Dean's Statement

We Nurture a 

Capacity to Create & Connect

To the World 

Our college is intended to provide a well-rounded, comprehensive and holistic educational environment and to nurture and cultivate a collective, intimate, imaginative, and culturally diverse identity. One of our core beliefs is that architecture is a cultural art in addition to being a place-based creation. Becoming an architect involves understanding of the relationship between people and their surroundings. With the current ecological awareness and the newly developed concepts of cultural environments, these two dimensions are being considered in our definition of what human environment is. 
 
We face continuous challenges by the fast developments in the construction industry, which is not compatible with the limitations of our local resources. This puts a great demand on us to keep developing feasible and appropriate construction technologies to balance between the two. Accordingly, we think of architects and designers as problem solvers and scientists in addition to being artists and creators. An important part of the college mission will be guiding diverse dialogues and thinking approaches for creating architectural and artistic expressions to bridge between what is local and what is global. Accordingly, we train and educate future introspective architects, designers and planners to understand architecture and design as both local and global phenomena, and to profoundly and ethically address issues with both national and international perspectives. Connecting our education to contemporary art and architecture and bridging with the future of our built environments is another important consideration of ours. Advances in building material and construction technology have evolved in parallel with advances in digital technology. Together, these advances are significantly transforming the industries of both the creation and the construction of architecture and art. Our design studios support the integration of the new possibilities of both digital technologies and the new constructions affordances and encourage the students to develop new possibilities for contemporary designs. It is our intention to place our college at the center of dialogue between the present and the future of our local and regional environments.
 
In order to achieve our goals we have established major policies and guidelines for studio culture, which aim to support the studio positive aspects, while curbing some of the unhealthy practices. Some of these policies include engagement, sharing, respect, innovation and optimism, in addition to providing environments which respect open-ended questions. 
 
I am happy to say that we have the human and technical resources needed to support our intended academic mission. One of the many reasons for the excellent national reputation that we already enjoy is our exceptional faculty members who all have graduated from well known American and European schools of architecture, and enjoy both good research portfolios and innovative and leading design abilities. Our academic team is comprised of highly qualified design educators, planners, architectural historians and theorists, behaviorists and specialists in historic preservation, digital design, design with climate, and urban design. Our digital laboratories and manual studios are equipped with the state of the art educational facilities. This is in addition to the easy access to multiple sources of information including electronic ones, which are part of a whole setup of the university system. Such resources not only support the process of teaching but also enable both our faculty and graduate students to conduct state of the art research. This is with the added support by the available research funding with the goal to advance the knowledge and the need to address and investigate the problems of our local environments. 

Thank You and Welcome!
 
Natheer Abu-Obeid, Dean