UArizona Distinguished Professor Mary Hardin Wins ACSA Design-Build Award for Stadium Rowhouses
Mary Hardin (right) works with students on the interior of a South Stadium Rowhouse design-build project. Photo courtesy University Communications.
Mary Hardin
University Distinguished Professor of Architecture Mary Hardin has been awarded an ACSA 2023 Design-Build Award for Stadium Rowhouses: Macro to Micro. One of just four national Design-Build Award recipients, Hardin leads hands-on design-build projects with undergraduate and graduate architecture students at the University of Arizona’s College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture.
The Design-Build Award is one of several esteemed honors presented by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), which selects projects for its Architectural Education Awards each year that honor architectural educators for exemplary work in building design, community collaboration, scholarship and service.
“This award reflects the outstanding work of the architecture students at CAPLA who designed and built four South Stadium Rowhouse units over several years—including during the pandemic,” Hardin says. “I’m delighted and honored to accept this award on their behalf.”
South Stadium Rowhouse 1. Photo courtesy Mary Hardin.
In 2014, Hardin proposed to the university and the local neighborhood association that students design and construct a row of small houses to mitigate views of the parking garage, transition the street edge back to a residential scale and help stabilize the residential boundary.
A 2015 studio produced and presented multiple master plan proposals to joint meetings of the neighborhood association and the university’s planning committee. With unanimous support from the stakeholders, the South Stadium Rowhouses then became an official university project.
Master plan proposals were handed off to new generations of students, who designed the individual housing units, produced construction drawings and built the rowhouses. Depending upon their year in School of Architecture degree programs, students could be involved in one, two or three semesters of the sequence. They might, for example, design and draw construction documents, then build for one semester. Or they might come in during building semesters and inherit many design decisions already in place. Deeper and more focused design projects each semester gave each generation of students the opportunity for full engagement and authorship of the projects as they were realized.
CAPLA architecture students work on the South Stadium Rowhouse design-build site. Photo courtesy Mary Hardin.
“The award-winning professors inspire and challenge students, contribute to the profession’s knowledge base and extend their work beyond the borders of academia into practice and the public sector,” notes the ACSA in presenting this year’s awards.
“I know I speak on behalf of the college, university and Tucson community when I say how impressive and inspiring the design-build projects undertaken by Professor Hardin and her students are,” says CAPLA Dean Nancy Pollock-Ellwand. “The South Stadium Rowhouses project is just the latest example of Professor Hardin’s excellent teaching and community involvement. Tucson is a more sustainable city because of the design-build projects she and her students have created. I am grateful for her leadership.”
View more information about the South Stadium Rowhouses.
Learn more about CAPLA Design/Build, or explore how you can support design-build projects, faculty and students.
