The overall goals of the Masters of Architecture Program are to provide students with a competitive edge of advanced knowledge and skill, to provide study choices that support career interests and address societal issues, and to make fully available the Los Angeles region as an instructive laboratory for advanced architectural studies. The program’s focus is on architecture in cities throughout the world where conditions of increasing density require design initiatives that support amenity, sustainability, and cultural meaning. This is a serious search given the disconnectedness and banality of modern cities, their continuing haphazard growth and development, and their wastefulness with regard to natural resources and societal potential.

Within an overall consideration of urban life, five sets of investigations are fully supported by the faculty and other resources of the University and the region. These design and research directions include the following:

• The opportunities to create more supportive urban places-amenity, sustainability, and meaning: habitat, places of commerce and exchange, the public realm, historic districts, open space and the streets, circulation interchanges, and infrastructures
• The transformation of building typologies-housing, cultural and educational institutions, civic and social service facilities, centers for health and well-being, market places, and environments for production and employment
• Understanding the integral importance of technology, building sciences, and ecology-building construction, materials and methods of assembly, structures, environ mental systems, manufacturing procedures, industrialization, energy and natural forces, and natural systems
• Attention to design methodologies and processes, theories of architectural design, process structures, visual communication, computer studies, methods and techniques of architectural simulation
• Investigation of issues of theory, history, criticism, historical inquiry and methodology, theories of interpretation, architectural criticism, history of ideas, cultural and social implications