The institution traces its origins to Karel Albert Rudolf Bosscha, a German-Dutch entrepreneur and philanthropist who saw that the Dutch East Indies needed locally trained engineers. His proposal for a technical school was approved by the colonial government, and the architect Henri Maclaine Pont was commissioned to design the campus in 1918. Pont did something unusual for colonial architecture: he looked at Indonesian building traditions. The result was a campus that blended the steep, multi-tiered rooflines of traditional Javanese and Sundanese architecture with modern European structural engineering. The school, called the Technische Hoogeschool te Bandoeng, opened on July 3, 1920, with a single department -- Road and Water Resources Engineering -- and a mandate to produce the technical workforce the colony demanded. Bosscha would later establish the astronomical observatory that bears his name on a mountain south of the city, further cementing his legacy as the patron of science in West Java. The campus he funded would outlive the colonial system that authorized it by decades.

Few universities have been renamed as often as ITB, and each name marks a convulsion in Indonesian history. The Technische Hoogeschool survived until the Japanese invasion of 1942, when the occupying administration rechristened it the Industrial University. After Japan's surrender in 1945, Indonesian nationalists declared independence and renamed the campus Technical High School. But the Dutch returned during the Indonesian National Revolution, seizing the campus and renaming it yet again as the Emergency University of the Dutch East Indies. During this turbulent period, the school began operating faculties of Engineering and Science under the umbrella of the University of Indonesia in Jakarta. It was not until 1959 that President Sukarno -- who had studied civil engineering at the Technische Hoogeschool in the 1920s -- formally separated the Bandung faculties into an independent institution. The Bandung Institute of Technology was born, dedicated to higher learning in natural sciences, technology, and fine arts. Each renaming had erased the previous authority's claim; the campus itself simply kept producing engineers.

ITB's roster of alumni reads less like a university directory and more like a history of modern Indonesia. Sukarno, the founding president who declared independence in 1945 and led the country until 1967, studied here. Baharuddin Jusuf Habibie, the aeronautical engineer who became Indonesia's third president during the tumultuous transition from Suharto's rule in 1998, is an alumnus. Djuanda Kartawidjaja, prime minister from 1957 to 1963, studied at the campus during its Dutch era. Hartono Rekso Dharsono became the first secretary general of ASEAN. Beyond politics, the campus produced Tjokorda Raka Sukawati, who invented the Sosrobahu construction technique -- a method for rotating precast concrete bridge girders into place over active roadways that was adopted across Asia. Karlina Leksono Supelli became one of Indonesia's first female astronomers. Karno Barkah, an aviation pioneer, received the French Legion of Honour. The breadth is striking: presidents and physicists, artists and airline executives, all from a campus that started with a single engineering department.

Today ITB ranks among the top three universities in Indonesia and was placed 281st worldwide in the 2024 QS World University Rankings. The main Ganesha campus in Bandung covers a sprawling complex of lecture halls, laboratories, an art gallery, a sports center, and a central library. A second campus in Jatinangor, opened to accommodate growing enrollment, now hosts all first-year students for their Joint Preparatory Stage. A third campus is planned for Cirebon. In 2009, the university's entrance exam drew 422,159 applicants for just 2,000 seats -- an acceptance rate below half a percent. But prestige has not insulated the institution from controversy. In January 2024, students discovered that ITB had partnered with an online lending platform called Danacita to offer tuition payment via installment loans. The revelation went viral on social media, drawing a rebuke from the Ministry of Education. Hundreds of students marched from the Ganesha campus to the rectorate building in protest. In 2020, Reini Djuhraeni Wirahadikusumah was appointed as the university's first female rector in its history -- a milestone for an institution that had been producing female scientists and engineers for decades but had never placed a woman at the top.