About Architecture and Urban Design

Mission

The mission of the Architecture and Urban Design (ARUD) program is to graduate architects and urban designers that are equipped to face the challenges of the contemporary city and bring people back to the forefront of their considerations. It prepares them to fulfill the designers’ multi-scale role from the design of one room to the design of parts of cities, rehabilitation of historic cores, planning city extensions or revitalizing waterfronts. The program is committed to ongoing enhancement in the overall quality of learning and scientific research to achieve its mission as well as to contributing to scientific and professional advancements in its fields of specialization. It is also responsible for providing students with theoretical knowledge empowered by technologically-agile tools and multi-disciplinary methods that allow them to practice research-based, socially responsible professional design and planning. The program insists on bringing real projects and case-studies into the classroom through engagement and partnerships with the industry equipping students with a deliberation and awareness that meets the complex requirements of the job market. It breeds architects that are capable of initiating a paradigm shift in architecture practice to become more integrative, utilizing ICT technology to better consider social, psychological, and cultural dimensions of design and meet the needs of current and future generations.

Description

The Architecture and Urban Design (ARUD) program is a 149-credit hour undergraduate program towards a B.Sc. in Architecture and Urban Design within the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Nile University. The program started in 2018 and was developed through an EU Commission co-funded project engaging 4 European and 4 Egyptian universities in addition to research and industry non-academic partners. The 2023 Bylaws compacts the study plan, facilitates transferability between programs, and introduces minors and more electives to keep up with transformative trends. The program adopts a multidisciplinary, multi-scale, people-centred approach that interrelates various specializations (architecture, urban design, construction, building ecology, human behaviour, and contemporary city issues) in a planned coordination among courses that form the foundation of architectural education. It also trains on up-to-date technology and tools (BIM, GIS, participatory design tools… etc.) giving its students an edge in the job market. ARUD international beginnings are sustained through the semester abroad with original partners and new partners in the EU. International professors continuously engage in teaching, reviewing and directing ARUD student work. To increase the effectiveness of the learning process the program emphasizes project-based learning, internationalization, engagement with industry, and brining real-life case studies into the classroom through workshops, guest speakers and stakeholder reviewers of student work. Courses address relevant issues such as sustainability, liveability, inclusion, circular culture to achieve user-sensitive design, community-based regeneration, adaptive re-use of buildings, 15-minute neighbourhoods, humanized smart cities and more. This multiscale approach from designing one-room to part of a city is enabled by making students root their design thinking in scientific research, learn how to contextualize theory, and transform it to design with a deliberation and awareness that meets the social responsibility of the designer.

Career Path:

Sustainable and user-sensitive architecture design
Architecture Brief / Program development
Scenario planning and design of adaptive re-use of buildings
Design and execution of culture-specific public buildings and services
Urban design of public space
Housing, neighbourhood and city extension design
Rehabilitation, regeneration and upgrading of existing areas
Sustainable heritage conservation
People-centred smart cities.

Graduate Attributes:

Can propose interventions integrating different scales (architecture, urban design, landscape, city planning, regional planning) based on understanding the complexity of cities.
Demonstrates knowledge and understanding of environment-behavioral studies taking into consideration cultural diversity, social differences, and the impact of a built form on people’s daily life and community identity.
Can conduct multidisciplinary empirical research triangulating quantitative and qualitative methods.
Can apply an ecological approach to building design and operation.
Design appropriate, affordable, and adaptable housing and liveable neighbourhoods.
Able to analyze and propose adaptive reuse of existing buildings.
Can participate in urban upgrading and urban regeneration projects.
Can initiate, engage and apply participatory design processes in design.
Conduct architecture programming and develop design briefs.
Conduct architectural and urban research and discern lessons learned from practical experience.
Utilize multiple ICT-based and digital design tools needed in professional environments.

Partnerships

ARUD has partnered with multiple institutions and establishments initially through the ERASMUS+ co-funded IMPAQT project comprising of seven educational establishments both local and international; namely, Technische Universität Wien (TUW), Universitat Politècnica De Catalunya (ETSAB), Universität Kassel (KU), Università di Cagliari (UNICA), Ain Shams University (ASU), Suez Canal University (SCU), and Alexandria University (AU); in addition to two non-academic institutions; namely, Housing & Building National Research Centre (HBRC) and Engineering Consultants Group (ECG).

In addition to the sustainable ties ARUD has with IMPAQT project former partners like ETSAB, ARUD has forged new partnerships with institutions such as Emaar-Misr, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture – Education Programme, and Denky Germany. ARUD also signed ERASMUS+ KA131 Mobility Agreements with Slovakia Technical University and ISTCE in Portugal which allows for the exchange of students and staff. ARUD has also signed MoUs with the Università di Cagliari, Italy, as well as CadMasters and 10 Tooba in Egypt to sponsor on-going teaching, research and extra-curricular activities.