Welcome

As the new director of the graduate program in architecture at Georgia Tech, it is my pleasure to welcome you to this website and to invite you to explore the challenges and possibilities that this program sets before you. Each year ahead promises new intellectual challenges; each year promises to be a creative and productive year in which each one of us is challenged to take a dare, to stake a claim, to stretch our imaginations and to hone our skills in the perfection of our craft and vocation.

The challenges abound, both ecological and economic, crossing both political boundaries and cultures and demanding design responses that cut across the grain of traditional disciplinary limits, territories, and scales. Architectural practice itself must shift in response to these challenges by utilizing the most sophisticated and appropriate tools to develop collaborative, integrated design solutions alongside other design disciplines, constructors, engineers, artists, industry experts.

To meet these challenges, we are continually refining our courses and our curriculum, reorganizing this college to better stimulate the development of students’ intellectual, critical, and creative design skills; to foster their ability to situate decisions within an ethical framework of architectural and social practices. Curiosity, imagination, inventiveness, capacities for conceptual and critical thinking, and effective communication are key attributes required of tomorrow’s flexible practitioner.

“Flexible practitioner” is a short-hand for the creative and intellectual nimbleness that this faculty believes is essential not just in preparing you for the job that awaits you as you leave this school, but rather for the path of the careers that stretch ahead of you twenty or thirty years hence. It has been the faculty’s experience that the content and context of practice has been significantly transformed even within the trajectory or our own careers. How can we best prepare you for what awaits when we suspect that the practices you create may be significantly different from the ones you inherit?

By expanding our ambition even during a challenging period of economic contraction, we are setting a bold agenda to be at the forefront of the technological changes propelling the transformation of architectural practice and sweeping all sectors of society. We intend to seize opportunities flowing from the erosion of conventional wisdom in order to shape a new and wiser consensus—where political will joined with environmental consciousness requires a new standard of design and building performance; and where old hierarchies and divisions of professional expertise must be reformed to advance the public good.  Powerful new digital tools now available to us propel these efforts by linking the inventions of design with means of production, integrating knowledge and fostering collaboration in design. An emergent global awareness of shared fates and responsibilities finds its form in the local expressions of a reinvigorated cultural imagination. Working across boundaries and in tandem with sister disciplines in the College and Institute, with the leading professional firms of the region and nation, and in exchanges with sister schools around the world, Georgia Tech’s architecture program will prepare you to be a flexible, socially-engaged architect capable of expanding knowledge of the built environment and advancing the state-of-the-art of architectural practice.

Three years is not a long time to wait for confirmation of this promise. Why not get started right now?

George B. Johnston, Ph.D., R.A.
Director, Graduate Program in Architecture