Adam Cardenas, Camille Castillo, and Zirui Wang (all MArch '25) named to the 2025 Metropolis Future100

UCLA Architecture and Urban Design students Adam Cardenas, Camille Castillo, and Zirui Wang are among 30 Master of Architecture candidates across the United States and Canada named to this year’s Metropolis Future100, produced by Metropolis magazine.

Each year, the magazine sets out to designate the top graduating architecture and interior design students in the U.S. and Canada, seeking nominations from faculty and mentors across North America. The jury chooses honorees across each of four categories: graduate and undergraduate students in architecture and interior design.

"These are the top architecture graduate students in the United States and Canada as selected by the Metropolis team," the magazine writes.

AUD's three honorees this year are preceded by 2024 AUD winners Pingting Li, Kinamee Rhodes, and Qing Yin (all MArch '24), as well as 2023 AUD honorees Sijie Ji, Wanying Li, and Clytie Hoi Ting Mak (all MArch '23).

"Adam Cardenas is a gifted, intelligent designer with a knack for producing intriguing, enigmatic projects that prompt new relationships between citizens and their environments," observes AUD's Mohamed Sharif in nominating Cardenas. "He charges his projects with subtle, novel approaches to building assembly and materials, their life cycles, and shared experiences that confound easy readings of old and new and now and then."

"Camille’s design work is distinguished by striking graphic and chromatic dimensions and arresting formal qualities," Sharif writes. "Her progressive and deft approach to adaptive reuse signifies her role as a remarkable transformer of existing buildings."

"Zirui is an exemplary curious mind who foregrounds a sense of open-mindedness to expand his growth as a young architecture student in the discipline," writes Kutan Ayata, AUD Vice Chair, in nominating Zirui Wang. "His skills are advanced and vast; his conceptual inquiries are ever deepening; the future realities he imagines are provocative, exciting and inspiring."

Browse the entire roster of this year’s Future 100 honorees via the Metropolis feature.