A Living Room Is A House Is A School Is A Home Is A Home Front: Re-opening The Cambridge School

Abstract

The Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (1915 - 1942) was a short-lived but significant experiment in architectural education. Over its 27-year lifespan, 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: How, in 1928, the Cambridge School started in a living room, later moved to a house, and eventually transformed into a school. How, in between two world wars, the Cambridge School became a home, and a home front, to women who wanted to access architectural education. How, then, in 2028, the Cambridge School reopens as an institute: a living archive remembering the school’s past and facilitating its future. This institute is housed in the school’s old site of an 1827 colonial-revival house and its 1928 alumni-designed extension in Harvard Square. Through architectural interventions, the thesis reignites the school’s legacy of resistance. These interventions turn the building into an institute that resists institutionalization: an architecture as a living archive. Through built form, the new Cambridge School reframes history and acts as a tool to reinform architectural pedagogy and practice today.