Here’s a thought experiment, courtesy of Joshua Vermillion, associate professor in UNLV’s School of Architecture. It’s a simple one, really: “Think of how much time you spend in buildings.” A lot, right? That’s architecture, of course. Now recall the vibes inside those buildings. That’s interior design. Now consider everything between the buildings. Much of that involves landscape architecture. 

These are the core disciplines offered by the school.

Vermillion’s point is twofold. First: “We matter,” he says. Collectively, practitioners in these fields “have an enormous impact on everybody’s day-to-day lives.” 

Which leads directly to his second point: Shaping the built environment is a bogglingly complex undertaking  — with many aesthetic, technological, social, and environmental factors at play — and a huge responsibility that requires deep, critical thinking. 

Each year, more than 600 students, graduate and undergrad, come to Las Vegas to take up those challenges, working with 15 full-time professors and a small army of part-time instructors, all working professionals. When they’re done, some will practice locally, while others use what they’ve learned here — about resort design, sustainable building, cutting-edge technologies — to develop careers around the globe.

For architecture students, “Las Vegas is a great living laboratory,” says the school’s director, landscape architecture professor Daniel H. Ortega. 

From their home base in the Paul B. Sogg building at the campus’ south end, would-be architects can go deep on issues that have global relevance, such as hospitality design and arid sustainability; students of interior architecture can delve into what Ortega says is an emerging focus in that field, healthcare design; and fledgling landscape architects learn firsthand not only what plants thrive in hot zones, but come to understand the many cultural, political, and social overlays that determine land use. All are future growth areas.

Learning in an Ever-Changing Environment

UNLV’s is the state’s only professionally accredited architecture school, Ortega says. It offers a “four-plus-two” architecture program, which means that while the undergraduate program isn’t accredited, the two-year graduate program is. Both the interior and landscape architecture programs are accredited at the undergrad level. “If students have an accredited degree, their path toward [professional] licensure is much easier,” he says.

As befits one the country’s most diverse universities, Ortega touts the architecture program as “an amazing opportunity for first-generation students to have access to a Research 1 level program.” 

He was a first-gen student himself, and, as he tells students, his education has afforded him chances to work around the world. He mentions former students now working in places like Saudi Arabia and South Africa, places that, like Las Vegas, are at the forefront of environmental change. “There’s a need for our people to take their expertise into those parts of the world,” he says.

“I truly believe our students are here because they want to make the world a better place to live,” Ortega says. “I think that comes across in the esprit de corps of our students. They all have a drive behind them.”

Architecture in a Place Like No Other

Fifteen years ago, associate professor Glenn N.P. Nowak was teaching at UNLV and working with the Marnell Companies, a major design-build firm that’s done significant work on the Strip. It got him pondering hospitality design in academic terms. “I couldn’t help but think this ought to be more integrated into the architecture curriculum,” he recalls. “There’s no other school in the world, no other city in the world, that is better positioned to look at hospitality design.” 

In 2010, the school’s hospitality design concentration was born.

A modern integrated resort is an enormously complex structure: It has to contain hotel rooms, restaurants, lounges, retail spaces, a performing arts space or two, plus ample back-of-house operations — so many interlocking systems, all optimized for the convenience of thousands of temporary visitors, not all of whom are sober. 

Fortunately for UNLV students, a bunch of these structures are parked just a couple miles from campus, offering a vast catalog of responses to resort design challenges — some visionary, some ordinary, some the Excalibur.

But the school, of course, is an academic discipline as well as a training program for future practicing architects. So, “the hospitality design concentration isn’t really about teaching students to design what you see on the Strip,” Nowak says. Rather, it involves a spirit of critical thinking and big-question asking that professors say animates the school as a whole. 

In this case, it’s about looking at what works, wondering what could be better, figuring out how these structures can meet future social and environmental challenges — and beyond that,  looking at what hospitality design can offer other avenues of architecture.

“We take all these great lessons learned from this crazy environment called the Strip and apply them to different building types all around,” Nowak says. Example: Consider that all of a resort’s design and engineering complexity is marshaled to a sole purpose: showing visitors a good time. “Around UNLV, we call it ‘the fun economy,’” Nowak says.

“Students — and myself — we look at the virtues of having good fun, and we wonder, why can’t we do a little bit of this in something that typically isn’t so fun?” 

Perhaps in office settings, schools, ordinary retail spaces, heck, even suburban sprawl. “Architecture has the ability to bring people together,” he adds, “and it doesn’t cost that much more to create these moments in the built environment that are, like, 'Wow!' It’ll put people in a better mood, create better experiences.”

If Las Vegas is a hospitality epicenter, it’s a global industry with global challenges, particularly those arising from climate change. The school is preparing students on that front, as well, says associate professor Phillip Zawarus, who is the landscape architecture program coordinator and is at the forefront of the school’s climate awareness efforts: “In all three disciplines, students are being prepared to take mindful steps when it comes to use of materials, water-consciousness, and sustainability. They’re studying how to have positive impacts in our valley, whether it’s urban heat islands, stormwater management, or creating healthy outdoor spaces.”

As an academic program, students and professors can explore these issues free of commercial constraints. For instance, Nowak says, a student recently set out to design a water-neutral resort. Could it even be done? Yes, it seems, and while the student’s proposals are too expensive for this moment, those ideas are now out there waiting for a receptive future. 

This mirrors the development of the hospitality concentration, and, in a broader sense, the school itself. The early years of Nowak’s program were largely devoted to compiling and organizing research materials, such as architectural case studies, much of it derived from capstone projects completed by previous graduates of the school.

Eventually, the program focused more on analysis of the built environments and critical thinking. “How could we make these buildings more sustainable? How could we make them more profitable? How could we make them more connected to the community?” Nowak says.

“So we’d throw a bunch of big questions at [students], and it became less about case studies and more about what-if scenarios, using these as a springboard to envision the next iteration of the integrated resort. It’s become more exploratory.”

Linking Academia with Practice

Architecture is a field of constant change. Many professors began their careers using analog drafting tools before switching to computer-assisted design; more recently, the profession has seen the advent of augmented reality and virtual reality, virtual modeling, digital fabrication, robotics, and now, perhaps, artificial intelligence. “I don’t know if any firms still have drafting tables,” Ortega says with a laugh. “If they do, they use them to hold their computers.”

“Pedagogically, we’re always on the edge of a knife,” Vermillion says. “On the one hand, we want to prepare students for the right now.” As for the other, he quotes hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, who said, “I never skated to the puck; I skated to where the puck was going.” 

Mindful that they’re training students to be the field’s leaders 15-20 years from now, Vermillion says, “We’re trying to see where the puck is going and how to get there.”

That calls for the latest tools, and Ortega is particularly excited by a new facility the school will launch this year, the Design Link Innovation Lab. It’s a hybrid classroom with four breakout areas, each anchored by a 76-inch interactive screen. This allows higher levels of in-class collaboration as well as interactive webinars and workshops with design professionals, beamed in from anywhere in the world. It’s like remote learning on steroids.

“The whole premise of it is predicated on linking academia with practice,” Ortega says. For example, “we might be experimenting with technologies, but if we’re not hitting the applicable side of technologies, we’re not really doing our students a favor.” 

As much as emerging innovation has changed how the profession is practiced, it’s been slower to change buildings themselves. Think about your car. It has hundreds of sensors feeding info into onboard systems that do everything from monitor tire pressure to automatically brake when the car ahead slows down. “Architecture just hasn’t evolved at the same rate,” Vermillion says. But that could be about to change.

AI as a Design Partner

Of course, the bleeding-edge technology garnering the most attention these days is AI. This has become a key part of Vermillion’s wheelhouse; he’s a widely recognized figure in the field and has worked on projects with a wide range of tech and media companies, from Microsoft to Harper’s Bazaar magazine. 

“It’s been on my radar for four or five years,” he says, and now that AI is really beginning to blossom, “it sort of drives my research and creative life.”

The technology comes fraught with urgent questions. Some are practical: Is it simply a design tool, or can it be a creative partner that helps push our knowledge and imagination in unprecedented directions? Will it make buildings more efficient? Others lean more meta: Will it replace architects? Will you be able to push a button on your Frank Gehrey 5000 and have plans pop out? Is this technology dangerous?

“Those are the sort of questions I ask myself when teaching new technologies,” Vermillion says. “These students are going to be redesigning our world. So, I’m trying to get them to approach these technologies from a pragmatic, practice-based place, but at the same time, to really approach these things with a critical eye, to ask which way progress really is sometimes.”

In any case, he says, AI is coming, whether you embrace it, resist it, or bury your head in the sand. That’ll be particularly important in a future sure to require increasingly sophisticated architectural responses to a culturally diverse, environmentally challenged world.

“My genuine hope is that once the novelty of generative AI wears off, we can get to the serious business of thinking about A.I. as a design partner that helps us negotiate between a number of competing constraints that are really complex, and maybe do things we haven’t thought of with our human brains.”

And no, he adds, he’s not worried about losing his job to an AI.

Cross-Campus Collaborations

One aspect that Ortega touts is that its programs — architecture, landscape architecture, and interior architecture and design — exist side by side. “It should not be taken for granted that all three disciplines are in the same building — that’s not always the case nationally,” he says. “Here, there’s an exposure to the other disciplines that they’ll be working with professionally.”

That spirit of interrelatedness also undergirds another initiative on the school’s grander vision board: a forthcoming doctoral program. A master’s is considered a terminal degree in architecture, but the school’s depth in Ph.D.-holding professors makes a doctoral program — one with a future-leaning twist — a possibility.

“It will not be a Ph.D. in architecture alone,” Ortega says. “We’re focusing more on a Ph.D. program in the built and natural environment, so that the expertise we have here in the school can all collaborate.” 

This blended approach calls upon all of the architecture school’s resources, but also opens up avenues for heightened cross-campus collaboration with departments such as hospitality, engineering, the arts, medical disciplines, and more. 

And where better than Las Vegas to begin putting it all together?

“We are the future,” Vermillion says of the conditions here. “The world is warming; demographics in the United States are changing; large-scale desertification is happening. So how do we live in concert with the desert rather than trying to conquer it?” 

The answers just might lie right inside the minds of UNLV’s architecture students.