LOOK UP! Winter Light Festival

Resilient Growth @ Portland Winter Light Festival - Feb 4-12, 2022 between 6-10pm

When Portland weather is cold and drizzly, the Portland Winter Light Festival draws crowds into celebrating our collective creativity. This annual event was catalyzed by a symposium on night lighting at Portland State University organized by Professor Jeff Schnabel with support from a Van Evera Bailey Fellowship from the Architecture Foundation of Oregon. While I wanted to bring vitality of light and color to the beleaguered streetscape of OldTown, instead we were steered to the upper windows.

This team project was inspired by Nature's resilience in the face of human-created challenges and began with student responses. Student Aaron Milgrim explained, "The opportunity to work on the Portland Light Festival project with Professor Cheng has allowed me to explore one of the main reasons I chose to study architecture: cross-disciplinary study. The project epitomized the idea of many disparate fields and ideas working together to form a cohesive whole."

LEARN MORE about how the seeds of student ideas generated a series of material experiments, that were then turned into a large scale project with professional help.