Associate Professor Karla Sierralta has received a 2025 Architectural Education Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) for her project An Action-Based Framework to Expand Understanding through Design.

This national achievement award honors significant contributions to creating more inclusive and representative models in architectural education. Her framework presents fourteen action-based strategies for thinking and making in architecture that seek to broaden participation, amplify perspectives, and reshape processes and outcomes in education and practice.

The project is organized around three core categories—individual experiences, creative collaborations, and pedagogical projects. It builds on more than two decades of work through her design practice, Strawn Sierralta, co-founded in 2003, and is further informed by nearly a decade of initiatives developed at UH SoA.