The Department of Architecture is part of the Stuckeman School in the College of Arts and Architecture at Penn State. The Stuckeman Family Building is in the middle of the College of Arts and Architecture campus, surrounded by the facilities for the Department of Art History, the Schools of Music, Theater, and Visual Arts, the Integrative Arts Program, the Palmer Museum, and several other facilities.

Completed in 2005, the 111,000-square-foot Stuckeman Family Building has a LEED Gold Rating, making it one of the first buildings on any U.S. university campus to earn that distinction. The four-story building, adjacent to both the Palmer Museum of Art and the Arts Building on the University Park campus, has an exterior made of recycled copper, brick, and energy-conserving glazed windows with exterior sun-control louvers, which minimize glare inside. Interior sustainable features include lighting controls with automatic daylight and occupancy sensors and an HVAC system that relies on a natural ventilation system in appropriate weather conditions. Integrated landscape and parking design filters storm water run-off to minimize pollutants.

University Structure

Penn State is hierarchically organized, with the Graduate School having jurisdiction over all graduate programs at Penn State. The Graduate School thus determines and monitors the minimum standards for all of the graduate programs at Penn State. The Department of Architecture receives applications to its graduate program and recommends applicants to the (University’s) Graduate School. The Graduate School in turn first admits students to the University and then to our graduate program.

The graduate faculty of the Department of Architecture, part of the College of Arts and Architecture, establishes the graduate program and its policies, standards, and regulations. The Graduate Executive Council and the associate dean for research and graduate studies of the College of Arts and Architecture may establish additional regulations for the various graduate programs in the College. Policies established by the Department of Architecture may be more rigorous than those established by the college or the University, but not the other way around.

The graduate program in architecture is overseen by the head of the department and administered by the associate department head for graduate dducation and the staff. The Ph.D. Affairs Committee oversees the structure of the program.