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The Community Catalyst team, recipients of a 2024–2025 Gibbs Design in Action Award (GDAA), partnered with Sisu Youth Services Inc. to provide architectural services that support the organization’s goal of ending homelessness in the Oklahoma City area. The GDAA is a grant initiative that supports student-led design and research projects that critically engage issues of community, social, and economic concern within the built environment. Through this program, students explore meaningful questions and propose creative design solutions that respond to community needs across Oklahoma.
Site plan showing the pavilion location at Sisu Youth Services in Oklahoma City.
The Community Catalyst team undertook a winding process of learning how to support the design needs of this non-profit. They worked with Sisu Youth Services to create marketing materials for community outreach programming and to reimagine a recently acquired neighboring property, where the organization plans to expand its existing housing. Local architect AHMM had developed a design, but Sisu Youth faced resistance from the surrounding neighborhood. As a trust-building effort, the team helped the organization activate the lot as a public space. Their work culminated in a design-build pavilion that gives young residents a sheltered outdoor space to socialize—its teal blue canopy conferring identity to the center and its community.
Left: Display boards show the students’ “Roots of Recognition” project for Sisu Youth Services. Right: OU architecture students Emma Eitzen, Jordan Hughes, and Gracie Kimbrell stand in front of the completed teal-canopy pavilion.
OU architecture students and community members work together to install posts for the new pavilion at Sisu Youth Services in Oklahoma City.
Walkthrough of the project.
Gibbs College of Architecture is proud to recognize Petya Stefanoff, who is pursuing her doctorate in the Planning, Design & Construction (PDC) program, has been appointed the new role of Director of Community Development for the City of Shawnee, Oklahoma. She joined the city in 2024.
Gibbs College of Architecture is pleased to announce that Amber N. Wiley, Ph.D., associate professor in the Division of Planning, Landscape Architecture and Design and director of the Institute for Quality Communities, has received national recognition for her book Model Schools in the Model City. The book has been named a finalist for the 2026 the PROSE Awards.
Gibbs College of Architecture Regional + City Planning Professor of Practice Vanessa Morrison and Associate Professor of Architecture Deborah Richards’ Open Design Collective received top honors at the inaugural BlackSpace Urbanist Collective Studio KIN Pitch Night Competition, held last month in Brooklyn, New York City.
