Architecture Foundation of San Francisco - 2020 Design Ideas Collective

A+D Students and Awards

Clarissa Jocelyn, 11^th grade, Award for Exceptional Submission and Best in Class, $200

Kiara Taylor, 9^th grade, Award for Exceptional Submission, $100

Isaac Nystrom Rice, 10^th grade, Award for Exceptional Submission, $100

Eva Nusbaum-Faust, 10^th grade, Award for Exceptional Submission, $100

Emilia Burkhart, 9^th grade, Distinction Award for Environmental Context

The Architectural Foundation of San Francisco held a Design Ideas Collective Competition in November of 2020. This exciting opportunity challenged high school students to reflect critically about the world around us, and enabled participants to put their creativity, spatial and analytical thinking and design sensitivity to the test. Students were asked to conceptualize a design and communicate their solutions through a variety of drawings, models, and writing. Open to all high school students across the world, young thinkers were provided the chance to engage in what is a very unique learning project. Entries into the Collective were reviewed as a judged competition.

The main question put forth by the competition was this: How can we use architecture and design to analyze our current predicament and create solutions to better our collective standing moving forward?

Events of today will resonate into tomorrow and beyond. How we adapt to circumstances we're presented with can dictate how we experience life moving forward. For participation in this Design Ideas Collective, students were presented with four subject matters of our daily lives (art and culture, activism, learning environments, and slow streets) from which to consider how we may implement changes in our engagement and evolve for the better.

Five Architecture + Design students from Ruth Asawa SOTA entered this competition under the guidance and instruction of A+D Director, Tara Siegel. Three of them responded to the challenge to design an outdoors Art and Culture Event Space at a site in Fort Mason, and two students responded to the challenge to design outdoor Learning Environments in response to the pandemic. Four Asawa SOTA A+D students received the highest awards in the competition, and one received a design distinction award. These five students participated in this competition as an optional project in addition to their regular A+D course work.