A paper for the student who has not yet decided.

posted on Jun 22, 2026

A paper for the student who has not yet decided.

This first issue of The MBS Review is for the student who has not yet decided. You have read a brochure or two. You have asked the family. You may have sat in a classroom this year and quietly wondered whether the syllabus you were studying was preparing you for anything that resembled the rest of your life. That feeling is fair, and it is the reason this paper exists.

We wrote it because architecture, more than most professions, is changing in plain sight. The work today looks different from the work twenty years ago, and it will look different again twenty years from now. A college brochure cannot quite explain that. A working studio can, and so can a longer piece of writing, the kind of writing that lets us slow down and say what we mean.

You will find four sections inside. The first looks at how architecture has evolved into the discipline it is today, and what that means for anyone choosing the field this year. The second walks you, and any patient parent reading over your shoulder, through the NATA exam without the usual fog of admissions language.

The third is about what makes a college a real place to learn this work, and how MBS thinks about that question after years of doing it. The fourth is about AI, where we have an honest opinion and a clear way of teaching it.

Read it slowly. Skip the parts that do not concern you. Come back to the rest later, when an idea arrives in the middle of a Tuesday. If anything in here makes you want to visit the campus, the address is on the back page. The studios are usually open, the canteen is honest about its prices, and our students are happy to be interrupted.