About the School of Architecture
Clemson University has taught architecture for over a century. Today, the School of Architecture is meeting 21st-century challenges through pedagogical and technological advances to provide design and preservation leadership in an expansive global environment. There is a strength and longevity of ambition and excellence in this school of southern roots and global reach; a permanent ethos of thinking critically and globally, while acting and making locally; and a culture that prides itself on inclusivity, collegiality, accountability, and connectivity.
The School of Architecture’s mission is to be a premier producer of transformational design and preservation leadership, shaping the environment of the 21st century for a better future. We are an interconnected, geographically distributed community of teachers and learners, dedicated to:
- Educating future architects, landscape architects, preservationists, and urban designers, through rigorous and expansive design education, with local and global understandings of firmness, commodity, and delight;
- Generating knowledge to address the great challenges of the time, like health care, resilience, and increasingly digital society, through innovative, interdisciplinary research, practice and scholarship;
- Advocating for the improvement and preservation of built, natural, and social environments, through design activism, public service, and public education.
The School of Architecture offers degrees in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Historic Preservation, and Resilient Urban Design, with total enrollments of over 500 students, supported by over 70 faculty and staff. The M.S. in Architecture and the Ph.D. in Planning, Design, and the Built Environment are offered as post-professional research degrees. The School's Fluid Campus offers a uniquely rich global education in world-class facilities in four locations. Students and faculty and programs regularly receive national and international recognition and awards including perennial top 20 rankings of the accredited graduate Architecture and undergraduate Landscape Architecture programs in “America’s Best” by Design Intelligence.
The School of Architecture is part of a College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities along with the departments of City Planning and Real Estate Development, Art, Performing Arts, Construction Science, Philosophy and Religion, Languages, English, and History.
Our History
Since its first year of instruction in 1913, architectural education at Clemson has been mindful of its geographies - its connections and relationships to both the state of South Carolina and to the wider world.
Already looking beyond borders, Rudolph Lee (1874-1959) established architectural education at Clemson to answer "an increasing demand in the South for men trained in architectural design, building construction and allied subjects." Like this mission, Lee had Southern Roots. Born in nearby Anderson, SC, he was an engineering graduate of Clemson's first class of 1896. However, studies also took him to Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania. The combination of polytechnic and Beaux-Arts training and awareness of national developments in architectural education informed the development of degree programs and faculty hires during Lee's tenure, which spanned from 1896 to 1948. During these years, faculty were trained at Clemson and Northeast schools, like Lee, and also in Europe. Similar to Lee's description of his new engineering building (not Riggs Hall) in 1927, architecture at Clemson was primarily a "Southern product, largely of our own state materials."
However, the materials came together to create a building with global reach: The building's inspirations, Lee noted, were "the villas of Rome and Florence, of sunny Italy."
Riggs would be home for the Department of Architecture from 1933 until the opening of Lee Hall in 1958. Representing growth and disciplinary independence, the new building coincided with the establishment of the School of Architecture. Designed by Harlan McClure, who served as director and dean from 1955 to 1984, Lee Hall symbolized the modernization of the school, the college, and the state. The move from Beaux-Arts Riggs Hall to modernist Lee Hall - a shift, in retrospect, from one international style to another - did not change the school's geographic networks.
Born in Chattanooga, Tenn., Harlan McClure (1916 - 2001) had Southern roots and a broad intellectual horizon. With degrees from George Washington University and MIT, McClure studied at the Royal Swedish Academy and taught at the Architectural Association in London before leaving the University of Minnesota for Clemson. As dean, he hired faculty educated at Clemson, across the U.S. and overseas. His creation of the Clemson Architectural Foundation advanced the similar mission of bringing distinguished thinkers to the school from around the world. In 1972, McClure would take the decisive step of establishing the Daniel Center ("the Villa") in Genoa, Italy, the first satellite of the school's "Fluid Campus".
The decades following McClure's direction have seen the continued growth of the school, in Clemson and beyond, under new leadership. The Clemson Architecture Center in Charleston, celebrating its 25th year, was established in 1988 by then-Dean James F. Barker, FAIA ('70). A decade later, department chair Jose Caban ('67) established the school's third urban center in Barcelona. Forty(+) years since the first groups of students occupied the Villa, thousands more have expanded their Clemson roots through the global reach of the Fluid Campus.
Today a geographically diverse faculty and student body study architecture, landscape architecture, historic preservation, and urban design in great works of architecture, including the new and award-winning Lee III, on four fluidly connected campuses.
Clemson University is accredited by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools to award the Bachelor's, Master's, Education Specialist, and Doctoral degrees. Contact the Commission on Colleges at 1866 Southern Lane, Decatur, GA 30033-4097 or call at 404-679-4500 for questions about the accreditation of Clemson University.
