It was an excellent event for the School of Architecture to see four of its graduate students (recent and current) in the Master of Architecture program receiving Honors and Merits Awards in the 2025 AIA Utah Student Design Awards Category during the recently concluded AIA Utah Annual Conference held on September 25, 2025, at the Garff Education Building, University of Utah. Our students captured all the awards in the Student Design Awards category for this year. The award recipients include Vita Lampetti (M.Arch ’27 Candidate), Miguel Gonzalez (M.Arch ’26 Candidate), Fatema Udaipurwala (M.Arch ’25), and Jack Burton (M.Arch ‘25).
Details about the student projects, including names and jury comments for the AIA Utah 2025 awards, are highlighted below.
Exo – 2025 Honor Award
Vita Lampetti, M.Arch ’27 Candidate
A beautifully executed project with striking presentation and imagery. The student’s graphic abilities dovetail with the creative clarity and thoughtful restraint. They presented a system approach that showed different types of aggregations while allowing each variable to maintain its own clarity.
Altius Tower – 2025 Honor Award
Miguel Gonzalez, M.Arch ’26 Candidate
A bold, imaginative project with imagery and strong graphic gestures that are both of a period and personal. The structural ambition reflects a vivid, thoughtful imagination that is looking beyond architectural design to the meaning of the structure and space and what that would mean for the people inhabiting the building. This is a standout example of style and substance working together towards a singular outcome.
Drug Rehabilitation Center – 2025 Merit Award
Fatema Udaipurwala, M.Arch ‘25
This project reflects a composed and confident personal style, elevated by a collage that skillfully blends artistically drawn elements and rendering techniques. The combination of both ecologically forward thinking and pragmatic ideas about space elevates the project above any singular reading.
Drug Rehabilitation Center in Amritsar, India3_pdf. – Fatema Udaipurwala
Reframing Land Tenure in Rural Britain – 2025 Merit Award
Jack Burton, M.Arch ‘25
A captivating and nearly ethereal collage, in which landscape and building merge into a cohesive experience. The project is cohesive and complete, yet the rendering style leaves open a lot for the imagination. While the tent forms need another layer of refinement, there the designer shows there is potential for pushing the design forward.
Jury comments on Student projects:
- The student submissions for the AIA Utah Awards stood out for their captivating imagery, bold imagination, and impressive attention to detail—especially within the constraints of just two pages. Jurors were struck by the strong and consistent graphic style, with beautifully executed collages and ethereal renderings that conveyed a surreal yet thoughtful design approach. Many projects demonstrated a mature grasp of global issues and architectural strategy, showcasing an ambition to shape form into meaningful concepts. The drawings were not only visually compelling but also used with clarity and purpose, contributing to a sense of coherence and completeness. Overall, the work reflected a deep creative engagement and a promising level of sophistication for student projects.
Congratulations, Vita, Miguel, Fatema, and Jack! The School of Architecture is so proud of you!