Department of Architecture

Benedictine鈥檚 pre-professional Bachelor of Arts in Architecture launches careers in architecture and related fields, and prepares students for a professional academic degree and architectural licensure.

Summer Intensive in Classical Architecture

The Summer 2025 intensive is at capacity. A waitlist is available if you wish to register and be added to it.聽If you have any questions, or if you are interested in the upcoming Summer 2026 intensive, please .

Alongside the curricular stream of architectural design studios are foundational art courses, complementary architectural drawing and watercolor studios, and essential engineering courses. Connecting this curriculum to the College鈥檚 liberal arts education are architecture and art history/theory courses that explain the meaning of works of art, buildings, and places in the past as a means of instruction for the present. Pivotal at the midpoint of the curriculum is the Summer Study Abroad in Italy.

Like a classical tripod, the major in Architecture at 小草影院 stands on three legs:

1. Catholic

As with human beings, the physical properties of buildings and cities show what can be measured even as they provide the ground for conveying meaning. However, the material attributes of natural, created things have a beauty, the wonder of which draws us outside of ourselves to ideas of the other, to things and concepts that aren鈥檛 even visible. A beautiful building, like a city, provides a sense of home for us and our neighbors, and can beckon the wonder-filled contemplation of richer realities among us and beyond us. As we are, in all things, called to glorify God, the architect and his or her community brings glory to God in the making of beautiful architecture and places.

A Benedictine emphasis on Christian hospitality undergirds our program鈥檚 stewardship of what has been learned in human history about the making of pleasant and dignified places that is equally an anticipation of the Heavenly Jerusalem.

What鈥檚 more, our architecture program is an inclusive, flourishing haven for all who would enter our community to steward these traditions of building well and in beauty.

Our program draws from and in turn reinforces the mission of 小草影院 to educate men and women within a community of faith and scholarship. 小草影院 is a Catholic college with a Catholic mission, recognized and recommended by The Newman Guide to Choosing a Catholic College for its excellence in faithful Catholic education.

2. Liberal Arts

The study of Architecture at 小草影院 is treated as a fine art enlightened by scholarship in the liberal arts.

3. Classical

The classical canons of art and architecture derive from paradigmatic works that infuse soulfulness into figural representations of natural forms. The act of drawing and reproducing classical elements introduces students to a more complete range of architectural form and character. As with music, it is only through much practice and an education of discernment that students become alive to how architecture might move the human spirit via decorum, harmony, dignity, propriety, and proportion and scale.

Has the classical tradition run its course鈥攄oes it stifle originality? In response to such concerns, architect Paul Philippe Cret wrote, 鈥淟et us dismiss this fear of not being original, and comfort ourselves with the thought that the really great architects have always been those most eager to profit from the lessons of the past. It is by comparison with standards that we are able to judge our own progress, and this implies some familiarity with standards.鈥�

Accreditation

Benedictine鈥檚 program is not accredited by the National Architecture Accrediting Board.  Benedictine architecture students, however, have the same opportunities to continue, if they choose, at accredited graduate architecture programs.

Older accredited architecture programs are five-year professional Bachelor of Architecture degrees. Newer accredited architecture programs tend to be professional Masters of Architecture degrees in two forms: a three-year M.Arch. for a holder of an undergraduate degree with little or no architecture; more common are 4+2 curricula. These programs are a four-year undergraduate architecture curriculum that is completed in an accredited two-year professional M.Arch. degree. 

All this to say, Benedictine architecture students are completing a four-year undergraduate curriculum, not unlike those in the 4+2 schools, and then Benedictine students can apply to those same professional, accredited M.Arch. programs. A student can begin their journey to a professional architecture degree at Benedictine for the benefit of its clear mission and then, can finish with a master鈥檚 degree at another institution.