Welcome to Architecture
All functions of the architecture program are housed in a single location, the Chicoine Architecture, Mathematics and Engineering Hall. The building features administrative and faculty offices, light-filled design studios and pin-up spaces, a 13,000 square-foot workshop outfitted with state-of-the-art manual and CNC fabrication and construction and manufacturing tools. The architecture program has a unique mandate to remain a small program of no more than 220 students, making it one of the smallest architecture programs in the USA working among practices of no more than ten architects working out of a fine fabric of small agrarian and mining cities. For us, as E.F. Schumacher quipped, "Small is Beautiful."
Our Programs
Bachelor of Fine Arts in Architecture (B.F.A.)
As part of SDSU's land grant mission, Architecture is committed to using its surrounding public and professional context as its primary laboratory for investigation. Through the study of the technological, ethical and cultural implications of making things that make places.
Master of Architecture (M.Arch.)
Students with a four-year undergraduate degree in architecture matriculate through our graduate program in two years. Architecture also offers a three-year Master of Architecture path to students that have completed an undergraduate degree in disciplines other than architecture.
Both Means and Ends
- Architecture is a way of seeing, shaping and making sense of our environment.
- It is a curiously pragmatic and material practice.
- It is a long-standing intellectual discipline.
- It is a legally responsible profession.
Architects use a conventional technology (graphics) to direct specific labor (construction) to effect a greater socio-political outcome (urbanism). In Architecture at South Dakota State University we are studying and exploring the disciplinary relationship between the practical means, "building arts" and our professional ends, "public works" in teaching, research and service. We believe, like Vito Acconci, that architects don't make shelter, they make models of shelter, the space between means and ends.