The Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design degree at Columbia GSAPP is a three-term program consisting of summer, fall, and spring terms. It provides an ecosystem where leading voices in the field of architectural practice and outstanding young professionals—who hold a Bachelor of Architecture or Master of Architecture degree—together explore architecture as a crucial player in the evolution of major contemporary modes of defiance.
The program has long been a site for architects from around the globe to test concepts and confront changes that affect architecture, cities, and territories worldwide. Utilizing an environmental paradigm, the program serves as a cauldron for rigorously-curated pluralism, where faculty and students work together on six areas of knowledge and action:
- Rendering technological systems accountable.
- The architecture of the climate crisis.
- Modes of environmental engagement.
- Materiality as a territorial practice.
- Interspecies relationships and non-anthropocentric otherness.
- Design for social inclusivity.
- The articulation of offline and online interaction.
- Decolonizing geopolitical design.
The program pairs a set of required studios with elective courses that are shared with other programs in the School, promoting interdisciplinary transferences and collaborations. Furthermore, by extending beyond the Columbia University campus into the urban matrix, New York City becomes the milieu where the MSAAD is installed, making the program a learning experience that not only uses New York as its principal case study, but is enacted in direct participation with the rich network of laboratories, research centers, design agencies, organizations, and independent practices that the city concentrates together.
