When Eugene citizens learned earlier this year that the General Services Administration would possibly be placing a ten-story, $70 million dollar federal courthouse in downtown Eugene, citizens and academics alike found cause for concern. Since the announcement of the new courthouse project, University architecture students and faculty have shown a vested interest in the placement and design specifications of the new facility.
Fall term architecture students in Professor Donald Genasci’s design studio studied the potential impact of placing such a large building in downtown Eugene.
Eric Black, a student in the class, said although there has been controversy over the project, a building of this scale can do a lot of good for the downtown area.
“I am not as concerned with the outcome of the design as I am with the decisions being made on the siting of the building itself,” Black said. “This decision is as important as the selection of the firm itself. The community is not realizing the positive potential this building provides for downtown Eugene.”
Last September, GSA Regional Administrator Jay Pearson said his decision to place the courthouse next to the Fifth Street Public Market was final. After pressure from Congressman Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., and Eugene citizens, the GSA chose to reconsider purchasing the current City Hall block for the new courthouse.
Now, seven months later, the search for a site continues after the GSA placed an ad in the Register Guard requesting to purchase land for the new courthouse from anyone in the Eugene/Springfield area willing to sell. As a result, the GSA received 22 possible sites.
Lew Bowers, Community Development Manager for the city of Eugene, said the GSA will now narrow their list to three sites and then conduct environmental reviews of each site, which he said will take several months to complete.
“After the environmental reviews are done sometime in the fall, a GSA committee will make a recommendation to Pearson and he will make the decision on the final site,” Bowers said. “I expect that the final decision will be made by September or October.”
Although the decision for the building’s site has not been made, a committee chaired by Michael Fifield, head of the University Architecture Department, held a competition that selected the firm that would design the courthouse. Los Angeles-based architecture firm Morphosis won the competition.
“They’re a very dynamic firm with some very innovative schemes,” GSA Public Affairs Director Bill Dubray said. “They should come up with a very exciting design – maybe a little out of the ordinary.”
Dubray said Morphosis will not begin design of the courthouse facility until the final site has been selected.
Architecture students and professors are pushing for the placement of the new courthouse to be in downtown Eugene. Fifield said in a March 23 Eugene Weekly article that the courthouse should be placed downtown because civic functions are an integral part of the city.
“The fact is, Eugene is slated to have a 270,000 square foot courthouse in the next few years,” Black said. “It might as well be done right.”
“It would be a disaster to make this into a suburban building that has no response to the needs of downtown,” he added. “It would be wrong to site this building outside of downtown.”