Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Architecture 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 7-337 Cambridge, MA USA 02139 617 253 7791 / arch@mit.edu architecture.mit.edu
BSA
SMArchS
The senior thesis in the Bachelor of Science in Architecture program is optional and intended for students who wish to culminate their education with a challenge that demands advanced work and rewards them with portfolio material, research documents, and developed viewpoints on a topic of importance.
The Master of Science in Architecture Studies, a two-year program of advanced study beyond the first professional degree in architecture, is founded on research and inquiry into contemporary problems of architectural design and practice in the US and around the world. The program reflects the idea that architecture and its ancillary disciplines are not just professional pursuits but also fields of knowledge and inquiry. The SMArchS program at MIT is administered through six ‘areas of study’ reflecting the different disciplines taught within the Department of Architecture: Architectural Design; Architecture & Urbanism; Building Technology; Computation; History, Theory & Criticism of Architecture and Art; and the Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture. Over the years, the challenge has always been to see if the work of SMArchS students could be more than MIT’s many and varied intellectual parts. The best SMArchS work is synthetic, drawing from the many fields of high specialization that MIT offers. In addition, thesis work is often more than that, true occasions for intellectual invention and surprise beyond disciplinary boundaries. For many students, this work will define their subsequent careers, offering them, in their future challenges, a beacon and inspiration to steer by even as they break new ground in situations that we can perhaps today only dimly imagine.
MArch The Master of Architecture program culminates in a thesis project. Under the guidance of thesis advisors, students conduct independent research and architectural design over the course of two semesters. Launched through an intense and often obsessive consideration of disciplinary concerns and the consideration of architecture’s effects in the contemporary world, each thesis ultimately delimits an area of architectural thinking and practice. By the final presentation most projects strike a specific conversation between these two poles of discourse: disciplinary history on one end and the contemporary world on the other, producing a highly varied collection of inquiries, proposals, and even genres of project. The primary objective of all MIT MArch thesis projects is to refine and expand the fields of architectural discourse and practice, and to seed, or at a minimum, to test, a possible trajectory both for architecture and for a generation of young architects who with their theses projects cross over into their professional careers as architects.