SoCal NOMA Summer Camp 2025: an educational pipeline
Growing up in northern Wisconsin, my elementary school career ambitions rapidly evolved from teacher to lawyer to a physician that specializes in sports medicine. My career dreams were a mirror image of my surroundings; all lofty aspirations and admirable occupations that my skillset never aligned with. Ultimately, I slowly turned my passion in lighting into a career through a squiggly trajectory, a series of trial and error, until I found myself as an architectural lighting designer at Oculus Light Studio – for students in Los Angeles, SoCal NOMA’s Project Pipeline Summer Camp now offers a more direct route.
This year, SoCal NOMA hosted its 16th annual Project Pipeline Summer Camp. It’s aptly named “Project Pipeline” as it sparks the interest of Middle School students, provides foundational skills in architectural design for High School students, and offers internship and observership opportunities for college students – it provides a structure for those entranced by the creative world of design and construction, and shows them a path for turning a passion into a career.
Five years ago, Lauren Dandridge (Chromatic) and Kate Furst (Available Light) initiated the inclusion of architectural lighting into the overall architectural curriculum of the Project Pipeline Summer Camp. These lighting workshops, paired with the educational initiatives of IESLA (including Russell Cole Memorial Lighting Design Competition and the Lesley Wheel Luminaire Design Competition) are the local lighting community’s way of getting the word out about how careers in lighting design are possible – and as the organizer of the lighting portion of this year’s Project Pipeline Summer Camp, I was once again blown away by the generosity of the local lighting reps, lighting manufacturers and members of the lighting design community in both their time and financial support of these education initiatives.
This year’s theme “Destination Crenshaw” revisited a 1.3-mile stretch of parks and public art along Crenshaw Boulevard in LA dedicated to preserving the history and culture of African Americans in historic Crenshaw. The students were each assigned a building along Crenshaw Blvd, introduced to a local artist to showcase, and tasked with creating a small model of their building. With our lighting activities, we were able to give students a chaotic, candy-fueled mini-lighting expo, bring back an ever-popular color theory workshop, and introduce a new facade lighting workshop. Through the frustration of sorting candy by colors under color changing light, the chaos of a candy-filled lighting expo scavenger hunt, and the exploration of various facade materials of their models using tape light of various optics – we introduced basic lighting concepts and further highlighted the architectural models they created, all while giving a hands-on “ah-ha” moment to the next generation of designers.
We are so grateful to SoCal NOMA for allowing architectural lighting to be a continued part of their Project Pipeline Summer Camp and for serving as the initial steppingstone in the educational pipeline for future lighting designers in the Los Angeles Area, allowing future designers to navigate a more direct path into the world of architecture and design – instead of navigating a wayward journey like me.
