Blog Archives

A conceptualization and design study completed by NewSchool students for the Mayor’s Airport Ad Hoc Committee considered expansion scenarios at Lindbergh Field in San Diego. The proposal won an Orchid award in 2009 in the annual city-wide Orchids & Onions public design competition.

The NewSchool architecture studio created the Gateway San Diego project to illustrate how Lindbergh Field could be integrated with local and regional transportation systems in a sustainable manner. At the request of the Destination Lindbergh Committee and the San Diego Regional Airport Authority, the student team, led by James Frost, AIA-E, produced a long-term development concept located on the north side of the airport.

The project was presented to the Destination Lindbergh Committee and the Airport Authority Board of Directors and was commended for its innovative approach and solution to a critical regional issue.

Student Design Team: Dustan Bagliere, Yousef Eshmawi, Rae Kim, Joel Smith, Giovanni Torres, and Scott Young.

The Yantalo World Health Center was one of the longest-running projects for the NewSchool’s office practice studio class. Over the past ten years, more than 100 NewSchool students have helped design community buildings for the village of Yantalo, Peru including a hospital recognized by the United Nations World Health Center.

The health clinic, located in the remote part of Peru, was designed by NewSchool of Architecture & Design students through a collaboration with the Yantalo Community Foundation and NewSchool faculty. The 16-bed Yantalo Clinic & Diagnostic Center in the community of Yantalo is billed as the first “green” clinic in Peru, powered by solar power and smart water use to decrease environmental impact to the region and lower operating costs.

With population growth, food production in the United States is reaching maximum capacity. Current trends in development create a struggle between farming and living. These two practices are modeled for their own benefit and are soon to clash in a disastrous agglomeration. The 30,000 plus residents of San Diego’s central urban context consume 21,231,000 pounds of produce each year. A new type of residential tower needs to come forth. Utilizing vertical farming, a new model of urban living can be tested in a dense community.

The residential farm tower located in a vertical community of tourist resources and developer condominiums will provide fresh produce daily to celebrate a direct injection of local goods from farm to market. It proposes a new level of social interface and engagement of the community. Let’s live, share, and grow within our city.

This project was published in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

In April 2015, Nepal suffered a devastating earthquake that killed nearly 9,000 people, injuring 22,000 people and damaged or destroyed nearly 800,000 homes, with entire villages being swept away.

NewSchool architecture faculty member Joseph Kennedy, who specializes in sustainable building, ecological design, and community development, wanted to help and recognized an important opportunity to collaborate with his students to help aid this humanitarian crisis. With an eye on creating a positive social impact, Joseph encourages his students to design for the 99% of the world’s population and to seek out projects not just locally but globally. He recognized that rebuilding all 800,000 homes was too great a task and that the locals needed proper education that would teach affordable and durable building practices that could then be implemented in Nepal, by the locals.

In the Fall of 2016, 60 fourth-year undergraduate architecture students in NewSchool’s Integrated Design Studio class teamed up with the City of Portland, integrated design firm Mackenzie Inc., and real estate company Intrinsic Ventures on a project to revitalize a rapidly growing neighborhood in the Central Eastside industrial district of Portland, Oregon.

Click here to learn more about the Ford District Project.

NewSchool’s undergraduate architecture students built a pavilion for the STEAMConnect’s annual conference focusing on lectures, debates, and workshops revolving around the links between Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics. The STEAM Pavilion idea originated from the necessity to accommodate the activities that take place at the annual conferences of STEAMConnect. These activities involve talking, sitting, eating and, above all, meeting. We found that Architecture is a clear combination of Science, Technology, Engineering, Math and Art, so addressing the necessities of the STEAMConnect annual reception would be the perfect example of STEM + Art disciplines coming together, blending creativity, design, and technical skills.

Graduate architecture student work by Caitlin Smith, Ryan Fleetwood, and John Lombardi.

San Diego’s Regional Planning Agency (SANDAG) projects that the San Diego region will grow by 1,000,000 people over the next 20 -30 years and to accommodate this increase in population we will need 330,000 housing units and space for 500,000 new jobs. Most of the new housing will be in the form of multi-family housing. The new growth cannot continue to grow outward so most of this additional growth will be infill and redevelopment in currently developed areas. Mission Valley is an area that can begin to accommodate some of this additional growth. In Mission Valley, there are underdeveloped and underutilized parcels and vast areas of surface parking lots. But there are major traffic problems caused by isolated POD developments, too few through streets, and poor transit service. Movement by pedestrians is either dangerous or impossible because of the development patterns.

Interior Architecture & Design students were challenged with the design of a new typology of workspace: a co-working space in downtown San Diego. With the help of Marianne Berg and Valentina Bertolizio and the direct involvement of Co-Merge as the potential client of the project, the students researched the new typology and designed diverse identities for the space.

Megan Powers designed a co-working space as a new office archetype with the purpose of cultivating innovation. The non-traditional office introduces social spaces to encourage serendipitous interactions.

Megan Eastman took inspiration from the hospitality industry when designing the workspace.