Director: Reinhold Martin, Architecture
Director: Lance Freeman, Urban Planning

Ph.D. research plays an increasingly important role in the evolution of all the fields devoted to the built environment -- challenging traditional assumptions by raising new questions or carefully rethinking old ones.

It is only by developing new forms of research that a school like GSAPP can play its international leadership role in guiding the profession towards new potentialities and responsibilities. The professional obligations of the school are not at odds with its academic obligations as part of a great research university. On the contrary. To provide the highest level of professional expertise in each of its disciplinary specialties, the school has to continually challenge, redefine and refine those specialties. Academic research, particularly that done at the doctoral level, plays a major role in this ongoing redefinition.

Far from being compromised in the attainment of the highest levels of scholarship because associated with a professional program, the doctoral programs are called on to use those highest levels to lead the profession in new or more precise directions. The doctoral programs enrich the school with sharp and creative minds. The young scholars are a remarkable force, playing a key role while moving endlessly backwards and forwards between the silent spaces of the library, the archives or the private study and the noisy spaces of the seminar and lecture rooms, design juries, or the coffee bar -- taking the lessons of professional discourse into their laboratory and bringing the lessons of their academic research out.

After a few intense years of core training in scholarship and teaching, doctoral students dedicate themselves to an obsessively rigorous investigation of a key question. In so doing, they open the discipline to a different future.