Classes

Introduces fundamental design principles as a way to demystify design and provide a basic introduction to all aspects of the process. Stimulates creativity, abstract thinking, representation, iteration, and design development. Equips students with skills to have more effective communication with designers, and develops their ability to apply the foundations of design to any discipline.

Provides instruction in architectural design and project development within design constraints including architectural program and site. Students engage the design process through various 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional media. Working directly with representational and model making techniques, students gain experience in the conceptual, formal, spatial and material aspects of architecture. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication provided.

Overview of design as the giving of form, order, and interactivity to the objects that define our daily life. Follows the path from project to interactive product. Covers the overall design process, preparing students for work in a hands-on studio learning environment. Emphasizes design development and constraints. Topics include the analysis of objects; interaction design and user experience; design methodologies, current dialogues in design; economies of scale vs. means; and the role of technology in design. Provides a foundation in prototyping skills such as carpentry, casting, digital fabrication, electronics, and coding.

Provides an introduction to visual communication, emphasizing the development of a visual and verbal vocabulary through the lens of typography. Presents the fundamentals of shape, composition, visual hierarchy, word/image relationships, and type systems as building blocks for communicating with clarity, emotion, and meaning. Students develop their ability to analyze, discuss, and critique both their work and the work of the designed world, with an emphasis on type as a visual and conceptual medium.

Note: class meets with 4.500/4.505 for the Fall 2026 term.

Introduction to cultures of form in architectural design, representation, and production, including material cultures, geometric discourse and analysis, Western and non-Western modes of perception and representation. Through a series of acts of forming and making, provides a primer and venue to rehearse skills such as 3D modeling and the reciprocity between representation and materialization. Exercises accompanied by lectures from practitioners, who each represent a highly articulated relationship between form and material in a body of design research or built work.

Note: class meets with Architecture Design section of 4.288 for the Fall 2026 term

Studies design as an interrogative technique to examine material sciences, media arts and technology, cultural studies, computation and emerging fabrication protocols. Provides in-depth, theoretical grounding to the notion of 'design' in architecture, and to the consideration of contemporary design methodologies, while encouraging speculation on emerging design thinking. Topical focus varies with instructor. May be repeated for credit with permission of department.

Provides a practical hands-on introduction to digital fabrication, including CAD/CAM/CAE, NC machining, 3-D printing and scanning, molding and casting, composites, laser and waterjet cutting, PCB design and fabrication; sensors and actuators; mixed-signal instrumentation, embedded processing, and wired and wireless communications. Develops an understanding of these capabilities through projects using them individually and jointly to create functional systems.

Schedule & Information

Explores the foundations of design through a series of bracketed methods of production. These methods exercise topics such as form, space, organization, structure, circulation, use, tectonics, temporality, and experience. Students develop methods of representation that span from manual to virtual and from canonical to experimental. Each method is evaluated for what it offers and privileges, supplying a survey of approaches for design exercises to follow. First in a sequence of design subjects, which must be taken in order.

Interdisciplinary approach to design through studio design problems that engage the domains of building technology, computation, and the cultural/historical geographies of energy. Uses different modalities of thought to examine architectural agendas for 'sustainability'; students position their work with respect to a broader understanding of the environment and its relationship to society and technology. Students develop a project with a comprehensive approach to programmatic organization, energy load considerations, building material assemblies, exterior envelope and structure systems.

Description posted here close to start of term.

Mandatory lottery process.

Description posted here close to start of term.

Mandatory lottery process.

Mandatory lottery process.

Part studio, part seminar, part field-trip, we will visit the sublime landscapes of the arid Bighorn Basin in Wyoming. We will travel through geological landscapes, sacred landscapes, extractive landscapes, infrastructural landscapes, remediated landscapes, preserved landscapes – almost all in some way contested landscapes, set within the current geo-political landscape.

Wyoming is perhaps the wilderness most haunted by invisible yet powerful Anthropocenic forces, exporting the largest tonnage of materials of any state. Native peoples thrived in these now deserted upland regions, adapting to the seasonal migrations of abundant fauna with a brilliant nomadic architecture, evolving respectful patterns of co-existence with nature, a pact of seven-generation mindfulness. You will need to balance between contradictory notions of well-being writ large in the anticline catchment basins and societal histories that have offered-up such material wealth.

The studio will explore critical materiality, but in the current global context of civilizational-scale dwelling, at precisely the moment rare-earth minerals have been discovered here in high concentrations, vital to emerging electronic performance. This will be counterpointed with notions such as "honorable harvest”, the deep respect native peoples’ show for the earth and all its systems: yet the Arapaho now mine coal.  .

Through 3 creative studies, you will be asked to use material imagination (Bachelard’s counterpoint to formal imagination) to elicit an ethical new C21st materiality; to capture a perceived pathos in a landscape artwork; and to design a material research center + visitor housing as a nascent and elegant new architecture.