Boston Architectural College
School of Architecture
The BAC provides excellence in design education emerging from practice and accessible to diverse communities.
Setting
Boston’s identity as a cosmopolitan city where young people convene for education and expand their horizons helps the school be a place of exchange. This is the immediate context for our faculty, staff, and students. Our students and faculty hail from different geographies and cultures. Our Office of Student Life supports this feeling of welcome through different student groups that sponsor events for the entire student body. We draw upon Boston’s ecosystem of highly qualified faculty with passionate perspectives and profound expertise. This permeability to Boston also enables us to draw gifted faculty and reviewers to design critiques and lectures.
School Philosophy
Emerging from design practice, the BAC’s School of Architecture educates students to become citizen architects who learn from faculty, professionals, and one another to envision a more equitable, ecological, social, and beautiful built environment. We believe resilient works of architecture integrate personal expression, theoretical frameworks, and building technology; design practice is a tangible form of applied research which accelerates change in society and in the professions. The BAC’s commitment to design practice and its community of students, educators, and professionals work and build collectively. The School of Architecture brings together diverse individuals to create a dialogue and to transform place and the larger world.
Programs
Only NAAB-accredited programs nationwide requiring calibrated, competency-based applied/experiential learning that occurs outside classroom setting conducted simultaneously with classroom learning. Every day students build confidence, curiosity, and a sense of self and belonging as they transfer knowledge between academic courses and practice.
of Focus
1. Digital Fabrication & Technology
2. Building Technologies
3. Community Design
4. History |Theory |Criticism
5. Resilience
6. Industry Collaborations
7. Digital Design & Visualization
8. Sustainability & High-Performance Built Environments
Opportunities
Co-Op / Work Placement
Cross-disciplinary experience
IPAL
Teaching / Research assistantships
Online Courses
Summer Program
Facilities
Large-format Printer
Laser Cutter
Woodshop
3D Printing
CNC Milling
Fabrication Lab
Policies
Transfer Policies
Transfer into the BAC is central to our mission of accessibility, whether the student originates from community college, non-architecture majors, from another NAAB accredited program, or from a program in another country. Our goal with each student is to see them appropriately challenged in their coursework as they begin here. We see from entrance essays that our success with IPAL and the flexibility of our online track programs have led to an increase in applications, which challenges our meticulous and personalized transfer placement process, but, ultimately, it has strengthened it.
