The House that Phil Knight Built

“No food, no drinks, no beavers,” reads a sign just inside the door of the auditorium at the University of Oregon’s John E. Jaqua Academic Center for Student Athletes, in Eugene. And in case the rivalry with Oregon State University, just an hour up the road in Corvallis, isn’t clear, the elevator takes up the theme: “Capacity: 3000 pounds, or one Beavers fan.”

It’s a jaunty attitude for an academic building, but it’s only one reason why the Jaqua Center isn’t just another academic building. It’s a perilously shiny — and controversial, given the university’s recent budget cuts — piece of new construction that boldly juts out of a corner of campus. Soothing any potential fiscal ire, however, is the fact that it’s been almost single-handedly financed by the Portland-born University of Oregon alum Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike and a big home-state supporter. (Without his company’s Beaverton campus, which holds 7,000 employees, it’s doubtful that Portland would be able to support as many expensive restaurants as it does.) And this is Eugene, “the anarchist capital of the United States,” as described by its mayor in 1999; and neighbor to the improbable Oregon Vortex, a tourist attraction billing itself as “an area of naturally occurring visual and perceptual phenomena” including disturbances to the laws of perspective, posture, and magnetism. In other words, things here can get a little weird.

But college towns tend to be only as strange as their gowns, and Eugene is no different. The University of Oregon is where the architectural theorist Christopher Alexander came up with the book The Oregon Experiment, which detailed an intuitive planning process furthered in his insanely successful A Pattern Language, a prescriptive architectural manifesto using “feeling” as a primary design criteria and pattern recognition as a problem solver.

It is also where the famous Oregon Ducks play. “When the football team wanders out onto the field with eight different uniform changes, that’s Eugene!” says Eugene Sandoval, of the Portland-based firm Zimmer Gunsul Frasca, lead architects of the project. Fun fact: the name confluence isn’t a coincidence but rather the result of a Filipino father who studied at the University of Oregon and loved the town’s name so much he gave it to his son. Had Eugene (the architect) been a little more interested in schoolwork in Manila, his father might not have sent him to Eugene (the town) to learn to study. But he wasn’t, and he did. And so, today the architect Eugene walks through the building he built for not only his namesake town but also his alma mater.

It’s a worn trope that student-athletes are often less academically inclined than their less athletic peers. Colleges across the nation, from state schools to the Ivy League, have their lacrosse teams, basketball players, students who can run really fast but might have a harder time with math. Often, though, teachers turn a blind eye, thinking instead of the perceived value of a winning streak. In other words, if you’re a “laxer” — a lacrosse player who lives and dies by the game — so is the school. It’s great for four years, but what doesn’t seem to be thought of all that often is that once the athletes get out into the real world, they won’t be intellectually coddled out of respect for their curveball. Sandoval, a former swimmer, has been thinking about that.

“The building is a platform to make student-athletes succeed in life past the University of Oregon,” Sandoval says. His coarchitect on the project, a fiercely well-put-together designer named Randy Stegmeier, concurs. “This isn’t about sports,” he says. “This is about life.” As they talk, they stand below a photomural of student-athletes. Each snapshot is taken over the course of a year and melded together to create an abstract portrait of Albert Einstein. It’s similar to what Rem Koolhaas did with Mies at the McCormick Tribune Campus Center, at Chicago’s IIT, but hipper, more casual, lower-slung. (Remember, this is Oregon.)

That said, the mural may be the only thing about the building that is casual and low-slung. From an exterior that glistens like a shining jewel box (particularly in the steady Oregon rain) and that seems to grow out of a flat pond often detailed with real ducks to the offices, which alone would be enough to make professors — tenured, publishing professors — in any of the other buildings, anywhere on campus — throw out their publication record and vie for the chance to talk student-athletes through their calculus homework, the Jaqua Center is a study in very good architecture, from program to site to detail.

“Sports are still treated like a gladiatorial event,” Sandoval says. “There’s not really any story of the way to get there and the way to succeed in life.” The existing student-athlete study center wasn’t going to get anyone anywhere. “It was in shambles,” Stegmeier says. “Students were in hallways trying to study.”

For the students, the Jaqua Center provides a chance for them to connect with the school, in some cases for the first time. For the university, it is a chance to protect its most successful student-athletes. The flip side of being a great athlete is that you’re not the only one who knows it. Sandoval runs through the list of concerns: outside sports agents, overenthusiastic fans, donors who “will go in and try and have a casual conversation” that somehow sounds nothing but menacing, and the boyfriends and girlfriends who just find it easier to do the athletes’ homework for them.