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With the enthusiasm of high school prom attendees, students compared outfits, added final touches and decided who looked the trashiest – the highest compliment of the night.
The Trashy Fashion Show and Party on Saturday celebrated another year for the Holistic Options for Planet Earth Sustainability conference , a four day-long event run entirely by University students.
The event is the only student-run conference of its kind in the United States. This year the conference drew more than 300 students, practitioners and community members from all over the country, including states such as North Dakota, Colorado and even New York.
For the 15 students and community members who made their runway outfits from refuse and other donated items during workshops on Saturday, the light-hearted nature of the show was a welcome departure from the academically rigorous workshops, speeches and discussions.
Plastic trash bags were crocheted into dresses, shower curtains were transformed into translucent skirts, and bicycle inner tubes were stretched into tube-tops.
Most agreed the hottest material of the evening, featured in almost every ensemble, was a shiny green foil from old potato chip bags.
“The most popular item this year was the potato chip bags,” said Eilidh Maclean, the Trashy Fashion Show coordinator. “The company, Spiral Spuds, went out of business and donated the rolls of the bags to Bring Recycling here in Eugene. That’s where we got a lot of the stuff for this.”
The only connection between the costumed festivities and the conference’s academic water theme, “Confluence: Where Water Meets Design,” was the rain-drenched participants dancing in the courtyard outside Lawrence Hall.
Attendees at other conference events addressed issues from storm water management and water conservation to maintaining safe drinking water supplies.
For those University students who are part of the Ecological Design Center, the goal of the summit is to promote understanding and application of sustainable design principles in architecture.
Part of that is bringing in a diversity of scholars from around the nation, student coordinator Tracey Bascue said.
“This was one of the more international conferences ever, with Nina Maritz coming from Africa and John Hyde from Australia,” Bascue said. “It was also the most diverse. We had a strong showing of landscape architects and people from other departments like Art and PPPM.”
Kristen Distefano, a graduate student from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, attended the conference with three other students and architecture professor Martha Bohm. Bohm received her master’s in architecture at the University and was the one who recruited the students and received funding from Cornell to attend the conference.
“This is really great to be a part of; it’s such a positive thing,” Distefano said. “I really enjoyed meeting everyone and seeing what other schools are doing.”
The planning for each year’s conference begins during a workshop called, “Future HOPES,” where participants share feedback and constructive criticism with the organizers. Then, at the start of fall term, the group begins meeting once a week. Faculty adviser and assistant professor of architecture Brook Muller called the workload of student organizers “enormous.”
“The majority of the student coordinators are pursuing professional degrees in some of the most demanding programs on campus and then they – in effect – take on a full-time job with this conference,” Muller said.
This year, the conference received roughly $17,000 from the ASUO’s Programs Finance Committee, but this sum was contingent on other fundraising.
“We raised about $8,000 or $10,000 in addition to the ASUO money and a large portion of that is from EWEB,” EDC Director Peter Henne said.
The EDC also received a considerable amount in donations from past coordinators and graduates. These contacts also help with bringing in the speakers.
“A lot of times these people can help get us in the door, which is the hardest part,” said John Pete, this year’s conference director.
“On occasion faculty helps attract the speakers,” Muller said, “but the majority of the students are familiar with the sort of design culture at large and the leaders in the area of green design and sustainability.”
The four keynote speakers this year included University of Michigan landscape architecture professor Joan Nassauer, member of the Namibia Institute of Architects Nina Martiz, University of Pennsylvania professor David Leatherbarrow, and California-based biologist and ecologist Paul Kephart.
Those top-notch speakers attracted a wide array of professionals to campus. In addition, as a coordinator, Bascue enjoyed inside access to the conference’s events.
“It was great to actually get to meet such accomplished professionals who want to meet us and talk with us,” she said.
In addition to the networking opportunities that the conference provides for its attendees, it also brings notoriety to the School of Architecture and Allied Arts and the University.
“It’s an outstanding example of student energy and initiative being focused on the problems of today,” said Environmental Leadership Program Director Steve Mital. “It attracts outside professionals and prospective students to campus and makes them think, ‘I want to be part of that green energy’.”
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