As we begin our new school year in Cambridge this fall, we are also embarking upon a new adventure in Singapore, with the inauguration of the recently-formed Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD).
Conceived in 2009 as a collaboration between MIT and the government of Singapore, SUTD is perhaps the first university in the world to focus specifically on design as a way to address the challenges of the future, and from the start SA+P has been deeply involved in designing its architecture program.
Our faculty have created more than a dozen courses for the curriculum, both graduate and undergraduate, and many of them will be going to Singapore to teach those courses, joining one of our recent alums, Andres Svetsuk, who is a resident member of the faculty there.
The research component of the program, focused on three ‘grand challenges’—the sustainable built environment, design for the developing world and devices for better living—will be co-directed by John Fernandez, director of SA+P’s Building Technology Program.
In combination with our part in MIT’s new edX program— providing interactive education online and conducting research on how students learn—we believe the SUTD experience offers us the opportunity to conduct a fundamental rethinking of how we educate leaders for the future.
It makes for a very rich brew of possibilities in the air here, these days. Stay tuned for more news as these programs develop.
ADÈLE NAUDÉ SANTOS
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Using a...
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Once again this year, students from SA+P have dominated MIT’s Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prizes in the Visual Arts, established in 1996 to recognize a body of artwork by a current MIT student, and the Laya and Jerome B. Wiesner Student Art Awards, present...
Alumnus Roger Lewis has had – and continues to have – a pretty remarkable career, as full of unexpected turns as a novelistic page-turner. The story began in Houston in the 1950s – a place he knew, by the time he was in his mid-teens, that he would eventually leave – and moved to Massachusetts...
