Dean's Welcome

Welcome to the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at the University of Maryland. We are the home of four leading academic disciplines of architecture, urban planning, historic preservation, and real estate development, and the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education.

Our University, ranked among the top 20 public universities nationwide, has many related academic departments and programs in Art and Art History, Landscape Architecture, American Studies, Public Policy and leading professional Business and Engineering Schools. The University also houses the nation’s largest single repository of historic documents, the National Archives. Our premier location in Greater Washington, DC, home to all the federal agencies and professional associations that guide our disciplines, makes us the logical choice for those committed to professional or academic careers in architecture, planning, preservation, and real estate development.

Our core aim is to advance the leadership and effectiveness of the disciplines responsible for designing, planning, developing, and preserving the health and integrity of the physical environment. And we do this through integrated education programs (at undergraduate, graduate, professional, and PhD levels), funded research and creative work (in all our fields), and community and professional service.

As a means toward this end, we commit to:

• deepening and broadening the knowledge and insight of our disciplines,

• balancing public and private interests through transparent, ethical reasoning,

• leading the integration of interdisciplinary and collaborative work,

• cultivating our social and ethnic diversities as necessary for our well-being,

• advancing innovation and change while embracing historic perspective, and
  

• integrating the promise of technology with cultural and aesthetic perspective

...so that we may move consciously and systematically toward a more appealing, safe, just, enlightened, and sustainable world in which to live, work, and play.

We are not philosophically or ideologically single minded, nor are we all things to all people. Our convictions and critical perspective stem from open and rigorous consideration of the long and broad view, finding clarity in what is real and may be possible. Theory and practice are fully integrated and mutually appreciated by all in our programs, for each makes the other fertile and effective.

Our unique metropolitan location provides valuable context for study and research. Our campus is surrounded by some of the greatest 20th- and 21st-century experiments in design, planning, and development with progressive, transit-oriented development occurring on the nation’s most successful transit system, the METRO, and decades of experiments with new towns including Greenbelt and Columbia, Maryland, and Reston, Virginia, just a few minutes' drive from campus. With the nation’s greatest “think tanks” a few Metro stops away (Urban Land Institute, the National Trust, the AIA, the APA, and numerous others), we are effectively a more meaningful part of what the nation has to offer our disciplines than any other.

Come visit us, and consider joining our quest to help shape the future.

Garth Rockcastle, FAIA
Professor and Dean