Visual Narratives of Change: Examining Students’ Drawings and Teaching Transformations at MIT

Since its inception, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA) has preserved student drawings and design projects as educational tools and reference materials. This practice, modeled after the Fine Arts School tradition, led to the archiving of thousands of student thesis drawings during MIT’s first century. These drawings provide valuable data for documenting the development of architectural education at MIT, illustrating shifts in representation techniques, responses to various influences, and changing architectural conceptualizations. In this study, we examine a collection of thesis drawings produced between 1873 and 1968 using a systematic, data-driven approach that incorporates both qualitative and quantitative methods for collection, processing, and analysis. By comparing these drawings with course catalogs from the corresponding years, we aim to investigate the relationship between drawing practices and teaching methodologies, contributing to a better understanding of the evolution of architectural education at MIT and the role of drawing in that process.