One of the oldest and most distinguished graduate schools in the United States, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences administers the education of graduate students in the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, and grants the PhD for all divisions of Columbia University.

Some GSAS master’s programs offer a high-level introduction to study within traditional academic disciplines, while others allow students to pursue new fields of inquiry through an interdisciplinary course of study or to cultivate or enhance professional skills.

Study in GSAS doctoral programs begins with several years of rigorous coursework and culminates in the writing of the dissertation, a substantial piece of independent research (or, in the case of DMA students, original compositions). The doctoral degree can be pursued in traditional disciplines as well as interdisciplinary research areas.

Partnerships with research and cultural institutions in New York enhance Columbia’s educational offerings, while the vast array of industries centered in the city provide numerous opportunities for professional development.

One of the oldest and most distinguished graduate schools in the United States, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences administers the education of graduate students in the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, and grants the PhD for all divisions of Columbia University. Some GSAS master’s programs offer a high-level introduction to study within traditional academic disciplines, while others allow students to pursue new fields of inquiry through an interdisciplinary course of study or to cultivate or enhance professional skills.

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Program Admission Requirements

New York, USA

Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP)

The MA program in Climate and Society uses an interdisciplinary approach to train professionals and academics to understand and cope with the impacts of climate variability and climate change on society and the environment. The twelve-month program emphasizes the problems of developing societies.

MA program in Climate and Society

Columbia GSAPP’s Master of Architecture program is a three-year accredited professional degree program and is regularly ranked one of the top architecture graduate programs in the country. At GSAPP, architecture is understood as a form of knowledge inextricably linked to a broader context of environmental and global action—one that is oriented not towards what architecture is but towards what it could be. Today, the Master of Architecture program pushes this understanding of architectural experimentation and re-invention forward, with faculty and students weaving together critical discourse with technological skill, disciplinary expertise with expanded modes of practices, and design speculation with engagement in the issues of our time.

On-Campus

Master of Architecture

The Master of Science degree in Advanced Architectural Design is a three-semester program aimed at providing outstanding young professionals—who already hold a Bachelor of Architecture or Master of Architecture—the opportunity to conceptualize design as a critical practice that shapes the world’s technological, relational, and environmental evolutions. The program is viewed as a framework for exploring both academic and professional concerns through a set of inquiries and premises: architecture and its design practices are critical in addressing contemporary challenges; architectural specificity is the result of transdisciplinary cooperation; architecture’s future agency lies in the discipline’s capacity to mobilize realities across different scales and time frames.

Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design

The Urban Design Program is a three-semester degree in the multidisciplinary study of cities, regions, infrastructures, and ecosystems. The program focuses on the city as an agent of resilient change and on the role of design in redefining the twenty-first century urban landscape, advancing new paradigms of research, practice, and pedagogy to meet the challenges of climate change, rapid urbanization, and social inequality. Students and faculty in the MSAUD program are united in their attempt to integrate and underscore the essential links between public space, social justice, and ecological systems. The program asks the venerable and necessarily shifting question: what is “the good city?”—reframing the city not as a fixed, delimited territory but as a gradient of varied landscapes supported by networks of food, energy, resources, culture, transportation, and capital.

Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design

The Master of Science in Computational Design Practices (M.S.CDP) is an innovative program for recent graduates and practitioners that extends and integrates disciplines between architecture, data visualization, and urban planning—focusing specifically on computational design practices for the built environment at multiple scales. It aims to pioneer new concepts and pedagogies for an integrated multi-scalar and spatial approach to computational design at Columbia GSAPP. The M.S.CDP curriculum encourages critical and creative engagement with spatial computational design as both method and practice.

Master of Science in Computational Design Practices

The Masters of Science in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture (CCCP) offers advanced training in the fields of architectural criticism, publishing, curating, exhibiting, writing, and research through a two-year, full-time course of intensive academic study and independent research. The program recognizes that architectural production is multi-faceted and diverse and that careers in architecture often extend beyond traditional modes of professional practice and academic scholarship, while at the same time reflecting and building upon them.

Master of Science in Critical, Curatorial & Conceptual Practices

The M.S. in Historic Preservation Program curriculum educates students to create new, future-oriented roles for built heritage that promote inclusive and resilient communities. With a particular focus on adapting to climate change and promoting social justice, the curriculum integrates humanist, scientific, and technological approaches necessary for students to shape the future of the profession: including the reuse of buildings, the design of adaptation technologies, planning and policy innovations, social and historical research, materials science and digital computation applied to the 3D scanning, documentation, assessment, monitoring, and care of built heritage.

Master of Science in Historic Preservation

The Master of Science in Urban Planning is a two-year accredited professional degree. Our program takes a comparative, global perspective to urban planning, centering social justice and critical practice. It connects the study of the urban built environment with grounded analysis of socioeconomic and political conditions to inform planning practice and praxis toward social, racial, and climate justice. We prepare students to confront and break down structures and practices of oppression rooted in class inequality, racism, and sexism. By studying the impact of global processes (such as immigration, climate change, and public health) on cities, neighborhoods, and communities—across the Global North and Global South—the program aims to foster new, creative planning and policy approaches that will improve processes and outcomes in cities around the world.

Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP)

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