Gould Hall room 114 was exceptionally crowded in Autumn 2006. It was occupied by not only the usual cast of landscape architecture students at the University of Washington (UW), but also high school minority students from a neighborhood youth program. In weekly, two‐hour sessions, the mixed teams of students sat around large tables to design installations for a “night market,” an event foreign to most of the UW students but brought fond memories to many of the participating youths. The UW students and the high school youths looked remarkably different. Besides the obvious age difference, the UW students were predominantly white, while the youths were mostly first or second‐generation Asian Americans. During the weekly sessions, there were moments of active exchanges as well as prolonged silence as the youths and the UW students stared at drawings and notes on the table. As the students worked together, they were confronted with one of most challenging barriers in a community‐university partnership—the socio‐cultural and institutional differences between community and university partners.