ABSTRACT
Arindam Dutta introduced his five years of service as director of the PhD in History, Theory and Criticism in Art and Architecture at the Department of Architecture at MIT. He detailed the academic, funding, and administrative challenges that he met during this tenure as director. He delved into the history of the MIT doctoral program in art and architecture and its current structure in relation to the students’ research process. The openness of the program inspires students to pursue a diverse range of research agendas and multidisciplinary topics. Dutta elaborated on a methods class that he taught in the doctoral program to explore the intersection of philosophical theories and first principles to expose the epistemological and disciplinary construction of objects. Dutta was invited to discuss funded and sponsored research in relation to theoretical pursuits and to elaborate on his role within Aggregate, an editorial collective of which he was a founder-member.
