One of the first architecture schools in America, the School was established in 1881 by William R. Ware within the School of Mines (the precursor of the School of Engineering). A former apprentice of Richard Morris Hunt (the first American to attend the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris), Ware had started the nation’s first school of architecture at M.I.T in 1865 and approached architectural education from a humanistic point of view. His appointment capped a distinguished career as a practicing architect, scholar, and teacher. It established the founding principles, followed since then at Columbia, of a professional program guided by practicing architects and informed by the highest levels of humanistic learning and scholarship integrated within a research University.
Ware saw the school as the synthesis of all the professional lessons he had learned in Hunt’s studio and the scholarship born from deep research in the University, with both the professional and academic sides nurtured by the remarkable research library of drawings, books, lantern slides, casts, and material samples he built, a collection that would soon grow into the world’s leading physical and digital architectural collection, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library. The crucial role of international travel in the Columbia program was already initiated in 1889 when Charles McKim established the first travelling fellowship.
The legacy of the founding principles, a program guided by leading professionals and researchers engaged with the crucial issues of our time across all scales of the built environment, continues today in under the deanship of Andrés Jaque in the context of the 21st Century architectural education. Dean Jaque became dean in 2022. Under his leadership, GSAPP has strengthened its commitment to producing new knowledge about architecture and the built environment and to interrogating the very foundations and boundaries of this knowledge. By questioning the premises, histories, and future directions of the field, the school aims to spark new forms of design and planning scholarship as well as new modes of engagement, practice, and action for confronting the complexities and challenges of contemporary society. This commitment is at the heart of GSAPP’s legacy of cultivating understandings of architecture and the disciplines of the built environment that are inseparable from the broader questions of our world—and of guiding those disciplines towards alternative creative potentials, expanded modes of practice, and broadened responsibilities.
GSAPP assembles today’s leading and internationally recognized scholars and practitioners to empower future generations of architects, critical thinkers, urban designers, planners, and real estate developers. Its faculty consists of MacArthur Foundation Fellows, AIA New Practices Award winners, Architect Magazine Top 50 Firms, Metropolis Magazine Game Changers, and a recipient of the Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award. Faculty have been recognized for their scholarship with awards ranging from the Society of Architectural Historians’ Antoinette Forrester Downing Book Award, the Fulbright Scholar Award, and the Berlin Prize, among others; and have participated in and curated today’s most prestigious exhibitions and international biennales in architecture. With Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, the school’s in-house imprint, GSAPP has published twenty-five books in recent years; and hosts 50 events and lectures on average per semester.