OVERVIEW
With a 5:1 student-to-faculty ratio, Rice School of Architecture is committed to ensuring each student gets dedicated assistance on their projects. To better expose enrolees to the humanities, and to business and engineering skills, the school also cross-lists its courses with other schools and departments and collaborates with arts groups on campus and in the city.
Rice School of Architecture’s top-ranked undergraduate program consists of two consecutive degrees: the first four years of study result in a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture; students subsequently receive a Bachelor of Architecture professional degree after an additional two years. M.Arch students choose from one of three tracks: one for students with little or no background in architecture, those who hold a four-year undergrad degree in architecture, and a research-based, three-semester track culminating in a Master of Science in Architecture.
Between their fourth and fifth years of study, B.Arch students participate in preceptorships, which constitute yearlong paid placements at top-ranked architecture firms in the U.S. and abroad. In the final year of their program, Master’s students take part in the Totalization program, which embeds world-renowned consultants in the studios directly. Recent Totalization series have included “Economy,” which examines the socio-economic contribution of accessory dwellings; and a Paris-focused studio that explores the possibilities of adaptive reuse. Among the standout student work that has emerged from Rice, A New Housing Model for Social and Environmental Resilience in Houston’s Third Ward by Sebastián López Cardozo and Lene-Mari Sollie won the A+ Award in 2021.
Committed to expanding the dialogue surrounding architectural education, Rice Architecture dean Igor Marjanović contributed to the Radical Pedagogies, a book by renowned critic Beatriz Colomina et al., and co-edited (with Ana Miljacki) “Pedagogies for a Broken World”, a recent issue of the Journal of Architectural Education.
NOTABLE ALUMNI
Ana Miljacki (professor at MIT), Jack Murphy (Architect’s Newspaper), Charles Renfro (Diller, Scofidio & Renfro), Li Hu (Open Architecture), Shinji Miyajima (SAW)
NOTABLE FACULTY
Ali Karimi, Reto Geiser, Jesus Vassallo, Carlos Jimenez, Albert Pope, Bárbara Barreda, John J. Casbarian, Troy Schaum, Maggie Tsang
