What is architectural engineering? Where art meets physics

Introduction

Architectural engineering integrates structural design, environmental physics and building performance into the creative design process. When we admire a building, we may describe what it looks like or how it makes us feel, but rarely stop to think about the physical problems its designers had to solve to make that experience possible, such as how the roof spans the space, how daylight reaches the middle of the floor or how the rooms stay comfortable through a hot summer.

Architectural engineering solves those problems as part of the design itself, on the understanding that a building is most successful when its form and performance have been developed together rather than one being fitted around the other.

Structural design physics

The Pantheon in Rome, completed around 125 AD, still has the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, and its builders achieved this by grading the concrete so that it becomes lighter towards the crown, with lighter volcanic stone replacing heavier aggregate as the dome rises. The oculus at the top removes material where it would add load without contributing much strength, and in doing so it also creates the circle of daylight that moves around the interior through the day, so the feature most visitors remember is as much a structural decision as an architectural one.

The Sydney Opera House shows the same relationship working in the other direction. Jørn Utzon's competition design of 1957 proposed a series of curved shells that nobody yet knew how to calculate or build, and took years of work by the design team before they found a solution in deriving every shell from the surface of a single sphere, which allowed the roof to be made from repeated prefabricated elements while keeping the form Utzon had imagined. In that case, the art came first, and the physics had to find a way to make it possible, which is a large part of what architectural engineers still do today.

Environmental building physics

Much of a building’s physics is experienced through light, air and temperature rather than seen in its structure, and Coventry Cathedral, consecrated in 1962, is a good example on our own doorstep. Basil Spence angled the stained glass windows of the nave so that they face towards the altar, so a visitor entering the building sees mostly plain walls and only discovers the full extent of the glass when they turn to look back, an effect that depends entirely on understanding how light and sightlines behave in the space.

At 30 St Mary Axe in London, the tower’s rounded form helps wind move around the building rather than down to street level, whilst the spiralling lightwells that rise through the floors bring daylight deep into the plan and allow the building to be naturally ventilated for part of the year. With new regulations in England requiring new buildings to be zero-carbon ready, decisions like these about form, daylight and ventilation increasingly have to be made at the earliest stage of a project, by people who can work confidently with architects on design intent and with engineers on the performance it has to achieve.

Architectural engineering at Coventry University

Our Architectural Engineering Meng/Beng (Hons) course is supported by two well-established disciplines at Coventry University, architecture and civil engineering, so students learn from staff and facilities across both. The course launched in 2023 and moved to the university's block delivery model in September 2026, which means you study one module at a time in focused blocks rather than several modules running in parallel. It is available as both a BEng and an MEng, and students who meet the required academic progression criteria can transfer to the MEng course, so the choice you make when you apply doesn’t have to limit how far you take your studies. The course is designed to help you develop the competences expected of a professional engineer.

From your first year, you will work on design projects that are developed and tested together with the structural, environmental and digital modelling skills needed to make them work, so that the questions explored in this article, such as how a form carries its loads or how a space is lit and ventilated, become part of how you design rather than a separate set of calculations carried out afterwards. Because the course draws on both architecture and civil engineering, you will learn design studio methods from architects and analytical methods from engineers, with each year building deliberately on the skills developed in the one before.

Explore our Architectural Engineering MEng/BEng (Hons) course details or book a Coventry University Open Day to visit our facilities.