Skip To Main Content
Penn State College of Arts and Architecture
Penn State College of Arts and Architecture
Select where to search:


Architectural History Minor

Explore the history, context, and preservation of built environments.

Leverage an interdisciplinary approach to studying architectural spaces, design processes, and construction practices across historical periods. You will analyze architecture and its context from multiple points of view, and fields of study, to build a layered understanding of architectural history.

This interdisciplinary minor administered by the Department of Art History is designed for students interested in exploring architectural history from a variety of disciplines. Architectural history uses methods familiar to art and architectural historians, architects, urban designers, landscape architects and historians, historic preservationists, classicists, archaeologists, anthropologists, historical geographers, and social historians to study and understand architecture.

This minor is open to students in all majors. Majors in Art History, Anthropology, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, and Geography may only double count 6 credits taken in their major field towards this minor.

On/Of Paper exhibition featuring work by the faculty of Architecture at Penn State.

Does this sound like you?

You want to understand architecture from multiple points of view and you are excited by the idea of an interdisciplinary approach to studying the history of architecture.

If so, the Architectural History minor sounds like a great fit for you!

Faculty Spotlight

Architectural study with wood, concrete, and smoke.
Architectural study with wood, concrete, and smoke.

Pep Avilés

Stuckeman Career Development Professor in Design

Pep Avilés is a historian, architect, and professor specializing in postwar and contemporary architecture. His academic research explores the impact media had on the materiality of architecture and the redefinition of modernism after World War II.

Avilés’ work has been sponsored by the Canadian Center for Architecture, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Getty Research Center, and has been exhibited at the Centre de Cultura Contemporànea de Barcelona (2017) and the Oslo Architecture Triennale (2019), among others. He is the founding editor of the journal Faktur: Documents and Architecture.

Pep Avilés, Stuckeman Career Development Professor in Design

News from A&A

Arts and Architecture appoints interim graphic design head for spring

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State College of Arts and Architecture has appointed Darrin Thornton, associate dean for academic affairs and outreach, as the interim head of the Department


Read More

Graphic design professor’s project featured in Philadelphia design festival

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A collaborative research project led by Phil Choo, professor of graphic design in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School, that helps people visualize the


Read More

Stuckeman architecture professor awarded inaugural Obel teaching fellowship

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Laia Celma, assistant teaching professor of architecture in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School at Penn State, was named an inaugural recipient of the


Read More