MIT Reports to the President 2002–2003

Department of Architecture

In This Report Architectural Design Design and Computation Building Technology History, Theory, and Criticism Visual Arts Undergraduate Program Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture Department of Architecture Enrollments Highlights of the Past Year Closing Remarks

The core activity of the Department of Architecture is its professional Master of Architecture degree program. The faculty for this program consists of architects, urbanists, building technologists, historians of art and architecture, artists, and various specialists in areas of architectural research such as design and computation. This wide range of faculty expertise assures a professional program of unusual depth and breadth, the basis of our ranking as one of the world's most respected professional schools of architecture.

The department is quite unusual in several ways. As noted above, the faculty represents many disciplines. More significantly, the department creates the opportunity for each discipline to have specialized advanced degree programs. We incorporate outstanding research and teaching programs into each of the following groups: Building Technology; History, Theory and Criticism (HTC); Visual Arts; Architecture and Urbanism, Design and Computation, and the core Architectural Design Group. We have been gratified to see excellent design work by our undergraduates in recent years. Notable strengths of the department underlie all the discipline groups: devoted teaching, the grounding of architecture in both social and material issues, and the remarkable international backgrounds of faculty, students, and teaching and research staff.

The discussion below is organized by discipline group, followed by individual topics that cross discipline areas.

Architectural Design

The statement below was prepared for the accreditation of our professional architectural design degree, but also emphasizes the interconnecting roles of all discipline areas in the department.

Goals in Architectural Education

It is a commonplace that new theories and new technologies are changing our conception of what architecture can do and how architects conceive their tasks and accomplish them. The unique position of the Department of Architecture is that we survey the development of theory from a decades-old departmental commitment to viewing such developments through the long lens of the history of criticism. We also view technology within an Institute that for a half-century has profoundly shaped and investigated technology's role in society. Therefore, we are open to—indeed enthusiastic about—new technologies and theories. However, we also feel impelled to test the results of our designing against long-held social and environmental values. As we embrace new concepts of architecture, we demand of ourselves that our designs have the qualities of space, light, air, tectonic soundness, and place that allow for appropriate, even poetic, habitation.

Over the last two years, we have revised and then implemented both a new undergraduate studio sequence and an MArch curriculum that has an increased emphasis on design, greater integration of subjects from different disciplines taken in the same term, and a stronger model for the selection and development of "concentrations." Also, in the past two academic years, entering graduate students took part in a program that integrated all their subjects, with the architectural design studio at the center of this new program. The new curriculum has been successful and has now run long enough so that we can give it a critical review during academic year 2003-2004.

The critical effort of the past year was a review of our two-year postprofessional Master of Science in Architectural Studies program. We clarified its structure and gave it new administrative strength. Substantively, there were two new initiatives. In the first initiative, we merged Design Technology and Design and Computation into the latter rubric. A research degree, the SMArchS program, has built its primary strengths in the several discipline groups surrounding architecture itself. In the second initiative, we are committed to bringing students to this degree program who will pursue research through architectural design, with faculty supervision and in the space tentatively titled the Architecture Laboratory.

Special opportunities for project-generated student travel were a continuing strength of the department. As in previous years, Shun Kanda led an extended summer study trip in Japan. The fall urban design studio was again conducted in collaboration with the Cambridge-MIT Institute. Numerous studios traveled within the region but also to such sites as Valparaiso, Chile, and Seoul. Reinhard Goethert led a group of students to Santo Domingo. Thanks to the generosity of alumni, students also pursued individual research studies in the United States and abroad.

Shared Themes

A hallmark of studio education at MIT is that instructors propose to their students not merely a project but a process by which that design might be accomplished. Our faculty employ a shared set of themes as vehicles for advancing their pedagogies. Here are those themes—not imposed by departmental fiat—but observed and endorsed by all of us after mutual consultation:

Tectonic Expression. We find among ourselves a poetic and pragmatic interest in how materiality, the manner of construction, and the means of managing natural forces (gravity, climate, airflow, etc.) might be expressed.

Light and Inhabitation. We feel that attention must be paid to the capacity of light to transform and model space in ways appropriate to a range of human activities and emotions.

Building Community. We believe that respect must be accorded to the identity and social needs of inhabitants of places, both to establish private territories for them and to enhance their ability to participate in the public realm.

Cultural Heritage. We respect the value of cultural differences, and we seek strategies that preserve the legacy of artifacts and customs from the past while addressing the pressures and opportunities of the present.

Urbanism. We are acutely aware of architecture's ability to contribute spatially, symbolically, and functionally to the shared but divergent social and economic life of cities.

Engaging the Landscape. We understand the impact of buildings as material and experiential extensions of the land. We thus pay particular attention to the impact that designed environments have on natural systems and vice versa.

Sustainability. We feel a concern for the conservation of natural resources, not just in terms of the efficiency of the buildings we design and the practices our buildings foster among their inhabitants, but also in terms of larger practices like settlement and transportation.

Virtual Environments. We are fascinated by the use of digital media to study and represent physical spaces and phenomena. We recognize the opportunity such media afford to design sites, software, and protocols that may foster a sense of inhabitation and of place in cyberspace.

Program Notes

For the MArch program, this was the second year of the integrated Level I fall studio and the coordinated Level II studios. The spring MArch Level I drawing subject was taught by lecturer Hansy Luz Better and was successfully integrated with the Level I studio taught by J. Meejin Yoon. The MArch thesis stream was formalized with the initiation of the portfolio seminar taught by Yoon and Mark Jarzombek. This sequence consists of the portfolio seminar, thesis preparation, and thesis. Jan Wampler taught a Level I undergraduate studio in connection with MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative. This was the first video documentation of a studio's process to be put online. The MArch program prepared for visits by the National Architectural Accrediting Board Visiting Team and for the MIT Corporation Visiting Committee in March 2003. Ann Pendleton-Jullian, Andrew Scott, and Mark Goulthorpe presented a proposal for a SMArchS program design discipline stream that was accepted by the SMArchS committee. Course evaluations for studio were revised.

Faculty Matters

Andrew Scott and George Stiny were on leave in the fall. Scott taught in China and continued work in sustainability with the Cambridge-MIT Institute. Stiny completed work on his book, Shape. Jan Wampler and Fernando Domeyko were on leave in the spring. Wampler taught at the University of California at Berkeley as the Howard Friedman visiting professor of practice. Domeyko spent the term in Chile. Wellington Reiter announced his resignation and will assume the position of dean of the School of Architecture at Arizona State University. Larry Sass completed his first year as assistant professor of design and computation. He received an Alumni Funds Award for innovative educational initiatives. N. Michael McKinnell completed his final year of teaching with us. The search to fill a tenure-track position in design with a faculty member with a strong computation background resulted in the appointment of Mark Goulthorpe effective July 1, 2003. Goulthorpe was introduced to students and colleagues through a visiting appointment in the spring term during which he offered a design workshop. New searches for a tenure-track appointment in architecture design and in architecture and urbanism were approved.

Admissions

Students in our professional, three and one-half year MArch degree program are admitted at two levels: students (Level I) who come from undergraduate studies in other areas, and students (Level II) who come from undergraduate programs in architecture and thus receive one year of advanced standing. Admissions have been consistently strong. In 2001, we exceeded our target enrollment without going to our waiting list (37 acceptances from 70 admits with a goal of 28). In 2002, we reduced our goal (to compensate for the heavy 2001 enrollment) and our admittances. The result was 28 acceptances from 61 admits, with a goal of 26. Students applying and admitted at Level I come almost wholly from the most prestigious private colleges and universities. As usual, our principal competitor for students was Harvard, with Yale strengthening its competition in recent years. Most of the students admitted at Level II come from major public universities in the United States and abroad. Harvard is the main competitor in this segment as well. In the coming year, we will enroll 10 of the top 20 applicants across the two levels. Altogether in 2003, there were 171 applications at Level II (including 9 BSADs for early admission) and 209 applications at Level I.

Research

Ann Pendleton-Jullian worked with Mark Burry in a Level III graduate design studio to study the use of parametric modeling tools and meta-design thinking (organizing the design process through the structuring of design constraints and variables) in relationship to issues of spatial complexity and behavior within the city of Valparaiso, Chile. A series of three articles on the work is in progress. A four booklet series by Ann Pendleton-Jullian was the subject of an exhibition entitled "Facts + Fictions (w/footnotes)" in the Wolk Gallery from April to September. Meejin Yoon was selected as a 2003 winner of the Young Architects Competition sponsored by the Architectural League of New York. She exhibited her work and lectured at the Young Architects Forum in the spring. Paul Lukez's design proposal for the transformation of the Dedham Mall into an "e-mall" was selected as a finalist in an international design competition called "Dead Malls," which was sponsored by the LA Forum. William Porter continued his research with Francis Duffy on the integration of technology and the workplace. He received a Class of 1960 Innovation in Education Award for his work on the SMArchS introductory subject and for the innovative theses he has supervised. He coedited (with Gabriela Goldschmidt) a book, Design Representation, to be published by Springer-Verlag in fall 2003. William Mitchell completed a new book, Me++, which will be published by MIT Press in the fall. George Stiny completed a book, Shape, also to be published by MIT Press in the fall. Terry Knight published three research papers on foundational issues in computational synthesis in the design research journal, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design. Takehiko Nagakura completed a new film on Alvar Aalto's competition project, the Altstetten Church, and showed other films of his on unbuilt architecture in Munich and Barcelona.

Research interests of faculty in Architectural Design include: sustainability (Andrew Scott); shape grammars (George Stiny); computational synthesis and supporting digital technologies (Terry Knight); "Enterprising Places," a study of how to support spin-offs of university-industry collaborations (William Porter and others through the Cambridge-MIT Institute); digital technologies and their impacts on architecture, urban design, and urban life (William Mitchell); computational representation and modeling of architecture (Takehiko Nagakura); computational and physical environment to support collaboration among geographically distributed groups and individuals (William Porter); design in developing countries (Jan Wampler, Reinhard Goethert); urban design (Charles Correa, Michael Dennis, Julian Beinart); urban morphology (Paul Lukez); the American landscape (William Hubbard); cities and landscape, and photographic representation of landscape (Ann Spirn); materials and fabrication methods as generators of new design possibilities (Yoon); and digital fabrication (Sass). This research has been well represented in publications including books, book chapters, journal articles, and news articles.

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Design and Computation

The Design and Computation group continues to develop a unique, wide-ranging program including foundational work in computation theory, practical applications of computation in architectural design, inquiries into the design process, and the impact of digital technologies on society and space. The group sponsored a lecture series, hosted two internationally distinguished visitors and an international doctoral student, and mentored a talented group of graduate students. Plans are underway to launch a new international conference series on Design Computing and Cognition. A search is ongoing for a junior-level faculty member who focuses on applications of research to design at the frontiers of design practice. A collaborative research and educational initiative was begun with the Specialist Modeling Group of Fosters and Partners in London. A spring design workshop on generative and parametric design was co-taught by Axel Kilian, Larry Sass, and Terry Knight with input from members of the Specialist Modeling Group at Fosters. A plan to establish the area as an independent discipline area will be developed and presented to the department for approval in fall 2003.

Architectural Practice

Established practices are conducted by Julian Beinart in association with Charles Correa, Michael Dennis, and Michael McKinnell. Smaller practices include those of Fernando Domeyko, Shun Kanda, Paul Lukez, Ann Pendleton-Jullian, Wellington Reiter, Andrew Scott, and Jan Wampler.

Professional Associations

The department has established special relationships with several international firms considered among the most notable in the world and continues to explore additional opportunities. Students completed internships or workshops in 2002-2003 with Renzo Piano Workshop in Paris (Jason Hart), Behnisch & Partner in Stuttgart (Pamela Campbell), Glenn Murcutt Workshop in Australia (Jeff Taylor), Ghost Workshop in Nova Scotia (Joshua Barandon), Fosters and Partners in London (Pui Wan Pearl Tang), and Takenaka in Japan (Aaron Greene).

Institutional Associations

The department welcomed one graduate exchange student from the University of Cambridge (John Cain) and two undergraduate exchange students from the Technical University of Delft (Maria Kums and Jasper Tonk).

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Building Technology

The Building Technology (BT) group continues a strong research record and specialized graduate instruction. The group is reviewing its programs critically with the goal of enhancing teaching both at the undergraduate and professional architecture levels.

Program Notes

The group continued its research on the joint project with Cambridge University on sustainable buildings and the use of natural ventilation in commercial buildings as part of the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI). Several students are carrying out detailed monitoring of a naturally ventilated office building in the UK. This monitoring will be used to document the energy efficiency and improved comfort in such a building. The results also will be used to verify detailed design and simulation programs. The group is involved in the conceptual design of advanced laboratory facilities that should significantly improve energy efficiency. In another research program, simple sustainable design tools are being developed to aid housing designs in China. This is a joint research program involving MIT, Chalmers University, ETH, and Tsinghua University. Simple design tools for commercial buildings in the developed world are also under development in a joint MIT-Harvard program. John Ochsendorf organized the BT Lecture Series around the theme of "Historical Perspectives on Building Technology." Invited speakers included Robert Silman, a leading structural engineer, and the Harvard historian of technology Antoine Picon, among other noted historians, architects, and engineers.

Faculty Matters

Leon Glicksman was named a consultant to the board investigating the NASA shuttle accident. Leslie Keith Norford was promoted to full professor effective 1 July 2003. Andrew Scott spent his fall term sabbatical focusing on his research in sustainability and teaching in China. John Fernandez was named to the Class of 1957 Career Development Chair for a period of three years. John Ochsendorf completed the first year of his appointment and quickly made notable progress in forging relationships among engineers, architects, and humanists. A search to fill a tenure track position was opened.

Institutional Associations

As noted under research, BT is involved in a long-term program under the Cambridge-MIT Institute. Research work continues with Tsinghua University and members of the Alliance for Global Sustainability.

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History, Theory, and Criticism

The faculty and graduate students of the History, Theory, and Criticism (HTC) group continue a strong record of research, conference participation, and publication. Graduates of the advanced degree programs also continue to receive excellent teaching positions throughout the world.

Program Notes

The department graduated three PhD and two SMArchS students. There were 67 applications (45 PhD, 23 SMArchS) with 23 prospective student visits in person or via telephone. Four PhD, two HTC SMArchS, and two Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (AKPIA) SMArchS candidates accepted enrollment for fall 2003. The program conducted a formal review of PhD Guidelines to develop a manual for students and faculty and worked towards establishing protocols of faculty coordination and communication. A reassessment of undergraduate teaching by HTC faculty, especially HASS and HASS-D subjects, resulted in new offerings. The office in 10-303 was redesigned and refurbished; adjacent offices were carpeted and two were repainted. Preparation began for an international conference entitled "Architecture–History–Pedagogy" to be held at MIT in fall 2003 and for a companion publication, a special edition of Thresholds, to honor Henry A. Millon. Work continued in expanding the art history slide collection of the Rotch Visual Library, especially in pre-20th century time periods.

Program Activities

The HTC Forum lecture series hosted Andrew McClellan, Walid Ra'ad, Reinhold Martin, Mario Carpo, and Svetlana Boym in fall 2002 and Simon Leung, Frederick J. Schwartz, and Martin Jay in spring 2003. Arindam Dutta organized a fall film series, "Negative Spaces," and a spring film series, "Documentaries," that engaged students from across the department. HTC cosponsored a graduate symposium with the History of Art and Architecture Department, Harvard University, entitled "Local Modernities: Islamic Cultural Practices as Sites of Agency, Mediation and Change" in October 2002.

Faculty Matters

Nasser Rabbat and Arindam Dutta were on leave in the spring term. Erika Naginski was named to the Alfred Henry and Jean Morrison Hayes Career Development Chair for a period of three years effective 1 July 2003. Visiting faculty were Helene Lipstadt (year); Mario Carpo and Alice Friedman (fall); Gulsum Baydar, Gail Fenske, John McMorrough, and Henry A. Millon (spring).

Research and Publication

Stanford Anderson's book Peter Behrens: 1868-1940 was released in an Italian edition with additional images. Anderson edited The Belluschi Lectures: Renzo Piano and organized completion of Eladio Dieste: Innovation in Structural Art, to be published by Princeton Architectural Press. Dutta, who received a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in Art History in the Humanities, will be on leave in 2003-2004. David Friedman received grants from the Delmas Foundation, Graham Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities, to support his leave in 2003-2004. Mark Jarzombek received a 2003 Graham Award and a Wiley Press Travel Grant to support completion of Global Architecture. Naginski received a Radcliffe Institute Research Fellowship for 2003-2004. Jarzombek, Caroline Jones, and Rabbat contributed to Thresholds. All faculty were active at conferences in their fields, lectured widely, and were well represented in numerous publications.

Research interests of the faculty include architecture and urbanism of modern Europe and America (Anderson and Jarzombek), and of Europe and its colonial enterprises (Dutta); modern European art (Naginski); art/architectural theory and epistemology (Anderson, Jarzombek, Naginski); urbanism in premodern Europe, and late medieval and Renaissance architecture (Friedman); medieval and modern Islamic architecture and urbanism (Rabbat); preservation, premodern Islamic cities, gender, and architecture (Watenpaugh); and historiography of art and architecture (all).

Student Financial Aid

During recent years, HTC had fallen far behind its traditional competitors (Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, and Cornell especially) in providing financial aid to doctoral students. However, in the past two years, thanks to the collaboration of the provost and dean, our financial aid offers have become competitive. With this support, HTC PhD admissions are once again successful. Doctoral students entering their nonresident research stage continue to win prestigious external research grants. The employment record of our graduates also remains impressive, with recent appointments at Columbia, Harvard, Illinois Institute of Technology, Princeton, and Yale.

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Visual Arts

The Visual Arts Program (VAP), despite numerous changes in faculty leadership due to leaves, continued to develop its unique program addressing the relation of artistic practice to new media, performance, architecture, urbanism, and related questions of sociopolitical content. New academic and administrative stability are now sought through a continuing search for a professor and director of VAP. VAP supports the undergraduate education curriculum of the Institute and also conducts a small graduate program.

Faculty Matters

Dennis Adams, on leave in 2002-2003, announced his resignation and will remain in New York at Cooper Union. Professor Krzysztof Wodiczko served as acting director in the fall 2002 term. Joan Jonas served in that role in the spring 2003 term. Wendy Jacob was on parental leave in the fall term. Reiner Leist continued his excellent work with students of photography, as did Joe Gibbons in video. Sanjit Sethi, a graduate of the program, returned as lecturer to teach introductory and sculpture subjects. Julia Scher, on leave for a second year in 2002-2003, resigned from her position as lecturer. Visitors were Judith Barry and Elaine Sturtevant. Reiner Leist resigned at the end of the academic year to take a position at Hunter College, New York.

Faculty Activities

While on leave, Adams taught at Cooper Union, and Wodiczko worked in France on the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery. Jonas choreographed and performed "Celestial Excursions" by Robert Ashley's opera in Berlin and New York. She is included in a forthcoming survey at Queens Museum of Art and several group shows and performed "Line in the Sand" in Los Angeles and Mexico City. Jacob's work was shown at White Box, New York; Smart Museum, Chicago; Betty Rymer Gallery at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and Hyde Park Arts Center, Chicago; upcoming work will be shown at Graz, Austria. Gibbons' work was named in the "Top Ten Films of 2002" by Film Comment magazine, and he received an LEF Production Grant. He had solo screenings in Berkeley, San Antonio, Boston, and Toronto and participated in group shows at the 31^st International Film Festival in Rotterdam, Images Festival in Toronto, and Pompidou Center in Paris. Leist's "American Portraits" were exhibited in several venues in Germany, and his public art project, "Green Library," was exhibited in Tokyo. He was awarded a Yaddo Residency and City of Ingolstadt (Germany) Art Prize. Sethi received a Fulbright Fellowship for a project in India. Barry's work appeared in Germany, Spain, Belgium, Cairo, Austria, and in San Diego and Boston.

Program Activities

VAP sponsored lectures and workshops in program areas: public art (Andrea Fraser, George Baker, Diane Shamash, Julie Ault); photography (Keith Sanborn, Margaret Livingstone, James Young, Sue Davidson Lowe, Anne Cahill); performance (Liz Phillips); video (Bill Daniels, Venessa Renwick, Louise Bourque, Keith Sanborn, Su Friedrick); and in the Architecture Lecture Series (Tony Oursler). Selected undergraduate students were included in the Boston University Photographic Research Center Annual Student Exhibition. Students participated with Jonas in her "Lines in the Sand" performance at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum as an extension of her performance subject. Graduate students received significant recognitions: Jennifer Allora (group exhibition at Tate Modern, London, and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; solo exhibition, Americas Society Art Gallery, New York); Sung wan Kim (screenings of "A-DA-DA" at San Francisco Asian American International Film Festival, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Total Museum in Seoul; recipient of New Artist Grant from Korean Culture and Arts Foundation); Lukasz Lysakowski (Best Image Award at Transmediale3 Festival, Berlin; screening of "blue" at Prague Biennale and European Art Festival in Osnabruck). In May 2003, the program held a SMVisS thesis show and review with open studios and distinguished guest reviewers.

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Undergraduate Program

Leslie Norford, undergraduate officer, and Renée Caso, administrator for academic programs, continued to support and strengthen the undergraduate experience. They were assisted by faculty who served as undergraduate advisors in 2002-2003: Arindam Dutta, John Fernandez, Leon Glicksman, Bill Hubbard, Wendy Jacob, Terry Knight, Paul Lukez, Erika Naginski, Leslie Norford, William Porter, Anne Spirn, George Stiny, and Jan Wampler. Also essential to undergraduate advising this year was Heghnar Watenpaugh as HASS concentration and minor advisor for the history of art and architecture. Joan Jonas served in a similar role as HASS concentration advisor for visual arts. Undergraduates are increasingly visible in the department, to the benefit of all; and they send representatives to the Architecture Student Council. The Senior Dinner is now an established tradition that brings faculty and students together to celebrate the conclusion of a successful major program.

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Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture

The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (AKPIA) at MIT is recognized today as a leading program in the study of architecture and urbanism in the Islamic world. To date, the program has 107 graduates—13 PhDs and 94 SMArchSs (Master of Science in Architectural Studies)—in addition to 18 PhD graduates of Harvard. Of these, 32 are teaching in leading universities in various parts of the Islamic world and in the West, four are curators in major museums, while most of the others are either self-employed as designers or employed in architectural and construction firms. To maintain its status and to adapt to recent changes, AKPIA has directed its teaching and research activities towards these goals: to enhance the understanding of Islamic architecture and urbanism in light of critical, theoretical, and developmental issues; to support research at the front edge of the field in areas of history, theory, and criticism of design, architecture, and urbanism; and to provide an extensive basis of information about architecture in the Islamic world and to share it with scholars, teachers, and practitioners from around the world. The program currently consists of two professors, one librarian, one visual material archivist, one administrative assistant, and a small number of graduate students (five PhD and four SMArchS students).

Program Activities

The program offers travel grants to students on a competitive basis. Sarah Rogers and Leonardo Diaz-Borioli were recipients for travel in summer 2002. The program sponsored "An Evening With" lecture series with distinguished guest speakers; presentations by AKPIA travel grant recipients; and a lecture by postdoctoral fellow Samer Akkach.

Faculty Activities

Nasser Rabbat was on leave in the spring term. He published Thaqafat al Bina' wa Bina' al-Thaqafa (The Culture of Building and Building Culture), a book of essays on architecture in Arabic, and additional essays in both Arabic and English. Two books are in preparation, one an edited book of essays on the courtyard house and the other on the 15th-century historian al-Maqrizi. Heghnar Watenpaugh presented a paper at conferences in Berkeley and Florence, moderated a panel on urban history at Harvard Design School, and attended additional conferences.

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Department of Architecture Enrollments

Course 4 counted a total of 276 students: 68 undergraduates (including 2 in Course 4-B), 93 MArch, 53 SMArchS/SM without specification, 1 SMBT, 5 SMVisS, 43 resident PhD, 12 nonresident PhD, and 2 special (nondegree) students. There were 3 exchange students.

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Highlights of the Past Year

Lectures

The Architecture Lecture Series, organized by Stanford Anderson, included in fall 2002, Hilary Ballon, Jürg Conzett, John Habraken, Hong-Bin Kang, Hinrich Lehmann-Grube, and Markku Komonen; and in spring 2003, Kathryn Gustafson, Terence Riley, Lawrence Speck, James Young, Stan Allen, and Tony Oursler. Rafael Viñoly presented the Sixteenth Arthur H. Schein Memorial Lecture. Leslie Robertson gave the Sixth Felix Candela Lecture. Kazuyo Sejima presented the Tenth Pietro Belluschi Lecture. The Building Technology, Visual Arts, Aga Khan Program, and History, Theory, and Criticism, and Design and Computation programs also sponsored discipline-based lecture series that were open to the public.

Publications

Thresholds, published twice a year as a journal edited and produced by students, is noted for developing diverse architectural themes in each issue. It now has national recognition, and its contents are systematically catalogued. PinUp, also wholly edited by students, served as an internal newsletter. FOUNDATIONS, edited by Anne Simunovic, assistant to the head, is a monthly electronic newsletter sent to approximately 2,400 undergraduate and graduate alumni whose email addresses are registered with the Alumni Association. The newsletter contains brief items about the department as well as news and opportunities for alumni. Course 4, edited by J. Meejin Yoon, is a handsome publication that documents specifically studio work from 2001-2002 but more largely represents the design curriculum. Its audience includes internal and external review boards, admitted students, alumni, and other friends of the department. 49 Projects at MIT: Thesis Works 2001-2002, edited by Nancy Jones and Luke Yeung, is a published survey of MArch thesis work and also includes selected thesis work from the more-research oriented SMArchS program.

Visitors and Lecturers

The department invited visitors and lecturers to contribute their special expertise to the curriculum. Visitors included Edith Ackermann, Mark Burry, Carol Burns, Paul Donnelly, Francis Duffy, John Gero, Mark Goulthorpe, Brian Healy, Hasan-Uddin Khan, Alan Joslin, Mary Lou Maher, Valeria Mazarakis, Hubert Murray, and Kyu Sung Woo in Architectural Design; Edward Allen in Building Technology; Gulsum Baydar, Mario Carpo, Gail Fenske, Alice Friedman, Helene Lipstadt, and Henry Millon in History, Theory, and Criticism; Judith Barry and Elaine Sturtevant in Visual Arts. Appointed as lecturers were Hansy Luz Better, Daniel Greenwood, Stephen Lacker, and Haldane Liew in Architectural Design; Daniel Arons, Carl Rosenberg, and Barry Webb in Building Technology; John McMorrough in History, Theory, and Criticism; and Reiner Leist, Joe Gibbons, and Sanjit Sethi in Visual Arts.

Architecture Student Council

Students elected representatives to the Architecture Student Council (ASC) from each level and discipline. Student representatives served on a number of department committees including admissions and search committees, Department Council, and MArch Curriculum committee, and attended studio faculty meetings as the agenda pertained. The ASC contributed agenda items to general departmental meetings. In 2002-2003, Robert Morgan served as ASC president. Elected student members were: Kwan Chan, Javier Arbona, Eleanor Fawcett, Soohyun Chang, Axel Kilian, Lisa Mroszczyk, Kenneth Namkung, Christine Walker, and Lucy Wong. The ASC has become a strong contributor to the well-being of the department. Their work in preparation for the two visiting committees was especially notable.

Student Awards and Fellowships

The following students received awards in the academic year 2002-2003:

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Closing Remarks

Ann Pendleton-Jullian completed her first year as both associate head of the department and director of the core MArch program. She excelled in these roles, which was evident to all and generously noted by the MIT Corporation Visiting Committee in February 2003.

Also in February, the department received its periodic review by the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB). The Corporation Visiting Committee came one week after the NAAB visit. The large, representative, and informed Corporation Committee (approximately 20 leaders in business, architecture, and academia) contrasted sharply with the small and narrowly constrained NAAB team (two architects, one educator, and one student, plus two observers). The difference was also evident in the contrast from a generous assessment of the department to a dubious one.

Despite the NAAB review, we are convinced of the excellence of the department, not least in our admiration of the 10 tenure-track faculty appointed in the last four years. This group will soon be joined by another fine appointment in Building Technology and hopefully by still others in four current searches.

I would also like to note the outstanding quality and devotion of our staff. I know this directly and most well with the headquarters staff, but it extends throughout the department.

Stanford Anderson
Department Head
Professor of History and Architecture

More information about the Department of Architecture can be found on the web at http://architecture.mit.edu/.

 

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