1. Aesthetics: We celebrate the creative process by teaching our students to cultivate their imagination, refine their craft, and design with beauty. This is accomplished when a building’s composition (i.e., the whole and parts) reveals an inner harmony and unity. We do this by grounding our students in timeless and tested design principles, patterns, proportions, sacred geometry, and spatial relationships inherent in nature and the classical tradition. Students also address the ethical function and aesthetics of architecture by understanding the built environment’s phenomenological effect on human perception, behavior, and experience. We encourage students to produce architecture that moves beyond prose and into poetry – an architecture that transforms chaos into cosmos and inspires the human spirit.
2. Culture: We infuse our students with an understanding of the importance of defending the authenticity of the human experience by honoring and preserving the spirit of a place, its culture, traditions, memory, and history. We study architectural precedents to learn from the past and address design challenges in a culturally and contextually sensitive way. We teach students the importance of approaching the design process with empathy, compassion, and humility so one might build upon the past and preserve the embodied history of architecture.
3. Technology: We promote creative problem solving by equipping out students with the technical skills to address the needs of the 21st century. Instead of succumbing to the aesthetics of speed, newness, and innovation, we focus instead on providing a timeless education balanced between theory and practice. This includes topics ranging from community engagement to globalization, historic preservation to adaptive reduce, building science to evidence-based design, environmental stewardship to wise resource management, new urbanism to revitalization of cities.
4. Well-being: In addition to architecture’s need to protect the public’s health, safety, and welfare, we teach our students to transcend those expectations and produce sustainable environments that enrich the human experience by promoting healing and well-being. Our traditional approach to design teaches students to look beyond the contemporary aesthetics of consumerism and instead focus on the durability, longevity, and adaptive-reuse potential of buildings. Building for time is a form of environmental stewardship and wise resource management which supports the University’s campus-wide sustainability initiative.

Program Description

The newly created Architecture Program at UVU is a five-year professional degree designed to meet the National Architectural Accreditation Board (NAAB) requirements. The degree features a rigorous design-oriented curriculum with a solid foundation in technology, practice-based coursework, plan and document generation, building codes, specifications, digital parametric modeling, building information modeling, architectural visualization, digital fabrication, building envelope systems, structural systems, and building sustainability. Students will become experts in current design and building technologies, making them ideal employees in architecture offices and related design & construction industries including civil, mechanical, and electrical.

The program at UVU emphasizes education in the classical and vernacular architecture. Students will research the traditional principles and philosophies of history to encourage a sense of community, a balance and respect with our natural environment, and wise use of limited resources and energy. Program coursework will study the past to inform the future. We emphasize the enduring design standards from history to inform and incorporate ideas into cutting edge technologies and solutions for modern society.

The program is structured as a two plus three stackable credential, awarding an Associate of Science in Engineering Design Technology after the first two years and a comprehensive Bachelor's degree for the final three years. This allows students who do not wish to pursue licensure a two-year path into the profession. In their final three years, students engage in coursework which readies them to become licensed, practicing architects, projects managers, principals, owners, and community leaders in the profession. Students acquire leadership skills through courses in professional practice, ethics, and architectural registration exam preparation.

Students learn to design buildings in a historical and cultural context through rigorous coursework in history, theory, culture, study abroad, and community service projects. Concurrently, students engage in arts and science courses to expand critical thinking.  A total of at least 151 hours of coursework is required for the Architecture degree.  

Please note: Students accepted to the 3rd year of the Architecture Degree Program are required to purchase a quality laptop computer before the beginning of the Fall semester.  It will be used for the final three years of their education on multiple design projects.

Bachelor of Architecture (B-Arch) Accreditation

In the United States, most registration boards require a degree from an accredited professional degree program as a prerequisite for licensure. The National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB), which is the sole agency authorized to accredit professional degree programs in architecture offered by institutions with U.S. regional accreditation, recognizes three types of degrees: the Bachelor of Architecture, the Master of Architecture, and the Doctor of Architecture. A program may be granted an eight-year term, an eight-year term with conditions, or a two-year term of continuing accreditation, or a three-year term of initial accreditation, depending on the extent of its conformance with established education standards. Doctor of Architecture and Master of Architecture degree programs may require a non-accredited undergraduate degree in architecture for admission. However, the non-accredited degree is not, by itself, recognized as an accredited degree.

Utah Valley University's Department of Architecture and Engineering Design offers the following NAAB-accredited degree program: 

• Bachelor of Architecture (153  total number of credits required) 

ACCREDITATION UPDATE

The NAAB grants candidacy status to new programs that have developed viable plans for achieving initial accreditation. Candidacy status indicates that a program expects to achieve initial accreditation within six years of achieving candidacy, if its plan is properly implemented.  In order to meet the education requirement, set forth by the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, an applicant for an NCARB Certificate must hold a professional degree in architecture from a program accredited by the NAAB; the degree must have been awarded not more than two years prior to initial accreditation. However, meeting the education requirement for the NCARB Certificate may not be equivalent to meeting the education requirement for registration in a specific jurisdiction. Please contact NCARB for more information.

Utah Valley University's Department of Architecture and Engineering Design was granted candidacy status for the following professional degree program in architecture: 

• Bachelor of Architecture (153 total number of credits required)

Year candidacy awarded: 2022

Next visits:

• Continuation of Candidacy, Fall 2023
• Initial Accreditation, Fall 2025

Projected year to achieve initial accreditation: 2025

Earliest graduation date projected to meet NCARB education requirement: 2023

NAAB Conditions and Procedures for Accreditation

• 2020 Conditions for Accreditation
• 2020 Procedures for Accreditation

Architecture Program Reports, Annual Reports, Letters, and Visiting Team Reports

• 2023 Architecture Program Report (forthcoming)
• 2022 NAAB Initial Candidacy Decision Letter
• 2021 NAAB Visiting Team Report
• 2021 Architecture Program Report
• 2020 NAAB Eligibility Decision Letter

Architect Registration Examination Pass Rates

• ARE 5.0 Pass Rates by School