M.S. Advanced Architectural Design

The Master of Science degree in Advanced Architectural Design is a three-semester, post-professional program that provides 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. These ideas are explored through innovations in representational tools and the embrace of new probationary artifacts, inviting students to shift away from the specialized mastery of specific scales towards methods of “transscalarity.” By aligning new models of response to new architectural modes of practice, the Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design program strives to empower graduating students in the face of unknown future scenarios.

The M.S.AAD is a designated STEM program eligible under the CIP (Classification of Instructional Programs) Code 04.0902: Architectural and Building Sciences/Technology. Learn more about STEM designation.

MSAAD is introducing an early action deadline of December 15, 2025, with a first round of decisions to be released before the end of January, 2026. This initiative is specifically designed to support incoming students with additional time to prepare for the Summer semester beginning on May 26, 2026. The regular application deadline is January 15, 2026.

The Advanced Studios bring together students in the Master of Architecture and Master of Sciences in Advanced Architectural Design programs. These studios, which take place during the fall and spring semesters at the School, have always explored the future of architecture in a diversity of ways. Each studio creates its own world—with its own intersection of social, cultural, formal, material, economic, and environmental concerns—and students have almost 20 worlds to choose from. After selecting a studio, students conduct experiments and develop projects through concepts and massings, programs and forms, drawings and models, materials and atmospheres, metrics and narratives.