The school grew rapidly with a building of its own until 1900, when Nelson Robinson went to Eliot with the desire to create a memorial to his son, Nelson Robinson Jr., who had been killed the year before in a Yard accident. The younger Robinson had been interested in architecture, and Eliot suggested that Robinson give the department a building and an endowment.

Bachelor Requirements

From the first, the school required a bachelor's degree for admittance, something no other school in the country does. Now, it takes a student as long to get his Bachelor of Architecture degree at Harvard as the time needed for a master's at M.I.T. or Pennsylvania. But both students and faculty agree that a liberal arts training is necessary to an architect and planner, who must be able to comprehend all of man's environment in order to build for him. Some will argue, however, that there should be more practical rather than general courses in the college training, and Stubbins feels the University should arrange with other colleges to take their students in the junior year and arrange a joint degree in architecture from Harvard and liberal arts from the student's original school.

When he became dean at the beginning of the 20's, George H. Edgell explained the bachelor's requirement.

"Its advisability may be questioned" he admitted, "but the mature men which it brings to the school give the faculty far more satisfactory material than could be obtained in any other way. The results are beginning to show and the faculty believes in another generation they will show brilliantly."

Designers all over the world believe they have show brilliantly in the last few years, that the school's program has been a success.

Lester A. Collins, chairman of the department of Landscape, Architecture, states the school's aim is "not to educate draftsmen, but to educate the men who will run the whole works, the leaders and administrators."

Stubbins agrees, and he believes the school's requirements should be more stringent, if they are changed at all. "It might be better to have a smaller school of really top-notch students, doing research and learning both architectural and industrial methods." Stubbins says.

Hudnut Enters

In 1933, Edgell left the school to become director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Hudnut became dean. Four years before, however, a $250,000 grant had created the first department of City (later Regional) Planning in the country. The school, broken off from the landscape department, interested Hudnut. Some members of the faculty say he was intrigued by the social and political possibilities of the department, and favored it over the others, but there is no tangible proof of this.

Planning grew gradually under Perkins, and in 1948 the integrated first year program finally enunciated the aims of the triumvirate. The planners, who alternated in their training between Littauer and its social science curses and Hunt with its design courses, were to be the theorists who told the architects what was needed where and why. The landscape architects were concerned with the actual physical planning, 'what was needed for certain soils and rocks in both back years, highways, and large factories. And the architects, with the information and programs of the other two were to do their actual construction designs.

The purpose of the integrated program was to acquaint each group with the problems of the other.

Esthetic and Functional

The planners must speak in the language of the architects and all must be able to understand the broadest theories of design and function of both esthetic beauty and environmental economy.

Today at the school, all agree that the three are inseparable, but some feel the program has bogged down. Students in architecture say the planners do nothing but gather facts. They are not designers in any sense. The architectural faculty accuses planning of throwing screws into the joint student programs of failing to provide the planning in advance for the creation of model towns and projects.