Cal Poly canyon transformed into construction site. See student ‘rite of passage’
On an overcast afternoon in late April, fourth-year Cal Poly students Eli Clifford and Rory Bruton were busy building geometric plywood huts to serve as their shelter.
Using nuts and bolts and custom-made brackets, they focused on fastening sheet metal to 102 wooden triangles as part of their building project, named OGMI.
“Each tile is removable. So at night, we can actually make little domes to sleep in,” Clifford told The Tribune as he attached a triangle to the half-made structure propped under his hands.
All around the pair, hundreds of students were splintered into small groups, building architectural creations in Poly Canyon, a grassy canyon in the northeast corner of Cal Poly’s San Luis Obispo campus.
More than 500 students from 16 California community colleges and universities participated in Cal Poly’s Design Village competition from Friday, April 25, through Sunday, April 27, according to a Cal Poly competition representative.
What is Cal Poly’s Design Village?
Design Village, an annual competition hosted by Cal Poly’s architecture program, challenges groups of students to plan and build temporary structures they must live in for 48 hours.
This year marked the 50th anniversary of the design competition.
The challenge is meant to be a team-oriented, hands-on learning opportunity that encapsulates Cal Poly’s “Learn by Doing” motto, the university said.
At the onset of the competition, students haul tools and materials up a mile-long path to reach Poly Canyon — an area nicknamed the “Architecture Graveyard” that’s home to about 30 permanent, student-designed structures spread across about nine acres, according to the university.
Once students reach the canyon, they have one day to complete their unique structures. At night, groups tuck into sleeping bags and hammocks beneath their temporary installations.
“The experience is not only a rite of passage for young architecture students, it (also) creates a vibrant community of creatives who find a home at Cal Poly,” organizers said on the competition’s website.
On Friday, a group of architecture students from Fresno City College said they felt a mix of excitement and fear during the first few hours of Design Village.
“We definitely romanticized it a little bit, coming up with our ideas,” said Paige Hankins, a first-year student at Fresno City College. “We’re like, ‘Oh yeah, this will definitely work.’ And then we got here, and we’ve had some hiccups, but we’re getting there.”
Called The Play Pen, the students’ project connects interwoven blue, yellow and red string to six plastic pipes to create a hexagonal structure reminiscent of a child’s playground, according to the group’s project plans.
The students told The Tribune that the Design Village competition was a good learning experience. While they had completed smaller models, they had never before executed a large-scale project.
“This is the first time that we’re actually applying drawing to physicality,” Fresno City College student Martin Valencia said. “We’re now getting in touch with our project. We’re understanding what goes into design and the materials.”
How SLO university’s architecture competition is judged
Students competing in Cal Poly’s Design Village competition must create structures representing the year’s theme.
The 2025 theme was “Nexus,” a term that describes a connection or a series of connections linking two things.
Competitors were tasked with thinking about how their structures’ forms incorporated connections between building materials and “a deeper link between the structure, the history and the community of Design Village,” the competition website said.
While screwing nails into planks of wood Friday afternoon, Maria Ganez, a second-year student at the College of the Sequoias in Visalia, said her group was following the competition theme by recreating a mangrove tree.
The plant survives best in the nexus between land and water, linking the two different habitats together, she told The Tribune.
Their two-story structure, supported by four burgundy-colored tree trunks, would serve as a meeting place where they could all coexist for the next 48 hours, Ganez said.
Groups were judged on how well they executed the theme and competition criteria, which included innovation, functionality, durability of the design, environmental impact and artistic value, according to Cal Poly.
First prize went to a group of students from Santa Monica College for their project, Phage, Design Village organizers wrote in an email.
Design Village is ‘rite of passage’ for architecture students
By Friday afternoon, Poly Canyon had transformed from a serene valley surrounded by grassy green hills into a construction site dotted with dozens of structures.
Pop music blared from loudspeakers as some students munched on sandwiches for lunch. Others continued bringing wood and tools into plots of land where their groups were busy building.
During gaps in work, students drifted from project to project, intrigued by their peers’ visions and structures.
“Everyone’s out here for a similar goal while here — to build their installations — and then we get to see each other’s designs,” Valencia said. “It’s a nice collaborative space to bounce ideas.”
When it came to Design Village expectations this year, Bruton said, “Sleeping was the least of our priorities.”
Instead, he and his Cal Poly teammates were more focused on fastening more than a hundred plywood tiles into playful structures, a task that left them with raw fingers and a few splinters.
“(Design Village) is a Cal Poly classic,” Bruton said.
This story was originally published April 30, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
