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Editor’s Note: This listing was updated on October 26, 2022

Overview

MIT’s School of Architecture + Planning consistently lands at the top of international rankings, undoubtedly for what the school itself has characterized as the “physical and intellectual innovations,” including “scientific frameworks and inventions, social and humanistic insights, and new methods of thinking and making” that it has generated throughout its storied history. Its students and faculty across departments and specialized research groups continue to innovate at warp speed, with recent projects including a shelter designed to house all species in the Nevada desert, self-assembling space architecture and the mapping of Brazil’s favela networks with 3D scans.

Legendary for its cross-disciplinary and collaborative approach, the School boasts five divisions, including the Department of Architecture; the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the Media Lab (and its Program in Media Arts and Sciences). It offers a number of degrees at both graduate and post-graduate levels as well as dual degrees.

Work by MIT student Inge Donovan

In the Department of Architecture, five discipline groups are represented: Architecture + Urbanism; Building Technology; Computation; History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art; and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. The department sees the architect as a collaborator, rather than sole visionary, in shaping the physical environment; it boasts a faculty of active practitioners engaged in everything from research into computation and design to the creation of housing developments and full-scale city planning. Architecture + Urbanism, for its part, defines its trio of pedagogical foci as urban cultural change, historical processes of urbanization and contemporary urban design.

In 2022, the School announced the creation of the Morningside Academy of Design, to be housed in the Metropolitan Warehouse. Renovated with new research labs, design studios, lecture halls and collaborative classrooms as well as makerspaces and areas for engaging with both community and industry, this campus building seeks to deepen “the integration of design across MIT and beyond.”

Notable alumni

Charles Correa, Nader Tehrani, Ahmed ElHusseiny, John Maeda, Sarah Whiting

Notable faculty

Dean Hashim Sarkis, Sheila Kennedy, Takehiko Nagakura, Azra Aksamija, Yolande Daniels, Rosalyne Shieh (Shaum/Shieh)

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