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5 great universities to study architecture in the US
20/04/2021
By BAM Team
Picture this… You just finished your Architecture B.A. – may be in your home town, in that school everyone told you was the best, or in the place you found out that fitted the most to your requirements, after a hard work of investigation – and now you want to go all the way in into the depth of the matter: you want a MArch and all that comes with it, in your resume.
So here you are again in that intersection: “Where should I study?”, “Are these Universities recognized?”, “Which is the best place to study architecture?”.
In this article, we’re not going to tell you which is the best University – because it will be the one that fulfills all of your requests, or at least some of them – but we are going to show you 5 architecture schools in the US that are widely recognized for their top-level education, where you can rest assured that you’re going to make a profit off, and where every person you encounter, either professor or student, is going to contribute in building the professional you aspire to be.
For this, we took 3 of the most famous World University Rankings as main references: the QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) World University Rankings – which most recent release (2021) you can find in our News section -, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE Ranking), 2021 and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (Shanghai Ranking), 2020.
So, according to the information provided by these three rankings and, of course, the BAM Ranking; here we have some of the greatest universities in the US where you can take your next professional step:
Rated fifth by QS Ranking, third by the Times Higher Education Ranking, and first by Shanghai Ranking, Harvard University belongs to the well-known North American “Ivy League” and its Graduate School of Design, besides being the school of great architects such as Jeanne Gang, Frank Gehry, Philip Johnson, and Thom Mayne, among others; is considered to have the best postgraduate architecture program according to the 2020 BAM Ranking, Master in Architecture II.
QS gives MIT the first position in its ranking, while Times Higher Education and Shanghai rankings give it, the fifth and fourth, respectively. MIT is another giant that has been home to great architecture minds in history, like Louis Skidmore, Ieoh Ming Pei, Carlo Ratti, among others. MIT’s Master of Science in Architecture Studies and Urbanism holds the fifth-best postgraduate architecture program in the latest edition of BAM Ranking.
Ranked seventh by QS and Times Higher Education rankings, and fifth by Shanghai’s; UC Berkeley mints the title as #1 public university worldwide in the U.S. News rankings, and one of its most important contributions to the academy was the development of the concept of environmental design, integrating the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and planning; that’s how its College of Environmental Design (CED) was founded.
Columbia is rated fourteenth in QS Ranking, while the Times Higher Education Ranking placed it in its seventeenth position and Shanghai Ranking gives it the seventh. Another Ivy League university, which Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) graduated architects like David Aldrich, Antoine Predock, and Philip L. Goodwin, among others; and holds BAM ranking’s second-best postgraduate program, Master of Science degree in Advanced Architectural Design, according to the 2020 edition.
QS Ranking rated it seventeenth; Times Higher Education Ranking, fifteenth; and Shanghai Ranking gave it its thirteenth place. UCLA is known as one of the top public universities in the US and one of the most selective in terms of admission; it also presents itself as an institution with a diverse range of backgrounds that promotes intellectual and ideological debate. UCLA AUD’s M.S. Architecture and Urban Design got the twentieth position on our 2020 ranking.
If you want more information about these and other universities, check our Architecture Schools section. We also would like to invite you to visit our 2020 BAM Ranking and stay tuned to our website and social media to make sure you don’t miss the 2021 edition.
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