Ana Miljački looks back at her nearly 20 years teaching in the MIT Department of Architecture and says that one thing was perfectly clear to her on arrival: the caliber of her students. “I appreciated immediately that these were students comfortable being at the edge of the discipline, eager to push and transform it,” says Miljački. “They didn’t necessarily seek the spotlight, but understood the value of participating in important transformations.” Transformations are forthcoming for Miljački, the Francis White Davis Professor of Architecture: She became head of the Department of Architecture for the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) on July 1, and the architecture department itself will move to the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse (the Met) in late summer. Miljački takes the reins from Nicholas de Monchaux, the Weber-Shaughness Professor, who helped significan…

The course, which transforms every year to include the most urgent topics of the moment, explores the recent past of architectural discourse, enables students to locate their own concerns, and is oriented toward the future. She sees the course as less of an opportunity to deliver a fixed body of knowledge and more as a process of shaping how students engage with ideas and one another. The class “intellectually socializes” incoming students, creating a shared framework that allows them to become meaningful interlocutors for each other over time. “We have to think critically about this present that we occupy: how we got here. What it means to practice architecture today. How might we do it differently?” she says. “Sometimes we forget that we make the reality. It matters to what end we do it, how we understand the context in which we operate, and how it has already shape…