Bachelor of Architecture - Architecture (Optional Co-op)

The program for the Bachelor of Architecture degree (first professional degree) is a five-year curriculum of at least 160 credit hours. The focus of the curriculum is preparation for professional practice in architecture and emphasizes sustainability, critical thinking, research and technology. The curriculum is divided into four segments: Foundation; Intermediate; Comprehensive Design; and Professional.

Design reconciles conflicting visions and exploits all available technologies to shape and sustain a better world. Houston’s hot-humid environment, low-lying Gulf-Coast geography, and dispersed pattern of un-zoned metropolitan development presents designers with an extraordinary laboratory, full of challenges and opportunities. The proposals seeded in the vast urban sprawl of Houston are transmutable to cities around the globe.

The Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design offers its students a platform of integrated disciplines - architecture, space architecture, interior architecture, and industrial design - from which to negotiate the complexities of contemporary practice in a world that is grappling with diminishing economic and natural resources, the realities of post disaster re-construction, and, at the same time, continued, rapid urbanization. The programs foster an environment where ideas find form, where practices that are socially equitable and fundamentally ecological establish a model from which to develop Houston’s future and to inform and shape design strategies globally.

The curriculum is designed to prepare graduates for professional practice in architecture, industrial design or interior architecture, by equipping them with a depth of understanding of human needs and a command of a range of technologies that will enable them to shape their environments and the objects in them.