Classes

9/10/26 - subject moved to studio W41-3219

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.

9/10/26 - subject moved to studio W41-3219

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.

9/10/26 - room changed to W41-3509

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.

9/10/26 - room changed to studio W41-4419

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.

9/10/26 - room changed to studio W41-4419

“if architects only work with what is existing, then we/they will never create anything new”

This studio aims to prove the opposite is true; showcasing that while in the past, creativity was defined as the spark that ignites something entirely new, we are at an inflection point. Our planet is suffering under our continued need for “newness”. If newness provides the only definition of creative spark, we will continue to extract, ravage and exploit our planet for resources. We will continue to throw things away. Our linear lifestyle will remain, by default, the definition of the creative mind.

What if, instead, we start with all that we already have? What if creativity is defined and celebrated by the ability to make the ugly beautiful, the useless useful and the abandoned loved?

In a climate changed and changing world, architects must learn to more deeply engage with existing material, deconstruction techniques and logistics, design for disassembly and re-configuration, and the planning for a building’s maintenance. Moving architecture away from the stylistic value of a finished object, and toward an ongoing, process oriented endeavor, it must immerse itself with both the lineage of our material past and the future of its continued value.

Mandatory lottery process.

9/10/26 - room changed to studio W41-4419

Somewhere between volatile markets and volatile governance, between prediction betting and networks of desire that proliferate at the speed of fiber optics, money seems to flow ever faster. Architecture attempts to keep up. Think of the light-frame building, the big box store, apartments that constantly change hands, restaurants and commercial districts that are in a state of perpetual flux. These buildings combine structural frameworks with articulated and customized surfaces, furnishings, layouts and organizations–blending the specific and the generic into new interwoven configurations that prioritize transformability over permanence.

And sometimes our tools fail us and the speed of building crashes into the speed of economy, or maybe vice versa. In 2020, work stopped on 1 Seaport, a 670-foot tall residential condominium building in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport neighborhood. Owing to a faulty foundation strategy chosen to save money, the building was leaning. Enough that slabs were misaligned by nearly a foot in some areas and enough to trigger a stop work order. The building has been left a (now-stable) partly-built shell with an exposed concrete core, clad with patchy swaths of glass that situate it between construction and completion.

This studio will use this concrete shell as a site to explore intersections between market narratives and adaptive reuse: as a Tour Dom-Ino to test how to inhabit a structural frame, as a capital stack to balance a patchwork ownership model, and as an experiment to account for multiple scales of time and use. Students will work on a large hybrid model/drawing throughout the semester that they will build, rebuild, elaborate, and append as a primary design tool. We will look at how to operate on an existing building to make it perform differently: to use design to register broader socio-economic conditions at the scale of a material or a detail. If money and time have conspired to demand new kinds of architecture, this studio intends to supply corresponding designs from lobby to roof, from core to shell. 

Mandatory lottery process.