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Urban Design students, Roshita Taylor, Soujanya Malla, and Jeremy Banes, shared their designs for Sweeney Switch in downtown Harrah, Oklahoma during the town’s St. Patrick Day celebration.
Sweeney Switch is a community design project between the City of Harrah, the Association of Central Oklahoma Governments (ACOG), the Institute for Quality Communities (IQC), and the OU Urban Design Studio. Graduate students in Urban Design are working with Shawn Schaefer and Urban Design Fellow David Boeck to develop an urban design vision for downtown Harrah, Oklahoma.
On St. Patrick’s Day, the City of Harrah, the Lumber Shack (a new restaurant and entertainment venue in Sweeney Switch), and volunteers from the community garden shut down Tim Holt Drive and a portion of Harrah’s Main Street in order to create a plaza using tactical urbanism techniques that included bringing in picnic tables, food trucks, and a portable stage.
Shawn Schaefer writes, “The temporary intervention was a proof of concept for a permanent public place that our students are currently designing. We learned a lot from the simulation.”
Conceptual Designs of the Sweeney Switch area
The students are focusing on several different aspects of development in their plan, including an entrance gateway to the Sweeney Switch district, a plaza with a fountain and a creek view, a pedestrian bridge, streetscaping and parking along Church and Main Street, and flood management.
The students will incorporate feedback and observations from the St. Patrick’s day event into their final designs for Sweeney Switch.
Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture professor and Institute for Quality Communities Director Dr. Amber N. Wiley’s book, Model Schools in the Model City: Race, Planning, and Education in the Nation’s Capital, has received two major honors from the Urban History Association.
Research initiated by Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture alumna Naila Hasan during her master’s studies at the University of Oklahoma has continued through faculty collaboration and resulted in a peer-reviewed publication in HERD: Health Environments Research & Design Journal.
Gibbs College of Architecture is pleased to announce Esther Thorp, Tyler Boydstun and Chukwuma Nwokoye as the winners of the 2026 Construction Innovation Translation Hub (CIThub) Student Ideas Competition.
