Gerald Gast
Associate Professor, Portland Architecture Program

Email: ggast@uoregon.edu

Visiting Associate Professor, Program on Urban Studies, Stanford University
M.Arch. Urban Design, University of Illinois.  B. Arch (H Hons), University of Illinois
Registered Architect: California

Associate Professor Gerald Gast teaches in the Portland Urban Architecture Program. His professional work, teaching and research emphasize the multi-discipline connections in urban design and architecture.  He is currently working on a publication of “Seminal Urban Design” projects in the western world.

Since founding Gast-Hillmer Urban Design, an urban design and architecture firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Professor Gast has developed a significant portfolio of projects for cities and counties in the western states. The firm completed the master plan for the San Diego County Administration Center - recognized as an outstanding planning project by a regional chapter of the American Planning Association.  Another project, “Uptown District” in San Diego, is an $ 80 million mixed-use residential-retail development with 313 new dwellings, a community center, and neighborhood shopping district in a high-density, pedestrian and transit-oriented urban setting.  Gast recently worked on design studies for a public square, MAX light rail station and south downtown redevelopment for the City of Milwaukie, Oregon.  He is currently urban design consultant for the General Plan of Redwood City, California, a diverse city of 100,000 adjacent to Palo Alto and the Stanford campus.  The firm’s projects have been recognized with awards from the American Planning Association and National League of Cities.

In his first international project, Professor Gast is leading a team designing the master plan for the new 10-acre Stryiskyi Park campus of the Ukrainian Catholic University (www.ucu.edu) in Lviv, Ukraine. The university, founded in 1915 and closed by the Soviets in 1945, reopened in 1992 following Ukrainian independence.  It is the first Catholic university on the lands of the former Soviet Union.  This project has been conducted with assistance from a team of graduate students from the UO Portland Program.

Professor Gast has developed research and design opportunities for graduate students with public agencies in the Portland region. A recent project funded by the Oregon Land Conservation and Development Commission developed the Master Plan for the Oregon Science and Technology Park, an ecological industrial park in the cities of Gresham, Fairview, Troutdale and Wood Village in the east metro area of Multnomah County.  The project lies along a four-mile stretch of the Columbia River adjacent to Interstate Highway 84 at the eastern edge of the Portland urban growth boundary.

In recent research, Professor Gast has focused on seminal urban regeneration projects in the Americas and Western Europe.  He has presented talks as an invited speaker at Stanford University, and at meetings of the California League of Cities, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, and regional chapters of the American Planning Association.

A member of the University of Oregon faculty since 1994, Professor Gast served as the first director of the Portland Architecture Program.  He currently serves as visiting associate professor in Stanford University’s Program on Urban Studies, where he teaches urban design.  Previously he was the director of the San Francisco Center for Architecture and Urban Studies and assistant professor of architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana and Miami University of Ohio.