Starting in 2018 with a partial draft plan begun by others, STP worked closely with City staff and the community to clarify the vision for a revitalized and expanded Downtown, and crafted a form-based code with customized development standards and design guidelines for infill commercial, mixed-use and residential development, and for a safe, comfortable, human-scale network of walkable streets and attractive community gathering spaces.  A top priority of the plan – established as part of the recently adopted General Plan Update, for which STP led the urban design vision work from 2017 to 2019 – was “putting Downtown back on the map”, re-establishing strong gateways from Highway 111, Indio Boulevard, and Jackson Street, which bound and provide primary access to the Downtown.  The historic Downtown is part of a larger envisioned City Center that includes the Midtown District to west on “Boulevard 111”, to which old Highway 111 is envisioned to evolve.

After completing bachelor’s and master’s degrees in urban planning from Hong-Ik University in Seoul, a Master of Urban Planning from USC, and over 10 years professional experience in the Los Angeles region, she recently earned a PhD in Planning, Policy and Design from UC Irvine, with a focus on land use regulation and form-based development codes.  For the past several years she has been a lecturer at Cal State Northridge on the subjects of graphic communication, qualitative research, and writing.

Cecelia will work closely with our principals and other senior associate to guide and direct the firm’s work, and will contribute to our constant innovation in documentation techniques and processes, coordinate the work of our in-house and consultant teams, and manage selected large projects. Her strong background in land use and development regulations, sustainability policy, information design, and community engagement very nicelly complement and balance our team’s already formidable strengths in urban planning, urban and architectural design, creative problem solving, graphic communication and form-based coding.

We are very pleased to announce that three new members joined our core team of full-time staff in 2019.  In August Andrew Krizman has joined us as a Senior Associate, bringing to our team his distinguished educational background and broad professional experience. Since his graduation in 2013 from the University of Notre Dame with a degree in architecture, he worked throughout the country and around the world as an independent urban planner and designer, a key member of large multi-disciplinary teams for urban and architectural projects of many sizes, scales and types.  As he joined us Andrew was finishing the thesis for his Master of Science degree in Sustainable Urbanism from Oxford University.  His role on our team is broad and focused on design, working closely with our principals and clients, and guiding our other associates and designers and subconsultants to shape, illustrate, and document each plan at the high level to which we always aspire.

In September we were joined by Javier Ballesteros Márquez, upon his graduation from Notre Dame with a Master of Urban Design degree, prior to which he received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Seville and completed professional internships in Spain, Poland and the U.S.  In October Martin Serrano Cordova joined our team, having been graduated from Notre Dame with a Bachelor of Architecture, with a minor in sustainability, and completed 2 years of professional experience as a designer with DPZ CoDesign. Please look for bios of all our staff on the Team page of this website. 

Speaking of which, we did not formally announce the arrival of Eryan Gwin and Russell Toler in our studio in October of 2018 and January of 2019, respectively.  We are equally pleased that they chose to join us, and have rapidly become the core of our growing team.  They have been working closely with our principals and long-time consulting associates, supported by a series of talented intern designers who each spent a few months with us in 2019, and have now returned to complete their degrees in Holland and at the University of Notre Dame.  We could not be more pleased with Eryan's and Russell's design, form-based code, and project management contributions to our work, and the opportunity to now expand our core team of full-time staff to 7.