$20 million gift from Salahuddin and May Choudhury becomes largest in school of architecture history
Salahuddin Choudhury and his wife, May, have committed $20 million to Virginia Tech’s School of Architecture, the largest gift the school has ever received.
The gift will create an endowment that the dean of the College of Architecture, Arts, and Design and the director of the School of Architecture can draw on to support the program going forward.
Choudhury joined Virginia Tech’s faculty in 1974, recruited by Charles Burchard, the first dean of what is now the College of Architecture, Arts, and Design.
Burchard could not offer much in the way of resources at the time. “In the early years, we had scant resources, but no one complained,” Choudhury said. “We begged, borrowed, and — no, we didn’t steal — to make do with whatever we had. And yes, our spouses brought pizza at 3 in the morning to Cowgill Hall as we worked on international competitions. Lacking furniture, the faculty chipped in to buy a rug for the students to sit on.”
Choudhury taught at Virginia Tech for 47 years, both on the Blacksburg campus and in the college’s study-abroad programs, before being named professor emeritus in 2019.
During his tenure, he worked alongside Olivio Ferrari, a colleague he described as a mentor, and taught what he called the Vitruvian ideal — a framework, drawn from the Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius, that ties philosophy, aesthetics, and culture to architectural training.
The architecture program grew substantially over that period. The college added facilities in Alexandria, Virginia, and Switzerland. By 2007, Design Intelligence ranked Virginia Tech’s Bachelor of Architecture program No. 1 among programs accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board, based on a survey of firms asked which programs best prepared graduates for practice, according to Virginia Tech News. The program remained among the top-ranked in DesignIntelligence’s most recent such rankings, issued in 2019.
Virginia Tech President Tim Sands credited the gift with extending a decades-long relationship between the Choudhurys and the university.
“The Choudhurys’ incredibly generous gift extends their 50-year legacy of distinguished professional service to the university into the future by providing philanthropic support that will spark new discoveries and empower students for generations to come,” Sands said.
“We are deeply honored by their commitment to Virginia Tech and proud to be part of their family’s ongoing engagement in higher education.”
Lu Liu, dean of the College of Architecture, Arts, and Design, said the gift marks a significant point in the college’s history. “The early faculty of Virginia Tech architecture built an incredibly strong foundation for the success of generations of architecture students,” Liu said.
“They taught the students not just how to design and how to learn, but also how to think creatively and critically and how to ask fundamental questions about the buildings and their broader context. Sal is an architect and a philosopher. His teaching was profound and critical to the strength of our foundation. We are profoundly grateful to him and May for their transformative gift that will help us to rise ever higher.”
Jim Bassett, associate professor of architecture and director of the school, said Choudhury modeled “a love of wisdom, a commitment to the education of the architect, and a champion of the idea that every great work of art, including architecture, is at heart an unanswered question.”
Bassett added that the gift raises a question the school will need to answer over time: “As this gift unfolds, it challenges us to ask, what can this make possible? While the answer will emerge in the future, we know the Choudhurys’ generosity will fuel top priorities like student experiences, faculty empowerment, and thoughtful adjustments in the education of tomorrow’s architects.”
Choudhury’s path to architecture and to Virginia Tech began with his father, who traveled from Bengal to Harvard in the 1950s to study international taxation law. “I was spellbound by his stories,” Choudhury said.
“He found out about the discipline of architecture at Harvard. He elaborated upon this new discipline that not too many people around me knew a lot about. By happenstance, the year I graduated from high school, USAID decided to add the Department of Architecture in the local engineering university. Obviously, I followed my father’s advice and enrolled there. Our professors came from Texas A&M, Harvard, Illinois, and Berkeley. Everything was paid for by the USAID.”
Choudhury earned his Bachelor of Architecture from East Pakistan University, then completed a Master of Architecture at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis.
He returned to Bengal to work after graduate school, but a civil war led his father to encourage him to return to the United States.
“I went to Washington, D.C. I was humbled by such a welcoming America and generous Americans,” he said. He was later recruited from a job in Washington to become an assistant professor of architecture at Virginia Tech.
Choudhury credited Ferrari with shaping his early years on the faculty, including a recommendation to read the Wall Street Journal daily—a habit that eventually fed into decades of personal investing. “As a young man, I pored over those small numbers on the kitchen table after dinner as May read Agatha Christie one after the other,” Choudhury said.
“We were both engaged in the same activity. We were both sleuthing detectives.” He said his early investing results were mixed but improved over time, building the resources behind the current gift.
Choudhury framed the gift, which will be known as the Choudhury Endowment Fund, as continuing a family pattern that stretches back generations.
“My grandfather was a scholar of Rumi and was a respected wise man in our ancestral village,” he said. “The high school of that village is named after him. My offering is a tribute to him, my father, and all my students and colleagues of the last 47 years. I learned from all.”
Asked about the decision to give, he cited C.S. Lewis: “Nothing that you have not given away will ever be yours… For many years I gave in the classroom. Now we are giving away our financial assets. … Charles Burchard, the dean of architecture at Virginia Tech, invited me to join the faculty over 50 years ago. I was offered a place to learn in the school. For 47 years, I was given the gift of intellectual liberty. The Choudhury Endowment Fund is a token of my gratitude. I hope many others may benefit as I did.”