The Architect at Mid-Century

Kathryn E. Holliday’s chapter traces the relationship of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) to American architecture education over a one-hundred-year span, from the AIA’s founding in 1857 and its centennial in 1957. The first part of the chapter examines the circumstances of the AIA’s founding, at a time when there were no architecture schools in the United States, and describes the variety of mid-nineteenth-century educational ideas and ambitions, many of which were related to the various personal educational experiences of the organization’s founders. The second part of the chapter focuses on the AIA’s 1957 report The Architect at Mid-Century, which offered a detailed analysis of architecture education one hundred years later. Holliday reveals the origins of an enduring divide between academia and professional practice, which continues to shape architecture in the United States.