Hello! 

The ACSA will now blog from this little corner of Archinect, sharing news, events, and conversations about architectural education in the USA, Canada, and beyond.

What is the ACSA? 

To start, we are not the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB), which coordinates architectural registrations across the United States; nor are we the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB), which visits schools of architecture in order to establish educational standards and grant accreditation. We're also neither the American Institute of Architects (AIA) nor the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS)--though, like the AIAS we work out of the AIA building in Washington DC.

[The AIA Headquarters Building at 1735 New York Avenue, NW in Washington DC, two blocks from the White House and facing the National Mall. Photo by Artifice Images from ArchitectureWeek.]

We do, however, work with NCARB, the AIA, and AIAS quite closely, representing the interests of our members (which are over 250 architecture schools including all accredited programs in the USA and Canada, or over 5000 faculty members and over 30 000 students) in conversations about architectural education and its relationship to the profession and higher education. 

The ACSA is a non-profit with a mission to advance architectural education by encouraging dialogue about the discipline; facilitating teaching, research, scholarly and creative works; articulating key current issues; and fostering public awareness of architectural education. To do this, the ACSA's endeavors include conferences, publications such as the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), awards and competitions for students and faculty, support for architectural research, policy development and advocacy (for example, on current discussions about revising the NAAB Accreditation standards), and liaison with allied organizations. 

We do all this with a full-time staff of seven (plus an accountant who is with us part time) which works under the leadership of an elected Board of Directors that is currently headed by Norman Millar, Dean of the Woodbury School of Architecture and principal of Norman Millar Architects, Hsin-Ming Fung of SCI-Arc, Donna Robertson of Illinois Institute of Technology, and several others. 

We also share information for those who are interested in attending architecture school: we have a helpful guide to architectural education and an online guide to all the accredited architecture schools in the USA and Canada (and several international ones). 

Our next event, in just over a week, is an Architecture College + Career Expo in San Francisco on September 28 that the ACSA is hosting together with the AIAS. The event is free to attend, and there's a big list of schools there that are eager to meet new prospective students, including:

• Academy of Art University
• Arizona State University
• Boston Architectural College
• California Baptist University
• California College of the Arts
• Georgia Institute of Technology
• Harvard University
• Illinois Institute of Technology
• Portland State University
• Southern California Institute of Architecture
• The Ohio State University
• Tulane University
• University of California, Berkeley
• University of Colorado, Boulder
• University of Idaho
• University of Illinois at Chicago
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• University of Miami
• University of Michigan
• University of Minnesota
• University of North Carolina Charlotte
• University of Oregon
• University of Pennsylvania
• University of Southern California
• University of Virginia
• Washington University in St. Louis
• Wentworth Institute of Technology
• Woodbury University

The event includes: school exhibitors, seminars, portfolio reviews, college representatives, and local campus tours. If you're on the west coast and want to hear more about these schools, many of which are in other parts of the country, it's a great opportunity!

If you're not in San Francisco, not to worry! There are several upcoming architecture college expos around the USA:  

San Francisco: September 28 at the Academy of Art University

Dallas: October 12, 2013 at the Dallas Center for Architecture

Chicago: October 19, 2013 at Harold Washington College

Boston: October 26, 2013 at Wentworth Institute of Technology

[Personal note from Lian:  since I hold down the ACSA's Boston "office," I'll be representing the ACSA at Wentworth--please say hello!]

Thanks for reading!

ACSA