Student Project Awards

Abstract:

Located in the San Rafael Valley near the U.S.-Mexico border at Lochiel Arizona, the historic Lochiel Schoolhouse stands as one of the few remaining one-room adobe schoolhouses in the United States. Built before 1905, the schoolhouse served generations of Mexican American students from Arizona and Sonora, cultivating shared cultural experiences, stories, and friendships that transcended physical and political boundaries. After facing threats of abandonment and demolition, the schoolhouse was restored over a 12-year effort by community members and stands today as a symbol of Mexican American cultural heritage and is a living archive of the border town’s rural educational history.

‘Escuelita Lochiel’ seeks to reimagine and preserve the historical site as a sanctuary for early learning where architecture, landscape, and ecology converge to empower youth. The site’s desert landscape is encapsulated by the modulated and growing adobe architecture that grows alongside educational and climate needs. The primary school energizes its students through bilingual education, playful gardens and adventure-led exploration. Inspiring children’s curiosities to feel connected in the historical site’s knowledge as it rewards them with a deep sense of belonging and place.

This thesis reimagines learning spaces through adobe architecture and landscape to nurture cultural resilience and ecological awareness in youth’s early learning in response to current educational and climate challenges.

Abstract:

Contemporary cities are shaped by density, speed, and constant stimulation. While these conditions activate collective life, they also exclude those who experience space differently. For many people with Autism Spectrum Disorder, the city becomes an over-stimulating environment structured around spatial and sensory barriers that limit participation.

ParkTEA emerges as an architectural response to this condition. Unlike conventional autism care infrastructures, typically displaced to the urban periphery, the project is located in the center of Madrid, on the former Cuatro Caminos depots. Embedded in a dense public transport network and surrounded by a socially, culturally, and economically active neighborhood, the site becomes a place of opportunity to construct coexistence.

Conceived as an open urban infrastructure rather than a closed facility, ParkTEA proposes a hybrid program organized into five architecturally distinct pieces. Each combines a space dedicated to autism care—education, day centers, occupational programs, or supported housing—with a public use linked to the neighborhood. Through clear formal identities, sensory regulation, and differentiated implantation, the architecture enables autonomous navigation, shared routines, and controlled interaction.

By embedding care within everyday urban life, ParkTEA reframes inclusion as a spatial practice that allows difference to remain visible, active, and legitimate within the city.

Abstract:

Located in Olaroz Salt Flat in Jujuy, Argentina, the project addresses a landscape shared by lithium extraction and increasing environmental fragility. Rather than opposing industry, the proposal redefines existing infrastructures as catalysts for regeneration. Through a sequence of evaporative fields, soil remediation areas, and new agricultural plots, the territory evolves from a mono-extractive surface into a diversified productive ecosystem.

Four architectural devices, a saline treatment station, a climatic tower, an agro-productive exchange node, and a logistical habitable platform, organize flows of water, minerals, energy, crops, and people across the landscape. These structures operate not as isolated buildings but as open frameworks where technical processes and everyday life intersect.

Interior and exterior productive landscapes merge into continuous working environments that enable local communities to participate in collective forms of production while maintaining cultural and territorial ties. By redefining extractive landscapes as spaces of interaction and shared productivity, the project positions architecture as an instrument of transition, capable of transforming fragile salt territories into regenerative and socially active infrastructures.