Undergraduate Architecture Thesis Projects Featured in National Student Showcase

Sponsored by the Association of Collegiate School of Architecture (ACSA), Study Architecture brings together colleges and universities, students and working architecture professionals to create a forum for sharing information and ideas. Through a national call for submissions, Study Architecture highlights exceptional student design work through an online Student Showcase. 

This year, five recent graduates from the UVA School of Architecture's Bachelor of Science Architecture program were selected to be featured as part of this digital exhibition: Anoushka Sarkar (BSArch '25), Katherine Shi (BSArch '25), Austin Small (BSArch '25), Sean Thiel (BSArch '25), and Sheen Wang (BSArch '25). We highlight their undergraduate thesis projects and congratulate them on their honors. 

Anoushka Sarkar, BSArch '25
The 5-Minute School

Thesis Faculty Advisor: Mona El-Khafif

Set in Fairhill, Philadelphia—a neighborhood affected by historic disinvestment in education, high vacancy rates, and limited public infrastructure, The 5-Minute School explores how education can be embedded into the everyday fabric of the city. Rather than designing a single school building, the project proposes a network of public learning spaces within a 5- to 10-minute walking and biking radius, transforming vacant urban lots into active, community-driven educational sites.

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All images © Anoushka Sarkar

At the center of the proposal is the site of the former Fairhill Elementary School, closed since 2013 and reimagined as a multi-generational learning center with wings dedicated to food and ecology, the arts, technology, fitness, and early childhood education. The design is structured on a 20'x20' modular grid system with interchangeable roof and façade components, allowing for flexibility, sensory variation, and user autonomy.

Radiating from the main hub are six "satellite" sites, including a rain pavilion, art part, solar garden, edible walkway, bike kitchen, and outdoor movement plaza. Each site offers hands-on, multi-generational, and place-specific educational opportunities. These sites are connected by a walkable and bikeable loop, which weaves through the neighborhood and links together existing community assets like libraries, rec centers, and social service organizations.

The 5-Minute School reimagines education as something lifelong, all around us, and capable of transforming neighborhoods into more vibrant, walkable, and healthy communities.

Katherine Shi, BSArch '25
Place-Reclaiming Chinatown: Repairing the Urban Landscape of Manhattan Chinatown

Thesis Faculty Advisor: Mona El Khafif

Chinatowns exist worldwide, and in nearly every major American city. Historically formed as ethnic enclaves of Chinese immigrants facing persecution from legislation such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, they have evolved into important socio-economic centers of activity and community hubs within their respective cities. New York City is home to nine Chinatowns, making it the largest center of Chinese Americans in the Western Hemisphere. However, many Chinatowns are shrinking due to urban development and gentrification, and Manhattan’s Chinatown, one of the first Chinatowns established in the US, is no exception. Asian residents and local businesses have been pushed out, resulting in closed storefronts, land loss, and displaced community members, especially following COVID-19. More significantly, there is the risk of cultural erasure as a result of these changes. 

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An important part of local identity, for example, is Chinatown’s distinctive use of public space, as seen in its culture of street vending and sidewalk appropriation. Columbus Park and Sara D. Roosevelt Park are some of the most important public spaces in the district. This is where residents socialize, play mahjong, exercise, and greet each other in their native tongue. However, large roadway infrastructure creates a significant and dangerous disconnect at the heart of Chinatown.

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This thesis, therefore, proposes an urban design approach for Manhattan Chinatown that seeks to reconnect green spaces in a traffic-torn cultural district, provide needed social infrastructure support, and reclaim the identity of the Manhattan Bridge Plaza as a Chinatown gateway. The intention is to bring vibrancy to underutilized sites at the heart of the community, not only by preserving and celebrating Chinatown culture and history, but also by supporting residents’ way of life within a transforming district. 

Austin Small, BSArch '25
Equinox House: Contextual Materiality of a Residence

Thesis Faculty Advisor: Peter Waldman

Rabbit Lake, southeast of Anchorage, Alaska, is a peacefully calm, yet brutally intense landscape tucked into a corner of the Chugach Mountains. Reaching the lake involves a two-mile hike from the nearest road access point after driving 10 miles out of the city. Sitting higher than the alpine line, roughly 3200ft above sea level, the lake and its surrounding mountains are void of trees; the shores instead are dotted with shrubs and littered with rocks that have been shed in avalanches over the years.

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One half of the project sits atop a bluff on the western bank, bridging a creek fed by the lake: this is the summer house. Across the lake, directly to its east and braced into the mountain behind, lies the opposing winter house. The two dwellings are connected by their compass alignment and the journey made between them; one that the project proposes is initiated by the solar path on both the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. With one window in both structures directly facing the other, the sunrise and sunset on the equinoxes act as a seasonal sundial, initiating the changeover journey between winter and summer. 

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A more immediate indication of movement, the long covered bridge of the summer dwelling is a kinetic structure proposing a blend of interior and exterior. The glass walls on each side of the bridge are designed to rotate and open upward, transforming the span into a livable breezeway. While the Western dwelling is light, breathable, and tectonic, the Eastern house is a burly cave in contrast. Made from the stone found on site, [its] thick walls and a centrally located hearth offer protection and comfort from the sub-zero temperatures of the winter months. The protective western wall guards the structure from harsh winds coming off the lake, while the clerestories of the saw-toothed roof take in as much of the minimal daylight as possible and offer views of the “Aurora Borealis” in the northern night sky.

In an attempt to design a house precisely unique to its setting, this project proposes a response both to the seasonally extreme nature of Rabbit Lake and to the traditional Alaskan lifestyle, a way of living that is intrinsically exterior. The proposal imagines a cast of characters: a nomadic countryman with a possible family, living off the land and lake as much as possible, and maintaining the dwellings in a simple and slow lifestyle by returning to nature. As a result of the drastic seasonal differences in both light and temperature, the project splits the home into two respective dwellings, living not only on the site but with the site; allowing the landscape, and interaction thereof, to complete the proposed design.

This project received the Highest Honors for the 2025 Fourth Year Thesis at the UVA School of Architecture.

Sean Thiel, BSArch '25
Unravel & Reweave: I-794 as Milwaukee's Urban Green Spine

Thesis Faculty Advisor: Mona El Khafif

Milwaukee’s downtown and its surrounding neighborhoods have long been divided by the I‑794 freeway spur—an aging band of concrete built in the 1960s and ‘70s that now requires immense repair costs, poses a multitude of safety hazards, and leaves vast amounts of underused land in one of Wisconsin’s most valuable urban districts. Rather than viewing the freeway simply as an obstacle, it can be reimagined as a spine around which an integrated, multi‑modal network of streets, pathways, programs, and parks can emerge and flourish, connecting the North and South on a higher level, and connecting the waterfronts that the site lies between.

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Scaling back access for automobiles—removing the “spaghetti” of on‑ and off‑ramps and consolidating access eastward at the Lake Interchange—reveals hundreds of thousands of square feet for housing and commercial development, a central greenway, and pedestrian-centric infrastructure. This new land emerges as the city’s connective tissue, linking important spaces of recreation and forming a new neighborhood to stitch together the central business district of Juneau Town and the Third Ward.   

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All images © Sean Thiel

Rather than a simple removal, a negotiated balance preserves critical commuter routes that aren’t supported by the current transit system while converting a majority of the former freeway footprint into a continuous open space connecting the greenspaces of the Milwaukee Riverfront to the state and county parks on the Shores of Lake Michigan. Housing, shops, cafés, and cultural venues step down to human scale at street level; the space beneath the elevated roadways becomes reclaimed for the city and bridges the gap between the freeway spur and the neighborhoods it divides. These new buildings integrate parking garages that are directly accessible from the I-794 overpass, allowing vehicles to enter and exit without encroaching on street-level activity. This approach helps relegate car traffic away from pedestrian spaces, promoting a vibrant street life and encouraging ‘park-and-walk’ rather than driving directly to one’s destination. Transit stops and bike hubs nestle at key intersections, linking bus and rail lines to pedestrian pathways that flow seamlessly into adjacent neighborhoods.

This symbiosis stitches together the city’s disconnected urban grid, transforming the concrete barriers into green corridors and crafting connectivity between people, place, and nature. Instead of a unimodal freeway, I‑794 becomes an interconnected downtown system where pedestrian mobility, outdoor recreation, and a new community thrive.

Sheen Wang, BSArch '25
Transforming Trios: Typologies for Adaptive Education, Safety, and Community

Thesis Faculty Advisor: Mona El Khafif

At Hutchison Beach Elementary in Panama City Beach, Florida, students adapt how they learn in response to their changing environment. Situated in a coastal, tourist-centered community along the Gulf of Mexico, the school frequently endures hurricanes and severe storms. With no dedicated community centers, schools here serve as storm shelters—often without enough space to meet demand.

This presents a unique design opportunity. The school’s campus includes numerous portable classrooms, originally meant as temporary solutions to overcrowding. Typically built at minimal cost, these structures are often uncomfortable and unsafe. But at Beach Elementary, there’s a shift: these portables are being reimagined as flexible, collaborative spaces where students and teachers co-create their learning environments to foster joy and exploration.   

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All images © Sheen Wang

In a place defined by constant change, this thesis asks: How can a new, adaptive typology for portable classrooms support education, shelter, and community in one modular space? How can it integrate with existing school structures while engaging the surrounding landscape? How might these units aggregate both horizontally and vertically to form larger spaces?

This thesis proposes modular, adaptive structures that meet programmatic needs—education, safety, and community—while responding to the site’s outdoor uses, from wetlands to playgrounds to sports fields. The architectural skin of each module supports both interior and exterior use, enabling hybrid, temporary programming that flexes with the rhythms of the school and environment.