On April 16, roughly 20 architecture concentrators walked into List Art Building for a meeting expecting pizza and exciting announcements. Instead, they were served some bad news: the department will no longer house the architecture concentration starting in fall 2028.
Current and prospective concentrators — including students that just matriculated this fall — will still be able to declare and complete their architecture concentrations as usual, HIAA Chair Itohan Osayimwese told The Herald. But students matriculating after this fall will no longer be able to declare the concentration.
Unless the concentration is made into its own department or picked up by another before then, it will no longer be offered at Brown.
The history of the concentration
Before 2016, HIAA was home to one undergraduate concentration: the history of art and architecture. According to the department’s website, the concentration “trains students in the techniques of close-looking, visual description and interpretation and critical analysis that are necessary to locate the work of art in history.”
But there were always students who “showed a strong inclination towards wanting to study architecture,” Osayimwese told The Herald. At that time, HIAA offered an architectural studies track that incorporated more design coursework than the concentration itself.
HIAA has also long offered HIAA 0100: “Introduction to Architectural Studio Design” to expose students to the basics of the discipline. But for students wanting more than just one course, the department often directed them to the neighboring Rhode Island School of Design’s Department of Architecture, which offers more in-depth studio courses accessible to Brown students, depending on seat availability.
In early 2016, to meet the increased demand for design coursework, HIAA established architecture as a new interdisciplinary concentration that would be available for students to declare starting that academic year, The Herald previously reported. The concentration, though, would be offered as a bachelor of arts degree, requiring prospective architects to pursue a masters or doctorate in architecture post-graduation.
Originally, making the concentration possible relied upon a formalized arrangement with RISD’s Department of Architecture, where Brown concentrators would take a number of their studio courses at RISD. But this arrangement was short-lived, as RISD struggled to accommodate so many students in studio classes, Osayimwese explained.
With University approval, HIAA hired part-time studio professors and established its own series of design courses in 2020, making the new concentration fully self-sufficient. The department also stopped offering the architectural studies track to focus on the new concentration, according to a timeline Osayimwese shared with The Herald.
“Our intention was to offer this program to see if it was something we could support and if it was going to work,” she added. “I think we did a great deal of work in order to try and meet that goal for ourselves and for our students.”
Increased growth and pre-professional pressures
Over the past eight years, the architecture concentration has grown in popularity. According to the concentration’s website, the graduating class of architecture concentrators has nearly doubled — from 12 to 21 — in the past four years alone. Now, Osayimwese speculates that architecture concentrators make up nearly half of the total number of HIAA concentrators.
Many concentrators, like Lainey Bechta ’25, stumbled upon architecture at Brown — Bechta came in as an engineering concentrator. “But I realized I liked the design aspects and statics and hated everything else, so I switched to architecture my sophomore year,” she said.
Others, like Harrison Douglass ’26, one of the architecture Departmental Undergraduate Group leaders, intended to pursue architecture from the start. “I thought architecture was really interesting, and I knew I had an interest in art history,” Douglass said. “I liked that the (architecture concentration) is pretty interdisciplinary, so you have to take art history classes, but you also take studio courses.”
But as the years passed, Osayimwese noticed that the students’ pre-professional desires — often to apply to graduate school to become a licensed architect — and the department’s initial vision were growing further apart.
“We found over the last eight years, really, that what students were more interested in was a more conventional approach to studying architectural design,” she said, leading the department to ask: “Are we the best people to meet these expectations? Is this our role?”
Since 2016, HIAA has tried to accommodate the needs of concentrators by adapting the curriculum, changing concentration requirements, increasing advising for students and hiring studio faculty to bring the concentration closer to what students desire, Osayimwese added. But still, the concentration wasn’t perfect.
Many concentrators faced difficulties getting into HIAA 0100 — which is a prerequisite for the more advanced studios and required for the concentration but only offers a maximum of 15 seats per section.
“It’s an introduction class, so (it makes sense) that people outside of the concentration can have a chance to dip their toes in and see if they like it,” said Anahis Luna ’25, one of the architecture DUG leaders. “But the fact that it was limited to 15 people made it incredibly hard to break in.”
To accommodate this growth in popularity, HIAA opened a new designated architectural studio space in 2022 and began offering two sections of HIAA 0100 last spring.
But despite some challenges, professor of the practice in architecture Marthe Rowen believes the concentration has successfully prepared students for a future in architecture. “The proof of that is that our students are getting into architecture schools, and our best students are getting into the best architecture schools,” she said.
Bechta, meanwhile, believes that the program “is setting you up for graduate school, but not for success.”
According to Bechta, most graduate programs require applicants to have taken physics and calculus courses — neither of which are requirements in the concentration at Brown.
“I’m going to have an advantage over those who have done no architecture work going into graduate school,” they added. “But if I really wanted to be serious about architecture . . . I would have gone somewhere else. (I’ll be successful) relative to peers who have had no experience, but to anyone else in the architecture field, A.B.s are kind of a joke.”
Osayimwese noted that offering a bachelors of science or a more advanced degree in architecture had never been discussed. “Historians don’t offer Sc.B.s.,” she said.
Architecture is a resource-intensive field, Osayimwese said. “And to put it simply, the resources were not made available for us to offer a full program in architecture,” she added. “We didn’t ask for them, because that’s not what we had envisioned in the first place.”
‘Uncoupling’ the concentration
In response to these challenges and the widening gap between the department’s and students’ visions, HIAA was faced with some tough decisions about the future of the concentration over the last academic year, Osayimwese said.
In September, the department formed an ad hoc committee devoted to proposing solutions to this issue. And throughout the fall semester, HIAA senior faculty conducted teaching observations in studio courses, which confirmed “concerns expressed by students and identified in previous reviews of the concentration,” according to a timeline provided by Osayimwese.
According to her, the department largely incorporated student feedback through course evaluations and confidential student meetings with their faculty advisors. But there was no formal opportunity for students to share their thoughts on the future of the concentration until April, when the decision had already been made.
With the ad hoc committee’s findings and advice from curricular deans, HIAA faculty ultimately decided to “uncouple” the concentration from the department during a November vote.
In April, the College Curriculum Council — the governing body of undergraduate curriculums and concentrations at Brown — voted to phase out the architecture concentration from HIAA, following a proposal submitted by HIAA. And on the 16th of that month, Osayimwese announced the decision to the concentrators.
Luna, Douglass and Bechta all attended that meeting in April. “I showed up like 20 minutes late because I had been in another meeting, and I saw that the room was dead silent,” Luna said. “It just seemed very hostile.”
“So we get there, and we have the pizza,” Bechta said. “And they’re like, ‘So we will be decoupling’ … And they kept saying the word ‘decoupling,’ but … we’ve been using the term ‘dropped,’ because it’s not decoupling if you’re leaving us and not providing us any support or anywhere else to go,” Bechta added. “That is leaving us on the side of the road.”
Douglass added that “there was a slight sentiment of, ‘Damn, they abandoned us.’ But at the same time, everyone knows that this is a good move because it’s just fair to the students and fair to the teaching faculty.”
Luna agreed, noting that the decision makes sense in retrospect. “I was maybe a little oblivious, but I think everyone else was kind of queued on at some earlier point or kind of knew that something was up.”
What comes next?
All courses required for the concentration will continue to be offered until the last architecture concentrator graduates. But starting next year, no new concentrators will be accepted.
Osayimwese emphasized that there will be no changes to the concentration over the next four years. “We fully embrace our obligation, and we’re committed to serving the students who are at Brown right now” and incoming students, she said. HIAA will also continue to support architecture alumni, specifically to those hoping to attend graduate school.
At the meeting, HIAA emphasized that it is possible for another department to pick up the concentration, or for the concentration to become its own department or school. But “the department, as a unit, is not currently involved in any conversations to create a new program,” Osayimwese said.
Douglass believes it’s possible for the concentration to be picked up by another department.The future of the concentration, he added, “is in someone else’s hands, but not sure whose hands just yet.”
Osayimwese emphasized that, in the meantime, HIAA hopes to refocus its attention on “what we’ve done really well for a long time, which is teach courses on the history of art and architecture, some of them including components of (design and making).”
“I’m still thinking about going to graduate school, but it’s sad to tell people about your time at Brown and be like, ‘Yeah, I concentrated in architecture, but it’s no longer offered,’” Luna added.
Julianna Chang is a University News Editor who oversees the academics and advising and student government beats. A junior from the Bay Area, Julianna is studying Biology and Political Science on the pre-medical track. When she's not in class or in the office, she can be found eating some type of noodle soup and devouring bad books.
