Architecture is the art of building.

But so important are buildings to human culture that this definition implies a wide range of conditions: from the most intimate spaces of a house, to the heterogeneous fabric of a city. This scope brings architecture into contact with other disciplines concerned with buildings and cities, such as engineering, construction, urban planning, landscape architecture, environmental science, art history, and sociology. Architecture necessarily engages with all of these neighbouring disciplines, but is the only one of them that has design as its specialist skill and knowledge base. Design is a mode of thinking and practice that combines historical and environmental knowledges, logical analysis and creativity. The Department of Architecture at Edinburgh treasures the distinctiveness of design, and seeks to put it to work in critical, responsible, and creative ways in the diverse conditions of contemporary metropolitan life.

Architecture's relationship to the wider world it serves continually evolves but always there is at its core an unchanging belief that the act of building is in and of itself a great and ennobling undertaking. In too many schools students and teachers now seem disinterested in building, distracted by cyberspace and a search for ways to transform the art of building into something else. Architecture is not a branch of information science; it is not a kind of electronics.

At Edinburgh we continue to believe in architecture as the most palpable of all the arts and the most public, the art of the here and now, the art of making and preserving fixed places that are the settings for the interaction of people and ideas over time. At Edinburgh, we hold the act of building paramount: the logical manipulation of environmental closure in the service of particular functions and symbolic purposes. This is our overwhelming preoccupation; this is the quintessence of architecture as an art and as a profession. We are wary of trends masquerading as ideas. In a time of hyper-specialization Edinburgh remains committed to a broad and deep generalism. To be effective, an architect must recognize and respond to a host of factors that taken in their totality describe the architectural problem which a building represents: a building is not the solution but a solution. We embrace the complexities and the contradictions of the contemporary, recognizing that today's issues are not for architects to tackle in a vacuum. Architecture is a collaborative art, embracing local community groups, as in the affordable house that is our annual First Year Building Project, and environmentalism represented by our on-going collaboration in design and research with the School of Forestry and Environmental Design.

In this work our Department is nourished and supported by Edinburgh itself, a city widely acclaimed as one of the most beautiful in the world. Photos of the town.