Architecture at University of San Francisco

The major is a pre-professional degree program that satisfies the entrance requirements for graduate architecture and urban design programs at the nation's top universities. The curriculum combines an introduction to architecture, community design, 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.

Program Learning Outcomes

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