Undergraduate Program
The college has taken a broad and integrated view of the design professions in developing its undergraduate curriculum and emphases. In recent years the problems and opportunities facing the design professions have changed dramatically. These changing conditions demand a broader educational experience than the individual professions traditionally have supplied.
To prepare students for these conditions, the college asks students to take a wide range of courses in the humanities, the arts, and the natural and social sciences so that they can view the world and contemporary culture from a variety of viewpoints.
Unlike undergraduate education in many other fields, students in architecture, planning, and design learn by doing. They experience design under the guidance of the college’s exceptional faculty, and from practicing designers in the Denver/Boulder metropolitan area. From the first day of the freshman year, students actively integrate and synthesize the knowledge gained in lectures and related course activities in their hands-on design classes.
The college provides required core courses throughout the curriculum in which students from all design disciplines study shared problems together. Architects, landscape architects, urban and regional planners, urban designers, technologists, and environmental designers need to understand each other’s perspectives, and increasingly work together to find solutions to the complex issues involved in the design of the built environment.
The undergraduate program in environmental design promotes the development of a body of knowledge that allows each student to understand and appreciate:
• the major theoretical perspectives used to inform the way we design our physical environments and the significance of the designed environment in the evolution of human culture;In addition, the program supports the development of a range of methods and practices that encourages students to:
• the different methodologies and processes used to give shape to our spaces, buildings, gardens, neighborhoods, towns, cities, and landscapes;
• the complex interactions that take place between the physical, ecological, social, cultural, behavioral, and historical factors that influence the form and quality of designed environments;
• the ethical perspectives that inform the way we work to design environments and settings that are healthy, sustainable, appropriate, and beneficial; and
• the social, cultural, historical, and professional contexts within which environmental design is learned, practiced, and perfected.
• explore and use the design process as the unique way of thinking used to give shape and form to the designed environment, and to realize its value as the common process that architects, planners, and designers use to effect appropriate change in the designed environment;
• effectively and creatively design environments and settings—spaces, buildings, gardens, neighborhoods, towns, cities, and landscapes—using appropriate theories, precedents, methods, tools, and technologies;
• use verbal, visual, and written materials to communicate design intentions and environmental outcomes so that students can work effectively as interns and professionals in the different fields that make up that group recognized as the design professions.
