Bachelor of Science in Interior Design

The interior design profession concerns itself with the interior spaces of buildings, providing for the physical, psychological, cultural, and social needs of people at work and leisure. Interior designers must understand a clients' interactions within society and be capable of translating this understanding into appropriate and inspiring designs for interior environments.

In practice interior designers execute projects for the whole spectrum of human activities. Examples include business and commercial establishments (offices and shops); places for recreation and hospitality (hotels, restaurants, resorts); health and cultural institutions (hospitals, schools, theaters, museums, places of worship); and residential interiors. In preparation for this wide range of design opportunities, the interior designer needs an academic grounding in basic problem-solving, formal design skills, and pertinent historical and technical knowledge.

The curriculum includes professional and general education courses. Each level of the students' education engages knowledge and skills in problem discovery and resolution, critical and imaginative thinking, communication, and technology. After the two foundation years, interior design content studios provide students with opportunities to develop further their creative abilities through design projects for a variety of human activity settings. Interior design students complete six quarter-long co-op work experiences during years two through five. Culminating the curriculum is a capstone senior project in which students exercise their acquired knowledge and skills in a two-quarter design project of their own choosing.

About the Program

The five-year Bachelor of Science in Interior Design curriculum is comprehensive from the beginning. Because interior designers must be able to integrate practical, technical, and aesthetic factors in designing building interiors, we introduce students immediately to that challenge. Each level of the student's education engages knowledge and skills in problem discovery and resolution, critical and imaginative thinking, verbal and visual communication, and appropriate technologies.

Following two foundation years, interior design content studios provide students with opportunities to develop further their creative abilities through design projects for a variety of human activity settings. Interior Design students complete a total of six quarters of co-op work experiences during years two through five. Culminating the curriculum is a capstone senior project in which students exercise their acquired knowledge and skills in a two-quarter design project of their own choosing.

Faculty in the School of Architecture and Interior Design have come to Cincinnati from excellent universities all over the country as well as from England, Germany, India, Nigeria, Australia, and Turkey. Most of the faculty members are registered professionals and many complement their university teaching with design practice. Research areas includehistoric preservation, sustainable design, digital media, building morphology, historical and contemporary theory, post-occupancy evaluation, universal design, building science, environmental technology, community design, urban design, interior design, archaeology, and post-colonial modern architecture.

The College of DAAP supports a multidisciplinary design and art culture, with programs in architecture, interior design, graphic design, digital design, industrial design, fashion design, art history, fine arts, urban planning, and urban studies.

Local architecture and design. The central basin and surrounding hills of Cincinnati are populated with fine examples of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architecture, many of them brick structures erected by German immigrants in the 1840s to 1880s. Scores of individual buildings and their interiors and whole districts are listed on historic registers. Local neighborhoods serve our teaching programs as excellent sites and laboratories for architectural, interior design, urban design, and historic preservation projects.

Notable architects who built in Cincinnati during that early period include Daniel Burnham, H.H. Richardson and Isaiah Rogers (whose Chamber of Commerce Building and Burnet House Hotel both burned long ago), John Russell Pope, Cass Gilbert, Ernest Flagg, as well as Cincinnati's own Samuel Hannaford and James McLaughlin. Engineer John Roebling managed to get a truss-suspension bridge constructed across the Ohio River in 1876.

Nationally-known architects who have left more recent marks on the city: Zaha Hadid, Michael Graves, Cesar Pelli, Gordon Bunshaft, RTKL, SOM, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, and Kohn Pederson Fox. Frank Lloyd Wright designed three houses here, Philip Johnson one.

The University of Cincinnati's campus master plan designed by landscape architect George Hargreaves features new buildings and urban landscapes by Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Michael Graves, Gwathmey Siegel, Machado and Silvetti, David Childs with SOM, Henry Cobb with Pei Cobb Fried, Liers Weinzapfel, Cambridge Seven, Moore Rubell Yudell, and Bernard Tschumi. Peter Eisenman's internationally acclaimed Aronoff Center for Design and Art houses the School of Architecture and Interior Design and the three other schools within the College of DAAP.