Course

In addition to the educational activities you do, your work in professional practice will also be assessed. You will work 20 to 32 hours a week at an architectural firm where you can apply what you have learned during the course. Professional practice is an integral part of the master. All relevant work gives you study credits (a total of 30 ECTS per year). During the course, your development in the domain of professional practice will be tracked by means of portfolios made up of your work and peer reviews.

You will conclude the first three academic years of your master course with a self-reflection called a “Koersbepaling.” This is an opportunity for you to determine which direction you want to take, with regard to your fellow students, the master course, and your professional practice. This will allow you develop a strong and unique vision for what you stand for as an architect. In the third year, you will use the Koersbepaling to create a proposal for a graduation project in the fourth and final year.

Research and design are closely interwoven with each other: designing requires analysis and research, the results of which can be assessed and applied in practice. (This is what we call “design-based research.”) Every year, the curriculum includes research-based educational activities. In the third year, you will work on understanding a new, complex task in the subject Research Skill, such as in urbanisation with health in mind or developing regional food systems. In your fourth year, you will also conduct research, which will form a part of your graduation design project.

The fourth and last year is entirely devoted to the graduation project. There is a lot of space to design your own project: you coordinate the subject, choose your own mentor and tailor your design method to the topic of your choice. The starting point is a social or professional issue that you want to explore thoroughly; something you feel strongly about and to which you want to contribute your expertise. After completing the master's course Architecture at ArtEZ, you register yourself as an architect in the Dutch Architects Register and may use the title of architect.

In the second year, you will visit a European city as part of the architecture field trip. Together with your fellow students, you will prepare both the organisation and content of the trip.

The first, second and third academic year conclude with a closing weekend: a short trip to a city where interesting transition processes are taking place. In recent years, this has included cities such as Manchester, Lyon, Wolfsburg, Leipzig and Frankfurt.

In addition to exploring other disciplines, you have the opportunity to venture beyond the boundaries of your studies by attending a summer school abroad. ArtEZ's master's course in Architecture has been an active member of a consortium of architecture programmes along the Rhine for many years, and recently, it has expanded to include the Tiber as well. The location of the summer school rotates; each time, one of the participating institutions takes the lead in organizing the summer school. The participating architecture schools are situated in Strasbourg, Konstanz, Karlsruhe, Darmstadt, and Rome. The theme of the summer school changes every year. The central theme revolving around the city's relationship with the river takes on a fresh perspective annually. The summer school takes place every year in either July or September.