The new Ford Alumni Center, currently under construction on the University of Oregon campus in Eugene, formally “topped out" on May 21, when the last concrete slab was placed on the fourth-story of this much-anticipated project, marking a milestone in the building’s construction process.

For TVA Architects, the project’s building architect, the act represents more than substantial completion of the Center’s structural concrete work.

It is a point where two of the Portland-based design firm’s most significant architectural commissions have taken visible form to create a powerful new entryway to the University of Oregon campus, making a statement about the school, the community and confidence in the future.

In addition to TVA’s work on the Alumni Center, the firm is the design architect of the adjacent Matthew Knight Arena, the high-profile 12,541-seat, glass-and-steel “theater for basketball” that will replace the school’s venerable McArthur Court. Synergistically, the Arena and Alumni Center are having an important effect on the campus, defining for the first time an official gateway to the school - a central point of welcome and connectivity linking the past and future.

According to Robert L. Thompson, TVA Architects’ founder and design principal, the simultaneous side-by-side projects were the result of a happy coincidence:  Originally, the Alumni Center was slated to be a separate, unrelated project located across the street from the Arena, near the new John E. Jaqua Academic Center for Student Athletes.

When stakeholders began to rethink this placement, Thompson embraced the opportunity to explore siting the Alumni Center close to the Arena, perhaps even enfolding it into the Arena, and opening up its original site as a greenway or park. TVA eventually inherited the project, and began creating a shared dialogue and relationship between the two buildings, resulting in an iconic new front door for the campus.

The buildings share a common architectural language and an elegant palette of materials, expressing TVA’s signature style of refined, clean modern lines. Nearly finished, the Arena sports a lightweight composite aluminum skin, much like a sleek modern airliner, with the construction focus now on the interior. As the new home for the University of Oregon Ducks basketball team, it will become the new “Mac Court.”

However, its larger function as a multipurpose arena will extend outwards to the community and City of Eugene, providing a valuable staging area for performing arts, and playing host to a variety of community and cultural events. 

In contrast to the Arena’s imposing, 405,000-square-foot mass, the Alumni Center is a 60,000-square-foot jewel that also speaks to the future. A long thin building with an open design, it features a highly glazed skin offering an abundance of natural light.  It will be a welcoming, multi-generational space, where students, parents, returning alumni and faculty can congregate, pay homage to the past and embrace the future.

A new underground parking structure beneath the Alumni Center will provide parking for 375 vehicles.

Both will be LEED certified, and both are ahead of schedule and under budget, scheduled to open in time for the Pac-10 Conference in January 2011.

For Thompson, the buildings are symbolically important to the school and surrounding community. They also represent the firm moving forward in the design world.

“We are fortunate that TVA has been involved in some of the most exciting and significant projects in the State of Oregon,” he comments. “They are more than just structures contributing to the built environment; they are economic drivers and indicators of where our society is heading. They are symbols of growth, enlightenment and hope for the future.”

For Thompson, there is also the sense of coming full circle, of giving back to the community, and to the school where he received his degree and learned the lean eloquent language of architecture.