Architecture Degrees Online

The Architecture Program integrates critical, artistic, and material approaches to the study and practice of architecture.

The five-year, NAAB-accredited* program is committed to experiments in alternative models of practice, design, and fabrication. The curriculum accordingly brings developments in culture, media, and technology to bear on the process of architectural production, allowing students to capitalize on new opportunities in a rapidly changing profession.

Our metropolitan setting informs the educational experience; the city of San Francisco functions as an urban laboratory, inspiring new ways to configure and inhabit architecture. Throughout their studies, students are encouraged to collaborate within and across disciplines to take full advantage of CCA’s studio culture. The program actively seeks the participation of leading international figures for studio instruction, juried reviews, and an ambitious lecture series.

The facilities on the San Francisco campus include dedicated studios with a wireless network infrastructure, a suite of fully equipped shops for various scales and media of fabrication, and four computer labs with the latest hardware and software. The New Materials Resource Center offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary collection of samples and is the only library of its kind housed at an art school.

Through the required internship, students have the opportunity to work at architectural firms in the United States and abroad. Architecture Program students also regularly enter and place in design competitions.

*In the United States, most state registration boards require a degree from an accredited professional degree program as a prerequisite for licensure. The National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB), which is the sole agency authorized to accredit U.S. professional degree programs in architecture, recognizes three types of degrees: the bachelor of architecture, the master of architecture, and the doctor of architecture. A program may be granted a six-year, three-year, or two-year term of accreditation depending on the extent of its conformance with established educational standards.

Master’s degree programs may consist of a preprofessional undergraduate degree and a professional graduate degree that, when earned sequentially, constitute an accredited professional education. The preprofessional degree is not, by itself, recognized as an accredited degree.

In July 2008 the Masters of Architecture Program was formally granted a three-year term of initial accreditation, effective January 1, 2008. Following the initial three-year term, at the next scheduled review in 2011, the program may receive a six-year term. CCA’s undergraduate Architecture Program is fully accredited.

In the United States, most state registration boards require a degree from an accredited professional degree program as a prerequisite for licensure. The National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB), which is the sole agency authorized to accredit U.S. professional degree programs in architecture, recognizes three types of degrees: the bachelor of architecture, the master of architecture, and the doctor of architecture.

A program may be granted a six-, three-, or two-year term of accreditation, depending on the extent of its conformance with established educational standards. Master’s degree programs may consist of a preprofessional undergraduate degree and a professional graduate degree that, when earned sequentially, constitute an accredited professional education. The preprofessional degree is not, by itself, recognized as an accredited degree.

Architecture Podcast
In spring 2006, students in On the Air, Jordan Geiger’s interdisciplinary studio course, worked with two types of technology that involve air in architecture: pneumatics (construction) and broadcast (representation).

Their work resulted in full-scale inflatable structures and this podcast.

The Master of Architecture Program focuses on material innovation, research, application, and resourcefulness within a larger social and cultural context. While providing a well-rounded architectural education, the program engages physically and digitally with old, new, and emerging building materials and systems to explore architecture as a critical and evolving practice. Digital craft, design research, interdisciplinary engagement, alternative models, and global involvement and exchange are emphasized.

Designed for students who have earned a bachelor’s degree in another field, the program is a three-year first professional master’s degree in architecture. It also accommodates students who have begun their architectural studies at the undergraduate level. Advanced standing may be granted to those who have some previous education in the field. Placement is based on a review of the portfolio and undergraduate transcripts.

CCA’s metropolitan setting enhances the educational experience it offers. The city of San Francisco serves as an urban laboratory, inspiring new ways to configure architecture and space. Small class sizes ensure access to a diverse faculty of practicing professionals. The program sponsors its own lecture series featuring architects and theorists from around the world who are working with a wide range of issues and ideas. Many of these guests stay on campus for several days to teach and review student work.

We believe that architects are cultural makers—leading and responding to social, economic, and ecological issues. Our goal is to graduate architects who will continue to produce real-world work that engages architectural theory.

The heart of architectural education is the design studio, where students learn to synthesize the wide range of ideas, issues, and technologies required for the conceptualization of architecture. It is also the place where some aspects of architectural practice are modeled and where history, theory, and technology are integrated into design.

The first three semesters introduce the culture of architecture and the nature of the discipline through rigorous studios that are open to graduate students only. In the following two semesters, students explore their own interests, choosing from a menu of elective studios that are taught by architects and focus on a broad range of practice strategies.

The final studio semester is spent executing an honors design thesis or an advanced studio using the student’s own research and focusing on his or her specific interests. A course on the intricacies of professional practice rounds out this cluster.

Running parallel to the studio courses is a sequence of courses in history and theory. These courses ground studio practice in the world of ideas. The first year includes an in-depth study of the history of architecture as well as a seminar course that places architecture in the context of culture, politics, technology, and philosophy.

In the second year, a one-semester seminar introduces architectural theory. The fall of the third year includes an intensive independent research lab, in which students explore their individual interests under the close supervision of a faculty member.

This work provides the intellectual framework for the concluding semester of studio work. Finally, each student selects two semesters of graduate level, topically based theory seminars from a menu of courses offered across all of CCA’s graduate programs.

A third parallel sequence of courses builds knowledge and skills related to technology and practice issues. Courses in sustainable building systems, building energy, structures, materials, and methods of construction form the heart of this sequence. Electives within the sequence include courses in deep-green building practices, advanced building construction, and digital craft.

The facilities on the San Francisco campus include dedicated studios with a wireless network infrastructure, a suite of fully equipped shops for various scales and media of fabrication, and four computer labs with the latest Macintosh hardware and software. The New Materials Resource Center offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary collection of samples and is the only library of its kind housed at an art school.

The program’s other resources include special summer studios, including travel studios. In August, just before fall classes begin, we offer incoming students a three-week Architectonic Intensive. This course is designed to give those with little or no making or drawing experience a head start.

The program also offers the 333 studio each summer. Based in San Francisco, this studio is three weeks long, with each of the weeks taught by a different internationally recognized architect. Instructors for 333 have included Nader Tehrani of Office dA, Thomas Wiscombe of EMERGENT, Rodolphe el-Khoury, and Lisa Iwamoto and Craig Scott of IwamotoScott Architecture.

Our Latin American travel studio alternates summers between Peru and Argentina. Each studio is led by a member of our faculty who is native to the country: the Peru trip is led by Sandra Vivanco, and the Argentina studio is taught by Leonardo Zylberberg.

The Master of Architecture (M.Arch) degree is earned through successful completion of a five-and-a-half year program at Norwich University. Graduates from other colleges are not accepted into the fifth year of this program. Transfers are accepted into the BS in Architectural Studies and are governed under existing university academic regulations (including 60 percent of credit hours being earned at Norwich).

The masters program builds on the experience of the undergraduate curriculum, preparing students to function as professional architects. The program emphasizes practical experience (through a practicum) as well as autonomy and rigor (through an architectural thesis and graduate seminars).

Admission into the fifth-year Masters of Architecture is not automatic. In their fourth-year, students must submit a portfolio of their studio work for review and approval by an architecture faculty committee. This threshold also requires a minimum university GPA of 2.50 and a GPA of 2.75 for all design studio courses; these thresholds are subject to change. The Masters year offers graduate-level professional electives as well as the opportunity to undertake a thesis, of one’s own choosing.

Perhaps the most exciting and innovative aspect of the masters’ curriculum is the requirement of an architectural internship in the summer between the fourth and fifth years. For this practicum, students will be required to locate and work in an architecture office (or in another design-related firm). The course work is completed using distance-learning techniques, which not only permit students to work in their hometowns (or other locations of their choosing) but also give each individual experience in digital communications and technologies which are major evolving aspects of architectural practice today.

The curriculum features the use of threshold points and portfolio reviews for each student in order to better identify individual career objectives as well as to assure the high academic caliber of every Norwich graduate.

Students have an opportunity to spend a semester in Berlin, Germany, in the School’s own study abroad program delivered by Lexia International.

Facilities
The graduate program is centered in Manhattan, a world capital. NYIT’s two campus settings in the metropolitan region permit students to combine theory with experience by living and working in a variety of areas and conducting field study in and around New York City, including its classic suburban region, Long Island, whose extended linearity, isolation by water, age, and intense land use make it both a laboratory and a unique experience for the study of urban and regional design. This provides the opportunity for case studies to test and apply new insights, theory, and designs to contemporary issues. NYIT’s distance learning facilities permit simultaneous courses and conferencing at all sites. Graduate design studio space is in Manhattan and will be allocated within architecture departments on each campus as needed. Seminar rooms are available for formal courses as well as informal events. Campus libraries are linked and material from one can be available at another through the intercampus exchange system. A study abroad program investigates existing canonical urban design and is integrated into the design studio sequence. This program allows the degree to be completed in a single year.

Professional Degrees
This Master of Architecture program is a post-professional degree. Applicants must hold a professional architectural degree from an NAAB-accredited college or university, or the equivalent, if applying with a degree from another country.

Courses
There is a minimum of six credits required for enrollment per semester. Studio courses will be taught in the traditional method with an average of 12 students per critic. Studios may be taught in a team format, depending on project type, intended product, and the relationship established with public agencies, civic organizations, research funding, etc. Some courses are organized as colloquia with specialists or noted people in education or practice providing a series of lectures with a course coordinator.

NYIT’s School of Architecture and Design offers a graduate Master of Architecture in Urban and Regional Design. It is a three-semester, 36-credit, post-professional degree for those holding a Bachelor in Architecture degree. The program’s three advanced design studios address urban and suburban design and architecture in the context of their region. These studios explore the relationship of design at many scales from personal to global dimensions.

Cities, towns, suburbs and neighborhoods are interdependent, and to understand the viability of each requires the investigation of their interdependence. It is important to study urban, suburban, and rural neighborhoods as part of a unified region of human settlement. The design studios investigate individual buildings, whole neighborhoods, civic centers, and metropolitan infrastructure together in ways that consider the impact of such intervention on the whole region’s environment. There is an emphasis on the consideration and critique of the historical, physical, social, political, and philosophical context.

The program provides a theoretical and historical understanding of the origin and the socio-political function of cities. It also makes use of a range of design tools, including computer mapping of physical density, demographics, land-use, transportation and ecological information as well as dynamic, interactive, multi-dimensional modeling. Designs investigate the relationship between creating a plan of space as well as the operational issues that must also be designed or organized to implement that plan.

The Bachelor of Science in Architectural Technology is a non-professional degree that permits the successful student to gain a license to practice architecture in the state of New York but does not make the degree holder eligible for NCARB certification. Should the successful Bachelor of Science in Architecture Technology graduate later seek to gain a first professional degree in architecture, he or she could pursue a first professional degree Bachelor of Architecture or a first professional degree Master of Architecture.

Those students in the B.S.A.T. program can concentrate their studies in advanced computer aided design (CAD) or construction management.

With a focus in advanced CAD, the B.S.A.T. candidate undertakes upper-level courses covering the use of computers in areas such as the preparation of construction drawing, the planning of advanced structures, the preparation of three-dimensional visual representations, as well as the use of computers in modern construction management. Upper-level courses in contract management, construction supervision, and real estate fundamentals make up the offer of the B.S.A.T. with a concentration in construction management. Two semesters of design fundamentals in the first-year design studios introduce the student to the basic principals of three-dimensional design through a series of composition, planning, and introductory design problems. In the second year, progressively more demanding problems, in addition to significant building design analysis exercises, are undertaken.

The student who is accepted into the Bachelor of Architecture program is required to complete Design III through Design VIII, or an additional six semesters of design studios. In the third year, students are required to solve architectural problems involving small but increasingly more complex building programs. Urban and community design and building design programs requiring inventive structural systems are emphasized in the fourth year. In the fifth and final year of the program, students undertake a terminal thesis project, individually chosen, that serves to demonstrate a cumulative grasp of all of the factors that influence the design of a complex work of architecture.

In the fourth and final year of the Bachelor of Science in Architecture Technology curriculum, the student is required to complete a capstone Project Integration Studio in which all aspects of a building design and architectural technology are fully explored and integrated into one comprehensive exercise. Although the design studios form the core of the experience at the School of Architecture and Design, complementary avenues of study and inquiry operate as essential aspects of the program and the training of students. Courses in architectural history introduce the student to the history of the built domain from the earliest times to the present. Methods of historical building design analysis and interpretation are introduced to the student through the study of great architectural monuments, as well as through the study of cities. Architectural history is introduced not only as a chronology of building development, but as a body of knowledge, an anthology, that serves as a tool in the design process. In addition to the survey courses, the school offers history seminars in areas such as architectural theory, the history of building technology, and the history of urban planning. A coordinated sequence of drawing and computer courses provide students with the skill to visualize and document design ideas starting with an introductory course focusing on hand drawing and the use of art media and concluding with a course on advanced digital visualization and rendering. The NYIT School of Architecture and Design program is widely respected by the professional community for its course offerings in areas of building technology. Technical competence is cultivated by exposure to an array of course offerings that cover all aspects of building materials, structural systems, and mechanical and electrical systems. The management of the construction process is covered by comprehensive upper level courses that focus on the procedures of professional practice and construction supervision as well as contemporary use of computers in construction industry.The technology faculty, as active members of the construction community, brings real world experience to the coursework and maintains an up-to-date bridge between the curriculum and changes in professional practice.

The Master of Architecture (M.Arch.) at NJIT is a post-baccalaureate professional program, fully accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB). The seven-semester 97-credit program is intended for applicants who have earned a Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of Arts, or a graduate degree with no previous design courses or experience.

Candidates entering the Professional M. Arch. program complete a required core sequence covering architectural history, integrated building systems, and digital design and representation applications as a series of progressive and cumulative co-requisites for the first four design studios. After completion of this mandatory core sequence, M.Arch students enter the advanced options sequence, in which students are given a selection of design studios in each semester, along with additional elective courses to round out their professional education.

A shortened program is available through advanced placement for applicants who have a pre-professional Bachelor of Science or Bachelor of Arts in Architecture or another field directly related to architecture, or students who have a Bachelor of Architecture from a non-NAAB accredited program (all international students

The degree of Master of Architecture was established to reward outstanding professional achievement in architecture. The purpose of the degree is to attract young graduates to pursue the attainement of high standards of scholarship and intellectual rigour in design activity. Candidates for the degree are nominated as for research degrees, and work under the supervision of academic/professional staff.

A candidate who is the holder of the Bachelor of Architecture Degree or of an equivalent qualification in Architecture, shall be eligible to obtain the Degree of Master of Architecture by Mode I or by Mode II.

Mode I
A candidate must have obtained an honours standard in the Bachelor of Architecture Degree or equivalent qualification in Architecture. The candidate:
(a) shall have attended a prescribed course of study for one year before presenting for examination
(b) shall have submitted a project in architectural design which, in the judgement of the examiners, makes a contribution to the field; and
(c) must have written and presented a dissertation which, in the judgement of the examiners, is of sufficient merit.

The Regulations on entry to the Mode I degree programme are as follows:
1. Candidates for the Degree of Master of Architecture (Mode I) who are holders of the Bachelor of Architecture Degree or of an equivalent qualification in Architecture, must have obtained Honours (minimum level 2.1) in their final examination.
2. Candidates must have the permision of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture to register for the Degree.

Mode II
A candidate may enter for the examination after the expiration of nine terms from the time at which the candidate obtained the Bachelor of Architecture Degree or equivalent qualification. The candidate
(a) shall have designed and executed an architectural work which, in the judgement of the examiners, is of a distinguished character; and
(b) must have written and presented a dissertation which, in the judgement of the examiners, is of sufficient merit.

The Regulations on entry to the Mode II degree programme are as follows:
1. Candidates for the Degree of Master of Architecture (Mode II) must be accepted by the Faculty of the College as prospective candidates at least six months before entering for the examination.
2. Candidates are required to give notice to the Dean of the Faculty before 15 January of the year in which they intend to present themselves for examination, with particulars of the building selected for examination under (a) above, the title of the proposed dissertation and details of their professional experience.

Architecture is a multidimensional, comprehensive discipline that essentially touches on all fields of human activity. It is an art and a profession that warrants imagination and creativity at many levels, including artistic, scientific, and professional. The nature of this utilitarian art is to serve humanity. As such, architecture combines functional, formal, cultural, theoretical, historical, political, technical, and spiritual concerns into inclusive contributions to the built environment.

mission of the program
The mission of the Master of Architecture program has three components: the education of students for the profession of architecture, research and design in critical issues of urban architecture, and support to the metropolitan region of Baltimore and to the State of Maryland. Click here to review the Strategic Plan for the Graduate Program in Architecture.

about the program
The Master of Architecture program at Morgan State University is one of two architecture schools in Maryland and the only architecture school in Baltimore. It offers one of the few accredited first professional master’s degree programs in the United States with all afternoon and evening classes and studios.

The program strives to prepare a multi-cultural student body for professional architectural experience in varied public and private settings. The program addresses issues in urban architecture, housing, health care, recreation, commerce, education, and governance—the activities that generate urban facilities—and presents a range of architectural problems to be explored. These explorations provide contact with the diversity of people who live or work in urban areas and address issues such as master planning, historic considerations, urban design, economics, construction technologies, security, maintenance, and design standards. Of special concern at Morgan State Univerity are the issues of the African-American and West African past experiences and evolving influences in the design profession.

Our course offerings in design, history and theory, technology, and professional practice are geared towards the dual objectives of preparing students both for employability in quality professional offices and leadership roles as licensed public and private sector entrepreneurs.
accreditation

The Master of Architecture program is a fully accredited, professional degree program by the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) pleading to the opportunity for licensure as professional architecture within the United States.

The National Architectural Accrediting Board requires that the following statement be included, in its entirety, in the catalogues and promotional materials of all accredited programs:

“In the United States, most state registration boards require a degree from an accredited professional degree program as a prerequisite for licensure. The National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB), which is the sole agency authorized to accredit U.S. professional degree programs in architecture, recognizes two types of degrees: the Bachelor of Architecture and the Master of Architecture. A program may be granted a five-year, three-year or two-year term of accreditation, depending on its degree of conformance with established educational standards.

“Master’s degree programs may consist of a pre-professional undergraduate degree and a professional graduate degree which, when earned sequentially, comprise an accredited professional education. However, the pre-professional degree is not, by itself, recognized as an accredited degree.”