Anywhere at Once

Ask where The Boston Architectural College (BAC) is, and most people will point to Back Bay: 320 Newbury Street, the studios, the galleries, the address on the letterhead. That answer is accurate. It is also incomplete.

In any given week, the BAC is also in a home office in Pennsylvania, where adjunct professor Jason Detwiler ’15 logs on to teach. It is in cities along the West Coast of the United States, and in Sydney, Australia, where his students join him. All of them are in the same course, with the same software, in the same institutional environment. For the length of that class, the BAC occupies all those places at once.

This is The BAC Cloud Canopy™, and its central proposition is simple: the cloud is the new ground of the college.

The conventional way to picture a college with online offerings is a campus at the center, with digital services radiating outward to reach students who cannot be there in person. Cloud Canopy turns that picture around. The BAC exists across the cloud, accessible to students anywhere, at any time, on nearly any device. The Boston campus, future distributed locations, classrooms, studios, and labs connect to that larger canopy and hang from it.

“The Canopy extends across the world, and everything is connected through it,” said Mahesh Daas, BAC President. “Cloud Lab, Zoom, professional design software, virtual desktops, and media systems are how the idea shows up in a student’s day, but the idea itself is institutional: a professional design school whose infrastructure travels to the learner.”

A Vision, Then A Test

The commitment beneath it goes back to the founding in 1889: professional design education for people pursuing it alongside work and other responsibilities.

Cloud Canopy grew out of BAC to the Future, the College’s vision of itself as a global network.

The BAC had offered its online Master of Architecture (M.Arch) degree for more than a decade. Cloud Canopy was something different: a shared computing infrastructure that gave students access to powerful design tools from anywhere, on almost any device. When the pandemic forced the College to move to remote learning in spring 2020, that vision became an urgent necessity. By August, the BAC had launched Cloud Canopy, with Cloud Lab at its center.

Kyra Tan M.Arch’28, ’24, was in the first year of her bachelor’s degree in interior architecture when the pandemic hit. An international student from China, she watched classmates return to their home countries while their studies continued.

“When COVID happened, it was the first time I started to really understand the meaning of a ‘global network.’ I had classmates who were also international students who had to return to their home countries, and everything was virtual. But when we joined a class on Zoom, we could still learn together and use the same resources. It helped me feel less alone and closed the distance between us,” Kyra said.

The emergency may have passed, but the infrastructure remained. Total student usage and average sessions have continued to rise each term.

Cloud Canopy’s reach now extends beyond enrolled degree students. The BAC’s Pre-College Summer Academy recently brought in nearly 100 high school participants from around the world, who joined remotely and worked in the same professional design software through the cloud.

One College, Many Places

Jason’s Introduction to Autodesk Revit course puts powerful design tools within reach of every student. By providing the computing power through a browser, BAC makes industry-standard software accessible on virtually any device—even a low-cost Chromebook. No $2,000 laptop required. It’s a simple but powerful way to remove barriers and expand access to design education.

“As BAC students are juggling their work-school balance, the Cloud Canopy gives them access to the resources they need, when it works best for them,” said Jason, who is also a practicing design technologist at Symmes Maini & McKee Associates. “When I was studying at the BAC, we had to be physically on campus to use the programs we needed to complete our assignments. That’s one more to-do on top of managing a full-time job and your personal life, all while earning your degree. Cloud Canopy and Cloud Lab eliminate that requirement and give students more control over their schedule.”

Jason’s own experience as a student marks the shift. When he studied at the BAC, the College’s computing environment lived in its buildings. Today it lives in the canopy, and the buildings are one of several ways to reach it.

The Same Environment, Entered from Elsewhere

Cloud Lab is the clearest example of an institutional resource that has moved from a room in a building to the cloud. It is a virtual mirror of the on-campus desktop computers, carrying the full suite of professional design and productivity software: Autodesk programs including AutoCAD, Revit, 3ds Max, Fusion 360, and Maya, along with the Adobe Creative Suite, ArcGIS Pro, Rhino, SketchUp, V-Ray, and more.

Before Cloud Lab, all that software lived on roughly 180 workstations in Boston, and studying from anywhere else meant supplying your own software and a machine powerful enough to run it. During midterms and finals, students lined up in the hallways waiting for a seat to open. The workstations are still on campus. The lab they run now opens in any web browser.

The environment is distributed across seven cloud regions: US East, Oregon, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Seoul, São Paulo, and Sydney. Seen on a map, the regions trace the outline of the canopy itself.

For BAC students, that flexibility is structural. More than 85% work in a professional capacity while earning their degrees, supporting themselves and their families as they study. Kyra, now pursuing her M.Arch while working at JCBT Architect in Quincy, Massachusetts, is one of them.

“My commute to campus is four hours round trip. I wouldn’t be able to keep my position at JCBT Architects while completing my Master’s degree without Cloud Lab. It gives me access to everything I need, no matter what location I’m in, on my own time,” Kyra said.

When Kyra opens Cloud Lab, she enters the same institutional computing environment she would use on Newbury Street. The College comes to her.

A College Without Walls

The BAC has been dissolving boundaries for a long time. Its practice-integrated model, in which students work in the profession while they study, has always treated the firm as part of the classroom. Jason teaches from inside practice. Kyra studies from inside one.

“You can now be a part of the technology, the software, and the hardware as a virtualized experience, in the same way that a professional would be utilizing it. So students are not only getting experience in what they’ll be expected to know upon graduation, they're also experiencing that access in the same way that professionals are,” Peter Atwood, Director of Digital Media, said.

Practice integration dissolved the boundary between school and work. Cloud Canopy dissolves the boundary between campus and elsewhere.

The BAC has always extended its classroom into the profession and the city. Cloud Canopy extends the College itself, and it raises a question that reaches well beyond online learning: What is a college when its campus is no longer bound by its real estate?