"Our mission is fourfold—to educate, to encourage, to prepare and to provide." - Merhdad Hadighi
It may seem commonplace to say that the discipline of architecture is, in itself, multi-disciplinary. It is indeed this very commonplace statement that continues to introduce complexities in the way that we teach and practice architecture. The fundamental issue is that architecture is a synthetic discipline that requires knowledge and expertise in composition (arts), history and theory (humanities), structural, environmental and mechanical systems (engineering), material properties (material sciences), land use and policy (law), computation (computing), human factors and more. The students and architects, alike, are constantly asked to integrate and synthesize information from many different fields of study.
The education of architecture is therefore a circulation between the disciplinary logic of each of the subjects and the inherent tectonic and synthetic model of learning of architects. The teaching of the core intellectual domains of each subject to architecture students is central to the pedagogic mission of any architecture program and critical to the survival of the profession. Yet this mission must be tempered by a shift towards the synthetic.
We have organized our curriculum to reflect this dual nature, this two-handed learning: the hand that must learn the core disciplinary practices of every field that influences architecture and the hand that must synthesize as an architect. To that end, our program circulates curricular content horizontally, among courses within each semester, as well as vertically, from year to year. The first year of our program concentrates on the introduction of the techniques and the principles of design. The second year concentrates on our interaction with architectural and societal history through the analysis of architectural precedents. Our third year involves the incorporation of technology, both in the design process as well as in constructing buildings. The fourth year, the culmination of our undergraduate program, concentrates on synthesizing and testing everything learned through the comprehensive design of a large, public, urban building. The curriculum of each year is then composed of design studios, lectures, seminars, and workshops that examine the topic of the year through multiple lenses.
Our graduate curriculum is dedicated to student and faculty driven research. We have devised a new model for graduate architecture education based on faculty and students working together on pioneering research. This new curriculum will be in place in the Fall of 2007. The Department of Architecture at UB is host to the most respected, internationally known, research faculty. Graduate students in our program have the opportunity to engage research as a fundamental part of their curriculum through one of our four "Research Groups": Inclusive Design, Material Culture, Situated Technologies, and Sustainable Urban and Natural Environments. The students will have seminars in intellectual domain and technical methods of their research area, have design studios and work directly with faculty on ground breaking research; all as a normal course of their study. I believe this new model of graduate education to be a provocative pedagogic approach that brings together faculty interests and expertise with the education of architecture students.
Mehrdad Hadighi,
Chair, Department of Architecture
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