What’s New?

• Submit Your Haiku to Our Poem Contest
  We invite you to join us in sharing what universality means to you by submitting haiku poems that reflect your experience here in Tigard. A rotating selection of these poems will be displayed in lights at the site of the future Universal Plaza. The poems could reflect how you’re feeling right now or the dreams you hold for the future; let your imagination take flight. Submit here! 
   
• Become a Design Advisor!
  We've started imagining many beautiful things that can happen here — and planning for a few of them! Over the next six months, three Design Advisories will be held where community members, like yourself, can engage with the design team and help create Universal Plaza. Your ongoing engagement can help us design the best possible plaza for all of Tigard. Sign-up to become a Design Advisor!

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 Bench by Artist Jill Torberson

• Thanks to capital support approved by Washington County Commissioners, TVC has commissioned four new artworks in the Musical Benches Public Art Collection.
  
  Universal Plaza will host a piece by Portland-based artist Jill Torberson. This temporary bench installation will engage visitors by encouraging them to make their own music or take a seat. 
  
  Jill Torberson, of Weld Metal Works, specializes in metal and steelwork and has created site-specific and historically relevant artworks on both large and small scales. Learn more.

Apple Box Seating by Asami Morita
Asami Morita will be fabricating a set of playful seating options to be temporarily installed at Universal Plaza. These moveable pieces will allow visitors to place the seats in locations where they can enjoy the plaza while remaining safe and socially distant during the pandemic.

The benches are inspired by Apple Boxes — wooden boxes used by event and film crews to stack and prop up various pieces of equipment. Asami Morita is a model maker and fabricator.

Born in Tokyo, Japan, and raised in Victoria, British Columbia, she received her BFA in Experimental Animation from California Institute of the Arts. Learn more.

Large Scale Ground Mural 
Tigard’s upcoming Universal Plaza now features a temporary brightly colored, 34,000 square foot ground mural. Local muralists Susan Charnquist, Liam McLaughlin and Emily Lux, all led by Raziah Roushan have created a fun, bright, and jaw-dropping ground mural that is already drawing attention from the Plaza’s business neighbors and downtown visitors. Roushan remarked, “The concept is smart. It showcases the largeness of the repurposed property by utilizing long straight lines and asymmetry. Then the blue dots and negative spaces encourage visitors to create their own intimate “stopping” points as they’ll enjoy the Plaza in coming weeks.”

Visit http://dwpwebcams.com/universalplaza/ to see Tigard’s Universal Plaza live feed camera. Rewind to see the ground mural in action.

Behind the Fence
What's happening at the future Universal Plaza site right now? Watch the live feed!

Or check out the timelapse video captured from the onsite camera.