Matthew Claudel
I’m Matthew Claudel, a designer and urbanist living in Portland, Oregon. I work on how cities, buildings, and institutions learn.
Cities are caught between a slow past and a fast future
The institutions that develop and govern cities were built for a slower world – one where the future looked like the past and prediction worked. The pace of change is accelerating, and institutions are straining under the pressure.
Adaptive Urbanism is a shift from prediction to learning. When the future is fundamentally unknowable, the only approach is to adapt to conditions as they arise. A learning approach raises hard questions:
What can a building become, and what is the value of optionality?
How can institutions sense the weak signals of change and respond to them?
How does the built environment respond to the activity within it?
I’ve spent my career on questions like these. If they’re interesting to you, please get in touch. I love to be challenged, and I love to collaborate.
- PracticeStrategy and design for buildings and districts, from the T2 Mass Timber Hub to Production Potential at the Venice Biennale
- ResearchHow Cities Learn: Urban Experimentation for Creating and Governing Technology, proximity and collaboration at MIT, and the full research record
- Writing & SpeakingOpen Source Architecture, Field Discovery, and talks on Adaptive Urbanism
The practice
Field States
In 2021 I founded Field States, an urban design and real estate strategy firm, to put these questions to work. We help owners, developers, institutions, and cities find and realize the latent value in buildings and districts.