Please note: This program has been transitioned to the Architectural Design studio minor for students entering MICA starting Fall 2024 of later. The information presented here is for current students completing the program as a major.

AD provides the creative foundation for designing the unimagined. Forging new ways of living in a time of environmental and social challenges, our student experience is exciting, challenging and varied as well as:

Unique - As one of the few architectural design programs in the country set in a college of art and design, students draw on a wide range of creative disciplines to inform their design work. Students in the Architectural Design department develop an understanding of space, three-dimensional form, and materiality. With these elements, they re-imagine our physical environment and its relationship to the body, the city and the landscape.

Personal and Multidisciplinary -  we encourage students to find their voice and develop their own creative process and always think in a multidisciplinary manner, in addition to giving students a practical toolkit of architecture skills. Our students reach an essential competency and go further to find their unique expression.

Design Process Informed - Design concepts are conceived through research and analysis in a creative exchange of components of the problem to be solved. This process is explored through drawing and model-making simultaneously. Students learn to be ambidextrous in hand-skills as well as digital skills.

High Achieving - Graduates of the program use their multi-faceted skill set allowing them to choose from a wide range of professional and academic options. Many develop their art as a studio practice, others continue to some of the most prestigious Architecture graduate programs in the country, and others develop their practice at the best architecture firms nationally and internationally. 

Future focused - Architectural Design is a unique opportunity for students to develop their design aspirations by investigating and reimagining the built environment. The program provides the core experience students need to become the next generation of Architectural Design professionals.