Ana Miljački has been named the next head of the MIT Department of Architecture. She will assume the role on July 1, 2026.
Miljački will succeed Nicholas de Monchaux, who has held the position since 2020. She will work closely with MIT School of Architecture and Planning dean Hashim Sarkis.
“I’ve been a member of the MIT faculty for 19 years,” Miljački told AN. “I have been humbled everyday to take part in its collective, private, material, cultural, and pedagogical ambitions and realities.”
In a statement, Sarkis pointed to Miljački’s “long-standing and deep commitment to advancing new approaches to training architects, and her acute awareness of architecture’s social and cultural role.”
Miljački is Francis White Davis Professor of Architecture at MIT. Previously she directed both Master of Science in Architecture Studies and Master of Architecture programs. In 2018 she founded MIT’s Critical Broadcasting Lab.
Through the Critical Broadcasting Lab and in partnership with The Architectural League of New York, Miljački hosts the I Would Prefer Not To podcast, which delves into the ethical and social dimensions of practice.
Miljački’s headship will begin before the MIT Department of Architecture starts relocating from 77 Massachusetts Avenue to the Metropolitan Warehouse, a former industrial storage building undergoing adaptive reuse led by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. For Miljački, the relocation has pedagogical implications.
“Making our home in the building of the former Metropolitan Exchange Storage facility, adapted by Diller Scofidio + Renfro for our pedagogical needs, will help us, I think, frame such post-extractive practices conceptually as well as didactically, as we rethink the discipline, our profession, and our pedagogical tasks,” Miljački said.
The Metropolitan Warehouse will facilitate ongoing discourse at MIT centered upon “circularity and reuse,” and also “preservation, repair, questions of climate, decoloniality, destruction, unworlding, and worlding,” she continued.
Beyond Cambridge, Miljački is embarking on this next chapter as higher education faces myriad challenges. Despite cuts at the federal level, Miljački remains committed to ensuring her students exit architecture school “with less debt” she said.
“I think we are in an unprecedented sort of violent and volatile historical moment, certainly in the recent memory of this country,” Miljački affirmed. “The climate crisis is compounded by various related crises, including the unfettered extractivist appetite that defines our moment. There’s so much to be done, by all of us involved in the critical understanding and shaping of the built environment.”
The MIT Department of Architecture will move from 77 Massachusetts Avenue into the Metropolitan Warehouse between September 2026 and January 2027.
