Welcome to the School of Architecture and Interior Design

At the School of Architecture and Interior Design (SAID), Canadian University Dubai, we educate the next generation of designers, innovators, and changemakers who will shape the future of the built environment. Through a unique combination of creativity, technology, sustainability, and entrepreneurship, our programs prepare students to address the complex challenges of rapidly evolving societies.

Studio-based learning lies at the heart of our educational philosophy. From their first year, students engage in collaborative and project-based learning experiences that encourage critical thinking, experimentation, and innovation. Our studios integrate theory, technology, research, and professional practice, enabling students to transform ideas into meaningful architectural, interior, product, service, and digital design solutions.

Our diverse international community creates an enriching learning environment where different cultures, perspectives, and experiences contribute to a global understanding of design. Supported by an internationally recognized faculty with extensive academic and professional experience, students develop the knowledge, technical expertise, and creative confidence required to become leaders in an increasingly interconnected world.

The School offers a comprehensive portfolio of undergraduate and postgraduate programs that address both the established foundations and the emerging frontiers of design.
Our Bachelor of Architecture (BArch) and Bachelor of Science in Interior Design (BScID) provide a rigorous education grounded in design thinking, technical competence, and professional practice.

Our Bachelor of Science in Design and Artificial Intelligence (BScDAI) prepares a new generation of designers capable of integrating artificial intelligence, computational thinking, human-computer interaction, and data-driven methodologies into the design of spaces, products, and services. Rather than treating AI as an external tool, the program positions intelligent technologies as active collaborators throughout the creative process, equipping graduates with future-ready competencies at the intersection of design and digital innovation.

At the postgraduate level, the Master of Science in Design Innovation for the Circular Economy (MScDICE) addresses one of the defining global challenges of our time: the transition towards sustainable and regenerative economies. The program equips professionals with the knowledge and tools to apply circular economy principles, systems thinking, digital technologies, and innovation methodologies to create resilient products, services, and built environments that contribute to climate action and sustainable development.

Together, our programs form a transdisciplinary educational ecosystem where students progressively develop expertise across design, technology, sustainability, entrepreneurship, and research. Throughout their studies, they explore the cultural, social, environmental, ethical, managerial, and economic dimensions of design while gaining valuable professional experience through internships, industry collaborations, international workshops, and real-world projects.

Our location in Dubai

Located in the heart of Dubai's City Walk district, Canadian University Dubai offers students an exceptional learning environment within one of the world's most dynamic centers of architecture, design, technology, and innovation. Just minutes from landmarks such as the Burj Khalifa, Dubai Design District (d3), the Museum of the Future, and many of the region's most significant architectural developments, the city itself becomes an extension of the classroom.

The School actively engages with Dubai's vibrant design ecosystem through partnerships with leading architectural practices, design consultancies, technology companies, cultural institutions, government entities, and international organizations. Students regularly participate in design competitions, exhibitions, research initiatives, internships, and collaborative projects that address real challenges facing the city and the wider region.

Whether pursuing careers in architecture, interior design, computational design, artificial intelligence, circular economy, or emerging creative industries, our graduates leave Canadian University Dubai equipped with the knowledge, creativity, technological skills, and global perspective required to shape more intelligent, sustainable, and human-centered futures.

Departments

Our past, present and future

The School of Architecture and Interior Design at Canadian University Dubai was founded in the year 2008. Since then, it has offered an environment in which Canadian values of higher education meet creativity, while drawing on the local culture and UAE academic higher education regulations.

The Department offers a transdisciplinary learning environment, intertwining sciences, humanities, and arts to build a graduate profile that is responsive to the contemporary architectural thinking and professional practice.

CUD is transitioning from a teaching university to a research and innovation-oriented university, and the School of Architecture and Interior Design is meeting this challenge with confidence and enthusiasm. Our new study plan is strategically framed by the creation of new knowledge through research, and targeting the generation of value for the new knowledge-based ideas we produce with our students. The recently founded CUD Incubator is assisting the process of these ideas and giving them an additional entrepreneurial perspective.

Our students’ profile

Our program is targeted at students who have the desire and will to improve the world by improving the places they live in. Those who are curious and prepared to use their imagination to create new forms of accommodation, those who are eager to investigate, experiment, try, test, reconsider and research to help create novel and innovative solutions. Our task is to guide them in this fantastic experience of creatively investigating the world of design, while exploring their inner world.

Careers for today and tomorrow

We live in a fast-changing world, and the future architects and interior designers we are educating today will be at the peak of their careers several years later, when the market can be entirely different. We do not offer an education exclusively addressing what an architect or interior designer is and does today, instead we offer a sustainable educational strategy to assure a career profile that is responsive, agile and adaptive to the changes in the industry. The education we offer is primarily focused on learning how values and principles can be innovatively used in built forms.

Attributes of a CUD graduate from the School of Architecture and Interior Design:

  • A professional, sensitive to the human culture, thoughtful to the environment, a creative thinker and an efficient entrepreneur.
  • Able to adapt to changes and to diverse conditions and familiar with both traditional and contemporary design and digital fabrication and construction methods.
  • Capable of revising existing concepts and inventing new ones, relevant to societal and cultural needs as well as challenges such as sustainability and climate change.
  • Able to consider and compose the different polarities such as digital/analogue, natural/artificial, local/global, cultural/scientific, objective/subjective.
  • Creative thinker, motivated by innovation, novelty and contemporary practices.
  • Exhibits interpersonal and communication skills needed to work on projects with clients and industrial partners.

Our teaching methods

To ensure the desired graduate profile, we have developed a student-centered teaching approach to architectural design. This approach is not only focused on the transmission of teacher’s knowledge to the student, but also on the teacher’s understanding of a student’s personality to encourage organic and creative thinking. For the School of Architecture and Interior Design, the teaching of design is not just the transfer of information but an active engagement with students to draw out a creative amalgamation of ideas, values, knowledge, and desires.

Our student life

The School of Architecture and Interior Design is like a second home, given the hours our students spend at university for academic and project purposes. CUD also offers various events and activities like sports, festivals, music, and dance performances, movies, cultural celebrations, competitions, visits to art galleries, museums, conferences and historical sites. Architecture and Interior Design students can use the University’s computer and construction labs and a well-organized library workspace to work on their projects. Students collaborate extensively with students from other faculties and often make friends for life.

Our study plans

To achieve its mission, the School of Architecture and Interior Design organizes its study plan around five main interconnected pillars reflecting the profile of architects and designers:

To think, to create, to make, to represent, to respect.

To ‘think’

It covers all academic content concerning the theories and history of architecture and interior design. The considerations of construction and materials, and the impact of the natural, cultural, financial and technical environments on design thinking and practice. The development of creative and speculative thinking, curiosity, imagination, cross-disciplinarity and research are the core targets of this pillar.

To ‘create’

It covers design studios which follow a graduate progression from the simple to the complex and from the small to the large scale. They are designed to incorporate aspects of all other pillars and to test and experiment with ways those pillars can be integrated. Experimentation and encouragement of new formal and functional explorations, familiarization with risk-taking, and introduction to speculation on which design could develop are the core targets of this pillar.

To ‘represent’

It elaborates techniques, tools and methods of presenting design proposals and representing values, feelings, and emotions. The familiarization with tools in finding, experimenting, representing and encouraging the synergy between human and non-human action in architectural design are the main targets of this pillar.

To ‘make’

It focuses on the making process by offering students insights and construction techniques into different building materials and techniques. It is presented in autonomous courses and into parts of the studio work. The impact of advanced technologies in construction, new materials, and cross-disciplinary collaboration of the contemporary building industry framework in this part of the study plan.

To ‘respect’

It introduces students to the impact of climate and environment on human life, the development of culture and the consequences of climate change on our future. The Faculty cultivates respect of natural and cultural environments and provides different techniques to implement the values in practice. The stabilization of the delicate equilibrium between the planet and society is a condition of our existence as humans, and innovation enables the reconsideration of established design attitudes and practices.