UCLA Architecture and Urban Design

UCLA Architecture and Urban Design UCLA AUD is a champion of ideas and their articulate expression.

Our exceptional faculty teach students to engage the world around them, to see ideas as productive forms of response, and to leverage design as expressions of newly curated perspectives.

“Interstitial Skies,” a project about ascension, lightness, and the spaces in between.Reimagining 1334 Lincoln Boulevard...
08/31/2026

“Interstitial Skies,” a project about ascension, lightness, and the spaces in between.

Reimagining 1334 Lincoln Boulevard in Venice, Sydney Patterson and Mengyan Wang (both MArch ‘27) preserve the original building’s proportions while introducing a mirrored, staggered twin, setting up a dialogue of slipping and veiling. Sydney Patterson / Mengyan Wang

Project completed for AUD’s second-year MArch Core/Comprehensive Design Studio, “NEXT–CYCLE,” Narineh Mirzaeian section, Georgina Huljich coordinator. MNOffice / Georgina Huljich PATTERNS.WORK

Instead of one ground-floor lobby, architectural stairs thread through the building to create “floating lobbies,” pulling the civic energy of the street upward through every level.

A steel frame brings airiness, while a transfer slab grounds the composition, freeing the performance hall below and letting educational programming slip and stack above. Wrapping it all: a diaphanous, translucent envelope that steps and shifts with the floor plates beneath it.

“This system links the idea of brightness to the performance of the building, where the architecture itself becomes as ephemeral and dynamic as the Santa Monica sky,” Patterson and Wang note.

The Los Angeles region is home to several high-volume oil refineries. Beneath their visible infrastructure lies an entir...
08/23/2026

The Los Angeles region is home to several high-volume oil refineries. Beneath their visible infrastructure lies an entire hidden landscape: a thick, inaccessible region composed on building-like non-buildings that sustain the city while remaining concealed from it.

Originating from this contradiction, “Building-Like Non-Buildings” embraces the contaminated, the imperfect, the uninhabitable spaces of the city as substance, and rejects the myth of the tabula rasa requiring a clean ground or a blank slate. The project proposes that long-term environmental remediation can become an architectural project unfolding over the next sixty years, transforming the refinery into a landscape of ecological monitoring, repair, and public space.

Project by Nabil Davidson and Zirui Wang (both MArch ‘26) for Kutan Ayata’s 2025-2026 research studio, “Future [Hi]stories of the City.” The year-long studio asked students to document speculative “future histories” of LA, taking up issues that currently pressure the city’s development and chronicling the state and impact of these issues from the perspective of the year 2066.

Nabil Davidson Zirui Wang Young & Ayata

New project!
08/23/2026

New project!

Three moves, one idea: art and culture enrich the public realm.“Music School for Youth Orchestra Los Angeles” by Alanis ...
08/23/2026

Three moves, one idea: art and culture enrich the public realm.

“Music School for Youth Orchestra Los Angeles” by Alanis Baez and Anna Shoemaker (both MArch ‘27), completed for second-year MArch Core Studio with Georgina Huljich

With three architectural moves, the project wraps old and new construction beneath a single perforated aluminum skin.
🔹 The plinth, unifying old and new
🔹 The agora, offering a procession through courtyards, rehearsal spaces, and student life
🔹 The jewel, presenting a glazed terracotta performance hall, cantilevered and independent, acknowledging the past without touching it

Each element follows its own structural logic, optimizing seismic performance while expressing the project as three interdependent architectural movements. The communal nature of music is made visible through sound, movement, and gathering, allowing the life of the school to engage the surrounding neighborhood.

The studio challenged students to imagine the next cycle(s) for an existing building, asking what to keep, reconfigure, and add as our cities and needs evolve. Here, that question becomes a civic one: cultural space and artistic opportunity as public infrastructure.

Three moves, one idea: art and culture enrich the public realm.“Music School for Youth Orchestra Los Angeles” by Alanis ...
08/23/2026

Three moves, one idea: art and culture enrich the public realm.

“Music School for Youth Orchestra Los Angeles” by Alanis Baez and Anna Shoemaker (both MArch ‘27), completed for second-year MArch Core Studio with Georgina Huljich // Alanis Anna Shoemaker Georgina Huljich PATTERNS.WORK

With three architectural moves, the project wraps old and new construction beneath a single perforated aluminum skin.

🔹 The plinth, unifying old and new
🔹 The agora, offering a procession through courtyards, rehearsal spaces, and student life
🔹 The jewel, presenting a glazed terracotta performance hall, cantilevered and independent, acknowledging the past without touching it

Each element follows its own structural logic, optimizing seismic performance while expressing the project as three interdependent architectural movements. The communal nature of music is made visible through sound, movement, and gathering, allowing the life of the school to engage the surrounding neighborhood.

The studio challenged students to imagine the next cycle(s) for an existing building, asking what to keep, reconfigure, and add as our cities and needs evolve. Here, that question becomes a civic one: cultural space and artistic opportunity as public infrastructure.

Three moves, one idea: art and culture enrich the public realm.“Music School for Youth Orchestra Los Angeles” by Alanis ...
08/23/2026

Three moves, one idea: art and culture enrich the public realm.

“Music School for Youth Orchestra Los Angeles” by Alanis Baez and Anna Shoemaker (both MArch ‘27), completed for second-year MArch Core Studio with Georgina Huljich // Alanis Anna Shoemaker Georgina Huljich PATTERNS.WORK

With three architectural moves, the project wraps old and new construction beneath a single perforated aluminum skin.
🔹 The plinth, unifying old and new
🔹 The agora, offering a procession through courtyards, rehearsal spaces, and student life
🔹 The jewel, presenting a glazed terracotta performance hall, cantilevered and independent, acknowledging the past without touching it

Each element follows its own structural logic, optimizing seismic performance while expressing the project as three interdependent architectural movements. The communal nature of music is amplified through sound, movement, and gathering, allowing the life of the school to engage the surrounding neighborhood.

The studio challenged students to imagine the next cycle(s) for an existing building, asking what to keep, reconfigure, and add as our cities and needs evolve. Here, that question becomes a civic one: cultural space and artistic opportunity as public infrastructure.

MSAUD @ UCLA AUD: One year. New trajectories. A broader field of practice.UCLA AUD's Master of Science in Architecture a...
08/19/2026

MSAUD @ UCLA AUD: One year. New trajectories. A broader field of practice.

UCLA AUD's Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design (MSAUD) is for architects and designers ready to push their thinking, and their future, into new territory.

Design, technology, material research, urban strategy, visual culture: MSAUD works at the intersections.

🔍 Who applies: Architects and designers with a NAAB-accredited BArch, a graduate architecture degree, or the foreign equivalent.

⏱️ How it works: A six-week Summer Studio builds fluency fast, followed by a year of Research Studios, Technology Seminars, and Critical Studies. Your skills and your potential reach new levels.

🧭 Four research topics, one question — how does design lead us into tomorrow's territories?
Speculative Worlds · Architectural Intelligence · Material Innovations · Urban Strategy

📍 Where it leads: Advanced practice, tech, research, curation, entrepreneurship, and beyond. Grads have landed at Adobe, Apple, Google, Autodesk, and IDEO, and have founded their own award-winning practices.

📅 Applications for 2027 matriculation open this fall, due January 6, 2027.

Link in bio to learn more, or DM us your questions.

More than 40 years after graduating, a class comes together to honor one of their own. 🎓The Class of 1983 Jack C. Green ...
08/14/2026

More than 40 years after graduating, a class comes together to honor one of their own. 🎓

The Class of 1983 Jack C. Green Endowed Fellowship in Architecture and Urban Design was created in memory of UCLA AUD alum Jack C. Green (1956–2023). We honored Jack and his legacy this past June at Rumble60, UCLA AUD’s 60th anniversary celebration.

Led by classmates Robert Keller and Dennis Whelan, 27 members of AUD’s Class of ‘83 came together to fund the fellowship. UCLA AUD extends its gratitude to classmate Karen Krygier for generously hosting alumni and friends for lunch before the celebration and to Emily Green, Jack’s wife, for joining classmates in honoring Jack’s memory.

“This fellowship distills that most important experience coming from our time at UCLA: knowing one another,” says Whelan.

The endowed fellowship ensures support for AUD students for generations to come.

More than four decades of friendship. One lasting tribute. 💙

Read the full story at the link in bio.

[Photo 1, left to right: Robert Keller, Carl Meyer, Emily Green, Sheri Singer, Dean Lionel Popkin, and Karen Krygier at Rumble60]

Los Angeles has struggled to build medium-density housing that’s both architecturally compelling and actually effective ...
08/11/2026

Los Angeles has struggled to build medium-density housing that’s both architecturally compelling and actually effective at adding units to the city

Meet “MEDIUM” — a proposal for the “mid,” designed as a space of novelty and dignity in a city defined by density extremes, from single-family sprawl to isolated high-rises

By Nathan Logan (MArch ‘26), completed for Jeffrey Inaba’s year-long research studio “Los Angeles,” which explores speculative architectural futures for the city Nathan Logan // Jeffrey Inaba

“MEDIUM” is adaptable and re-configurable. It could exist anywhere, but is designed for the sites LA underutilizes, working around conditions that usually make housing here hard to build. Chains of mini-towers rise lightly off the ground, linked by spans that let the project touch down with minimal impact on its site. Short bursts of verticality create unit proportions rare in LA but common abroad.

Address

365 PORTOLA Plaza
Los Angeles, CA
90095

Opening Hours

Monday 8am - 5pm
Tuesday 8am - 5pm
Wednesday 8am - 5pm
Thursday 8am - 5pm
Friday 8am - 5pm

Website

,

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when UCLA Architecture and Urban Design posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Featured

Share

Category