UNLV ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL MAY BE NEXT THE STOP FOR HIGH SCHOOL COMPETITORS

Vegas Boulevard to keep Raiders fans around the stadium before, during and after the team’s home games.

The Southwest Tech team credited its project’s success in part to clear renderings and graphic design produced in Adobe Photoshop, a computer program team members learned on the fly while creating their project. Radiant came just one year after the now-senior trio said they tried, but failed, to submit an adequate project for last year’s High School Design Awards.

“It felt great to win this year,” Ossa said. “I think last year we were just feeling out the waters and seeing how the competition is.”

“They have worked so hard for this,” added Czar, the Southwest Tech architecture teacher. “They went above and beyond and really earned it.”

Northwest Career and Technical Academy junior Genesis Villar, 17, worked for one month on her project, but used afterschool hours and weekends to design 17 graphics for her parking facility. The extra time and hard work earned Villar $1,000 and the competition’s honor award — the highest individual prize of the evening.

Villar, who took architecture class as “something fun on the side,” said she aspired to be a computer engineer.

“There’s always the chance that something goes wrong with a project this big, but I thought everything came out really well,” she said. “I wasn’t sure at first if I would win, but this is an amazing feeling.”

Sisti, who works for the Las Vegas branch of San Francisco-based architecture firm Gensler, said the sheer challenge of this year’s project — compared with last year’s task of developing the land on the former site of the Riviera resort — resulted in fewer submitted entries than previous years. About 35 entries were submitted in 2018, down from as many as 200 at the awards show’s peak several years ago.

Mike Del Gatto, now a professional architect in Southern Nevada with Carpenter Sellers Del Gatto Architects, won an AIA High School Design award in 1992, and continues to mentor participants in the program.

Del Gatto, who graduated from Valley High School before studying at UNLV’S School of Architecture, said winning his award in high school was “instrumental” in fueling his passion for a career in architecture. The profession has allowed him to learn about different clients’ businesses and touch lives through designing and constructing buildings.

“The places where we eat, sleep, work and play have a big impact on our mood, how we interpret things and our quality of life,” Del Gatto said.

UNLV landscape architecture professor Danny Ortega said some of the competition participants would be future UNLV School of Architecture students and community leaders. He hopes the awards show was just the beginning of a successful road for many local architects to come.

“If it were up to us, we’d want all of these bright students to come here,” Ortega said. “I just hope we get to see more of them in the future.”