What will I learn?
Graduate Licensure-Ready with Illinois Tech’s Designed-Focused Bachelor of Architecture. In a rapidly growing world that needs sustainability-driven designers ready to help build the future, start your path to becoming licensure-ready with our academically rigorous and hands-on-driven Bachelor of Architecture program. Located in the heart of a global architecture hub in Chicago, you will have direct access to a globally recognized architectural ecosystem, extensive professional networks, and opportunities for real-world architectural exposure and collaboration. You’ll learn from highly accomplished faculty members who are actively working in industry, such as Wiel Arets and John Ronan, who will provide you with international expertise and mentorship on every project, bridging academic insights with professional realties. Learn technical skills such as drafting while exploring vital topics such as sustainability and material reuse and explore the creative aspects that bring vibrancy and life to the built environment in our five-year Bachelor of Architecture program. Your academic experience is built around immersive, studio-based learning where you’ll receive 12 hours of dedicated, one-on-one instruction weekly, covering topics such as the lack of affordable housing in urban areas including Chicago. You’ll also have access to our cutting-edge, 14,000-square-foot Fabrication Center, where you can work on design projects with access to 3D printers, CNC mills, and more. The history and theory sequence of our curriculum presents the intellectual contexts within which architecture, urbanism, and landscape architecture are practiced and interpreted. These courses introduce the buildings, cities, sites, projects, texts, images, people, movements, schools, and concepts that have shaped architecture in the past and that shape architecture today. In addition to this content, the history and theory coursework also teaches methods of visual analysis, close reading, critical thinking, and effective writing. Our goal is to provide an understanding of the complex intellectual, aesthetic, technical, and political contexts within which architecture arises. Primary source readings by architects, critics, novelists, and theorists are essential to this approach. An overriding aim of these courses is to articulate the irreducibly rich relationships between buildings, cities, and landscapes as material artifacts and the ideas that surround them. The history and theory sequence begins with a set of core classes that provide a broad introduction to architecture and urbanism, covering examples from around the world and throughout history. These courses are built upon a core set of projects, texts, and concepts that provide our students with a foundation for their studies and careers. This core sequence is followed by advanced classes-mostly electives selected from a changing menu of seminars-that expand into more sophisticated and specialized topics in smaller class settings
