Founded in 1896 by Sir William Macdonald, it offers accredited professional and post-professional programs ranging from undergraduate to PhD levels.

[5] The School of Architecture is located inside the Macdonald-Harrington Building, designed by Sir Andrew Taylor, on the McGill University downtown campus.

[14] Initially a Beaux-Arts style school based in the Arts and Crafts movement, it became a Bauhaus-based institution under new directorship after World War II.

[16] In 1896, Sir William C. Macdonald created a chair in architecture at McGill which was led by Stewart Henbest Capper, a former student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

At this time, the school had two architecture studios which occupied two rooms of the top floor of the original Macdonald Engineering Building.

Four among these students have tributes named in their honour at McGill, including Gordon H. Blackader, for whom the Blackader-Lauterman Library is named, Hugh McLennan, namesake of the Hugh McLennan Memorial Travelling Scholarship, Murdoch Laing, of the Murdoch Laing Prize and John Louis Robertson, of the Louis Robertson Book Prize.

At this time, McGill Principal Lewis Williams Douglas considered discontinuing the architecture program due to low enrollment; however he faced a great deal of backlash from Turner and several famous architects from Montreal, and eventually abandoned the idea.

[28] Wisnicki was the fourth woman member of the Ontario Association of Architects and the second to join the Architectural Institute of British Columbia.

After the Second World War, the School of Architecture increased its staff and doubled its physical accommodation due to the surge in university enrollment.

This required the school to briefly use McGill's Dawson College, a satellite campus in St. Jean, Quebec, to accommodate its students.

This new building expanded the school's physical size immensely, and enrollment grew to 133 full-time students by the 1949–1950 academic year.

[note 4][30] Lasserre's resignation, coupled with the new influx of students at the school resulted in the hiring of several new faculty members, which included Robert Esdaile and Harold Spence-Sales.

[25] In 1946, Spence-Sales became Associate Professor of Design, and he and Bland established the first post-graduate architecture and planning program in Canada.

In the following years, Ray Affleck, Fred Lebensold, Andre Vecsei, Warren Chalk and Moshe Safdie also became visiting professors.

The first appointee in 2006 was Dan Hanganu, and subsequent hires include John Shnier (the first Canadian to win the Prix de Rome in Architecture), Steve Badanes, Atelier TAG, Matthew Lella (partner at Diamond Schmitt Architects), and Gilles Saucier.

[42] The multi-level workshop is located in the basement and ground floor of the Macdonald-Harrington building, and provides students with their model-making needs.

The workshop contains various equipment and power tools for working with wood, plaster, glass, acrylics and metal, and also contains other facilities, including a fumehood for sandblasting, spray painting, casting and mould-making.

[citation needed] The Media Centre is located in the Macdonald-Harrington building and is available exclusively to architecture students, faculty and staff at McGill.

Founded in 2008 with funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, FARMM connects students and researchers with colleagues internationally, and provides modern infrastructure for simulation, imaging, and fabrication.

As of 2020, the Collection consisted of over 200,000 drawings, photographs, slides, models and maps as well as 400 metres of papers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architects in Canada.

[51] The largest fond of major Canadian architects is that of Moshe Safdie, who donated his archives to the collection with an ongoing bequest since 1990.

The models were created out of Roma Plastilina between 1940 and 1990 by Orson Wheeler,[54] a sculptor and former professor at McGill's School of Architecture.

The library was established through a donation from the family of Gordon H. Blackader, one of the first students to study at the School of Architecture who died during World War I.

[1] As of 2018, student to faculty ratios fall between 12:1 and 15:1 for design studios, as established by the Canadian Architectural Certification Board (CACB).

[64][61] Offers of acceptance into the program are based on a unique review process including an evaluation of a portfolio of works and extracurricular involvement, in addition to grades.

[61] The School of Architecture has one of the highest percentages of women representation at McGill, with an overall ratio of female-to-male students of approximately 2:1.

[9] The ASA is chaired by the President and run by a council of six vice-president portfolios: Academic, Internal, External, Administration, Finance and Student Life.

[47] Since 2011, the ASA has been part of the Engineering Undergraduate Society (EUS) at McGill, and is also a member of the Canadian Architecture Students' Association (CASA).

[11] The Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture has close ties to several architecture schools across the world and has formal bilateral exchange agreements on a departmental level with seven schools in particular, including The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Politecnico di Milano in Milan, Tongji University in Shanghai, École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville, École nationale supérieure d'architecture de Grenoble, Université catholique de Louvain in Brussels and TU Wien in Vienna.

Each year, the School of Architecture presents public lectures, exhibitions and symposia showcasing leading architects and important figures in the field.