College of Architecture records

The College of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology celebrated 100 years of architectural study and teaching at Tech in 2008. Founded as the Department of Architecture in 1908, it became known as the School of Architecture after World War II. In 1975, the School of Architecture became its own college and was renamed the College of Architecture.

The impetus for the creation of the Department of Architecture at Tech came from a Civil Engineering student, Ernest Daniel ("Ed") Ivey (1887-1966), who in 1907 asked for a meeting with President Matheson to discuss the possibility of forming an architecture program. The first courses in Architecture were offered the next year, with Ivey among the first group of students. In 1911, Ivey left Tech to start his architectural career before completing the degree requirements. However, that same year seven students were the first to receive Bachelor of Science degrees in Architecture, and four more graduated in the following year. In 1912, the Department of Architecture included forty-two full-time students and three faculty members. James Herbert Gailey (1887-1966), who came to be known as “Doc” Gailey, began a forty-two year career on the faculty in that year.

Classes were taught on the third floor of the Electrical Building during the first years of the Department of Architecture. The Department remained at that location until 1920, when it was moved to the third floor of the Mechanical Engineering Building. Two years later, the Department moved again, this time to the Physics Building, where it would remain until 1952. In that year, a new building dedicated to the study and teaching of architecture was finally completed.

During the early years of architecture at Tech, courses were taught in the Beaux-Arts tradition, in which students participated in a series of competitive juried projects awarded by institutions such as the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design (BAID) and the Southern Intercollegiate Competition. In the latter competition, Tech students placed first and second during the five-year period between 1922 and 1926; in the same period Tech students received several Mentions from the BAID. The program was structured into two educational tracks during the 1920s: The first course of study was a regular four-year program leading to a Bachelor of Science degree; the second, a two-year program, led to a Certificate of Proficiency. In 1925, Tech became the first school in the South to be elected to the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. The school was accredited by the American Institute of Architects in the same year. By 1927 Tech had become the largest architectural school in the South, with over 100 students and seven faculty members.

Under the new leadership of Harold Bush-Brown (1888-1983), who took over the chairmanship of the Department of Architecture in 1925, the Department began to forge a new direction away from the traditional architectural design of the Beaux-Arts toward a more modern approach influenced by the Bauhaus movement. This slow revolution, as Bush-Brown referred to it, began during the early to mid 1930s. During this decade, major figures in the Bauhaus movement such as Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe came to the United States to teach. Paul M. Heffernan (1909-1987), who had trained at Iowa State, Harvard, and the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, arrived at Tech in 1938. Tech came under pressure by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture to abandon some of the traditions of the Beaux-Arts training methods during this period. Following the example of other prominent schools in the nation, Tech began a five-year curriculum leading to a Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1934. The four-year Bachelor of Science degree remained in place for those not wishing to become architects.

The student and faculty population fell during the Depression and the years of World War II. In 1937 only nine students graduated in architecture, and in 1940 there were only nineteen graduates. During the war enrollment reached its lowest point of twenty-two students and four faculty. For a brief period during World War II the degree of Bachelor of Science in Architectural Engineering was offered; after the war the program reverted to the four-year and five-year degrees that were instituted in the 1930s.

The post-war period saw a resurgence in enrollment, with an average of more than 400 students in architectural programs during the late 1940s and early 1950s. With the reorganization and change of name to the Georgia Institute of Technology under President Van Leer came the creation of the School of Architecture in 1948, which placed Architecture as an equal to other schools within the College of Engineering. The addition of three faculty members, Jim Edwards, Thomas Godfrey, and Samuel T. Hurst, who had been students of Walter Gropius at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, increased the school’s movement toward the more modern Bauhaus approach. In 1944, the architecture firm of Bush-Brown and Gailey along with associates R. L. Aeck and Paul Heffernan participated in the creation of a campus master plan. Included were proposals for several buildings, among them a building for the School of Architecture. The firm of Bush-Brown, Gailey, and Heffernan designed and built numerous buildings on the Tech campus prior to the war and during the post-war building boom, including not only the Architecture Building but also the Old West Stands of Grant Field, the School of Textile Engineering, the Price Gilbert Library, and several dormitories.

The new Architecture Building, which was designed by Heffernan and built in 1952, was constructed as a functionalist building with intellectual zones and public spaces that corresponded to the expanding curricular needs of the architecture program. The growth of the industrial design program led to the addition to the faculty of the Bauhaus-trained Hin Bredendieck in the same year that the new building was completed. Master’s degrees in Architecture and City Planning were also granted for the first time during the early 1950s, and later in the decade the first Bachelor’s degrees in Industrial Design and Building Construction were awarded. Women were admitted to degree programs in Architecture beginning in 1953. The first woman to graduate, Thera H. Richter, completed a Master of City Planning degree in 1959. Two undergraduate women, Esther Behar and Barbara Field, were the first to graduate with five-year Bachelor of Architecture degrees in 1966.

In 1956, after thirty-one years of leadership, Harold Bush-Brown retired as Director of the School of Architecture. J. H. Gailey retired in the same year. After Bush-Brown’s retirement, Paul Heffernan took over as Director, a position he would hold for twenty years. During Heffernan’s tenure, the first African-American students in architecture graduated, among them Bill Stanley (in 1972) and his future wife Ivenue Love-Stanley (in 1977). In 1972 the first Paris Program began with study abroad programs in Italy. By 1975 the program had moved to Paris and expanded to a full year.

By the late 1960s, the architectural programs at Tech were coming under criticism from the National Architectural Accrediting Board for their lack of innovation and dynamism. In 1971 the Board encouraged Tech to convert from the traditional five-year degree to a four-year undergraduate and two-year graduate degree. Accordingly, Tech instituted four-year Bachelor of Science and two-year Master of Architecture degrees in 1973. In 1975, the last year of Heffernan’s tenure as Director, the School of Architecture became its own college and was renamed the College of Architecture. William L. Fash (1931-2002) became the College’s first Dean.

In 1980, during Fash’s tenure, the graduate wing of the College of Architecture was added to the 1952 building. Designed by Jerome Cooper of the architectural firm of Cooper-Carry, the new structure was a corduroy building compared to the bowtie and tweed jacket next door, according to George Barnett Johnston, an Associate Professor of Architecture at Georgia Tech. Like the 1952 building, with its spaces devoted to design labs the addition represents a response to the changing needs of architectural education, the movement away from drafting toward a growing emphasis on design. Students became involved in projects such as the John Hedjuk cubes and the Mad Housers shelter constructions for the homeless during the 1980s. Computer-assisted design also began to be incorporated into the curriculum in 1984.

Thomas D. Galloway (1939-2007) succeeded Fash as Dean when ill health forced Fash to step down in 1992. Two more European study programs were established during the early part of Galloway’s administration. Galloway also oversaw the 1999 switch from the quarter to the semester system, and he initiated the Common First Year program for architecture students, in which all students follow a curriculum introducing a range of design issues and problems.

After Galloway’s untimely death in 2007, Douglas C. Allen took over as Interim Dean for one year. Allen was instrumental in obtaining financial resources for the Solar Decathlon project, a collaborative venture involving students in several branches of the architecture program that won the BP Innovation Award. He also oversaw the transfer of the Heffernan Design Archives to the Georgia Tech Archives.

In July 2008, Alan Balfour was appointed the third Dean of the College of Architecture. He oversees five academic units, seven research centers, more than 700 undergraduates, and more than 500 graduate students in the building and design programs at Tech.

Source: Elizabeth Meredith Dowling and Lisa M. Thomason (eds.), One Hundred Years of Architectural Education: 1908-2008 Georgia Tech (Atlanta, Ga.: Georgia Tech College of Architecture, 2009).