Architecture students and faculty at the Pratt School of Architecture. Image courtesy Pratt Institute
What’s on the minds of architecture deans this semester? With the new Fall term now a few weeks in, Archinect touched base with the deans and directors at leading architecture schools across the country to learn about their goals, the themes that shape their curricula, what excites them, and, potentially, concerns them these days.
Today, we’re sharing thoughts from the heads of schools as academically and geographically diverse as Pratt Institute, Notre Dame, USC, Tulane, and Cranbrook, to name only a few. Issues range from housing to technology, LA fire recovery to 2028 Olympics prep, mass timber to climate resilience, and from valuing craft to embracing AI (or in one case, deliberately rejecting it).
At the Pratt Institute School of Architecture, we very recently hosted Executive Director of UN-Habitat Anacláudia Rossbach for a presentation on the UN’s New Urban Agenda and its ambitious housing goals. We were excited to host her at the school, as housing has become a key part of our curriculum across disciplines and scales. We have a particular interest in co-housing and understanding how models of living are shifting, as many of our studios and seminars postulate, people become more willing to share more spaces for social and environmental impact. This collaborative way of working is even leading us to work with many local groups and partners, such as the New York Housing Authority. This year, we are looking to grow our work on a variety of housing topics and to broaden our local and national partnerships to explore how we design the structures, spaces, and policies that frame how we live together.
Quilian Riano
Dean, Pratt School of Architecture
Our goal at the USC School of Architecture is to prepare students for the immense challenges they, our disciplines, and the larger planet already face. We do this above all by seeking to transform existing forms of practice — challenging how architects, and allied fields, don’t just work, or think, but also communicate, produce, and disseminate the knowledge of that field. In a year like 2025, with its many uncertainties and anxieties, it’s possible our greatest project will be embracing the kinds of optimism, and forward-looking change, that I believe is the reality of a discipline like architecture.
This fall, our faculty at USC Architecture are leveraging the knowledge and projects being produced across the four different and distinct disciplines that make up our school: Architecture; Landscape Architecture+Urbanism; Building Science; and Historic Conservation, with extensive curricula, program reviews, and course redesigns intended to make the school and its work more relevant to our times. Like other creative fields and forms of human knowledge, architecture is already being redefined by the battle between disciplinary expertise and the kinds of transdisciplinary collaboration and integration that are a hallmark of our time. To me, that foregrounds questions of intelligent practice, no less than smart design.
We are directly engaging the unique global city around us in timely, relevant ways; and running studies working on the post-fire challenges that include running studios directly engaging organizations or communities that suffered terrible loss last January, while the school is working directly with the Case Study 2.0 organization looking to lead efforts to rebuild Malibu and the Palisades; a subject of conferences and guest lectures this fall. We’ve recently approved new courses that this year will take more students directly out onto the streets of our home city in ‘walking’ seminars that directly engage Los Angeles. We’ve also grown our professional mentorship programs and fellowships with the USC Architectural Guild, providing a vital link to professional experience and knowledge across Southern California.
We’ve partnered with LA Metro and others to organize ShadeLA, a design competition we launched this month and which is open to any students in the greater Los Angeles metro area, to design, and build, a series of shade structures for the crowds that will attend the 2028 Olympics. And finally, not all of our new initiatives this fall are focused on Southern California: Further afield (literally), our undergraduate Global Studies program this year includes a new destination in London, and our directors at other destinations have created new partnerships in Europe, the Meditteranean, and Asia, while new graduate student destinations include 60s land art destinations across the American Southwest, as well as a new short course in Mexico City. All efforts we see as essential to the global lives of not just our students and their futures, but also that of our school.
Brett Steele
Dean, USC School of Architecture
Tulane School of Architecture and Built Environment has gone through
four years of exponential growth in our student population, that meant
bringing in 26 new permanent faculty members, and we are planning to
bring six more this year and possibly a similar number next year. This
requires very deliberate work in maintaining Tulane’s particular
identity as a school built to deal with the most pressing issues of our
time and place — climate change and social equity in the built environment — while
harnessing the extraordinary talent and ambition of new and long-time
faculty. Our established reputation in educating excellent professionals
and engaging with our communities has expanded to include the pursuit
of strong research outputs. The challenge for us is always how these
outputs are impacting and addressing real-world dilemmas, from the
territorial scale to the material scale and to the human scale.
Iñaki Alday Sanz
Dean, Tulane School of Architecture
UCLA is a research powerhouse that underpins and fuels UCLA AUD in both spirit and practice. Inquiry and curiosity are integral to our ethos; research drives our curriculum and shapes our future. This year, AUD’s research studios engage with expansive global questions — from mobility to artificial intelligence to housing — while also addressing pressing local conditions in Los Angeles that have major implications for us all. These include an exploration of sustainable infrastructure in advance of the 2028 LA Olympics, as well as a design-build studio led by celebrated Mexico City-based architect Tatiana Bilbao that envisions “forever housing” in LA’s Boyle Heights. As always, I am looking forward to the ways in which we, as designers and as an institution, bring together diverse forms of knowledge, people, and possibilities to imagine and contribute to a more equitable and sustainable future, locally and globally, with immediate and sustained impact.
Mariana Ibañez
Chair, UCLA Architecture and Urban Design
I am excited about the opportunity to develop synergies across all
the disciplines in our school — Architecture, Interior Architecture,
Landscape Architecture, and Historic Preservation — coalescing around
sustainability, resilience, community engagement, and low-carbon
construction technologies, including mass timber. Our students are
curious, engaged, and full of potential, and I look forward to seeing
our faculty continue to nurture their growth and talent. I hope we
approach this new academic year with optimism, creativity, and a strong
sense of community and mutual support for one another.
Uli Dangel
Director, University of Oregon School of Architecture & Environment
At this pivotal moment in the history of Cranbrook Architecture, the
department is interrogating the future of architectural education while
continuing the legacy of joy in making at the heart of this incredible
place. For us, this means endless experimentation, critical and
intentional engagement, seeking inspiration in the unexpected, and
exploring beyond existing boundaries to where the most generative moves
are often made. The pedagogy emphasizes the idea of planting seeds and
tilling the soil as a practice of cultural and ecological stewardship,
the entrepreneurial role of the architect in today’s world, and
embracing responsibility for creating a future we want to live in.
Cranbrook Architecture is a place where things that have not existed
before take shape and become real, where possibility is the expectation,
and the motto is “Let’s see what happens!”
Elise DeChard and Gina Reichert
Interim Architects in Residence, Cranbrook Academy of Art
At APDesign // K-State, our curriculum is driven by the belief that
excellence in design can positively impact society by addressing
challenges at every scale of the built environment. As a
multidisciplinary college, we honor traditions of craft and
collaboration while embracing emerging technologies, from advanced
fabrication to AI. This term, our faculty and students are energized by
connecting timeless design values with new tools to tackle thorny issues
with creativity, responsibility, and vision for a better future.
Michael McClure
Dean, Kansas State University College of Architecture, Planning & Design
AI is going to revolutionize the architecture and planning professions, and it promises to transform historic preservation and the fine arts in profound ways. For a capital project at Penn this fall — the renovation and expansion of an 1892 Cope & Stewardson building to house interdisciplinary research hubs and studios — our team considered over 2,000 brick options. Generative AI can streamline this process by analyzing materials based on performance, aesthetics, energy efficiency, and compatibility with existing structures. But our primary focus at Penn is what I could call “organic intelligence.” Our faculty pioneered strategies for understanding and working with natural systems decades ago that we continue to build on, and we are expanding our investment in cultural exchange and community engagement. It’s vital that we invest in dialogue and finding balance in our stewardship of planet Earth.
Frederick Steiner
Dean, University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design
This fall, UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design is prioritizing the role of technology and computation in shaping the built environment. Our goal is to ensure students become critical and aware users of their techniques and tools. To support pedagogical shift, the college is hosting a public lecture series, “Technology for a Sustainable Tomorrow,” with speakers from many disciplines. Simultaneously, a new foundational first-year course is in development to embed this awareness into the earliest stage of every student’s education.
Renee Chow
Dean, UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design
Ohio State’s Architecture program is building its core curriculum around today’s most pressing issues. At the center is a commitment to addressing climate and the responsibility of designing climate-responsive architecture, while preparing students with the skills and insight to meet these challenges.
Rachel Kleit
Interim Director, The Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture
We’ve already enjoyed an exciting month of classes, public lectures, and events — and there’s much more to come this semester. Rather than preview upcoming events (which you can find on our website), I’d like to highlight the five outstanding visiting critics who have joined us in Slocum Hall to lead special option studios:
Hernán Díaz Alonso (HDA-X), together with Stephen Zimmerer (Syracuse Architecture), will teach “The Box/Casa House: A Mutant Archetype,” a transformative studio that invites students to reimagine domestic architecture by mutating one of its most iconic forms: the “Box House” or “Casa Box.”
Ali Chen (Ali Conchita Chen) will teach “Common Grounds,” in which students will reimagine the design and branding of a coffee shop within the University’s Florence campus. The studio will develop both an architectural proposal for the existing space and a new visual identity. Students will travel to Florence to visit the project site and participate in a workshop with the Polimoda Fashion School.
Pablo Sequero (salazarsequeromedina) will lead “Seaside Adaptations: Between Publics, Leisure and Infrastructure,” a studio that explores how existing coastal and leisure infrastructure in Miami can be reimagined in the context of the global climate crisis. This studio is part of a multi-year campaign led by the School of Architecture in collaboration with the University of Miami School of Architecture. Together, the schools aim to foster public engagement with the urgent issue of coastal resilience, encouraging nuanced interpretations through student proposals, presentations, discussions, and debates.
Ashley Bigham and Erik Herrmann (Outpost Office) will teach “First, Color,” a studio that positions color not as an afterthought to material and form, but as a primary agent of spatial inquiry and design engagement — on its own terms.
Fei Wang (Syracuse Architecture), Nan Wang (URSIDE Design), and Yiming Wang (Wang Yiming Studio) will teach “Metamorphosis of the Phoenix: The Confluence of Art, Architecture and Landscape,” which explores how architecture, art, and environment converge in response to contemporary ecological challenges. The studio will travel to Taliesin West, Arcosanti, and surrounding earthworks, crafting interventions that respond to desert extremes — scorching sun, rare water, and ancient stone — while engaging global precedents from Christo’s ephemeral works to Japan’s Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale.
Michael Speaks
Dean, Syracuse Architecture
I wake up every morning with a smile on my face, thinking that our school is the only one in the land whose curriculum is directed by an intentional pedagogy. A pedagogy written into a book by our entire faculty and illustrated by the work of both undergraduate and graduate students. I am impressed by this kind of cooperative spirit shared among the members of this 52-member faculty. I am inspired by their will to reject AI as a formative influence in any creative endeavor associated with our program; by their insistence instead, to teach the history and theory of the built environment in depth; to engage with learning about construction-related technologies both high and low, current, recent and ancient; to be empathetic with the generational interests of students; to encourage learning by doing; to collaborate in their research work with faculty across a multitude of departments in various of our university’s schools and colleges.
It gives me great hope and pleasure to walk the studios of our school every day and see students engage in drawing by hand and rendering in watercolor; consulting the books piled next to their desks, seeking to connect their projects to the wisdom of the ages; engaging in architecture, urbanism and landscape architecture simultaneously in almost all of their work; reporting from their year in Rome and their worldwide travels with impressions and sketches to last a lifetime; engaging with a variety of civic, residential and commercial program types; speaking clearly and truly during reviews, recognizing that they will be responsible for the intended consequences of their ideas; rejecting performative protagonism and supporting each others’ learning needs; aspiring to become architects, excellent both in practice as well as in service to society.
I go to sleep at night content with the thought that at Notre Dame, we have finally turned the corner on obsessive starchitecture by operating on a simple generative assumption: That the design of individual projects, such as buildings, landscapes, urban precincts, etc. is for the purpose of creating diverse cities and stewarding nature, rendering them both worthy of human flourishing. Us adult architects are primarily responsible for having created the worldwide urban and environmental mess we are currently inhabiting. We are proudly teaching a new generation of architects to recognize the design sins of their forefathers and mothers. And to commit their lives to changing the built world that they are about to inherit, one little beautiful, durable, and resilient project at a time. There is really no other way to bring our society and all others back on an even keel.
Stefanos Polyzoides
Dean, University of Notre Dame School of Architecture
We want to hear from you: What’s happening at your architecture school this semester? What’s new? What’s exciting? Anything concerning? Share in the comments below!