University of Virginia School of Architecture

About

The University of Virginia School of Architecture educates designers, planners, historians, and makers who work across every scale of the built environment. Housed in Campbell Hall on UVA’s Grounds in Charlottesville, the School brings together four departments: Architecture, Architectural History, Landscape Architecture, and Urban and Environmental Planning. It offers undergraduate degrees in architecture, architectural history, and urban and environmental planning, professional master’s degrees in each of the four disciplines, graduate certificates in historic preservation, real estate design and development, and urban design, and a PhD in the Constructed Environment. The School’s stated mission is to create more just, resilient, and healthy futures. Research runs through all of its programs and is pursued through design and making as much as through analysis. Faculty work across departments and across the University, and regularly partner with municipalities, nonprofits, and industry. The School maintains fabrication labs and shops that let students test ideas at full scale, an emphasis that connects its teaching directly to questions of construction method, material, and assembly. The Housing Futures Lab is one expression of that commitment. Directed by Schaeffer Somers, who holds a joint appointment in Architecture and Public Health Sciences, the lab studies affordable housing as both a design problem and a health outcome. Its research examines how standardized components and prefabrication can lower the cost of well-designed housing without lowering its quality, and it works with local government, housing organizations, and communities to test that research through built projects.