By Lisa Kaczke
As construction continues to double the program’s studio space in the basement of the Ruggles MBTA station, the architecture department is also getting a new name: the School of Architecture.
The change has already been approved by the Provost’s Office and the Faculty Senate, said George Thrush, chair of the architecture department. The change will be made official if it is approved by the Board of Trustees, said Bruce Ronkin, associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences.
“Our hope is that come fall, it’ll be the School of Architecture,” Ronkin said.
Becoming a school will articulate that architecture is a professional program at Northeastern and will give it a chance to compete with other universities, such as Syracuse University, Cornell University, Pennsylvania State University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Thrush said.
Currently, the College of Arts and Sciences has two schools, the School of Education and the School of Journalism. The School of Architecture will join them as a subset of the College of Arts and Sciences.
Amanda Bergin, president of the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) at Northeastern, said she has noticed a period of growth in the department over the past years. When Bergin, a junior architecture major, came to Northeastern as a freshman, the architecture department was just becoming an accredited program. Without the accreditation from the National Architectural Accreditation Board (NAAB), students could earn their bachelor’s degree in architecture, but would have to go elsewhere for their master’s degree, Bergin said.
After the architecture department received its accreditation from NAAB, Northeastern students could start earning their master’s degree in architecture at Northeastern, without having to receive further education to qualify to become a licensed architect.
The changes being made in the architecture department, including its status as a school, will help it when it is visited by NAAB next year, which visits every three years, Thrush said. If Northeastern does well in it’s next visit, NAAB will cut back its visits to every six years. If an architecture program rates poorly when it is visited, it loses its accreditation, Thrush said.
Matt Pitzer, a senior architecture major who is also vice president of AIAS, is enthusiastic about the renovations being made to the architecture studio in Ruggles station.
Pitzer said the additional space in the studio is needed because the students need their own individual desks to work at.
Previously, there were only 86 seats for nearly 300 students in the program, Thrush said. By the time renovations are completed in January 2006, there will be 280 seats for up to 350 students in the program. During the renovations, a temporary studio has been set up on the second floor of Dockser Hall, Ronkin said.
During the last two weeks of each semester, architecture students can be seen frantically working away in the studio space in Ruggles station.
“If you walk past there, people are in there at six in the morning, three in the morning,” said Pitzer.
Besides added desk space, a student lounge is something the students would like to see in the renovated space, Pitzer said.
“We’re there for two weeks straight,” he said, adding students would like a place to relax while at work.
Thrush said in addition to these changes, the architecture department is hoping to add two more professors to the department, which currently has six full-time faculty members. The architecture department is still waiting to hear from the provost about how many faculty members they will be able to hire, Thrush said.
Despite the changes, Pitzer said the architecture department is still underfunded. He would like to see more money for the department to purchase more of the equipment that the students need.
“It’s still far from where I feel it needs to be,” Pitzer said.
