Archinect - News

The Cooper Union is starting to bring back free tuition

2024-09-03T17:02:00-04:00

In a surprising move, The Cooper Union has announced a return to tuition-free education for all undergraduate seniors within each of the next four years starting with its Class of 2025. The reversal comes ten years after school trustees formally voted to do away with its free mandate for the first time as a result of financial strain. The New York Times was first to report on the announcement, which follows a $6 million grant from three Cooper alumni.

The Cooper Union says it is on track to be free to all students by the 2028-29 academic year. Current costs for undergraduates hover at $44,550. However, the school is prioritizing the ten-year plan. Current first-, second-, and third-year students will receive full-tuition scholarships in their senior years under it. In a statement, outgoing President Laura Sparks said progress on the issue "[reaffirms] the ideals that have been foundational to this institution since Peter Cooper opened its doors in 1859."

Previously on Archinect: Coo...

SCI-Arc's immersive 2024 Spring Show exhibition to feature a colorful assortment of new student work

2024-04-18T12:58:00-04:00

This post is brought to you by SCI-Arc, an Archinect Partner School

SCI-Arc, an Archinect Partner School, is hosting its annual Spring Show exhibition later this month that will feature the work of undergraduate and graduate students from all school programs. The show takes place on its LA Arts District campus, beginning with the opening reception at 6 PM on Saturday, April 27th.

The annual exhibition is meant to highlight students' work and the diversity of SCI-Arc’s course offerings via four immersive monochromatic rooms, each with different textures covering its surfaces. The curator of this year’s Spring Show, postgraduate Fiction and Entertainment program faculty Alexey Marfin, tells Archinect: "The spaces operate on two scales: The bold statement seen from afar, but also the fine material detail seen on closer inspection."

"The exhibition will be centered around an experience...

Criticism around U.S. News Best College rankings targets a culture of deception at the top of higher education

2022-09-12T16:16:00-04:00

The annual U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges list has just been released, opening up a fresh channel for the ongoing debate over the value of and methodologies used in ranking institutions of higher education.

A focal point of the 2022 rankings is Columbia University, which dropped from 2nd to 18th place after being a mainstay in the top ten for several decades. The decision by U.S. News to demote the Ivy League institution came after the publication of a damning investigation from mathematics professor Michael Thaddeus wherein he outlined a deliberate fabrication of statistics meant to game the already flawed and disputed methodology. The scandal is notably the second in recent memory after a 2012 investigation uncovered similar tactics at George Washington University that went on for a period of decades.

A look at the other top-ranked schools in the 2022–2023 National Universities list with academic degrees in architecture offers a reflection of similar rankings, such as Bes...

Student housing starts down sharply in 2022, expected to rebound for 2023 according to a new industry report

2022-06-28T16:56:00-04:00

A new report from the industry group RealPage indicates the extent to which the pandemic and certain societal trends related to higher education have impacted construction starts on private student housing developments nationwide.

The 175-school survey showed overall construction is now in a lag compared to the relative boom which took place throughout the 2010s when many colleges and universities adopted the more expensive luxury accommodation development model in an attempt to attract more undergraduates to campus.

Across the country, college enrollments are declining as smaller regional institutions continue to merge or shutter while prospective freshmen fail to matriculate onto campus altogether. This has coupled with the effects of the pandemic on the construction industry to create a nearly 50% decline in new beds (from 50,000 to 26,000) when compared to the industry...

Mississippi State University studio teaches the value of collaboration between its architecture and building construction science students

2022-05-20T13:27:00-04:00

Earlier this week, we explored the relationship between architecture and construction science disciplines through the lens of a Building Scientist position at Payette. While the two fields are commonly intertwined within professional practice settings, they are also being implemented in a collaborative design studio taught at Mississippi State University (MSU). Students from the school's architecture and building construction science departments worked together in a unique studio called the PCI Foundation Studio.

After receiving a special grant from the PCI Foundation in 2020 to incorporate "precast concrete into the classroom," MSU Architecture's Associate Professor Alexis Gregory allocated the $100,000 grant to be utilized within architecture courses at the school. This funding was used to develop the Spring 2021 PCI Foundation Studio.

Under Gregory's direction, sixteen teams of students from both departments worked together to develop a collaborative design-build project benefitt...

SCI-Arc's 2021 Undergraduate Thesis Weekend Renews Discourse Through Imagination and Community

2021-04-22T17:20:00-04:00

This post is brought to you by SCI-Arc, an Archinect School Partner

In acknowledgment of the extraordinary work done by the 2021 Undergraduate Thesis class during this unprecedented year, SCI-Arc is proud to announce its 2021 UG Thesis Weekend on April 23–24, 2021 as this year’s graduating thesis students, along with Undergraduate Thesis Coordinator Jenny Wu, present and share their accomplishments with the world.

Student work by Jessie Pan, Di Wan + Rongyi Tan, Advisor: Marcelo Spina. Image courtesy of SCI-Arc

“Since our move to remote teaching a year ago,” shares Wu, “our students have used this opportunity to be inventive about how they work on their thesis, by transforming their digital work into compelling narratives and turning their own living spaces into creative laboratories for unconventional model building.”

This April 23–24, SCI-Arc’s fifth-year B.Arch students will present their thesis projects during an immersive, virtual Undergraduate Thesis Weekend, an online public p...

CCA's Buoyant Ecologies Float Lab Launches in San Francisco Bay

2019-12-27T14:14:00-05:00

This post is brought to you by California College of the Arts (CCA)

In August 2019, California College of the Arts (CCA) Architectural Ecologies Lab, one of five research and teaching labs in CCA’s Architecture Division, launched the Buoyant Ecologies Float Lab in San Francisco Bay. The Float Lab, a cutting-edge prototype for an ecologically productive floating breakwater, builds on five years of applied research at CCA. It was initiated in the college’s integrated building design studios, in which students developed architectural proposals questioning traditional boundaries between land and water.

Buoyant Ecologies Float Lab on CCA's back lot prior to deployment. CCA Architectural Ecologies Lab

Buoyant Ecologies Float Lab, CCA Architectural Ecologies Lab

Merging expertise from design, advanced digital manufacturing, and marine ecology, the Float Lab imagines a new kind of architecture for climate adaptation. Conceived as a link in a chain of bean-shaped, wave-attenuating floating ...

SCI-Arc Celebrates a School Year’s Culmination and Welcomes Another

2017-10-03T12:37:00-04:00

This post is brought to you by Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).

Since its founding in 1972 as an independent school of architecture, SCI-Arc has developed a series of idiosyncrasies that have anecdotally permeated the broader architecture community. Prominent among these is hosting its cap and gown-less Graduation in the middle of September-- literally an hour after its last review of the academic year and a week after the first pin ups of the new school year. This means that September is the most dynamic time of the year at SCI-Arc as it concurrently welcomes in a new class of undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students and bids farewell to its latest generation of architects eager and ready to imagine and shape the future.

SCI-Arc’s 2017 graduation ceremony was held on Sunday, September 10 and featured a commencement address by architect Marion Weiss, cofounder of WEISS/MANFREDI and B.Arch Graduate Deborah Garcia ’17.

A celebration of student ach...

The Yale architecture studio where students must pitch to "an actual client"

2016-04-07T13:08:00-04:00

“This kind of pedagogical approach, where students are engaged with a ‘real’ client, has the potential to be very informative for the design process ... Usually people view constraints as detrimentally restrictive, but I think in this case it allows students to always have parameters by which to judge their work.” [...] [Yanbo Li ’16] said that the studio is a “perennial favorite” among senior architecture majors from year to year, and said his own experience was not an exception.

Related on Archinect:

Harvard's new undergraduate design program teaches "architecture as liberal art"

2014-12-17T18:47:00-05:00

These three streams—history and theory, design imagination, and the physical act of making—are the central components of the undergraduate track in architecture studies, a joint program from the Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ (FAS) department of history of art and architecture. [...] The first students in the track, housed within the art-history concentration, graduated last spring.

The Graduate School of Design at Harvard has long been revered as one of the world's top institutions, but only recently has that pedigree been extended into an undergraduate architecture program. As recently as a few years ago, there were no architecture studio courses available to Harvard undergrads – those interested in architecture would concentrate in the department of History of Art and Architecture, a liberal arts program which isn't tailored towards the 5-year accredited BArch programs of similar undergraduate institutions. But for the first time in Fall of 2012, the GSD and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (where History of Art and Architecture is housed) opened a new, collaborative program for undergraduates. Students who enroll in this track of studies will take two studio courses in architecture, within the context of a wider-ranged liberal arts education – the foundational idea being that architectural design thinking is its own form of liberal-arts practice, and that t...

Redrawing the architecture major

2012-04-25T18:15:10-04:00

Yale’s new undergraduate architecture program treads a fine line between Yale College’s liberal arts philosophy and the preprofessional culture of its home in the Architecture School’s Rudolph Hall. Due to the major’s rigorous coursework early on and focus on production, six undergraduate students in the major interviewed said that they feel the program is more “preprofessional” than other majors at Yale.

New UG Architecture Concentration Planned at GSD

2011-04-23T14:24:09-04:00

Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Graduate School of Design are developing a new undergraduate concentration in architectural studies planned to be offered for the first time in the fall of 2012.