designBridge projects, 2007–2013: notes from the archive
Added by the archive's custodians, November 2026.
designBridge was a student organisation at the University of Oregon. Its history page says it began in 2005, when students decided that architecture could be of service to the community around them and that they could learn from the exchange. The group offered design and design-build work to local organisations that could not pay for professional design, and its mission statement asked for clients who shared its "commitment to sustainable design and green building practices".
This page is a present-day note on what the restored site still shows. It was written in 2026 by the people who look after the archive, not by anyone from the original group.
What the project list records
The site's menu is the most complete record left, and it runs year by year. In 2007 there were Skinner City Farms, NW Youth Corps and the Edison bike shelter. 2008 brought the Garden Avenue HIV Alliance, the Moss Street Children's Center and the Roosevelt bike shelter, and 2009 had KC Rainwater, Camas Pedal, an EV charging station and Garden Canvas. Huerto de la Familia followed in 2010, Playscapes and Storm in 2011, and The Common Good and Building Green in 2012. Bike shelters, rainwater and storm water keep coming back, which fits the green-building line in the mission statement.
The EV charging station, 2009
The EV charging station page was a gallery of sixteen images with no written description. The file names sort them under four headings (watershed, oakway, mazzis and 76), and three of the images survive: two site-analysis drawings and a street-level photograph filed under the watershed heading. One drawing marks a "potential site" along a street beside a building labelled "watershed building", with local and heavy traffic drawn in as arrows. The other puts the site next to a "76 station", with a bus line running along the main road. On the record, then, the project had reached the stage of choosing where a charging point could go and how cars would get to it. Whether anything was built is not recorded on the site.
Two projects with fuller write-ups
Huerto de la Familia was for the Small Farmers Project, an organic farm collective in Eugene made up of Latino families from Peru, Mexico and El Salvador who grew strawberries, blueberries and black cap raspberries. The brief covered a tractor shed, a cooler for the berries, a selling stand and a washing area. The land was leased and the farm might have to move, so the structure had to come apart and go back up somewhere else; the team wrote that every decision was weighed against how easily it could be understood, taken down and built again.
Storm, written up in March 2012, was a storm water demonstration project for the City of Springfield, designed with the Sustainable Cities Initiative. It was to sit between a new elementary school and a community building called the Brattain House, with a rain garden, a pavilion and several interactive teaching pieces.
The website itself
The later version of the site ran on Joomla 1.6. That is why every address has /index.php/ in the middle, and why some articles can be reached by two different paths. For anyone curious how Joomla sites of that period were put together, TechnologyStory keeps a step-by-step Joomla programming guide written for version 1.5, and its Joomla template tutorial starts with how a page is divided into module positions. More material from the same years, from CSS fixes to Windows tips, is at technologystory.net.