School of Architecture and Interior Design

Program Portals

Experience the synergistic intersection of our diverse architecture and interior design disciplines, where creativity thrives through the showcased capstone work across three interdisciplinary degree programs.

Master of Architecture B.S. Architecture B.S. Interior Design

Message from the Director, Edward Mitchell:

The professions of architecture and interior design vacillate between the tangible world of things and the conceptual world of abstraction. Unlike other design fields whose out put can be worn or touched or played with, our work is a promise of a world to come. The output of our students in drawings, models, and videos, to many are a contract with the future. And the vehicles towards that promise, often begun with the abstraction of diagrams, geometry, or for that matter, the money or political capital that would enable that vision are, depending on one’s point of view, either the actual work or the translation of a reality yet to come.

That tension between abstraction and the real haunts and drives the work of our students. The DAAP building itself is a manifestation of the most abstract of concepts. There is a shift in the work of the students that is symptomatic of broader issues. Students want to make a difference. They long for a change in our physical reality even when the cell phone and the computer distract their focus into abstractions.

You will see how bodies subjected to the forces of abstraction - financial upheaval, climate change, political disenfranchisement - is an attempt to examine the locus of crisis on the body itself in the work of our Interior Design students. Or you will see investigations into recycling materials from obsolete buildings or reusing abandoned structures, handbooks on how to build with mass timber products and experiments in cast and rammed earth as evidence of new work in material studies. You will also see heroic efforts to mitigate cultural and housing crisis in Haiti and Peru, efforts to clean the environment, and, in one instance, a sixty foot drawing of an internalized conflict between a fictive, arcadian past and a dystopian techno-future that could only be a product of a spatial and visual representation cooked from video games, the internet, and a shaky confidence or obsession with the power of hand drawing and the loose control evident when paint is put to paper.

New generations of architects and interior designers will, we hope, find their own voice and address their own problems as they make their way in the world. School can seem like an abstract experience to a definitive end; we hope the lessons learned in the School of Architecture and Interior Design (SAID) propels graduates into a more productive and enlightened future.

—Ed Mitchell

Edward George Mitchell,

Director, School of Architecture and Interior Design; Professor

mitcheew@ucmail.uc.edu

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Strategic Futures Key

Health and Wellbeing

Urban Systems

Sustainable Living

Digital Culture

Creative Entrepreneurship

Strategic Futures

Capstone Work by Program

Use the dropdown menus below to explore showcases by a student’s first name, last name, project title, or Strategic Futures focus area. Easily find specific projects or discover work aligned with topics that interest you most.

Master of Architecture

The Master of Architecture (M.Arch) graduate degree is open to students who have already earned a pre-professional undergraduate degree in architecture, as well as those who received undergraduate degree in a subject other than architecture.

The M.Arch program is committed to useful art, technical craft, and an ethical practice. The professional, design-centered approach encompasses this range of issues, preparing graduates for licensing and a critical engagement with the world of practice. This critical spirit does not simply accept presumptions and practices at face value but examines their provenance and consequences with a wary eye and an open mind.