Beyond the Classroom

Forty years ago, prolific Tucson real estate developer and University of Arizona philanthropist Roy Drachman established an endowment to fund the Roy P. Drachman Institute for Land and Regional Development Studies. The institute, now housed within the College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture (CAPLA), was designed to bring research being done within the U of A’s architecture and planning departments to local government and business interests, turning professors — and students — into de facto community partners.

The goal, as then-Professor Lawrence Mann put it, was to “try and make land development [in Tucson] occur efficiently and fairly.” (Drachman had strong opinions on everything from limiting building heights to preserve the Tucson skyline to slowing traffic patterns to make the city safer for cyclists and pedestrians, once telling the Arizona Daily Star, “People are so short-sighted; they think if they don’t prepare for growth, it won’t occur.”)

The institute’s specific priorities have shifted, but its core focus is the same. “It’s about the physical world,” says director Courtney Crosson, who also is an associate professor at CAPLA. “Other [institutes] can’t build physical things. We can actually take the research, the policy suggestions, and build the outcome and make that physical change in our communities.”

Crosson cites the recent collaboration between CAPLA students, Drachman research professors and local partners including the nonprofit Tucson Hope Factory and Primavera Foundation to design, build and work toward the implementation of a village of micro shelters to house Tucson’s homeless population. The project, which is still ongoing, includes everything from fabricating physical shelters to researching and writing policy recommendations that led to a temporary change in Tucson’s building-and-zoning code — a genuine, real-world impact on the community and built environment.

This year, the institute also graduated its first cohort from a new program called Community Engaged Scholars. The program — also funded with limited philanthropic support, including a portion of Roy Drachman’s 1986 endowment — pairs students from across the university with CAPLA and Drachman professors to research community-facing projects with the support of a stipend.

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“I think it feeds into a lot of the provost’s initiatives around community-engaged work,” Crosson says. “We’ve had two rounds so far, both of which got more than 70 applications for only five spots. We have a lot of students who want to do this work.”

One of those students was Linus Friedman ’26. Now an employee at the planning and engineering firm Kimley-Horn, Friedman applied for a CES position working with Drachman Assistant Research Professor Bill Mackey ’94 on a project about middle housing — residential buildings sized between a single-family home and a large apartment complex — in Tucson and other cities in the Western U.S.

For Friedman, the scholarship was an opportunity to give his interest in sustainable communities a narrow, tangible focus. “I always wanted to get more into zoning code and the technical backend of planning, but there was never a class that required that sort of depth,” he says. “I ended up reading these long code documents from various cities, which is not something I’d do in my free time.”

Friedman says the work helped him understand just how specific and bureaucratic architectural practice can be — something his more theory-oriented classes hadn’t necessarily prepared him for. “Bill [Mackey] would talk about trying to build in [the] West University [neighborhood] or something like that, and there’s a particular setback law that impacts his ability to design well or make a project viable. That definitely struck me, in the sense that these guidelines have real effects that impact the ability of architects to execute a project.”

Then there’s fifth-year architecture student Dennis Nichols. Nichols grew up in rural Idaho; his family owns a grocery store in a town of around 3,000 people called Soda Springs. “Connection to history, connection to storytelling, connection to community — you know, this really small, tight-knit community — was really influential in my childhood,” he says.

Nichols secured a position working with Helen Erickson ’12, the project director for CAPLA’s Heritage Conservation Program, to research historic preservation efforts in Cochise County.

In addition to helping familiarize Nichols with GIS technology, which he used to annotate maps of historic sites, the project put him in touch — as in, face-to-face, over-breakfast touch — with authors and historians in Cochise County, allowing him to cultivate the kinds of relationships and communication skills he now sees as essential to practice.  

“One of my big takeaways from the project is how powerful relationships are in getting work done, and getting work done that feels good for the people involved,” he says.

Both Friedman and Nichols noted the program’s accessibility (a five-hour-a-week commitment), especially for students with heavy workloads. “It’s opening up research to so many more people in that it’s one semester and a low time commitment,” Friedman says. “I was doing an internship, had another job and was a full-time student, but when I saw the applications come up, I thought, ‘I can make it work.’”

Drachman remained energetically involved in just about everything he could remain involved in until his death in 2002 at the age of 95, once saying he only continued to make money in order to give it away. A job and an internship on top of a full-time class schedule — as work ethics go, he could probably relate.