Undergraduate Programs
Design reconciles conflicting visions and exploits all available technologies to shape and sustain a better world. Houston’s hot-humid environment, low-lying Gulf-Coast geography, and dispersed pattern of un-zoned metropolitan development presents designers with an extraordinary laboratory, full of challenges and opportunities. The proposals seeded in the vast urban sprawl of Houston are transmutable to cities around the globe.
The Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design offers its students a platform of integrated disciplines - architecture, interior architecture, and industrial design - from which to negotiate the complexities of contemporary practice in a world that is grappling with diminishing economic and natural resources, the realities of post disaster re-construction, and, at the same time, continued, rapid urbanization. Faculty and students work together in a studio-centric curriculum, supported by a premier digital fabrication facility. Open studios seamlessly incorporate coursework into project-based learning through material investigations and applied research. At the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design, making is not simply an action or a craft, but a form of critical thinking, calling forth innovative solutions for contemporary conditions.
Our programs foster an environment where ideas find form, where practices that are socially equitable and fundamentally ecological establish a model from which to develop Houston’s future and to inform and shape design strategies globally.