Despite its founding within a technical school, the architecture program began as a course of general study that was more closely aligned with the liberal arts.

Devoted to research projects at the convergence of multimedia and technology, the Media Lab was widely popularized in the 1990s by business and technology publications such as Wired and Red Herring for a series of innovative but practical inventions in the fields of wireless networks, field sensing, web browsers, and the World Wide Web.

There have been numerous research spinoffs of the Media Lab, including One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Electronic Ink, and LEGO Mindstorms.

The CAVS had the goal of encouraging collaboration among artists, scientists, and engineers, and it served as a precursor to the MIT Media Lab decades later.

The Department of Urban Studies and Planning offers the following degrees: The MIT Center for Real Estate was established in 1983 with the aim of improving the quality of the built environment.

A substantial portion of the annual budget, which supports half tuition and full-tuition scholarships in addition to the school's costs, is generated through donations from alumni in both the public and the private sector.

The partnership is aimed at facilitating affordable housing development, building community assets, and improving youth pathways to advancement.

The MIT Senseable City Laboratory aims to investigate and anticipate how digital technologies are changing the way people live and their implications at the urban scale.

Recent projects include "The Copenhagen Wheel"[17] which debuted at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, "Trash_Track" [18] shown at the Architectural League of New York and the Seattle Public Library, "New York Talk Exchange" [19] featured in the Museum of Modern Art, and Real Time Rome included in the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture.

The network of contiguous buildings that combine to create the campus fosters sharing of common spaces and circulations with neighboring fields of study.

Most of the school facilities are located in or near the Rogers Building at the main entrance to the central MIT campus (chiefly designed by William Welles Bosworth); the hallway spaces have been nicknamed the Infinite Corridor.

The "glass bowl" nature of many of the architectural spaces lining the Infinite Corridor invites colleagues across the school for observation and collaboration.

A narrow, sky-lit atrium between the old building and the new addition allows sunlight to reach offices and studios in the upper floors, mitigating the unavoidable loss of exterior views.

The result is an addition that has been referred to as a "glass cage," which contains the book stacks, limited-access collection, and exhibition gallery, while the renovated original Bosworth building holds the main reading room and administrative offices.

The 163,000-square-foot (15,100 m2), six-story building features an open, atelier-style, adaptable architecture specifically designed to provide the flexibility to respond to emerging research priorities.