Michael Mehaffy
Coordinator, ESRG
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Michael Mehaffy (born in Beaumont, Texas) is an urbanist and critical thinker in complexity and the built environment. He is a practicing planner and is known for his many projects as well as his writings. He has been a close associate of the architect and software pioneer Christopher Alexander. Mehaffy launched the Environmental Structure Research Group ESRG in 2006 in part to implement Alexander's ideas on the symbiosis of Science and Design.
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Education
Mehaffy's education reflects his wide inter-disciplinary interests. He studied 20th century music, design and the arts at California Institute of the Arts. He studied physics, anthropology and liberal arts in the Plan II Interdisciplinary Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin. He studied architecture and liberal arts at The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington, where he received a BA in 1978. He did graduate work at the University of Texas at Austin and at the University of California at Berkeley, studying Architecture, Urban Planning, Philosophy, Business Management, and Public Affairs.
Career
Mehaffy is probably best known in planning for his role as development project manager for the Orenco Station project, an ambitious $200 million, mixed use residential and commercial transit-oriented development with 1800 homes and 500,000 square feet of retail and office. The project received numerous national awards and extensive media attention. He has also served as project manager or consultant on other major mixed-use communities including Harbor Peak in Brookings, Oregon; the Fairview redevelopment project in Salem, Oregon; Cherry Park, a transit-oriented development in Hillsboro, Oregon; and others.
During 2003-2005 Mehaffy was Director of Education of The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment in London. There, he oversaw the creation of a highly-regarded new graduate and professional education programme, in partnership with leading agencies and institutions in the UK, including the Royal Institute of British Architects RIBA, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, English Partnerships, and a number of academic and research institutions. Under his direction, the Foundation hosted conferences and master classes with international leaders in these topics.
Since the devastation of the Southeastern States following hurricane Katrina, Mehaffy has been working closely with Andres Duany and others in planning reconstruction. Needless to say, he has fought for a reconstruction that preserves and recaptures the most human qualities of the built environment, as they existed before the disaster. Duany and Mehaffy has been vocal about the necessity of rebuilding so as to continue the socio-cultural richness of the region during its centuries of history.
Mehaffy is currently Acting Chair of the USA chapter of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU), a patronage of HRH The Prince of Wales. He is a research associate and former Managing Director of the Centre for Environmental Structure -- Europe, Christopher Alexander's UK-based research center. He is Secretary of Katarxis Urban Workshops, a Luxembourg non-profit consultancy. He is also a partner in the European School of Architecture and Urbanism, an EU-funded pilot program.
Mehaffy operates a planning and development consultancy, Structura Naturalis Inc., from his office in Portland, Oregon.
Ideas
In architecture, Mehaffy has collaborated with Nikos Salingaros and others to develop a theory of "connectivism" (or connective systems) in environmental design. In philosophy, Mehaffy has developed an updated theory of structuralism, informed by the insights of complexity and information theory, called "symmetric structuralism". In economics, Mehaffy has made contributions to an approach called "culturalism", in which trading mechanisms are developed to represent cultural values (including those that interact with unknown future events) within the economic system.
Katarxis No. 3
In 2004, the online magazine Katarxis [1] published a major issue on science and architecture. It featured interviews with Christopher Alexander, Andres Duany, and three distinguished scientists: Philip Ball, Brian Goodwin, and Ian Stewart. Michael Mehaffy was one of four co-editors (along with Brian Hanson, Nikos Salingaros, and Senior Editor Lucien Steil), and was instrumental in getting it online in final form. This was the first presentation of Christopher Alexander's most recent work, because Alexander had kept an almost twenty-year silence about what he was building while working on his monumental book The Nature of Order. It has been said that Katarxis 3 therefore heralded a new basis for understanding the built environment and its generative processes.
Awards
Arthur Ross Award for Community Design (2006); Livable Communities Transit Design Award (2002); Ahwahnee Award (2000); Austin Heritage Society Award (1986); and others.
Selected Publications
- The New Modernity: The Architecture of Complexity and The Technology of Life
- Codes and the Architecture of Life
- The End of the Modern World
- Notes on the genesis of wholes: Christopher Alexander and his continuing influence
- Notes Toward an Updated Critical Theory of Modernism
- Meaning and the Structure of Things (Philosophy of structuralism)
- Making TODs Work: Case Study of Orenco Station, Oregon
AboutUs Pages
External Links
- INTBAU College of Traditional Practitioners
- Tectics, blog and website of Structura Naturalis Inc. (Mehaffy's consultancy)