Overview
We’re an architecture school, but first, we’re a community—a set of communities. Our students come from every US state and dozens of countries (30+ languages are spoken here). Nearly half are the first in their families to attend college. More than half are women. And more than half are from groups who were previously underrepresented. Our faculty are largely practicing architects and landscape architects, complemented by a group of scholars. All are active in their fields, and many regularly win significant national attention. Students and faculty are supported by a committed staff, many of whom are trained as architects and designers. With over 700 students and nearly 100 faculty and staff, we’re large enough to offer real diversity, and small enough to know everyone around you.
Chicago
Chicago is America’s third-largest city, but first in so many things: the first American department store, the first car radio, the first vacuum cleaner, the first zipper, dishwasher, opinion survey, deep dish pizza, brownie, and perhaps most importantly, the first television remote control. But beyond even those, Chicago is America’s first city for Architecture. American architecture was born here, first with Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, and then a second time with Mies van der Rohe and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. That legacy remains, from the city’s fabulous skyline to its miles of lakefront parks. Whether in the fine arts, sports, politics, literature, music, theater, food, or history, Chicago is top-rated. You will never run out of things to experience here.
Bronzeville
Illinois Institute of Technology is located in the South Side Chicago community of Bronzeville. Like many other Chicago neighborhoods, 19th-century Bronzeville was home to a variety of European settlers. But the neighborhood achieved its greatest prominence as a focus of the “Great Northward Migration” of Black Americans beginning after World War 1. By World War 2, Bronzeville was the cultural and economic center for Chicago’s Black community, with thriving music, literary, journalistic, and mercantile scenes. Racism and Urban Renewal drove a period of post-war economic and population decline, just as IIT was being created. But residents never gave up on the neighborhood and today’s Bronzeville—now home to chic restaurants and galleries, museums, shops, and IIT, is an energetic story of rebirth.
The University
Illinois Institute of Technology was founded in 1890 when minister Frank Wakely Gonsaulus challenged Chicago business leaders to see higher education as something other than a province of the privileged. Meat packer Philip Danforth Armour stepped forward with $1 million and the Armour Institute was born, first offering classes in engineering, chemistry, library science, and…architecture. Illinois Institute of Technology was born when Armour merged with arts and sciences-based Lewis Institute in 1940. Today’s IIT, referred to colloquially as “Illinois Tech,” is a modern university of more than 8000 students, faculty, and staff, located on a landmarked 120-acre campus in the Bronzeville neighborhood, about 3 miles south of downtown Chicago.