many cities in the state, while Portland’s Residential Infill Project goes even further in its support for new multifamily housing options in all areas of the city. These initiatives have the potential to reshape the housing landscape of the region and drive a national conversation on housing policy and design. The city of Los Angeles, for one, has responded with the Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) Standard Plan Program of pre-approved low-cost designs for that backyard housing type and have recently hosted a design ideas competition for “Low-Rise” housing innovation.https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/portland-in-conversation...

Masterly Confusion: Ported Protection in the American Interwar

Architectural Histories, 2022

In domestic design projects ranging from carpet prototypes for the Metropolitan Museum in New Yor... more In domestic design projects ranging from carpet prototypes for the Metropolitan Museum in New York to bridge infrastructures for Robert Moses, architects Ralph Walker and Aymar Embury II drew from their experiences of trauma, play, and tectonic improvisation as camoufleurs during the First World War to work through logics of protective concealment. As with the operations of artillery and personnel camouflage, where makeshift flat tops of fabric and foliage provided portable spaces of relief within a brutal theater of reciprocal violence, the 'masterly confusion' of much interwar architectural work long deemed 'modernistic' , middlebrow, or not fully modern was often animated by therapeutic desires for safety and comfort. Here, designs which sought to mask or avoid the aesthetic and physiological shocks of modernity also furthered the entrenchment of modern forms of mobilization, organization, and risk management. This essay traces how formal ambivalence born out of protective necessity on the battlefields of the First World War migrated across surfaces and mutated into surfaces back in the United States, advancing fluid forms of capital and corporatism via subtle tectonic and material means across a range of scales. It also argues that descriptive difficulty with respect to interwar style (and its relation to 'modernity') starts to dissolve when switching registers to look at the attitudes that pervade these architectural practices of conscious equivocation. This work marks a critical episode in modern architecture's construction of an expanded notion of environment, where engagement was produced through and experienced as relief.

Justin Fowler

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