Portland State University School of Architecture

ARCH 299 - Architecture Summer Immersion
MONDAY-THURSDAY 10AM-12:30PM
JUNE 22 - JULY 19
4 CREDITS

We invite you to join a high-energy, 4-week summer immersion that breaks architecture out of the traditional classroom and onto the land. Designed specifically for non-majors and anyone curious about design, this course prioritizes creative, hands-on making as a primary vehicle for architectural thinking. Bridging architectural fundamentals with Indigenous Traditional Ecological and Cultural Knowledge (ITECK), you will explore space not as a static consumer commodity, but as an active, relational infrastructure co-authored with the living landscape.

Moving daily between Shattuck Hall and the beautiful PSU Oak Savanna, you will craft structural profiles to test your design ideas right on the landscape, compile atmospheric digital landscape collages, and sculpt weathering models to convey your ideas. Come collaborate, experiment, and discover how to design structures that manifest design as an instrument of spatial sovereignty, ecological storytelling, and reciprocal stewardship to tell a deeper story about our shared world.

No prior architecture experience required!

Thesis day 4!

Nathalie Hutchinson: Subversive Architecture proposes turning modern development practice on its head by leveraging collective agency through community-led investment and design. Situated in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Southeast Portland, the project tests innovative engagement strategies and defines “neighborhood triage” in the face of the housing crisis, translating research into a mixed-use community hub paired with affordable cooperative housing.

Meg McKean: The Sxole Stewardship Center is a training and cultural heritage center dedicated to celebrating, sustaining, and transmitting the knowledge and practice of reef-net fishing. Sxole, also known as reef-net fishing, is a 1,800-year-old Indigenous fishing practice and the most sustainable salmon fishing method in the world. This project proposes an architectural space for Indigenous-led knowledge transfer, cultural stewardship, and public education that positions reef-net fishing as the future primary salmon fishing practice of the Salish Sea.

Jessica Snyder: An aerial gondola network that functions as both everyday public transit and resilient infrastructure in the event of the future Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake. By moving circulation above vulnerable ground conditions, the project establishes an independent system capable of operating when conventional transportation networks fail.

Ryan Cook: This thesis examines how we must reconsider our relationship with the natural environment in the aftermath of a devastating wildfire whose impacts will shape the landscape for decades. The proposed design—a canopy walk—creates a vantage point from which visitors can observe the forest’s gradual recovery over time.

Sohrab Ghasemi: This thesis explored architecture as a form of political resistance. Set in NYC, the project proposed a monumental intervention that casts a shadow over the UN Headquarters. Through scale, absence, and atmosphere, the project questioned power, visibility, and the role architecture can play in political discourse.

Congratulations to all the presenters!

FRIDAYS@1: THE GENESIS AND DISSEMINATION OF THE OPEN STAIR:

Join us this Friday@1 as Juan Manuel Heredia presents on the history and architectural significance of the open stair. Before the modern period, stairs were typically enclosed, hidden, and treated as purely functional parts of buildings. Beginning in the late 15th century, Spanish architects began opening these staircases by removing enclosing walls and roofs, transforming them into more visible and spatially expressive architectural elements

Friday, May 22nd 2026 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Location
Shattuck Hall Annex
SW Broadway at Hall Street
1914 SW Park Ave, Portland, OR 97201

Thesis Day 2!

Thao Mai: Faith-based shelters offer families in Portland, Oregon, a pathway from homelessness to permanent housing, supported by community outreach and efforts to build healthy neighborhoods.

Luke Player: Child centered adaptive reuse of a commercial office building into co-housing for PSU students with children. Transforming a corporate ruin into a vision of collective whimsey and support.

Alex Yarovaya: This thesis project responds to the fragile gap between school and adulthood for young adults with autism. By combining equine-assisted spaces with career training and daily work environments, the architecture stages controlled encounters with fear, trust, and growth while preserving choice and autonomy. It merges the familiarity of barn and arena typologies with contemporary, sensory-responsive design to support independence in a world typically not built for sensory difference.

Vinuar Gardi: This thesis examines the Kurdish diaspora in Portland as a community shaped by displacement, political fragmentation, and the ongoing negotiation of identity in exile. It explores how collective memory, ritual, and intergenerational gathering sustain Kurdish culture within a Western urban context that often renders it invisible. The project asks how belonging can be cultivated locally while remaining deeply connected to a homeland.

Kaila Zandel: Burn Scar Tattoo Studio, this thesis proposes a tattoo studio for covering burn scars. Through the themes of identity, exposure, pain, and duration, the space choreographs a progression from vulnerability to reclamation.

Gianna Sullivan: An ecological outpost in the Great Basin that integrates small field shelters with shared work infrastructure to support long-term ecological practice. The project explores how spatial thresholds, regionally derived materials, and adaptable systems can sustain bodily presence while maintaining environmental attunement.

Abby Degler: Letter & Leaf Learning Campus is a calm, intuitive environment where every space is shaped to reduce cognitive load and nurture confident, joyful learning for dyslexic students.

Congrats to all the presenters!

Thesis Projects: Day 1

Thomas Thilavanh
Architecture that reveals the Vietnam War’s legacy of aerial bombardment and unexploded ordnance (UXO) in Laos through material and ephemeral relationships across the sky, ground, and space below.

Sham Aldura
A memorial and civic network at Saydnaya Prison that preserves testimony and gives survivors a place for memory and documentation.

Aaron Wood Characters of Geologic Time, This thesis seeks to put human experience in the context of geologic time through storytelling and architecture in Portland. The geologic phenomena that make up much of the landscape of Portland are studied for their scientific understanding and are re-interpreted as characters in a story that come together to create this place. The architecture serves as a space to come in touch with these characters and the ancient forces that create landscapes

Join us this Friday in welcoming Nati Ochoa and Natalie Reeder as they discuss their time as the recipients of the 2025 Rudolph Barton Travel Fellowship. Nati and Natalie traveled this winter to explore how indigenous tradition and technology.

May 15th 1 PM - 2 PM
Shattuck Hall Annex
SW Broadway at Hall Street
1914 SW Park Ave, Portland, OR 97201

Join us for this week’s Fridays @1 as Hope Svenson discusses her work as an architectural historian and archivist specializing in the built environment of Oregon. She will talk specifically about the 2021 book she published on Oregon’s Mt. Angel Abbey library building, designed by Alvar Aalto, and her current position as the Architecture & Design Project Archivist at the Oregon Historical Society. Architectural archives are representations of our built (and unbuilt) environment that have value as historical documents, contractual records between architects and clients, and are works of art in their own right. Svenson brings a historian’s perspective to the design discipline that values the archival record and the stories it tells (and doesn’t tell) about what we build, what we don’t build, and why.

March 6th 1pm-2pm
Shattuck Hall Annex
SW Broadway at Hall Street
1914 SW Park Ave, Portland, OR 97201

More info in bio link

Join us for this week’s Fridays @1 as Hope Svenson discusses her work as an architectural historian and archivist specializing in the built environment of Oregon. She will talk specifically about the 2021 book she published on Oregon’s Mt. Angel Abbey library building, designed by Alvar Aalto, and her current position as the Architecture & Design Project Archivist at the Oregon Historical Society. Architectural archives are representations of our built (and unbuilt) environment that have value as historical documents, contractual records between architects and clients, and are works of art in their own right. Svenson brings a historian’s perspective to the design discipline that values the archival record and the stories it tells (and doesn’t tell) about what we build, what we don’t build, and why.

March 6th 1pm-2pm
Shattuck Hall Annex
SW Broadway at Hall Street
1914 SW Park Ave, Portland, OR 97201

More info in bio link

Join us for this week’s Fridays@1 as Hope Svenson discusses her work as an architectural historian and archivist specializing in the built environment of Oregon. She will talk specifically about the 2021 book she published on Oregon’s Mt. Angel Abbey library building, designed by Alvar Aalto, and her current position as the Architecture & Design Project Archivist at the Oregon Historical Society. Architectural archives are representations of our built (and unbuilt) environment that have value as historical documents, contractual records between architects and clients, and are works of art in their own right. Svenson brings a historian’s perspective to the design discipline that values the archival record and the stories it tells (and doesn’t tell) about what we build, what we don’t build, and why.

March 6th 1pm-2pm
Shattuck Hall Annex
SW Broadway at Hall Street
1914 SW Park Ave, Portland, OR 97201

Join us for this week’s Fridays @1 as Hope Svenson discusses her work as an architectural historian and archivist specializing in the built environment of Oregon. She will talk specifically about the 2021 book she published on Oregon’s Mt. Angel Abbey library building, designed by Alvar Aalto, and her current position as the Architecture & Design Project Archivist at the Oregon Historical Society. Architectural archives are representations of our built (and unbuilt) environment that have value as historical documents, contractual records between architects and clients, and are works of art in their own right. Svenson brings a historian’s perspective to the design discipline that values the archival record and the stories it tells (and doesn’t tell) about what we build, what we don’t build, and why.

March 6th 1pm-2pm
Shattuck Hall Annex
SW Broadway at Hall Street
1914 SW Park Ave, Portland, OR 97201

More info in bio link.