Whether you have a bachelor’s degree in architecture or another field, our three-year Master of Architecture (MArch) program supports an experimental and socially oriented approach to architectural design.
📍1111 8th St., upper level
Graduate Architecture Studios
Media Gallery
Lightform Workshop
Digital Craft Lab
Explore architectural innovation in San Francisco | MArch at CCA
Materials Library
About Master of Architecture (MArch)
Hands-on lab work and research
▪️ About Master of Architecture (MArch)
We’re a NAAB-accredited professional degree program with STEM designation. Uniquely focused on digital craft, urban research and activism, ecological engagement, full-scale fabrication, and experimental history, the MArch program prepares you to connect advanced architectural design with professional practice. With opportunities to work across disciplines—such as interaction design, interior design, and sculpture—you’ll lead conversations and develop solutions around the world’s most pressing issues.
Bay Area connections
Building on San Francisco’s legacy of social and environmental justice, we investigate collective living, ecological resilience, contemporary aesthetics, and the politics that shape our spaces and cities. We’re located among top, innovative architecture, design, and technology firms, such as Gensler, Autodesk, and Google.
Architectural Ecologies Lab
Serves as a platform for collaborative research between designers, scientists, and manufacturers. This interdisciplinary setting provides tools to address ecological challenges like rising sea levels, habitat restoration, and climate change.
Digital Craft Lab
This research lab features experimental making through emerging technologies. Advanced computation, robotics, responsive environments, and rapid prototyping are motivations to reconsider how architecture is produced.
Urban Works Agency
Responds to the politics of the contemporary city. Equity, ecological vitality, and economic resilience are reimagined through urban and territory scaled analysis, narratives, and arguments.
▪️ Hands-on lab work and research
Our state-of-the-art facilities accommodate diverse materials and processes to materialize your design research and spatial experiments. MArch students have pushed digital tools to new scales and applications, such as projecting environments with Lightform devices, or using 3D printers to model ideas, as Lulu Wang (MArch 2022) did when reimagining healthcare spaces.
Rapid Prototyping Studio
This prototyping and fabrication space is outfitted with computerized machinery. Tools include laser cutters, 3D printers, a large-format vinyl cutter, and CNC routers. Architecture students use this studio to make models with various materials, including acrylic, cardboard, cloth, fabric, glass, masonite, paper, plastic, plywood, rubber, stone, and wood.
Materials Library
The most innovative, emerging, and sustainable materials are available at your fingertips in the Materials Library, which includes over 1,000 samples. Everything is searchable online by five categories of criteria: composition, form, process, properties, and application.
