Cal Poly Pomona architecture student team Paraday Sarun, Mariana Uy and Matthew Rivera (all architecture ’19), won the Los Angeles Business Council 2019 Julius Shulman Emerging Talent Award, following their presentation to industry leaders. 

The three secured the top honor with "Meet me at the unit with the red teddy bear," their project for transitional housing for the homeless. The Julius Shulman Award was announced at the 49th Annual Los Angeles Architectural Awards on Friday, June 21 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Each student on the CPP ARC team received a $2,000 scholarship from W.E. O’Neill Construction.  

Each year the Los Angeles Business Council invites a team of designers from five of the best schools of architecture and design in Los Angeles County to tackle a design problem of regional concern. This year, the challenge was to design permanent supportive housing for homeless people prototype using modular construction that could be adapted to multiple sites. Their proposal needed to include both a 10,000-square-foot site and a 20,000-square-foot site.

Rivera, Sarun and Uy's winning design "was inspired by the idea that the identity of each individual as part of a collective community should be of worthy consideration," said Parady.

"Beyond a basic shelter, the personal belongings of homeless individuals are often overlooked as relevant elements of their lives," he said. "Such possessions exceed basic material needs for survival, maintaining significance as artifacts preserving one’s distinct identity…. We wanted to take into consideration that as humans, we all have certain things that we value most and that keep us rooted. With that as the basis of the prototyping model, this project proposes a storage/display system intended to be personalized by each inhabitant, giving expression to their own unique identities. As a whole, these individualized elements would together form a collective canvas for the building."

Professor George Proctor, chair of the Department of Architecture, described this year's team as "bright, thoughtful and diligent" with bright careers ahead of them. The trio immersed themselves in two weeks of intensive work before presenting their design and ideas to the jury and community leaders. Their design incorporated a display wall for personal effects for each housing unit, organizing attention to the resident(s) in a structure with open corridors overlooking a programmed common space for the homeless community.

“The winning team had a wonderful story. They recognized who were going to be the tenants and had an understanding what was going to be important to them,” said Lorcan O’Herlihy FAIA, founding principal of the firm LOHA. Deborah Weintraub, AIA, LEED AP, and City of Los Angeles chief deputy city engineer, noted that the idea of modularity is challenging. “From the city perspective, we’ve found that sometimes the modular construction methodology is not necessarily cheaper. The challenge to the students as they move to the next phase of their career could be how to do modular construction cost effectively.” 

This the third time a CPP ARC team won the Shulman Award in the last four years (2015, 2017 and 2019), capping off a series of Spring 2019 competition victories for the department:

• 2019 Design Village Competition: In late April, CPP ARC teams brought home three major awards (Best in Show, Crowd Favorite and Honorable Mention) from this statewide competition hosted by the School of Architecture and Environmental Design at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. For one weekend about 400 students from 14 universities transformed Poly Canyon into a temporary community of 52 shelters that honored the polytechnic philosophy of "learn by doing." 
• 2019 2x8:Exchange Competition: Fourth-year architecture student Ryan Hung V. Nguyen placed first in this annual student exhibition and scholarship fundraiser hosted by the Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Architects. His entry, housEMOJI, "challenge[d] the idea that the iconographic form (in this case the gable roof) is primarily useful as a shape, showing instead how a shape can be shaped in unexpected ways by the building's program."