Portland State University architecture student William Chandler has won the 2017 Hatfield Architectural Award. Chandler, now in his third year pursuing a master’s degree, was honored at a luncheon last week.

“He demonstrated a deep understanding of community service through design,” said Jane Jarrett, executive director of the Architecture Foundation of Oregon, which sponsors the scholarship. “The committee found Willy’s portfolio to show a higher level of design than other applicants’.”

The award came with a $2,000 scholarship. Chandler will be able to use the money to cover education-related expenses such as tuition or loan repayment – even travel to supplement studio learning, Jarrett said.

Chandler, a Vermont native, has already been involved in projects as far away as Haiti. But he was drawn west “by a desire to ski,” he said. After receiving a degree in horticulture, with an emphasis on landscape design, from Montana State University, Chandler took a year off. Then he chose to continue his education at PSU.

“During my year off after my undergrad studies, I didn’t find the intellectual challenge I wanted,” he said. “Coming to PSU, I was given that intellectual challenge.”

The projects being tackled by the Center for Public Interest Design helped convince Chandler to enroll in PSU’s School of Architecture, he said.

“The center has worked with the Rosewood Initiative,” he said. “They do a lot of work with children and underserved populations.”

The Rosewood Initiative, a nonprofit, works to improve the lives of residents in the Rosewood area around Southeast 162nd and Burnside streets.

“I have also been able to work with the Right 2 Root program,” Chandler said. “That looked at helping the African-American population in the Albina neighborhood that have been displaced by gentrification.”

Chandler was a member of a team that entered the Portland sleeping pod design contest; it sought designs for dwellings able to serve homeless individuals. He also worked on a project to help the Northern Cheyenne Tribe reduce wildfire risk at its reservation in Montana, and traveled to Haiti to design steel play structures for children.

Of all of Chandler’s efforts, the most memorable one for him was the Opera a la Cart project. The idea was to build a traveling stage that would operate like a food cart but provide opera instead of food.

“It is like opera du jour,” he said. “In terms of my responsibility, the Opera a la Cart project was the biggest.”

The Hatfield Architectural Award honors the late Mark O. Hatfield, a longtime Oregon politician who died in 2011. He received the AFO‘s Honored Citizen Award in 1998.

AFO’s goal is to honor Oregon architecture students who combine design promise with community service. While the scholarship was given annually, the luncheon was suspended when Hatfield became ill in 2005 … until this year.

“When (Hatfield) became ill, and later passed away, we did not feel we had a (sufficiently attractive) program to continue the luncheon,” Jarrett said. “Now, with so many of our past scholars doing such great work in the Northwest and around the world, we felt it was time to bring the luncheon back.”

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