The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design offers an interdisciplinary and international postgraduate master of science degree entitled The Berlage Master in Architecture and Urban Design. This is a postgraduate program for architects and urban designers who have already completed a master’s degree in architecture or an equivalent five-year degree. It is a primarily privately funded, one-and-a-half-year, English-language program. The program has been accredited by the Dutch-Flemish accreditation organization.

The program is aimed at students who seek an intense educational setting in which to improve and sharpen their scholarly and research skills as well as critical thinking abilities. The program focuses on cross-cultural research and design; explores innovative architectural and urban models for a more socially and culturally sustainable global future. It is taught by an international body of visiting renown designers and scholars as well as select teaching staff from the Faculty of Architecture. Its approach is focused on new forms of architectural thinking, alternative modes of defining a design project, and innovative ways of practicing as a designer and a researcher. It is also tailored to educate students in the formulation of integrated design knowledge, considering architecture and urban design a complex connection between cultural, social, and economic factors, as well as of strategic, organizational, and spatial considerations. 

The program has been created to meet the challenges of globally oriented practice by expanding the range of education architects receive and by redefining the methods, instruments, and approaches of research and design practice. The program is framed around three main notions: “cross-cultural,” “reality based,” and “social and cultural sustainable”:

Cross-cultural The program regards cross-culturalism both as a condition of practice and as an educational principle. First, the curriculum is developed to qualify designers to operate in an international and, thus, cross-cultural field. This implies developing specific research and design instruments, methods, and approaches to act across cultural borders.  The program is one of the first of its kind to focus intensively on how the designer might be educated in an increasingly globalized world, concentrating comparatively on the complex development of projects within different cultural settings. Second, the program will use the cross-cultural character of its student and tutor population to introduce a different level of debate and reflection within architectural education. Tutors and especially students will be asked to bring the experience of their local cultural conditions to the educational program, such that the development of new architectural instruments, methods, and approaches can be immediately discussed and evaluated within a comparative cultural frame.

Reality based The program is also characterized by its firm embedment in a reality-based frame of reference. The program is unique in that it educates students to develop new theoretical concepts (term 1); conceive of innovative definitions of the design project (term 2); and pose newfangled ways of practicing (term 3) in close relation to, and with explicit feedback from, an interdisciplinary team of stakeholders composed of public authorities, research organizations, corporations, real estate developers, and municipal planners, as well as of scholars and professionals. This soundboard of various reality-based actors will allow the development of innovative research and design concepts—methods and strategies that have a greater resonance within the complexity of global architectural practice, while keeping a critical academic distance to them.  The program is developed to educate “reflective practitioners” (Schön); designers who are simultaneously capable of reflecting “in action” (through actual research and design) and “on action” (through critical analysis and reflection).


Socially and culturally sustainableThe program explicitly engages with current interests in sustainable global futures, while moving away from a dominant image of sustainability as a high-tech matter. It instead focuses on the social and cultural dimensions of sustainability; on how the built environment relates to changing lifestyles and life choices as populations age, grow, and become increasingly embroiled in a global society. The goal is to ground a more structural reflection on the impact of these global developments on architecture and urban design, while simultaneously measuring the social and cultural aspects of the proposed organizational principles for the built environment. The program aims for an understanding of social and cultural sustainability as integrated in the various dimensions of architecture and thus embedded in concrete patterns, morphologies, and typologies.

The program’s attention to cross-cultural, reality-based, and socially and culturally sustainable issues requires a critical exploration and redefinition of how we understand a “design project”—including its strategic, organizational, and spatial characteristics. Hence, in the first part of the program (term 1), students will be educated to investigate the definitions, aspects, and constituents of a design project—building upon their academic and professional experience to achieve new disciplinary ends. The second part of the program (term 2) will educate students in how to innovatively articulate a design project as a complex and integrated system of spatial agency. In the program’s third and final part (term 3), students will learn to implement such an innovative design project as a way of intervening in a layered field of spatial, social, cultural, and economic conditions and stakeholders.