About

The embARC Summer Design Academy is a four-week, credit-bearing summer program at UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design — consistently ranked as the top public university program for architecture and the built environment. Rising seniors, and exceptional rising juniors, spend four weeks in studio-based instruction covering architecture, urban design, and sustainable city planning, with daily sessions from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. in Bauer Wurster Hall. No prior design experience is required. Upon successful completion, students receive college credit on an official UC Berkeley transcript and a certificate of completion. The program admits approximately 70 students drawn from across the United States and internationally.

The curriculum integrates five components: an Architecture and Urban Design Studio covering freehand sketching, drafting, model-building, and digital representation; a Sustainable City Planning Workshop exploring authentic urban planning problems; a Digital Design Workshop introducing current professional software; an Environmental Design Conversation Series featuring practicing architects, urban designers, and CED faculty; and a Community Build project. The Community Build component is distinctive — students work in CED's Fabrication Shop alongside trained shop staff to design and construct real infrastructure for a local nonprofit partner, experiencing the client-designer relationship firsthand. Past projects have included food access infrastructure for Berkeley-area organizations. One-on-one design reviews with instructors and field trips to San Francisco and the broader Bay Area supplement studio time throughout the month.

For students seriously considering environmental design, architecture, urban planning, or landscape architecture, embARC offers direct access to Berkeley CED's faculty, studio culture, and fabrication facilities — the same environment where Berkeley's undergraduate and graduate architects are trained. The program's combination of credit-bearing coursework, portfolio development, and community-engaged design work makes it one of the stronger pre-college architecture offerings in the country, comparable in institutional weight to Cornell's Introduction to Architecture program and well suited to students drawn to the civic and sustainability dimensions of design that define Berkeley CED's identity.