Set against Reno’s foothills, the Debbie Smith Career and Technical Education Academy establishes a new model for learning environments where industry, artistry, and community converge. The project transforms a disjointed mid-century campus into a unified academic village that frames education as both collaboration and civic act. A two-story academic building anchors the site, organizing the campus around a central commons and terraced green. This composition reconciles topography and circulation, stitching new and existing buildings together through plazas, outdoor classrooms, and shaded walkways. The resulting sequence of spaces encourages movement, gathering, and the exchange of ideas — indoors and out. The architectural language is purposeful and direct. Exposed structure, robust materials, and visible systems embody the honesty of craft. The “Pitch Pit,” a monumental stair within the commons, becomes the social heart — a forum for daily interaction, presentations, and shared experience. Daylight and transparency animate interior bridges and labs, revealing the act of making and celebrating curiosity as a collective pursuit. Material continuity binds old and new. Black metal panels, polished concrete, and warm wood accents extend across the campus, aligning durability with identity. The palette echoes the school’s colors — black, white, silver, and gold — and reframes utilitarian forms into school pride expression. Programmatically, the design supports an exceptional range of disciplines: from Nursing and Robotics to Agriculture, Welding, Culinary Arts, and Media Production. Each is expressed architecturally through specialized labs, integrated graphics, and visual openness that encourage cross-disciplinary engagement. The building becomes a living diagram of learning — where structure, systems, and signage together form a curriculum of space. The design’s planning framework reflects an educational philosophy centered on visibility, inclusivity, and shared purpose. Circulation zones double as social corridors, connecting diverse programs and encouraging interdisciplinary discovery. Transparency is used not as a gesture, but as a pedagogical tool — transforming corridors into galleries of process, where students witness one another’s work across disciplines. The building’s modular structural grid and rational organization allow for future adaptation, enabling the facility to evolve alongside emerging technologies and industries. In this way, the architecture becomes both a vessel for learning and a resilient infrastructure for the district’s long-term educational vision. Sustainability is inseparable from strategy. Over half the campus was retained and repurposed, conserving embodied carbon while focusing resources on transformative new construction. The design process enabled iterative collaboration with educators, ensuring that spatial planning, technical performance, and educational vision evolved together. In composition and intent, the Debbie Smith CTE Academy redefines what a public school can be: a place where architecture teaches resilience, where making is visible, and the built environment itself becomes an agent of pride and possibility.