About The BAC

Strategic Planning

The BAC 2005 Strategic Plan

The 2005 Strategic Plan for the BAC has been prepared at a time when conditions are very different from those under which the school was founded. Internal and external forces now present particular challenges to the BAC's mode of operation. The Strategic Plan has been developed to build upon the BAC's past decade of growing maturity and strength and allow it to respond to new opportunities for design education and influence. Driven by changing expectations of students and a rapid advance of technology, design education must now extend beyond the basic disciplines of Architecture, Interior Design and Landscape Architecture. It must reflect a new diversification of markets, a new business landscape, the evolution of building industries into new clusters of participants and partnerships, and the changing relationships among all of these. For the BAC education to embrace these changes, a continued expansion of new and different teachings will be necessary.

To understand the spirit of operations appropriate for the future, the 2005 Strategic Plan was initiated with an extensive inquiry both among current and recent participants in the school's activities, and among numerous external constituencies with whom graduates are likely to collaborate in their careers. Historic documents, previous reports, and prior recommendations were reviewed and evaluated. These inquiries confirmed the strength of the traditional BAC philosophy, but also exposed the changing methods of practice within design offices. Building on that knowledge, the Strategic Plan seeks to leverage the implications for design education. The following are some of the insights that emerged from these efforts:

The Design Professions
Future design opportunities will call for increased collaborative efforts of people with varied skills, many from outside the design fields. To encourage a free flow of ideas and responsibilities, the individual disciplines of Architecture, Interior Design, Landscape Architecture, and Design Studies should be collectively described as the Design Professions. This will reflect a common focus on the built environment and recognize an overlap in project roles, allow for the inclusion of emergent related disciplines and encourage more and richer collaborations.

Design and Practice Skills
Design as a multi-disciplined effort of many participants and partnerships will require adding or extending traditional skills. To reflect this requirement for students, faculty and professionals the BAC will need to:

  • develop new curricula and pedagogy to reflect the external forces that shape career opportunities for graduates
  • prepare design professionals for participatory and leadership roles in complex teams
  • initiate activities that prepare design professionals to more directly engage the business community in all phases of project development
  • improve skills in communication, effective collaboration and critical thinking
  • expand skills in organizing and orchestrating professional pre-design and non-design activities

Sustained Commitments
The exploratory surveys and focus groups found widespread support for the traditional principles of the BAC, and in particular, learning integrated with concurrent experience in professional practice. Hence the Strategic Plan retains a commitment to the traditional principles, but assumes these will evolve as the school embraces many of the challenges outlined above. The core principles are:

  • learning integrated with concurrent experience in professional practice
  • instruction provided by qualified practicing professionals
  • accessibility and diversity
  • affordability

Institutional Support
In moving forward to a period of planned development for the BAC the Strategic Plan recognizes the importance of nurturing a sense of community for all members of the BAC through a hospitable, collegial and responsive school environment. Both the physical facility and the social atmosphere must be supportive of the efforts of students, faculty and staff, and also encourage the engagement of the general public.