The graduate degree programs have few requirements yielding a great deal of flexibility, encouraging work outside the curricular and disciplinary borders. Students do best when they understand their own direction and are able to assemble for themselves a curriculum and a set of advisors that take advantage of the wealth of resources available in Cambridge. Students come to HTC from design schools, from MA programs, from work, and directly from college. PhD and Master's students (enrolled in the SMArchS program) follow the same curriculum through the first three semesters of their enrollment. Master's students tend to return more frequently than PhD students to architectural practice and design teaching, but a large number also go on to PhD programs.

The program's strengths can be summarized as:

• History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture, Art and Urban Form
• Late Medieval through Baroque, 19th and 20th Centuries
• International

The History, Theory, and Criticism Program was founded in 1975 as one of the first to grant the PhD degree in a school of architecture. Its mission has been to generate advanced research within MIT's School of Architecture and Planning and to promote critical and theoretical reflection within the disciplines of architectural and art history. Students and faculty work in a variety of fields, covering diverse parts of the globe. Commitment to depth and diversity is an integral part of HTC's identity and one of the reasons for the success of its students, who come to Cambridge from around the world. Between 1975 and 2001 HTC awarded 50 PhDs and 47 Masters degrees, and the recipients of these degrees have gone on to teach in prominent universities and colleges worldwide. Unlike other architectural history departments in schools of architecture, HTC includes art historians on its permanent faculty and offers both a PhD and Master's in art history as well as in architectural history. The core faculty is annually supplemented by distinguished visiting scholars who contribute significantly to the intellectual life of the program.

The goal of the HTC program is to prepare students for an intellectual life in universities, in architecture schools, and in architectural practice. Emphasis is placed simultaneously on critical method and historical substance. Students are encouraged to identify research projects that are relevant to their own concerns and allow them to reflect on contemporary issues. At the same time, the program demands rigorous historical scholarship. It is this combination, we believe, that leads to real change in the ways we think about art and architecture and write their history.

HTC is a unique program in American education. Its location within the oldest school of architecture in the U.S. focuses attention on interdisciplinary issues in contemporary practice and distinguishes it from the art history departments of universities. A number of the HTC faculty have professional degrees as well as academic ones and this contributes to the interaction of practice and scholarship that is unique to this environment. Alone among the graduate programs in architecture schools, HTC hosts a substantial curriculum in art history. Its theoretical and critical orientation constitutes an important part of the education of all the students in the program.