We strive to make our concentration an environment of rigorous yet open inquiry. Our goal is to create new architectural knowledge via the research, practice and design work of our faculty and graduate students. We pursue this objective through the strengths present in our SSCS community while abiding by principles of collaboration, integration and personal connection. We profess architectural design as a legitimate and sophisticated mode of inquiry that can probe, ponder, and respond to the most profound and concrete questions posed by humanity. Following the Journal of Architectural Education, we approach the scholarly study of architectural design using two mutually dependent perspectives: (a) design as scholarship (i.e., building as the act of construing/embedding knowledge, beliefs, ethics, aesthetics) and (b) the scholarship of design (i.e., investigation of the various phenomena associated with building).

Specifically, we are interested in the practice and study of architecture as the unique place where the immaterial and immeasurable aspects of our humanity meet, shape, and become in turn transformed by the very physical and empirical dimensions of our embodiment. This of course is a wide space of investigation that our concentration community pursues in a variety of ways ranging from semiotics to phenomenology, technology to anthropology, religion to science, design process/method to post-occupancy analysis, sustainability to communication.The Sacred Space and Cultural Studies concentration offers an unique set of opportunities that include: