IIT - Inventing the Future

Dear Students Admitted to the College of Architecture:

The studio faculty and our students in the College are finishing a productive year of building projects for the foundation and advanced studios. With constant attention to sustainable solutions, our students have designed complex buildings for sites in Chicago (competition for urban elementary school, high rise hotel), Seattle (boating center), Grand Portage, Minnesota (border crossing station), the Badlands (visitor center), Germany (rural chapel if the Oldendwald, housing in Berlin), among other places.

Travel and study abroad is key to our educational mission. This spring, Professor Frank Flury (below) and his Oldenwald rural chapel studio students visited the Bruder Klaus Field Chapel designed by 2009 Pritzker-Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor.

The Bauhaus legacy, where artistic and architectural ideas are established with unlimited explorations of materials and structural concepts, allow first-year students (below) to examine notions of space, scale, the effects of light, and site in Crown Hall.

Each year at our annual Open House (Friday, May 15, 2009), drawings and models are exhibited. Architects and professionals from Chicago join faculty and students to mark the end of the academic year. In addition, our best students are awarded generous travel and tuition scholarships in our Spring Awards ceremony.

As you are readying your decision about where to study architecture, you will also want to consider the meaning — its value and lasting quality — of your professional, NAAB-accredited B.Arch. degree from the College of Architecture at IIT. Upon the completion of their studies, our students are highly sought after by architectural offices. After all, our B.Arch. program is ranked 12th in the United States (Design Intelligence).

What do architects have to say about our students? At our Spring 2009 Career Day, practitioners described our students as "prepared to work in design firms due to their attention to detail and understanding of building constructability... I was thoroughly impressed with the caliber of IIT architecture students and their work."

Upon graduation, our students are immersed in a network of professional architects and planners who work with our teaching architects. And their work after IIT is rewarding. In a recent Chicago Tribune article (March 8, 2009), one of the College's studio faculty, Andrew Metter of Epstein, was highlighted for his design of the new Serta headquarters outside Chicago. The project architect with Andrew Metter is IIT B.Arch. alumnus Daesun Park.

And architect-educator Metter described why his globally recognized firm seeks IIT College of Architecture students.

"Our firm has consistently relied upon IIT to provide the most diversified, well-trained, and qualified graduates that the architectural educational system has to offer — on a national as well as international level.

"At IIT, the depth of faculty experience, the College's influential architectural heritage, and stimulating mix of interdisciplinary courses, have combined to produced highly respected, thoughtful and marketable young men and women ready for the profession."



We look forward to your arrival at Crown Hall and the IIT campus. As you ready your decision about where to study architecture, please feel free to contact Assistant Dean Stephen Sennott in the College of Architecture (sennott@iit.edu and 312.567.8835) if you have questions about the program.

The Office of Admissions will work carefully with admitted students and families with questions about financial aid. Please contact us if we can help you make a well-informed decision about your college choice.