About

MIT Architecture is shaped by MIT’s architecture. From our front door on Massachusetts Avenue, this architecture is imposing, classical, and apparently immutable. Yet the physical and intellectual innovations that MIT has produced — scientific frameworks and inventions, social and humanistic insights, new methods of thinking and making — course around the world and have remade it several times over. The resulting tension between speed and heaviness, and between lightness and gravity, is most beautifully captured in the ephemeral and enduring culture of hacking MIT’s own architecture: the illicit adornment of domes and towers with fire engines, Daleks, Lunar Landers, subway cars and Star Wars droids. 

Below the roofline, MIT’s architecture is largely given over to labs and shops — places in which things are measured, charted, discovered, and optimized. But our discipline is also profoundly shaped by irrational creativity and inescapable political realities. Creativity, history, politics and technology are all present at MIT, but in this Department, they live, work, and invent together.

The organizational architecture of our department reflects this reality. Faculty in the arts, design and urbanism, computation, building technology, and history and theory, are all among the very best of the world, and they organize themselves to serve groups of advanced students. Our undergraduate and professional degrees connect these conversations, as our faculty work together to model architecture’s unique integration of diverse modes of thinking and making.

The Department of Architecture is one of five divisions within the MIT School of Architecture + Planning. The other divisions are: the Department of Urban Studies and Planning; the Media Lab and its Program in Media Arts and Sciences; the Program in Art, Culture, and Technology; the Center for Real Estate; and the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.

The Department is structured in five discipline groups: Architecture + Urbanism; Building Technology; Computation; History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art; and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. 

The Department houses thirty-seven permanent faculty, of whom three are under-represented minorities and fifteen are women. Across this past year, we were joined by another twenty-three visiting faculty, lecturers, and instructors across our curriculum. Twenty researchers help staff our labs and workshops.

In 2022, we housed 172 Master’s students across our MArch and Master of Science degrees, 45 PhD students, and many hundreds of undergraduates across our courses, including 32 Architecture Majors, 15 Art and Design Majors, and 17 Minors. Our population of 280 students is a balance of 47% US, and 53% international students, representing over 45 countries.

Graduate students number 217, with 131 women and 100 men. The undergraduate students number 49, with about 35 women and 13 men, and 1 unspecified. 20% of our US-based graduate students and 11% of our US-based undergraduates identify as POC.

Graduate Student Aid
Graduate student aid is the highest fund-raising priority of the Department of Architecture. Aid is crucial to attracting the best graduate students because few outside grant opportunities exist for master's and doctoral students in this field. 

Department of Architecture Unrestricted 
This fund allows the Department of Architecture the flexibility to invest as needed to create an optimal academic experience for students and faculty. 

Lawrence B. Anderson '30 Fellowship Fund 
This fund honors our beloved former dean who himself contributed immeasurably both to architecture and education. 

Make a gift on-line
http://giving.mit.edu
 

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