MISSION
UVU’s Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch) is a five-year professional degree that prepares students for leadership in the profession of architecture and urban design. The program promotes a built environment that bolsters genuine communities through durable, useful, beautiful, and human-scaled architecture. The degree is rooted in classical and traditional architecture. The holistic foundation seeks to balance the art of building with aesthetic sensibilities, historical precedents with contemporary needs, craftsmanship with digital technologies, and theory with practice-based application. The goal of these efforts is to produce “master builder,” practice-ready graduates. Our students create a lasting and beautiful world that uplifts the human spirit.
CORE VALUES
Aesthetics: We celebrate the creative process by teaching our students to cultivate their imagination, refine their craft, and design with beauty. This is accomplished when a building’s composition (i.e., the whole and parts) reveals inner harmony and unity. We do this by grounding our students in timeless and tested design principles, patterns, proportions, sacred geometry, and spatial relationships inherent in nature and the classical tradition. Students also address the ethical function and aesthetics of architecture by understanding the built environment’s phenomenological effect on human perception, behavior, and experience. We encourage students to produce architecture that moves beyond prose and into poetry – an architecture that transforms chaos into cosmos and inspires the human spirit.
Culture: We infuse our students with an understanding of the importance of defending the authenticity of the human experience by honoring and preserving the spirit of a place, its culture, traditions, memory, and history. We study architectural precedents to learn from the past and address design challenges in a culturally and contextually sensitive way. We teach students the importance of approaching the design process with empathy, compassion, and humility so they might build upon the past and preserve the embodied history of architecture.
Technology: We promote creative problem-solving by equipping students with the technical skills to address the needs of the 21st century. Instead of succumbing to the aesthetics of speed, newness, and innovation, we focus on providing a timeless education balanced between theory and practice. This includes topics ranging from community engagement to globalization, historic preservation to adaptive reduce, building science to evidence-based design, environmental stewardship to wise resource management, and new urbanism to the revitalization of cities.
Well-being: In addition to architecture’s need to protect the public’s health, safety, and welfare, we teach our students to transcend those expectations and produce sustainable environments that enrich the human experience by promoting healing and well-being. Our traditional approach to design teaches students to look beyond the contemporary aesthetics of consumerism and instead focus on the durability, longevity, and adaptive-reuse potential of buildings. Building for time is a form of environmental stewardship and wise resource management which supports the University’s campus-wide sustainability initiative.
ACCREDITATION UPDATE
As of Spring 2019, Utah Valley University’s proposed professional architecture degree program, Bachelor of Architecture, began seeking candidacy for accreditation through the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB). UVU’s Bachelor of Architecture degree program was granted Initial Candidacy as of May 2022. The program is required to apply for Continuation of Candidacy and host a visit in 2023.
Should you require additional information, please go to our website at www.uvu.edu/aed/architecture.
