DESIGN SCHOOL TO ADOPT STUDIO IDEA

Departing from its class-room system of instruction, the Graduate School of Design has adopted a new studio plan for the organization of teaching in architectural-design, according to Dean Joseph Hudnut.

Advanced students and beginners will work together in single studies instead of the customary method of dividing students into classes corresponding to their degree of training, Hudnut explained. It is expected that beginning students will learn from advanced students, and the advanced students will refresh their knowledge through teaching the others.

The studio masters, each of whom has charge of a single group, are Professors Walter F. Bogner, Marcel Breuer, and G. Holmes Perkins, all of whom combine their teaching with outside practice of architecture. Each student spends one year in each of the three studies, studying practical problems of building design, construction, materials, and the social utility of structures.

Before entering the work of these studies, students are given a preliminary discipline in basic principles. As a part of this work, under Professor Henry A. Frost, students make a complete frame model of a structure.

Students in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Town Planning are taken into the studies from time to time for collaboration with the architectural students.

Typical of the group projects, one of the studies is undertaking a problem of the development of Magazine Beach on the Charles River in Cambridge. The students have made preliminary investigations of the community, including such problems as the distribution of playgrounds, public health provisions, and building laws, and have developed from these investigations a general layout of beach facilities. When a general plan is agreed upon, each student is assigned an individual share in the project.

In addition to the new studies, the graduate studio under the direction of Professor Walter Gropius will be continued. Selected students who are graduated from the Harvard School of Architecture and from other schools of architecture are admitted to this studio, and are given problems involving highly advanced problems of design and construction.