Mile Four—From San Antonio to Omaha 

By Luke Carothers 

The fourth leg of our Rising Stars Road Trip covers some serious ground, following I-35 from south-central Texas through two of the Lone Star State’s fastest-growing cities before turning north for the long haul to Nebraska. Along the way, new schools, innovative housing, and a growing arts campus show just how many forms community growth can take. 

San Antonio to Austin. Austin to Omaha. Three cities, four Rising Stars, and plenty of pavement between them. Time to get moving. 

Room to Grow 

Our fourth stretch of road begins in south-central Texas, where the San Antonio River rises and a city more than three centuries in the making continues to grow around it. San Antonio has reinvented itself more than once. Over the last century, its population has roughly doubled every forty years, putting new demands on the schools, neighborhoods, and public spaces serving the people who call it home. 

For Lucia Prado, growth is taking shape in the Medina Valley Independent School District. Medina Valley ISD recently opened their second high school, a project six years in the making. The campus is designed to serve students with different paths after graduation. State-of-the-art science labs and flexible learning environments sit alongside career and technical education spaces for welding, culinary arts, automotive technology, and other hands-on programs. 

Prado served as O’Connell Robertson’s primary representative on the project, which ended up being the largest new high school project in the firm’s history. That placed her at the center of coordination between the district, contractor, and project stakeholders. As part of the technical leadership team, she helped translate a broad range of instructional and operational needs into a cohesive campus, which required balancing educational goals and equity considerations with district standards. 

While Prado’s work responds to a rapidly growing student population, another Rising Star has explored how thoughtful design can serve people facing an entirely different set of circumstances. 

As Engineer of Record for the IKEA Small Home Initiative, Charys Clay led the structural design of sustainable housing creating for individuals experiencing homelessness. The Small Home applies principles of trauma-informed design, using the physical environment to support healing, reduce the potential for re-traumatization, and promote well-being. Beyond providing shelter, the initiative gathered insights into how trauma-informed spaces perform in practice, helping inform a housing model with the potential to be scaled more broadly. 

Together, these projects capture two very different sides of what growth can ask of the built environment. One creates room for a new generation to learn and discover where it wants to go. The other examines how a small, carefully considered space can help someone find stability. 

From San Antonio, we point the car northeast and follow I-35 toward Austin. The Texas landscape begins to roll as we approach the edge of Hill Country and another fast-growing city where education is shaping the work of a Rising Star. 

Lessons in Reinvention 

The state capital in Texas has become synonymous with rapid growth, but education has been part of its identity for generations. The University of Texas at Austin anchors that tradition on a massive scale, while schools throughout the city face a more immediate challenge in creating places that can evolve alongside the communities they serve. 

That evolution can be seen across Doug Dawson’s work across the region, including the modernization of Austin High School and the complete replacement of the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders. At Ann Richards, the challenge was particularly complex: build an entirely new school on the existing 14.6-acre campus while students continued attending classes. 

Completed in 2021, the resulting 184,000-square-foot facility serves grades six through twelve and reflects the school’s strong STEM identity. Collaborative maker spaces are distributed throughout classroom neighborhoods, while learning stairs and a reading porch create places for students to gather outside traditional classrooms. 

Dawson helped navigate the planning behind that transformation as the project moved through multiple phases. O’Connell Robertson provided master planning, programming, and comprehensive architecture and engineering services, bringing the campus in line with Austin ISD’s updated educational specifications while preserving the identity and community significance that already belonged to the school. 

That balance has carried into Dawson’s other large-scale educational work in the area. Rather than treating modernization as a clean break between the old and the new, his projects have had to account for what a school already means to a community while creating spaces capable of supporting how students will learn next. 

We leave Austin with considerably more highway ahead of us. The route turns north as we trade Texas Hill Country for the Great Plains until we reach Omaha, Nebraska. 

Setting the Stage 

Omaha has been putting on a show for a long time. Orchestras and opera helped establish the city’s cultural scene more than a century ago, followed over the decades by museums, galleries, theaters, and other spaces that made the arts an increasingly visible part of civic life. 

Downtown, that tradition has gained new ground with the expansion of the Omaha Performing Arts campus. 

The redevelopment added two very different pieces to the district. Steelhouse Omaha brings touring national acts, emerging regional bands, and community events into a flexible new performance venue. Nearby, the Tenaska Center for Arts Engagement fills another role entirely in providing dedicated space for education, rehearsals, and community programming. With its completion, the campus connects the experience of seeing a performance with opportunities to learn, practice, and participate. 

Before audiences could fill those spaces, however, plenty had to happen beneath and around them. 

As Senior Project Engineer, Rob Vanderveen handled grading, public infrastructure design, and modeling for the redevelopment. His work helped establish the physical framework for the new facilities and fit them into the surrounding downtown environment, which is an essential but less visible layer of a project ultimately designed to put creativity front and center. 

That contrast is part of what makes the expansion interesting. Steelhouse is built for the energy of a packed room. The Tenaska Center is built for the work that happens before someone ever reaches that stage. Vanderveen’s contribution sits further behind the scenes still, in the infrastructure that allows both pieces of the campus to function. 

It is a fitting addition to a city that has spent generations making room for the arts. Omaha’s cultural footprint has expanded again. This time with new places to perform, rehearse, learn, and gather—and the groundwork to support them. 

More Miles. More Momentum. 

By the time our tires come to a stop in Omaha, we’ve covered more than just the miles. This leg of the trip has been about making room. Room for a growing school district in San Antonio. Room for stability and healing with a much smaller footprint. Room for students in Austin to learn differently without losing the identity of the schools that came before them. And, finally, room for Omaha’s arts community to perform, practice, and participate. 

The scale changed at nearly every stop, but the underlying challenge didn’t. Communities are never finished. They grow, priorities shift, and new needs emerge. The built environment has to respond, sometimes with a sprawling new campus and sometimes with infrastructure most people will never notice. 

Our road trip isn’t finished either. There are more cities on the map, more miles on the odometer, and another group of emerging AEC leaders waiting down the road. 

We’ll see you at the next stop.