Undergraduate degree: Bachelor of Interior Architecture (BIArch)
Undergraduate minor
About the major
In interior architecture, we offer a broad professional curriculum that combines robust shared design courses with specialized study in interior design to create big picture design thinkers. Our aim is to help students develop research and design skills they will need to revitalize, reuse, and adapt existing buildings and interior spaces to enhance quality of life for users. Throughout the curriculum we focus on making spaces and objects that resonate with users and provide uplifting, healthy, and sustainable interior environments.
Our department has a long history of interdisciplinary collaborative learning. Interior architecture students are immersed in a rich mix of faculty, students, and courses in other design majors while earning a professional degree accredited by the Council for Interior Design Accreditation (CIDA). Our unique curriculum is project based and student driven. Interior architecture studio courses allow students to propose design solutions to real-life problems that focus on the critical issues of our time. A comprehensive project in the final year allows each student to conduct in-depth study and research into their specialized areas of interest.
A little more info
- The School of Architecture and Environment offers in-house expertise and options to amplify our student learning. Students can take courses and studios in other majors and study with leaders in sustainable design practice and healthy environments.
- Our curriculum engages students with real-life projects and stakeholders, and we design and fabricate real custom elements such as furniture and light fixtures.
- Two visiting professorships allow us to bring new practicing designers from around the world each year to teach and lecture about their work.
- UO’s study abroad programs are open to you, for example, in Rome, Vicenza, and Barcelona. The school also works with the Danish International Study Programs in interior architecture and furniture design, to facilitate study in Copenhagen.
- Our faculty maintain active research and creative practices that focus on design theory, user-centered design, color and light, and furniture design. They share their expertise with students in the classroom and in directed design studios.
Career opportunities
Students with a degree in interior architecture possess highly desirable design and technical skills that focus on adaptive reuse of existing buildings (a growing sector of the design industry). Studying interior architecture prepares you to practice interior design at the forefront of professional practice while also allowing you to expand into related fields, such as branding, exhibit design, and lighting design.
Valued for their collaborative skills and broad knowledge, many of our graduates find success in integrated architecture and design firms both nationally and globally. Most students (more than 85 percent) are working as designers within nine months of graduation.