STUDENT PROJECTS & AWARDS
Students create a wide variety of outstanding and often award-winning work during their time at CAPLA.
Check out a gallery of select student work or scroll down to view more detailed examples of student projects and work from undergraduate and graduate architecture, landscape architecture, sustainable built environments, urban planning and other students:
Narratives and Galleries
CAPLA Teams Take First Place & Runner-Up in National Affordable Housing Competition
Two teams from CAPLA earned national recognition, taking first place and runner-up in the Design & Construction category of the 2026 Hack-a-House Competition. The national competition challenges students to develop innovative solutions to solve the affordable housing crisis.
CAPLA’s Reef Townsend earns national recognition for sustainable desert architecture
CAPLA Student Reef Townsend earned national recognition for Arid Futures Pavilion, a design that explores how contemporary architecture can respond to the Sonoran Desert through thoughtful site integration, material choices and sustainability.
CAPLA’s Ella Parsons earns national recognition for reimagining traditional desert architecture
CAPLA Student Ella Parsons earned national recognition for Aguán, a project that looks to the Sonoran Desert’s longstanding building traditions to inform a sustainable relationship between architecture and the natural world.
CAPLA students share Indigenous perspectives in Archtober presentation
“ISAPD in Our Hands: Student Chapters Shaping the Future” explored how student chapters of the Indigenous Society of Architecture, Planning, and Design (ISAPD) can foster learning, cultural engagement, advocacy and professional growth within universities and their communities.
CAPLA Students Collaborate with Community Gardens of Tucson
Last spring, CAPLA students partnered with Community Gardens of Tucson to explore new possibilities for the Mary Meredith Community Garden. Led by Architecture Lecturer Chris Tucker, students in the BA.DAP program’s Spatial Design Studio developed design proposals for the garden’s school-side grounds, considering how the space could support children’s outdoor experiences and the surrounding ecosystem.
Finding a Sense of Place: Javi Barcelo’s City Immersion Scholarship Journey to Mexico City
For Javi Barcelo, B.Arch ’27, architecture is deeply connected to place, culture and community. His City Immersion Scholarship gave him the opportunity to explore those connections firsthand in Mexico City, an experience that ultimately helped shape the direction of his capstone project.
CAPLA Design/Build
CAPLA Design/Build involves students in hands-on projects via studio courses, independent study and other courses with lab components. The pedagogy of design/build centers around the belief that learning by doing is a powerful method of gaining and retaining knowledge because of the immediate application to tangible problems.