Universal Plaza

Tigard’s long-awaited downtown plaza! 
Planned to open in 2022, Universal Plaza will be a place for everyone—a community gathering spot in the heart of downtown Tigard that celebrates our shared humanity and our one shared planet. The Plaza design process will start later this year, and we’d love your participation now, through this website, or later, when we form a large committee to help guide the design process.

This summer, we were expecting to fill the site with people for ArtWalk, Taste of Tigard and Latino Fest events. Coronavirus 2020 cancelled all those plans. 

But that hasn’t stopped our activation phase. We simply moved it online. We've started imagining many beautiful things that can happen here—and planning for a few of them. If you’re excited about Universal Plaza and want to help co-create it, this website is exactly where you need to be.

Participate, Activate, Engage!
This summer, we’re embarking on a placemaking program filled with creativity and experimentation. We invite you to join with us and to participate in the calls for art and online activities, and to stay tuned for more playful art that will pop up as the year progresses.

One day, Tigard’s Universal Plaza will be a cherished public space, with areas for everyone to gather, play, and make memories. While we wait for that day, the site can still help us engage our imaginations about public life and public space. Art can happen here, originating both from our local community and well beyond. Through light and sculpture installations, a large site-specific mural on the ground, and performances—all viewable online—we hope to draw the Tigard community to the project, to ideas and expressions of universality.


It's All About the Art

• Musical Benches

  Thanks to capital support approved by Washington County Commissioners, TVC will be commissioning four new artworks in what is being called Musical Benches Public Art Collection. The benches will be strategically placed in order to highlight the qualities of particular communities, enhance existing events, and/or to bring foot traffic to under-utilized areas. Our very own Universal Plaza will be a site for one of the benches! Stay tuned to see how this interactive art exhibition develops.

• Raziah Roushan
  Raziah Roushan is a Tualatin Valley area artist and will be creating a large-scale, temporary ground mural for the Universal Plaza for all to enjoy. Raziah Roushan has been making a mark on the American public as a professional artist and arts advocate. For two decades, Roushan has been working as a professional artist in mediums such as oil, acrylic, charcoal, pastel, aerosol, printmaking, as well as murals and large-scale chalk art.
  
  She blends traditional methods with contemporary styles such as graffiti, text and stencil. Through constant juxtapositions of imagery, Roushan develops stories on the canvas by which viewers are invited to engage into conversation and debate. Her portfolio includes over 50 exhibitions, over 20 large-scale murals, and performance at over 47 chalk festivals.  Learn more here...