MArch program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT
As the first program of its kind in the United States, the professional degree program at MIT also has a particular responsibility to the future. Defined by the intersection of design and research, our professional program serves as a laboratory for all the innovation and scholarship within the department — while also serving as a laboratory for the future of architectural education itself.
In this laboratory, our students are leaders. The small size of MIT’s MArch program, with 25 students in each class, allows for unique trajectories through MIT, into the profession of architecture and beyond. The program’s size also ensures that our experiments together are conducted in an atmosphere of engaged debate—with ourselves, with guests, and with the larger communities which we serve. As well as within the classroom, this culture extends through public lectures and programs within the department, the School of Architecture and Planning and all of MIT, with students curating the most agile platforms for dialogue.
Though it feeds on everything that surrounds it, the MArch laboratory derives its energy from its key testing ground: the studio. Studio is a key site of iterative, embodied, design learning, where cultural meaning animates methods and materials with urgency. MIT’s MArch studio sequence is both surrounded by and infused with deep disciplinary and interdisciplinary thinking, sometimes in support of, and other times deliberately at odds with, studio concerns. It comprises three distinct units: (3) Core Studios, (3) Research Studios and a Thesis Project.