The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
College of Architecture + Design

Bachelor of Architecture, B.Arch

We are makers. We embrace challenging ideas with the power to transform humanity and our world through creative, sustainable design.

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Program Details

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Program Overview

A Bachelor of Architecture degree is a five-year professionally accredited program. The core of our curriculum is the studio, where you learn to explore and generate ideas, speculate, draw, and envision your own creative practice. The first year, you will focus on design fundamentals. Our curriculum supports radical experimental thinking from the beginning. In response to open-ended prompts, students operate conceptually. As students move through the program, territories, research, systems, atmospheres, cities, and buildings take shape. The B.Arch concludes with students choosing the way they frame their work. This often involves bringing personal, poetic, and extra-disciplinary ideas into their process.

We have two paths to provide greater opportunity for your career goals. In addition to the B.Arch, we offer a degree option to prepare students for an accelerated master’s degree in landscape architecture.

Concentrations

B.Arch – Traditional Track
B.Arch – Master of Landscape Architecture Preparatory Track

Why study architecture?

UTK first year students present at final reviews — Become an Architect

At Tennessee, we believe architects have the opportunity—and the responsibility—to reshape how people live, work, and engage one another. Students question conventional assumptions about the built environment while imagining new possibilities for communities, technologies, and culture. We love buildings and obsess over how they are conceived, sourced, constructed, inhabited, and sustained. But architecture is never only about the building itself. Whether designing physical spaces, immersive digital worlds, or broader systems and experiences, students learn to see architecture as a multivalent creative discipline capable of shaping the future.

student created wooden architectural model — Experiential Learning

Architecture demands fluency across many ways of thinking and making. At Tennessee, students develop foundational skills in drawing and representation—practices that have anchored architectural thinking for centuries—while embracing emerging technologies that are reshaping the profession. From the first year, students work with generative AI, digital fabrication, laser cutting, and 3D printing alongside traditional techniques of sketching, model making, and physical construction. Learning extends beyond the conventional architectural studio. Students work with industrial robotic arms, virtual and augmented reality, CNC milling, waterjet cutting, ceramics, metalsmithing, and other advanced fabrication technologies. These resources are integrated throughout the curriculum, encouraging students to experiment across media, develop new methods of making, and discover the techniques that will define their own creative practice.

industry professional engages in conversation with UT student. — Land Your First Job

Professional development begins long before graduation. Nearly every Bachelor of Architecture student completes an internship, works as a teaching assistant, or collaborates with faculty on research while enrolled at Tennessee. These experiences are supported by tangible infrastructure set up for lifelong success: relationships with faculty who know students by name, academic advisors trained as designers, an extensive alumni network, and an epic architecture and design career day, connecting students with leading firms and organizations before they graduate. Our goal extends beyond helping students secure their first position. We prepare graduates to become future leaders of the profession—architects who design successful practices, lead major firms, and distinguish themselves through the unique perspectives and expertise they develop at Tennessee.

What you can do with a Bachelor of Architecture after graduation

Architecture is not a single career path but a discipline with countless ways to practice. Graduates build practices that range from sole proprietorships to global firms, from community-embedded work to interdisciplinary collaborations spanning technology, fabrication, education, research, and entrepreneurship.

Architect

Architects shape the built environment by designing buildings, landscapes, interiors, and cities that respond to human needs, cultural and artistic values, and economic and environmental forces. They lead interdisciplinary teams through every phase of design and construction, balancing creativity, technical expertise, and public responsibility. As a NAAB-accredited professional degree, the Master of Architecture satisfies the educational requirement for architectural licensure in the United States while preparing graduates to establish independent practices, join leading design firms, serve public agencies, or invent new forms of architectural practice.

Game Designer

Game Designers create immersive digital worlds that rely on architecture's unique understanding of space, scale, history, narrative, materiality, and human experience. From video games and virtual production to simulation, virtual reality, and augmented reality, architects increasingly contribute to the design of interactive environments that blur the boundaries between physical and digital space. A Master of Architecture prepares graduates to bring design thinking, world-building, and spatial imagination to the rapidly expanding fields of gaming and immersive media.

Embedded Practitioners

Embedded Practitioners lead design initiatives from within organizations whose primary mission extends beyond architecture. Working for universities, healthcare systems, technology companies, museums, government agencies, nonprofits, and other institutions, they often oversee building projects on behalf of their organizations while also shaping planning, strategy, operations, and innovation. As owners' representatives, campus architects, design strategists, and organizational leaders, they translate institutional goals into the built environment while applying design expertise to broader organizational challenges.

Featured Courses

The first year focuses on design fundamentals, moving through conceptual, abstract and experimental exercises that challenge preconceived ideas about space and form.

Here's a glimpse of some of the courses offered in your first year in the program.

ARCH 171

Design I: Spatial Order I

ARCH 123

Representation I: Visual Logic and Perception

ARCH 101/107H

Intro to Architecture

ARCH 102

Visual Design Theory

Course Catalog

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