The use of metaphor offers considerable promise within scientific disciplines for encouraging creative thinking, drawing attention to important concepts or principles in a discipline, and developing new methodologies. Ferguson's description of architectural practice as a metaphor for the development of social programs is used to demonstrate these uses of metaphor through a comparison of architecture to the development of culturally adapted minority education programs. Architecture's design process, which seeks to understand context through analysis and to create a form appropriate to that context through synthesis, parallels educational program development. Judging the success of the design process through the analysis of fit between the form and its context, extends the metaphor to program evaluation. Like architecture, educational programs have functional-practical, milieu-creating and symbolic purpose. As in architectural building tasks, minority educational program development must analyze the cultural contexts, seek solutions to a series of functional or psychological needs, view the resulting form as one solution among many, and evaluate the fit. (BS)