MIT is the only school in the US that actually has History and Theory program as an individual discipline that rigorously focuses on the area of study. Schools like GSD or Princeton don't do that; they employ academic staff to teach HTC courses but don't really have them work in a particular group of research like us.

This issue actually has two sides. Because what really makes GSD or Princeton a well-known 'design' schools is that they know how to incubate students with applications of theory, together with practice. I audited several introductions of courses at GSD last week and I did notice that all the courses, mostly theory courses, tend to benchmark students with contemporary concept and theory of architectural design and that make it very easy for students to comply their interest in theory to design. While MIT is mostly focus in a contemporary discourse of theory in a philosophical manner, GSD transcends theory to students' work, and this acquisition lead to different products: research paper by MIT and a design work by GSD.

I am not convinced that what GSD does is the best way to deal with presence of architecture, but it seems to me that critical understanding is more applied and more comprehendible when it deals with concrete design as a product.

So approach of each school is different. Let me do the summary:

GSD and Yale, like most of design schools in the US employ design approach with application of theory, mostly contemporary up-to-date seminal theory and thoughts (because some are too broad and to vague to be called 'theory', it is more like a trend or fashion). I would also add Rhode Island School of Design and Penn in this category

MIT, Georgia Teach, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell service tectonic and practical approach, they will mostly deal with 'approved theory', challenging existed theory than fabricating the new fashionable one.

Columbia, UCLA, Pratt, Parsons deal with anti-conservative thoughts of architecture. Computational concept has been blended to an idea of architecture as a culture of revolving imaginary design. These schools don't talk architecture anymore; they talk politics of space, tangible or intangible visual perceptive distribution and so on.

Princeton, Cranbrook and Cooper Union, as they were influenced by artistic assessment, as they all were part of art school before actually established themselves in architecture notions, seem to produce architectural designer, not an architect. What I mean by the word architecture means a lot more than just a science of building in term of art, it means everything that is constructed by a foundation of thoughts, leveled by broad idea of intellectual integration and topped up with certain aspect of progression. Artistically oriented, the schools are, students will be give extreme liberal concept of design to work with.

Lastly, because if I keep typing this mail will never end, the person who is conducting the program, known as chair or head, is visually a very significant factor. Penn once attracted all the best architecture students in the world because of reputation of Lou Kahn and Bob Venturi, the same as what made GSD very modernism aquainted during Gropius' era, or Paul Rudolph's period at Yale, Hejduk's modern transformation at Cooper Union, Tschumi's role at Columbia and so on. The chair is the one who work on assigning the 'main approach' of the program, and also the one who works on seeking the right man for the right job.

I asked so many scholars in the field, they all have quite the same perspective about schools like GSD as described above, but, frankly no one can really tell me what do they think about 'architecture at MIT'. The image of our program is so fuzzy. Stanford Anderson's role as a head of the department for decade excelled the role of HTC program, but apparently not of the design program. Anderson is a great theorist, but he deals more with history, than a proposal for future utilization of theory. Tschumi was a theorist as well when he was the dean of Columbia Architecture School, but his conceptual proposal stood out as a provocative ideas of new dimension of architecture and it was regarded seminal process of design; and that made Columbia stands out in the contemporary stage of architectural design.

Hence, having a theorist as a chair of the program is an ideal for a research drive, but not for a design. Stan Allen, Robert Stern, A. Vidler, Sylvia Lavin, Toshiko Mori are widely recognized in the design arena, their appointment nurture and foster advanced movement and direction of the school.

The good example is by asking you this question 'how do think about architecture program at Penn and Berkeley?' The answer is that the images in design discipline of both schools are as blur as ours, why?, The answer is because Detlef Mertins is a pure theorist, same as the one at Berkeley.