In five years, CCA Architecture will be a model for a renewed discipline that boldly engages social inequity, environmental precarity, and technological acceleration—not as background conditions, but as the very terrain of design.

We will continue to be a learning and research environment where technological experimentation, material craft, and critical inquiry converge—shaping the built environment from room to city and amplifying design’s public reach. Here, students will learn to make and to question, to code and to care, to draw with rigor and to prototype with purpose. Our studios will double as cultural laboratories, our shops as philosophical forums, our classrooms as launching pads for real-world impact.

We will be known not just for producing skilled architects and interior designers, but for graduating design thinkers: practitioners grounded in the tools and traditions of the discipline, yet unafraid to push beyond existing practices to reimagine what and for whom we design. They will enter practice not as narrowly trained specialists, but as designers committed to collaboration across fields. As agents of change, they will bring intellectual agility, creative vision, and pragmatic skill to the worlds they help build.

We won’t retreat from the complexity of the present. Instead, we’ll confront it—playfully, seriously, and with a vision grounded in equity, ecology, and creative, consequential action—designing toward more just and joyful futures.

1. Advance a Pedagogy of Urgency and Impact

We will embed the real stakes of practice—social, environmental, and technological justice—into the core of our pedagogy. We are not simply training professionals; we are preparing designers to engage the world with purpose, agility, and the courage to make change. We will:

• Foreground social impact, environmental action, and critical technological literacy across curricula in all programs
• Reimagine our core curricula as integrated, shared platforms for knowledge, methods, and discovery
• Align our teaching, research, and public programming around evolving themes that connect our work to urgent issues in culture and practice
• Advance collaborative projects that model resourceful and equitable responses to real-world challenges
• Create a more diverse knowledge ecosystem through engagements across disciplines within and beyond CCA
• Emphasize purposeful practice, where professional readiness aligns intentions with impact

2. Rethink Technology as Practice and Inquiry

CCA Architecture will remain a hub for critically engaged craft and creative engagement with emerging technologies. Our approach to fabrication, AI, robotics, simulation, and computation will have multiple dimensions:

• Philosophical: Treat emerging technologies, such as AI and robotics, as objects of inquiry, questioning their cultural, social, political, and economic implications
• Creative: Extend the interplay of craft and technology to explore new aesthetics, ethics, and ecologies of architecture and design
• Technical: Explore and integrate emerging technologies and tools across design workflows, fabrication processes, and representational methods
• Material: Integrate analog traditions of making with emerging computational practices, ensuring fabrication remains central to design innovation.

3. Expand Reach and Deepen Impact

We will expand the division’s relevance, accessibility, and visibility—amplifying our voice, broadening access, and cultivating new modes of engagement. We won’t wait to be discovered; we’ll transform the division into a meeting place and invite the world in. We will:

• Project a clear and compelling identity through a public narrative that reflects our values, vision, and experimental ethos
• Attract and support a wider variety of learners by valuing diverse experiences, meeting evolving needs, and expanding non-degree pathways that respond to urgent issues in practice and culture.
• Cultivate partnerships across communities, industry, and academia to advance our research, amplify our public presence, and extend the impact of our work
• Reinforce our role as a platform for dialogue, where architecture and design meet other disciplines and publics

4. Build Disciplinary Foundations for Unknown Futures

We remain committed to the core skills, knowledge, and mediums of architecture and interior design. Our tools are not static; they are evolving instruments of agency, adaptable to shifting contexts, and open to reinterpretation in light of emerging realities. We will continue to develop and evolve our curricula to emphasize that:

• Fundamental design skills—research, drawing, modeling, and making—are central to intentional and impactful professional practice
• Historical knowledge and theoretical literacy amplify agency by situating practice in the broader arc of human culture and action
• Communication skills are essential tools of persuasion, advocacy, and collaboration
• Professional readiness prepares one to act with confidence and conviction in shifting contexts

5. Foster a Culture of Research, Experimentation, and Agency

We will foster a culture where faculty and students lead with vision and learn through empowered experimentation. As an academic community, we model the intellectual, ethical, and creative dispositions our students will carry forward to imagine—and realize—better futures. We will:

• Champion faculty research and creative practice as integral to the culture of the Division
• Reaffirm the design studio and classroom as spaces for serious play and rigorous, joyful discovery
• Foster student leadership grounded in experimentation, responsibility, and vision
• Ensure students experience architecture and interior design as both a craft and a worldview—a way of making, thinking, and acting in the world