IN-PERSON Prague Research & Teaching Conference

Abstract

What insights can student hand drawings provide about the history of an architecture school? At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), since its inception, students’ drawings and design projects have been preserved by the institution to serve both as didactic tools and precedent references for future generations. This practice, adapted from the Fine Arts School model, led to MIT archiving several thousand student thesis drawings in its first century. Serving as invaluable educational resources, these drawings not only document the evolution of architecture education at MIT but also showcase different forms of representation, responses to internal and external influences, evolving conceptualizations of architecture, and the school’s enduring identity. In this paper, we will examine a set of thesis drawings produced by former MIT students between 1873 and 1968, following a systematic and data-oriented approach that combines qualitative and quantitative research methods in the procedures of collection, processing, and analysis. We will compare these thesis drawings with the course catalogs of the corresponding years to understand the relationship between representation and teaching approaches. Interpreting this material will allow us to trace the evolution of architecture teaching at MIT and the different roles that drawing has played over time.