Desktop: A Material History of MIT Architecture During a Year Apart

October 29 - December 13
MIT Keller Gallery, 7-408

This past year, as we typed away in our respective remote-classrooms, we often wondered what our classmates were making. Zoom lends itself well to digital products, but we missed the messy bustle, the peer-to-peer trying, failing, learning, the: "hey-could-you-take-a-quick-look-at-this-for-me "of the MIT Department of Architecture as a whole.

Desktop aims to materialize the diverse experiences of MIT Architecture during the remote 2020-2021 academic year. Here - on our collective work surface - is a space to explore the artifacts of our isolation, the stories behind the products and processes of making at a distance. The finished and the unfinished, the prototype and the cast-off, the footnote and the shopping list, the things we made and the things we used to make them -- Desktop offers a reflection on the material histories of this year apart while celebrating our coming together.*

*Designed and curated by James V. Brice, Jeffrey Landman and Joel Cunningham, with Aidan Flynn. Desktop was made possible by the generous support of the MIT Department of Architecture.

Photo Credits

01. Event poster, courtesy of curators.

02. Models by Julian Geltman and Emily Wissemann, Taylor Boes, and Gil Sunshine. Image by Daisy Zhang.

03. Chair by Tim Cousin. Image by Daisy Zhang.

04. Models by Isadora Dannin and Zhifei Xu. Image by Daisy Zhang.

05. Curators James V. Brice, Jeffrey Landman and Joel Cunningham. Image by Daisy Zhang.