Fall 2025 Graduate Admission Short Response Questions
The questions below are examples of the previous years' short response questions.
MArch and MSArch applicants
You may select any of the four questions to respond to.
MAD-Crit and joint degree applicants
Please answer Question 4.
QUESTION 1
The UIC School of Architecture has historically been a hub for debate. In fact, one of its former directors, the late Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman, once claimed that architecture is Oedipal in nature: for new architects and their ideas to take hold, old ones must be “killed” off. What is one architectural idea you would like to get rid of?
QUESTION 2
What is the future of Architecture? To answer this question, architects have mixed seemingly unrelated things –past and present, for example, or one location and another – to infer new directions. Alison Smithson combined diagrams of the traditional Arabic city with large contemporary projects to identify a new building type: the mat building. Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour read mid-twentieth century Las Vegas through Rome to develop a theory and practice of postmodern architecture. Select two buildings, built or speculative, and describe the future they collectively inspire.
QUESTION 3
Architecture is buildings. It is also the media – drawings, photographs, models, videos, and writings – that surround them. Name one drawing, image, film, essay, etc. that has been foundational to your understanding of architecture. Share it as an image, set of images, or text, and mark it up. Highlight, annotate, add to, or cross out to help us see the lesson in the chosen piece of media.
QUESTION 4 – required for MAD-Crit and joint degree applicants
Identify a topic of interest in the field of architecture that you would like to research and briefly describe it. Tell us why and how the topic is relevant today… and where it might go wrong. Position the proposal within the broader architectural discourse, referring to other architects, writers, critics, journalists, historians, or theorists who have dealt with the same subject matter.