Recently seniors Sophia Solis and Joseph Dickinson represented PV at the Santa Barbara County Architectural Design Competition. On March 12th the future architects went to Santa Ynez High School to compete with 30 other North County HS students for a coveted place in the finals. For seven hours the two created drawings to address the competition problem: Redesign an existing city block near the Arlington Theater. It required a public transit hub, an inviting open space connecting the block to State Street while scaled to pedestrians rather than cars, and six new dwelling units.

Sophia was notified the next day that the judges picked her along with five others to compete in the finals. The six North County finalists would join another six finalists from the South County Preliminaries at the Finals which were held Saturday March 16 in Los Olivos. At the Finals Sophia had to make a 15-minute presentation explaining her work to the judges and audience members as she stood beside her architectural drawings.

Although she did not win it was still an amazing accomplishment! Sophia and Joseph represented PV with ‘Panther Class’ and are sure to go far in the field of Architectural Design.

“It was an amazing learning experience and I am so grateful that I got the chance to compete and make it as far as I did with the little amount of knowledge that I have learned so far.” -Sophia