Beautified Brutality: Mapping Eugene’s Hostile Design

Over the past few decades, scholars and educators have challenged the traditional focus of architectural history on styles and formal features, placing more emphasis on user experience. This experience, however, is not common to all. Each sector of society understands, inhabits, and utilizes architecture differently, leading to divergent ways of performing one's identity within the city. For example, unhoused people are often excluded from full participation in public life. This commentary shares an experiment that complements an architectural history course with a set of assignments where students engage with sociopolitical aspects of the built environment through mapping and analyzing anti-homeless, hostile design in Eugene, Oregon.