Small Budget, Big Impact

It was a great night celebrating landscape architecture with our peers at ASLA Oregon’s 2024 Design Awards soirée on September 27. We were inspired by the professional and student achievements and incredible projects happening around the region.

During the event, Mayer/Reed was honored with a Green Ribbon Merit Award for our pro bono work on the Gorge Accessibility Project for Friends of the Columbia Gorge. The Green Ribbon for Biodiversity and Climate Action recognizes projects that demonstrate notable strides toward shared biodiversity and climate goals and set an example for what our profession can achieve in areas of carbon drawdown, climate resiliency, ecosystem services and community empowerment.

The project, conceptual designs for two accessible recreation sites in the Columbia River Gorge at Cape Horn and Catherine Creek, establishes a vision and develops materials for grants and fundraising. We are proud to be recognized for this important work and are grateful for the opportunity to work with a client and partners that value the goals of inclusivity and climate action. We look forward to seeing the concepts take shape.

Congratulations to all the firms, designers and projects celebrated at the soirée!

New Paths to Graduation at hayu alqi uyxat 

A heartfelt ribbon-cutting ceremony on September 21 celebrated the opening of Portland Public Schools’ (PPS) new hayu alqi uyxat building — “many future paths” in the Chinook Wawa language. Designed by Bassetti Architects with landscape architecture by Mayer/Reed, the new building is home to PPS’s previously dispersed Multiple Pathways to Graduation programs and serves some of the district’s most vulnerable high school students.  

Influenced by trauma-informed best practices, the new home of Alliance High School, DART/Kuumba School, Teen Parent Services and Childcare, and the Reconnection Services and Center is non-institutional in character, emphasizing a connection to nature inside and out. Outdoor spaces offer opportunities for collaborative learning, solo study, sensory breaks and play. Beneath large oak trees, a gathering circle embedded with the representation of a medicine wheel is a special focal point. 

At the opening event, students and school leaders expressed words of hope and praise for their new learning community. The hayu alqi uyxat building is part of the PPS School Improvement Bond Program and is anticipating LEED Gold certification. 

Celebrating a Modernized Benson Polytechnic High School  

Community members and local dignitaries joined students, staff and project team members in celebrating the official reopening of a modernized Benson Polytechnic High School. The September 14 ribbon cutting marked a new era of innovation for Portland Public Schools’ 1916 career and technical education (CTE) campus.  

The modernization, led by Bassetti Architects, balances historic preservation with expansion, increasing space for state-of-the-art, hands-on learning. Mayer/Reed’s site design respects the campus’s classic symmetry while introducing universal accessibility and adding student-centered outdoor spaces throughout.  

Visitors to the grand opening event toured the building and explored new and redesigned outdoor spaces including the main entry landscape, a new central courtyard adjacent to the student commons and the multi-functional CTE courtyard with outdoor workspaces for construction, applied geometry, manufacturing and automotive workshops. 

Benson is the sixth high school to be modernized or rebuilt through the PPS School Improvement Bond program—all with landscape architecture by Mayer/Reed.  

“We Speak Your Language” Wayfinding at the New Holgate Library

Multnomah County Library and the Southeast Portland community recently celebrated the grand opening of Holgate Library. The bright, modern facility, designed by Bora with multilingual wayfinding by Mayer/Reed, is the first new, permanent library to open in the Multnomah County Library network in more than a decade. At 21,000 square feet, it’s one of the largest.

With an emphasis on accessibility and inclusion, Multnomah County Library commissioned Mayer/Reed to design wayfinding with five languages and unique icons to invite visitors to explore the collections, programs and services. The driver for this work — the “we speak your language” approach — is a milestone change in how the library communicates with patrons. Multnomah County is the first library system in the nation to commit to this level of multilingual signage.

The comprehensive rollout across the entire library network is funded by a 2020 voter-approved bond. By the Spring of 2026, Multnomah County will see the new signage system in major renovations/replacements of seven branch locations, refreshes at other locations and a large, new East County Library (around 95,000 square feet).