Kingston Heath, Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation announces that his program recently received a gift of $2.8 million dollars by Art DeMuro, President of the Venerable Group, Inc.  This gift has led to a proposal to move the program from Eugene to Portland to better address content related to “green preservation.”

Heath has been elected for his third term on the Board of the Vernacular Architecture Forum.  He will be chairing a session at the Annual Meeting in Madison, Wisconsin.  His paper on the “Croatia Conservation Field School,” that he founded and co-directs, will be presented at the “Preservation Education: Sharing Practices and Finding Common Ground” symposium September 8 & 9 in Providence, R.I. He will also be presenting a paper, and serving on a panel, at the American Folklore Society forum on Integrating Folklore and Preservation in New Orleans, October 24-27.  

Professor Howard Davis’s new book, Living Over the Store: Architecture and Local Urban Life, has been published by Routledge.  Davis delivered a keynote lecture at the Sixth Annual Meeting of the International Seminar on Vernacular Settlements in Famugusta, North Cyprus, in April.

Brook Muller has been appointed Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the School of Architecture and Allied Arts beginning June 2012.

Associate Professor Hajo Neis, Ph.D., Director of the Portland Urban Architecture Research Laboratory (PUARL), and his thesis design students presented their advanced studio work on Regenerative Design at the Oregon Design Conference April 2012 in Salishan: “Redesigning andRebuilding Cities, Towns, Neighborhoods, Streets, Buildings and Gardens, Destroyed by War, Terrorism, Natural Disaster, and Human Failure.” The work focuses on real world problems, and students are working with communities, agents, NGO’s and agencies interested in long-term generative recovery in projects in Japan, Haiti, Malawi, Bosnia, Hungary, China, Netherlands, and the US. 

PUARL also co-sponsored the 49th International Making Cities Livable Conference (IMCL) May 2012 in Portland, with the participation of Neis and Emeritius Professor Jim Pettinari.

Associate Professor Mark L. Gillem, PhD, AIA, AICP was part of a teaching team that received the 2011 Workforce Development Through Training Award from the Center for Environmental Innovation and Leadership.  This national award recognizes teaching excellence and was awarded at the GOVGreen Conference in Washington DC on December 1. Dr. Gillem has developed and teaches a series of planning and urban design courses for the federal government. He also recently received a major design award from the American Planning Association’s Federal Planning Division. His firm, The Urban Collaborative, LLC, prepared the Southwest Campus Area Development Plan for Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The jury recognized the plan as the Outstanding Area Development Plan at an award ceremony in Los Angeles in April 2012. While in Los Angeles, he was the Chair of the American Planning Association’s Federal Planning Division Annual Training Workshop. The event attracted over 300 planners working for and with federal agencies. He also recently spoke on sustainable master planning in Los Angeles at a NASA workshop and at George Mason University in Washington DC where he announced the release of a new master planning policy for the Department of Defense that he authored.