The Master of Architecture, a first-professional degree, is a NAAB-accredited, STEM, 84-credit, three-year (or 56-credit, two-year advanced standing) program that maintains a mission to train students as leaders in the professional practice of architecture with substantive methods of design and inquiry. The program is intended for students holding a four-year undergraduate, nonprofessional degree in any field. Applicants with degrees from a four-year BSc in Architecture or BScEng in Architecture may qualify for advanced standing.
This program aims to expand a student’s undergraduate education (architecture, design, or nondesign-related) by imbuing them with the disciplinary and technical precision to engage in evolving design methods, design research, design thinking, and professional practice. Central to our mission as educators, the Department of Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (GAUD) is committed to a balance of knowledge and understanding, enhancing our student’s individual capacities to ask often difficult and challenging questions facing the profession and discipline, specifically through design and with audiences outside of architecture and urban design.
The Master of Architecture curriculum comprises two primary stages, the core curriculum and the advanced curriculum, and four primary areas of coursework: design, history-theory, technology, and media.
The focus of the core curriculum sequence is for students to develop the necessary skills, as well as an in-depth understanding of integrative methods and disciplinary issues at the forefront of the profession and discipline. The content in core design studios, core history-theory courses, core architectural mediums courses, and core building technologies courses in the first three semesters becomes increasingly cross-coordinated, fostering “circular” learning and a broad range of modalities and methods of design. These initial semesters progressively introduce more technical, media-based, and theoretical complexity; are supported by a distinctive cohort of co-teachers (many of whom are recent GAUD graduates and/or top graduates and PhD candidates in the region); and coalesce to intensively prepare students for the Integrative Studio project in the fourth semester. Unique to the GAUD and critically hailed by the NAAB accreditation committee in its most recent accreditation report, the Integrative Studio is a combined design and integrative building-systems course and brings together a number of related disciplines into a single project, which students develop in teams. An ensemble of technical consultants from world-leading firms in New York City work directly with GAUD faculty and students on their design projects engaging in subjects including, but not limited to, facade design, structural design, and energy design. In the first, second, or third year, students may elect to participate in one or both of our international programs.
