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Welcome to the Department of Architecture. Prepare for the real world. Our School is focused on how architecture, landscape, and urban design negotiate the diverse concerns that are inherent to our urbanized context and ultimately shape how we live.

As a School within Northeastern University, we are committed to study through engagement, with an interdisciplinary approach to contemporary imperatives like health, security, and sustainability in pursuit of global resilience. Our School contributes to a vast range of faculty expertise found across the University. For our students, interdisciplinary opportunities result in dual majors, minors, concentrations and electives, in fields ranging from marine science to public policy and civil engineering to data visualization.

We are located in the heart of downtown Boston; a city that has a long history yet is still growing, small and local, yet globally renowned for education, institutions, and a strong design community. As a coastal city, Boston has radically altered its built and natural environment over time and is now impacted by changing conditions, calling for innovative design approaches. Our design studio is located inside a major public transit hub, which lets us connect to every corner of the region and to every one of these contemporary urban concerns – Boston is our urban laboratory.

Our students engage with a broad range of different contexts and cultures, local and far-away, academic and professional. Our co-op program interweaves the study and practice of architecture, with the understanding that if we want to innovate our built world, we need to innovate the way we build. While studying, our students have practiced architecture in hundreds of professional settings in dozens of cities and countries, creating a supportive network around the world. Through global studies abroad, cities like Berlin serve as new settings to explore varying social, cultural, and environmental influences on architecture, urbanism, and landscape. Through Dialogues of Civilizations or traveling studios, our faculty share specific geographic expertise on the ground in places like China and Croatia with students.

As a whole, our urban focus and context, interdisciplinary collaborations, integration of local and global engagement, and our approach of combining academic study with professional practice collectively create the experiential learning of our program.

You can find much more about the undergraduate and graduate programs on this site.
We welcome you to come and study with us. In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to contact me at [email protected].

Dan Adams

Director, Department of Architecture
College of Arts, Media and Design
Northeastern University
[email protected]