All Studio Stories

CAPLA's School of Architecture has partnered with the School of Art and School of Information to offer a new, transdisciplinary undergraduate degree: the Bachelor of Arts in Design Arts and Practices. CAPLA coordinates two of the degree's four emphasis areas: Object Design and Spatial Design.

Recent Master of Landscape Architecture student Irene Pineda has won first place in the graduate/professional student category of the UArizona 2022 Data Visualization Challenge for her map Plant Trees in Pomona for a Sustainable Future. Her map identifies where trees should be planted to provide more shading in the rapidly industrializing Southern California city.

Professor Jonathan Bean and the Solar Decathlon Design Challenge Multifamily Building team of fourth-year B.Arch students Andrew Norris, Jonah Cummins-Mikkalson, Alex Kolodziej and Nhan Vo not only took first place in their division, but also was selected as the 2022 Design Challenge Grand Winner for Commercial Divisions—a first for CAPLA and UArizona.

BS in Sustainable Built Environments student Shamara Smith came to UArizona from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In this video profile, she discusses how she became interested in sustainability, her passions for leaving the world better than she found it, why community engagement is important and the value of networking in building a new career.

Thanks to research by CAPLA's Heritage Conservation Project Director Helen Erickson and graduate students Sarah McDowell and Teresa DeKoker, the Buffalo Soldier military establishment Camp Naco in Southeastern Arizona has been listed by the U.S. National Trust for Historic Preservation's as one of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places for 2022.

The new U.S. embassy and consulate built in 1983 in Lisbon, Portugal was a high-security office building for the ambassador, political, military and economic departments, as well as other, more secretive functions. The site was a pastoral 12-acre location of a historic 17th-century former monastery and estate on the outskirts of the city.

Rowhouses created as part of CAPLA design-build studios led by architecture professors Mary Hardin and Eric D. Weber, and designed and built by architecture students, were featured on KVOA News 4, an NBC affiliate in Tucson, on April 29, 2022.

In the Biden administration’s new infrastructure law, funding is available to states and communities that UArizona Assistant Professor of Architecture and Sustainable Built Environments Jonathan Bean says can be used to help fight climate change. Learn how and listen to the full interview.

MS Urban Planning student Christina Scarpitti made her way to Tucson in the midst of the pandemic. Although her time here came with a few trials, she looks back and reflects on the positive experience CAPLA and the School of Landscape Architecture and Planning have provided her as she enters the job field.