M.S. Advanced Architectural Design

The Master of Science degree in Advanced Architectural Design is a three-term program consisting of summer, fall, and spring terms. The objective of the program is to provide outstanding young professionals who hold a Bachelor of Architecture or Master of Architecture an opportunity to engage with and conceptualize design as a critical practice that shapes the world’s technological, relational and environmental evolutions.

The program is viewed as a framework in which both academic and professional concerns are explored. Overall, the program emphasizes an experimental approach to research and architectural design rigorously grounded in contemporary challenges.

In the Advanced Studios, nearly 20 studios work on the themes and methodologies defined by their individual critics, exploring the way new instruments, techniques and formats allow design to gain a relevant influence on a multiplicity of existing realities. The Advanced Design Studios work as laboratories of discussion and practice of new ways of mobilizing architectural ingredients, concepts, programs, tools and methods to connect design with thought and action. Themes and programs both carry an educational objective and present an opportunity for critics and students to jointly develop the capacity and the authority to intervene specific layers of the everyday.

The Advanced Design Studios are part of an experimental pedagogical ecosystem based on dialogues and positive discussions between different ways of thinking: students learn to build, defend, and rectify their arguments in a dialectical practice that is inseparable from their design endeavors. The Advanced Studios are open to M. Arch students and M.S. AAD students.

Studio culture is an extraordinary accumulation of coexisting conceptual and political positions that can be considered a part of the cutting-edge relationship between architectural practices and the present. The school is aware of this wealth and appreciates the special energy stored in this vibrant milieu shared and constituted by GSAPP faculty and students.

The Transfer Dialogues series highlights this intensity by giving students access to other GSAPP Advanced Studios while getting helpful panoramic information. Our intention is to open a new space for architecture and its parallel disciplines in the social, political, intellectual and economic arena with a critical position focused on the collective construction of the future.