News and Announcements

The Association for Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) has awarded Drachman Institute Director and Associate Professor Courtney Crosson with a Practice + Leadership Honorable Mention for the Relocalize Our Food project.

The College of Architecture, Planning & Landscape Architecture’s Senior Lecturer in Architecture Laura Carr was part of the team that received a $200,000 grant for the Native People’s Design Coalition from the Office of the Provost.

The University of Arizona Drachman Institute will help establish a new center to address the interconnected issues of housing security, climate and health with a focus on Hispanic and underserved communities in the arid Southwest. A $3 million Hispanic Serving Institutions Research Center of Excellence grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development will establish the Arizona Research Center for Housing Equity and Sustainability, or ARCHES. The new center will be a partnership among 19 researchers at Arizona State University, UArizona, Northern Arizona University and the University of New Mexico.

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.

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.

Assistant Professor of Architecture Courtney Crosson has been appointed director of the University of Arizona’s Drachman Institute by CAPLA Dean Nancy Pollock-Ellwand. Crosson's introduction was combined with a project showcase on April 13 in a "relaunch" of this important, community-focused institute.

“Winners of the 2nd Annual Universal Design Awards reveal how the next generation of designers are rethinking accessible architecture,” says Architizer in a March 2022 article that highlights work produced by third-year B Arch students in a studio sponsored by Ascension Wheelchair Lifts.

Ladd Keith, CAPLA assistant professor of planning and sustainable built environments, was quoted in a February 17, 2022 KOLD-TV story on Tucson’s goals to become carbon neutral by 2030. “We need to make sure the most vulnerable in our community are taken care of when we address climate change.”

Assistant Architecture Professor Courtney Crosson is working with CAPLA students to design solutions for a more sustainable Tucson by 2050, thanks to sponsorship and advising by GLHN Architects & Engineers. In the Fall of 2021, students partnered with five community organizations to design sustainable urban food systems.