RESEDA : Teen Draftsman Has Designs on a Bright Future

When he arrived in Reseda eight years ago and was introduced to gang life, 11-year-old Jose Sosa immediately knew he wasn’t interested. He had already seen enough bodies lying in the dirt streets of his Salvadoran barrio.

“Gangsters want to kill each other,” said Sosa, now 19. “I didn’t want to see that. I had already seen it.”

So, when his friends and schoolmates began running with gangs, Sosa took up a more docile pursuit--architectural drafting.

Now the long hours sitting under a hot lamp--pencil in one hand, ruler in the other--are paying off. The Reseda High School senior recently won the first-ever National Drafting Competition, sponsored by the National Assn. of Women in Construction.

“There are (draftsmen) who have been out there for years who can’t draw this well,” said Sosa’s drafting instructor, Bela Palagyi.

The soft-spoken Sosa took home a $1,000 prize for a design that was not only aesthetically original, according to the judges, but also involved extensive research and incorporated little-known building materials.

The competition consisted of designing an affordable three-bedroom, two-bath house for a family of four. Other than the fact that the house had to be accessible to a disabled person, the assignment was fairly straightforward. And many students handed in straightforward solutions to the architectural problems, Palagyi said.

Not Sosa.

His house is a flowing half-circle, a crescent-shaped miniature mansion arching across a hillside. Cars are parked beneath the living room, and the primary building material is plastic foam blocks. And once these are filled with concrete, not only would the house be well-insulated, it would also be the perfect place to ride out the Big One, according to Women in Construction spokeswoman Cynthia Morgan.

“He (Palagyi) said he wanted something different,” Sosa said with a shrug. “So I gave him something different.”

The national award is the latest in a long line of compliments not only for Sosa, who has won several area competitions, but also for Palagyi, a drafting instructor for 36 years whose Reseda High students have won 20 out of 24 annual Los Angeles drafting contests.

While there’s no question about Sosa’s talent for original design and concise drawings, his future in the field is not yet clear. He planned on joining the U.S. Marines in order to take advantage of the GI Bill and go to school when he got out. Now the young artist is considering other options, hoping for a scholarship maybe, or money from another competition.

“I’ll find a way,” he said. “I’ve wanted to do this all along.”