The School of Architecture was an original component of North Carolina State University's College of Design, known at its founding in 1948 as the School of Architecture and Landscape Design. Before the Department of Architecture existed, North Carolina State College offered a Bachelor of Architectural Engineering degree through the School of Engineering, beginning in the 1920-1921 school year. In 1927, Architectural Engineering became a department within the School of Engineering. This department's name changed to the Department of Architecture and Architectural Engineering in 1940, and it added a Bachelor of Architecture degree in the 1940-1941 school year. In 1946, the board of trustees of the Consolidated University of North Carolina approved a School of Architecture and Landscape Design for State College in response to the post-World War II building boom. In 1948, the search committee hired Henry L. Kamphoefner, a University of Oklahoma architecture professor, to head the new school. Kamphoefner brought several faculty members with him to North Carolina State College, including George Matsumoto, James Fitzgibbon, and Duncan Stuart.
Under Dean Kamphoefner, the Department of Architecture within the School of Design, as it soon came to be called, exerted broad influence on architectural design in North Carolina and the wider Southeast. Kamphoefner's push to adopt the "School of Design" name, because "Architecture is a function of design-not the other way around," reflects the broad influence he and others sought in the education of State College's architecture students. In the School of Design's early years, prominent designers and theorists, as well as architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Charles Eames, and Louis Kahn lectured at the school. The Department of Architecture received accreditation in 1950. The students soon began to win major awards, including the Prix de Rome, Paris prizes, Guggenheim fellowships, and Fulbright scholarships, and the school quickly developed an international reputation for experimentation with architectural structures.
In the 1960s, as architectural education began to focus more on urban and community design, the Department of Architecture established the Urban Design Program as a joint academic program with the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This program, founded by Peter Batchelor in 1968, educated students in urban design by drawing on the resources of both universities and provided a means for the School of Design to contribute to projects in the wider community. The Department of Architecture discontinued its Master of Urban Design degree in 1984 but continued to offer courses in this area.
The academic degrees offered by the Department of Architecture have changed over time. The department offered a five-year bachelor's degree in Architecture originally, then added a Master of Architecture degree in 1969. The department phased out the bachelor's degree in 1972 and reestablished it in 1982. The Department of Architecture changed its name to the School of Architecture in 2000, when the School of Design became the College of Design.
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1948 -
1950
:
Matthew Nowicki, acting Department Head
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1951 -
1956
:
Eduardo Catalano
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1956 -
1967
:
Henry Kamphoefner, Dean / Department Head
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1967 -
1974
:
Robert Burns
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1974 -
1975
:
Administrative Committee
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1975 -
1978
:
John Loss
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1978 -
1979
:
Linda Sanders, interim Program Director
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1979 -
1983
:
Martin Harms
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1983 -
1991
:
Robert Burns
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1991 -
1992
:
Paul Tesar
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1992 -
1997
:
Christos Saccopoulos
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1997 -
2001
:
Fatih A. Rifki
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2001 -
2002
:
Robert Burns
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2002 -
2007
:
Thomas Barrie
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2007 -
2008
:
Paul Tesar
From the guide to the North Carolina State University, School of Architecture Records, 1948-1978, undated, (Special Collections Research Center)
