On April 21, Gibbs College celebrated the inaugural Gibbs Design Activism Awards (GDAA). The GDAA is a grant-initiative that supports student-led design and research projects that engage topics of community, social and economic concerns across Oklahoma.
At the event, Master of Interior Design student Azra Fific and Architecture student Ryan Godfrey received awards for their innovative projects. Fific’s project, Refugees and Placemaking: Healing Trauma Through Interior Design, investigates placemaking and interior design strategies to help the Afghan refugee community heal trauma and assimilate to Oklahoma City.
GDAA Award Recipient Azra Fific presenting her project.
Godfrey’s project, Passing, explores the intersection of architecture, gender and sexual identity, focusing on the different ways in which buildings can be qualified as queer spaces.
GDAA Award Recipient Ryan Godfrey presenting his project.
Gibbs College also announced the 2023-2024 grant recipients Salma Akter, a PhD student in Planning Design and Construction, and Giselle Walker, an Environmental Design student. Their projects were selected from a pool of highly competitive proposals.
Akter’s project, titled Spatializing Refugees during Resettlement: Investigating the Role of Built Environment in Refugee Children’s Well-being, focuses on assessing the well-being of children of families who have fled Myanmar resettled in Tulsa since 1970. Tulsa is known as “Zomi Town” because of the concentration of Zomi (ethnic group) people. Due to the absence of refugee integration in the built environment process, child refugees in south Tulsa often experience profound physical and emotional vulnerabilities in their newly resettled living environment.
This project aims to identify and explore the role of the ‘people-place’ connections or the impact of the built environment and place attributes on children’s psycho-physical well-being and how these connections develop over time in new settlements. Finally, the project intends to develop a perceived “ideal” design model for children’s well-being to guide future research and design.
2023-2024 grant recipients Giselle Walker (left) and Salma Akter (right).
Walker’s project, Cut: The study of wayfinding and directional signage implementation in and around the built environment of historically Black townships in Oklahoma, brings visibility to the unique history of Black Townships in Oklahoma. Through a process of research and mapping, the project will locate and provide information about the fifty towns that have been documented, of which thirteen remain today. This digital wayfinding seeks to uncover the identity gap between passersby and the rich history of these Oklahomans.
These towns were targeted by a series of Jim Crow Laws and county-level oaths that called for white farmers to refuse to rent, lease or sell land within a mile of White or Indian residents to any Black person. With the growing Placemaking movement, under-resourced and under-represented towns are positioned to finally express and represent their unique identities in the built environment. This project will create a graphic story of these All-Black towns, which have persisted despite efforts to harm them socially and economically.
Congratulations to our students for receiving these well-deserved awards!
The University of Oklahoma College of Architecture is proud to announce that Model Schools in the Model City, authored by Director of the Institute for Quality Communities, Amber N. Wiley, Ph.D., has been named one of ten finalists for the 2026 ASALH Book Prize for Best New Book in African American History and Culture.
This semester, students in the LA 5535 Studio: Ecological Planning and Design, led by Prof. Afsana Sharmin, took on an ambitious hypothetical project to redesign key parts of the OU campus. Their mission: to tackle the critical real-world challenge of stormwater management through innovative green design.
Petya Stefanoff, Chair of the Educational Committee with the American Planning Association, Oklahoma Chapter (APA-OK) and Gibbs College PhD candidate, has developed a new training program for local government officials. The program, focused on land use, zoning principles, and land development, recently certified its first graduates with Certified Citizen Planner status.
