Profile

PhD (Architecture) University of California, Berkeley, 1989
MCP (City Planning) University of California, Berkeley, 1980
MArch University of California, Berkeley, 1979
Dipl. Ing. (Architecture  and Urban Design) Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, 1976

Registered Architect: Germany

The work of Associate Professor Hajo Neis examines the concepts of quality and value in architecture and urban structure. The director of the University’s architectural studies program in Portland, he teaches design studios, courses, and seminars in urban architecture and theory with an emphasis on the art of building.

Neis has practiced architecture and planning in Frankfurt, Tokyo, Berkeley, and Borken (Germany). His design and oversight of the Eishin Campus, completed with the Center for Environmental Structures in Japan, received honors from the Japan Institute for Architects, the Japanese Association of Architectural Journalism, and the Prefecture of Saitama, and served as the subject of a documentary film. His work has appeared in many publications including Nikkei Architecture, Architecture and Urbanism, Progressive Architecture, Baumeister, Kenchku Bunka, Shinkenchku, and the Journal of Urban Design,as well as Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order (Oxford University Press), Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing (D. Seamon, ed., State University of New York Press), and D. Kemmis’ The Good City and the Good Life: Renewing the Sense of Community (Houghton Mifflin). He has also collaborated with the Center for Environmental Structures on a new town in Venezuela and a mixed-use urban housing project in Frankfurt, and with Thomas Kaestner on numerous competition entries selected for publication.

Throughout his career, Neis has taken on small projects—an experimental office building with two apartments in Tokyo, stepped library furniture in Berkeley—that demonstrate theoretical ideas in physical detail. He collaborated with W. Rang on “More Ethics and Less Aesthetics,” selected as a finalist in the architecture competition and exhibition for the Venice Biennale 2000 and exhibited on the Biennale website. Most recently he collaborated on the design of a platform and stair, now under construction, that transform a water tower in Germany into a memorial.

Neis has authored articles in English, German, Japanese and Greek journals and co-authored A New Theory of Urban Design (Oxford University Press, 1987) and Schule des Sehens: Zum Wahrnehmen und Architektonichen Entwerfen (School of Seeing: Perception for Architectural Design, Fachhochschulverlag, 2000).

Prior to joining the UO faculty, Neis lectured throughout Germany and Japan and taught as an assistant professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, as a visiting professor at the Technical University of Dresden and the University of Applied Sciences (Fachhochschule) of Frankfurt, and as a tutor with the Prince of Wales Urban Design Task Force in Potsdam-Berlin and Beirut.