AT THE START of their undergraduate architecture lab this fall, Mark Mulligan and Michael Smith gave their students an assignment that seemed like something out of a high-school shop class: take two pieces of wood, and make a joint. But before the students sat down to plan their projects, Mulligan and Smith had lectured on subjects ranging from the physical properties of the material to the cultural legacy of Japanese wood joinery, revealing the depth that even such a modest project could contain. By the end of the week, students had moved to the woodshop in the basement of Gund Hall to build the plans they’d sketched, fulfilling for the first time the hands-on component promised in the course’s title—HAA179x: “Construction Lab.” Soon, the principles of design and history they had learned earlier met with a very different understanding of what’s possible in a world with gravity and human error. “They draw and think up these things” that can be quite intricate, says Smith, a lecturer in architecture. “But then they’re presented with the material, and the whole world changes.”

These three streams—history and theory, design imagination, and the physical act of making—are the central components of the undergraduate track in architecture studies, a joint program from the Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ (FAS) department of history of art and architecture. It took years of planning on both sides—including “literally two years of meetings”—to get the program off the ground in the fall of 2012, explains Noyes professor of architectural theory K. Michael Hays, the GSD’s associate dean for academic affairs. The first students in the track, housed within the art-history concentration, graduated last spring.

The GSD-FAS collaboration represents what Hays calls “a new band of knowledge” for the College, offering undergraduates the first real chance to take advantage of the GSD’s offerings. Yet those involved in the program’s creation harbor an even bigger ambition—to make the case that design thinking, beginning with architecture in particular, is an invaluable form of liberal-arts inquiry. “The study of architecture, in a broad sense, is a study of culture itself, and in some ways is a mode of knowledge,” says Hays, one of the GSD’s leading boosters of the new track. To illustrate, he points to a student in one of the first classes, who switched from her original concentration in philosophy. “She told me, ‘I came here knowing that I could think. I didn’t know that I could make things, and I certainly didn’t know I could think by making things.’”

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For Hays, that kind of cross-disciplinary connection is an exemplar of what his dream of linking the GSD and the College could spark. Though the program currently focuses on architecture, he hopes it will be expanded to a stand-alone concentration, still jointly administered with the art history department, that could encompass the different kinds of design that play significant roles in today’s world, including graphic and industrial design and urban studies (already, FAS’s 2013-4 annual report hints at the possible creation of an interdisciplinary secondary field in urban studies). Several GSD professors noted that, in their ideal world, the track would attract students beyond those headed for design school—just as literature concentrators don’t all become professors, and engineering concentrators don’t all become licensed engineers. Instead, the program’s graduates could become policymakers with an informed understanding of the built environment, or engineers with a sense for the aesthetic choices inherent in all their decisions. As Hong puts it, “Design has no boundaries. It permeates through any kind of profession.”