Bachelor of Arts Degree in Architecture and Community Design

The BA is a pre-professional degree program that has been carefully crafted to satisfy the entrance requirements for professional architecture and urban design graduate degree programs at the nation's top universities. The curriculum combines an introduction to the disciplines of architecture, urban design, city planning, and landscape design with a strong emphasis on the social sciences and humanities. In the classroom, around San Francisco, and on international immersion trips, we train students to become impassioned readers, interpreters, actors, and designers of their cities, institutions, and communities. Students will: gain a historical foundation of architecture from pre-history to recent developments in the field, through a broad and inclusive approach to the range of social and economic factors affecting the design of world cities and buildings. develop familiarity with social justice issues in under-served communities and developing regions of the world as well as more traditional perspectives on architectural history. develop critical skills and methodologies of inquiry, analysis, conceptual development, and resolution and presentation of design ideas. Learn to integrate aspects of site, program, space, structure and material to create designs for buildings, which also actively respond to the historical, cultural, social and political exigencies of time and place. develop analytical tools that give attention to the various historic and social forces that intersect to create the built environment. gain a solid foundation in technical and conceptual design skills, enabling them to present their architectural ideas visually, verbally and in writing to clients, associates, and communities at the grass roots and municipal levels. graduate with the knowledge and skills enabling them to facilitate positive change to built environments in the world.