A living room is a house is a school is a home is a home front: re-opening the Cambridge School

Cambridge, MA, USA
Harvard GSD, Thesis
Advisor: Dr Lisa Haber-Thomson
2023

The Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (1915 - 1942) was a short-lived but significant experiment in architectural education. Over its 27-year life span, it produced over 800 graduates, more than 250 women-led firms, and was one of the larger schools at the time. It was also the first US architecture school to offer women master’s degrees, and the first school to combine the teaching of architecture and landscape architecture. It redefined architectural pedagogy, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and academia’s relationship to practice. Today, its history is hardly known.

This thesis unearths the Cambridge School’s rich but forgotten history by reappraising its past and envisioning a new future; reopening it as an institute to question current approaches to architectural pedagogy, the role of domestic labor and gender dynamics within the profession.

To learn more about the history of the school, please visit this in-progress living archive.

Sonya Falkovskaia

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