NCARB Awards Grants to Pratt Institute and the University of New Mexico
Washington, DC—The National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) has awarded NCARB
Grants for the Integration of Practice and Education in the Academy to Pratt Institute and the University of New
Mexico. The schools will receive $5,000 each as seed money to turn their proposals into innovative programs that
bring together architectural practice and education.
“We received many excellent proposals,” said former president of NCARB and chair of the Practice Education
Committee, H. Carleton Godsey, FAIA. “The interaction of non-faculty practicing architects and students was evident
in the successful proposals, and most clearly met the goals of the grant program.”
The second annual NCARB Grant builds upon the NCARB Prize for Creative Integration of Practice and
Education in the Academy, now in its seventh year. As a separate funding venture, each academic year the Council
awards up to a total of $10,000 through one, two, or three grants to National Architectural Accrediting Board
(NAAB) accredited program(s) to support the creation and implementation of new ideas and methods of integrating
practice and education. The grant was created to support and encourage concepts that may be more risk-taking
than a school can initially afford on its own.
Pratt Institute was awarded a grant of $5,000 for their proposal to integrate coursework across various disciplines
of study with a specific focus on the fourth semester of the Masters in Architecture program. Their proposal
focused on a semester that links the Comprehensive Architectural Studio with a corresponding technical course,
Integrated Building Systems. The grant proposal sought funding to further develop the cross-disciplinary semester
by developing a concurrent history/theory course. The new course will bring students into firms to examine and
prepare case studies that document the ways in which theory is integrated into practice, design, and construction.
The course will use a virtual format to link research with actual projects as they enter into the construction phase
in locations around the world.
The University of New Mexico was awarded a grant of $5,000 to provide financial impetus to develop a series of
professional-level courses for advanced students, interns, and practicing professionals. The courses reconsider the
role of the practitioner-educator and address the gap between practice and the academy, strengthen the continuum
of the architectural education process, and transform the training of interns into the education of interns. These
courses cover topic areas generally considered to be the most critical in the gap between the academy and practice
such as the architectural impact of building codes and standards, construction administration, construction costs,specifications, product selection, contract negotiation, and liability. Because the courses will be taught by local
experts, they are intended to provide the richness and immediacy that is often difficult to create in educational
environments.
This year, members of the NCARB’s Practice Education Committee reviewed 16 proposals from 15 different
schools. Each proposal included an application form, a narrative no longer than five pages, a supporting letter of
commitment, an itemized budget, and a letter from the dean authorizing the project. Schools applying for the
NCARB Grant were encouraged to:
- Explore different venues or innovative curricular methods/programs to increase the practice/education
link or
- Support efforts that, for a variety of reasons, have not materialized into for-credit curricular activities and,
therefore, have not been submitted to the NCARB Prize program.
Courses and initiatives that result from the NCARB Grant program as well as other for-credit courses that represent
unique efforts to integrate practice and education initiatives may be eligible for the NCARB Prize program.
Architecture schools with NAAB-accredited programs are invited to submit established projects, completed or in
progress by the end of the fall 2007 term, that exemplify the merging of practice with education. Six cash awards,
totaling more than $60,000, will be awarded next spring.
For more information about the NCARB Grant program and the NCARB Prize program, visit the NCARB Prize
section of the web site (http://www.ncarb.org/prize/). NCARB Prize submissions for the 2007-2008 academic year
are due on or before 5:00 PM ET, Tuesday, February 5, 2008. Submissions for next year’s NCARB Grant are due
on or before 5:00 PM ET, Tuesday, October 14, 2008.
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