Associate Professor & Chair of the Baker Lighting Lab, University of Oregon
Student work by Sofia Gonzales, Alborz Nazari, Pashmin Patil, Audrey Foltz, and Jade Maas (2024)
In November of 2022, voters in the David Douglas School District approved a $140 million construction bond measure to make repairs, improvements, remodels and new construction to K-12 school facilities. Of the approved projects, $46 million will go towards the design and construction of a Future Careers Center at David Douglas High School. The Future careers center will offer state-of-the-art facilities to support Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs. A CTE curriculum emphasizes business, technical, and industry workplace skills to prepare students for future careers in agriculture, arts and information, business management, health sciences, human resources, and Industrial and engineering systems. When surveyed nationally, students enrolled in CTE courses are up to 30% more likely to graduate high school and after graduation, CTE concentrators are more likely to be employed, earn higher quarterly average wages, and pursue additional vocational training through 2 or 4-year colleges.
Our studio collaborated with BRIC Architecture, a Portland-based architecture firm that has been hired to design the Future Careers Center, which emphasizes career training for science, technology, and engineering careers of the future, and industrial arts careers for the present. Students spent the winter term researching the 2022 Bond Measure and designing a project scope that included the Future Careers Center and an additional opportunistic scope for retrofits to the existing high school and/or an expanded pre-K program. This first studio term culminated in the programing, site, and schematic design for the future center. In the winter term, students took a deep dive into the environmental and energy performance of their designs, utilizing cutting-edge software to design, evaluate, and optimize performance to align with the AIA COTE Top Ten Framework for Excellence. Students were encouraged to submit their projects for consideration in the 2024 AIA COTE Top Ten for Students Competition. Sofia Gonzales’ project was awarded a AIA COTE Top Ten Winner in the fall of 2024 (https://www.acsa-arch.org/2024-cote-top-ten-for-students-winners-announced/)!
siobhan rockcastle 