History of the Program
The architectural studies program in the Department of History of Art and Architecture has evolved over a period of nearly thirty years. It started as an emphasis within Art History but now constitutes a separate track within our department. It has become perhaps the premiere liberal arts college program in pre-architecture in the country. It generates ever-increasing interest among incoming first-years at the Academic Forums, receives numerous inquiries from prospective applicants, and attracts transfer students. As of last May it accounted for roughly half of the 81 majors in HAA. Each year, perhaps half a dozen of our graduating seniors go into professional study at top graduate programs in architecture, landscape architecture, preservation, and planning, here in the US and abroad (including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Berkeley, the Universities of Washington and Oregon, the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, and the AA in London). Last spring a student interested in preservation applied to six schools, was accepted to all of them, and given major grants to two. A landscape student was accepted to six of the seven programs to which she applied.
The Architectural Studies Program
Academics: The architectural studies program at Middlebury has been conceived to require a minimum of major-specific courses, rather drawing upon a cross section of curricular offerings in the liberal arts spirit that is preferred by the country's major professional graduate schools. Its goal is to offer the students enough of an exposure to the field that they can determine whether they wish to pursue it professionally and to help them develop the skills and credentials necessary for admission to graduate school. For those who decide this is not something they wish to build upon after Middlebury, it still provides a fine way to acquire a liberal arts education in a synthetic manner. It combines study in the history of art and architecture (to develop critical awareness and skills) with straight art studio work, calculus, physics, and elective work in a range of fields -- environmental studies, geography, economics, sociology, etc. -- supplemented with winter-term internships. We encourage joint study in areas like theater design and environmental studies.
Departmental offerings specific to the program involve a sequence of design studios:
Introductory Studio
Intermediate studio
Senior Methodology Seminar
Senior Thesis Studio
Electives in architectural history and related topics are selected from the art history curriculum. Specifically architectural courses include:
Art of the City
Modern Architecture
American Design
Modernism & Postmodernism seminar
The Classical Tradition in Western Architecture
Italian Renaissance Architecture
Middlebury as Microcosm
A History of Architectural Structure
Study Abroad: Architectural studies students are encouraged to study abroad during their junior year (and to prepare for that study by acquiring appropriate languages). We have identified excellent and suitable programs in Copenhagen (DIS), Florence (Syracuse University Program), Paris (under Columbia University's New York-Paris program), and Edinburgh (University of Edinburgh), that supplement our offerings and that broaden our students' horizons and deepen their study of architecture.
Extra-Curricular Aspects. To complement these academic offerings we present a broad array of extracurricular activities and opportunities. Prominent among these is professional advising through our annual "Alumni in the Arts" symposium. During our senior trip to New York we visit buildings and meet their architects at their offices. We also organize a yearly Auto-CAD workshop for our students (important to obtain internships), guest critics for design juries (local professionals and faculty imported from Williams College and Norwich University in exchange for doing jury stints for them), lectures (e.g. Art Gensler, Todd Williams and Billie Tsien), and a weekly student-run architectural table with pre-assigned topics and the occasional visitor.