Classes

Note 1/30/23: Schedule change from TR 1-6 pm to TR 2-6 pm.

As the US population continues to relocate to sunbelt states, Phoenix has become one of the fastest growing metros in the country. This influx of new people during recent extreme droughts has pushed water resources and heat impacts to their limits; Phoenix is now the hottest city in the US. For those who still live in the urban core, the lack of shaded landscape and abundance of heat absorptive building materials has produced dangerous living conditions. Our studio is tasked with the challenge of designing “cooling” infrastructure, through architectural and landscape, while providing housing solutions for the inner loop neighborhoods of Phoenix. We will examine the inner loop of Phoenix to reimagine how new landscapes, infrastructures and housing typologies can be combined for “cooler,” safer, and healthier living.

This joint urban studio presents a new pedagogical model that brings together planners (DUSP students) and designers (ARCH) around a shared urban challenge. The studio will be offered as 2 study modules. The first module, which takes place over 6-7 weeks and includes a spring break trip, will focus on research -‘reading’ the metro landscape through analytical representation and mapping, and then further programming and writing a project brief which will inform design projects goals and parameters. The second module, which takes place over the following 6-7 weeks, will advance the learnings and briefs created in the first module to work on the design project in two groups. Working collectively, one group will develop a vision plan for the future of the inner city loop, and the other will be working on designing a ~60 unit housing cluster within an existing ‘loop’ neighborhood. As a whole the studio, through its research and design components, seeks to promote new approaches to urban living that address environmental, social, and economic challenges as presented by the Phoenix inner loop.

This joint urban studio will focus on one of the most urgent climate, environmental, and urban challenges we face today: heat and urban growth.  

Combining research and design, the studio presents a pedagogical model that brings together designers  - SMArchS Urbanism  (ARCH) and planners (DUSP students) to work together around a shared urban challenge where professional lines are blurred.  

The City of Phoenix, and its Office of Heat Response and Mitigation, have asked us to consider three wicked problems facing sunbelt cities as they continue to rapidly grow: affordable infill housing, heat island effects,  

and better access to multiple modes of transportation. Students will conduct group planning research as well as site analysis and urban design to comprehensively innovate around the nexus of urban heat--intergenerational housing--autonomous mobility  

and universal access design. The goal is to create a new set of block and streetscape typologies for cooler, intergenerational, autonomous living in Phoenix’s South Central neighborhoods. 

The urgency of the climate crisis has motivated a growing interest in material reuse at scale in architecture to support an alternative, circular approach to building construction.  The Odds & Mods pedagogy platform will offer a multi-year curriculum focused on these topics from a variety of perspectives.  In this IAP workshop, students and instructors will focus on technologies and workflows for digital circularity, encompassing a range of methods to acquire, characterize, design with, engineer, fabricate, and assemble reused and undervalued materials.  Students will specifically develop skills to engage in existing and emerging frameworks for reuse of unconventional and undercharacterized materials in creative architectural contexts.  The workshop will involve both technology-augmented, hands-on making and the use of computational design tools.

Merely to think about cities and get somewhere, one of the main things to know is what kind of problem cities pose, for all problems cannot be thought about in the same way.
– Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Chapter 22, “The kind of problem a city is.”

While we have begun to understand the interconnected properties of our cities, we still lack the tools and methodologies to engage cities as designers along the grain of these insights. This has consequences not just for the inclusion of physical factors at different scales, but also to the lack of influence of those most affected by climate change on design for resilience in their communities.

In this workshop we will explore digital tools and methodologies to conceive distributed, environmentally validated design proposals, connecting principles behind urban networks with systematic design and evaluation of a large number of distributed design interventions. We will introduce Local Software, a set of tools and workflows to imagine, evaluate, and implement networked urban designs by connecting GIS and parametric CAD software.

The course will provide a critical introduction to computational tools and approaches for urban design. Students will familiarize themselves with design workflows that integrate geospatial information, parametric modeling, and geospatial modeling to develop networked urban proposals. We will also discuss the conceptual, social, and political framework for such networked action in urban environments.

In the workshop, we will be engaging with Green City Force, an AmeriCorps program that engages young adults from New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) communities in environmental service. The workshop will begin to prototype a set of distributed interventions – ‘eco-hubs’— across NYCHA properties. NYCHA sites represent a distributed landscape throughout New York City whose population approaches that of Atlanta, and which are in areas of the city most vulnerable to the effect of climate change. Participating students will have the potential to apply to join this ongoing collaboration after the conclusion of the workshop as well.

Open to DUSP and Architecture students, others by instructor permission as well.

For more information email Carlos Emilio Sandoval Olascoaga.

The term "megalith" simply refers to a 'big stone,' but behind this seemingly simple definition lies centuries of human ingenuity and cultural significance. In this course, we delve into the cultural act of bringing a stone to life, exploring the techniques and technologies used by ancient civilizations to transport and position these monumental structures.
Through a combination of theoretical learning and hands-on practical exercises, students will gain a comprehensive understanding of calculus-based curvature modeling and solver computation, necessary to drive the location of a megalith's center of mass. By mastering these concepts, participants will unlock the secrets of effortlessly moving massive objects and performing feats of spectacular prowess.
Students will embark on a journey of discovery, learning how to design, compute, and execute the precise movements required to transport megalithic stones. From principles of leverage and mechanical advantage to employing cutting-edge computational techniques, participants will explore a range of strategies for overcoming the logistical challenges inherent in moving objects of such monumental scale.

Moreover, this course goes beyond mere technical proficiency, encouraging students to consider the broader cultural and historical contexts surrounding megalithic engineering. Through engaging discussions and interactive activities, participants will explore the societal implications of megalithic construction, examining how these monumental structures have shaped human civilizations throughout history.

Where is North? This question is crucial to humankind’s ability to orient ourselves in time and place. It is not only important for navigation, but also fundamental to aligning our places of being. This course seeks to engage in one possible origin of architectural thought: Polar Alignment. There are a range of methods that align with north in the northern hemisphere. Some are terrestrial and magnetic while others are celestial and observant. Each method brings with it a set of biases, error tolerance, and cultural meaning. To address the various anomalies of each method, scale becomes essential to build accuracy, confirm observations, and build cultural significance. Orienting ourselves involves geometry (earth measure) as much as it does geography (earth drawing). 

Students will build upon methods developed in the Crop Circle Kit to impart cardinal direction. This will involve historic analysis, geometric experimentation, and computational development. The workshop will culminate in a colossal field drawing that inscribes the earth with knowledge about orientation. 

Clients, funding, consultants, contracts–architects are enmeshed in financial mechanisms that forever remind us of our direct reliance on local and global economies. Money talks and architecture follows: our work articulating the interests of those served while fluctuating with the rapidity of the market. And while this relationship may be fixed, perhaps we can find ways to resist its normative logics, which exacerbate social inequalities and consolidate power in the hands of the few and the privileged. This workshop will explore alternative economies and financial arrangements to find ways to re-code capitalism’s tendencies, desires, and outcomes. We’ll draw from a range of writing–from queer theory to post-colonial studies to literary criticism–to undo dominant financial orientations.

We will ask whether in addition to designing architecture, we can also design the market that demands architecture – to produce economic scenarios under which we might build. Each week we will pair readings in economic anthropology (studying how economies are shaped by behavior, cultural values, and social relationships), texts from other disciplines, and case-studies to invent atypical demand-chains, work against models of optimal performance, and instrumentalize culture to undercut efficiency. We will look at how we might produce clients, programs, and actor networks rather than responding to the whims of the market. We will consider how we might think of economic arrangements as tools for designers.

We will read, write, and compile a compendium of research for a publication on the topic. Students are encouraged to find broad reaching examples–from the domestication of post-war military technology to the proliferation of sharing economies to recent trends in reuse and the circulation of materials.

We will focus on buildings, materials, and products, largely drawn from North America in the 20th and 21st centuries, but may also look further afield. The course will focus on real examples of immaterial and material phenomena, inventing new languages and representational strategies along the way.

The Deep Time Project aims to expand architecture timescales of perception seeking to re-position architecture as a more sensitive response to its environment. The course is structured around an interdisciplinary series of guest lectures, screenings, readings and precedent analysis on time literacy with particular focus on art and philosophy. Looking at the multiple repertoires of subjectivities and agents involved in the architectural process each student will develop design experiments on time aiming to explore a different constellation of temporalities that architecture must account for.

Undergraduate students welcome!

Units: UG: register for 3-0-6 (9 units)
Units Grad: register for 3-0-9 (12 units)

Augmented Historical Pedagogies: Tiergarten’s Hidden Urban Narratives is a collaborative workshop bringing together three institutions: the MIT Department of Architecture, the Institute for Architecture at TU  Berlin, and The Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. The collaboration will foster a VR- and AR-based, interdisciplinary study of the Tiergarten, Berlin’s largest park and a site which has undergone unique historical transformations. Because of its complex history, not just in field of architecture and urban planning, but also within the history of film, literature, politics, zoology, hydrology, and botanics, Tiergarten is an exemplary location for a critical exploration of the ways through which urban history is written and produced.

In addition to engaging with the site’s history through readings and archival research, students will use advanced simulation techniques–such as environmental sensing, laser scanning, and photogrammetry–as well as game engines, and produce immersive representations of Tiergarten. These projects, virtual- and augmented-reality installations, will be conceived as digital spaces that present the multiplicity of the park’s historical narratives through a variety of mediums, techniques and materials. The aim is not to make a passive reconstruction, but to use these digital spaces as the sites for insightful historical investigations. The final results, a collection of virtual tours and ‘incisions’ through the layers of knowledge and representation, aim to provoke discussion not just about Tiergarten’s past, but also about a re-envisioned future.

Cities, industries, & systems are material mines that have formed over centuries. As these artificial mines are built, voids they form, out of sight, grow. In a time when resourcefulness is the new imperative, the realm of design beckons a shift from a boundless creative aspiration towards an appreciation of scavenged, processed, & off-cut materials, allowing them to shape imaginative pursuits.

For OFFCUT/CUTOFF, we will travel to Bahrain and immerse ourselves in an environment of industrial production. We will study, analyze, and map Awal Group’s operations, material sources and waste streams. Offcuts from the manufacturing of ducts and HVAC systems will form a palette of materials that we will upcycle through a series of fabricated design solutions. Techniques used will include but not be limited to rolling, bending, casting, punching, and inflating. The resulting work will be showcased at the House of Heritage along the Pearling Path in Muharraq. 

During our time on the island, we will be engaging with local metal smelters and design studios, including bahraini-danish, Civil Architecture and Studio Anne Holtrop.

Limited Seats, please submit an application by midnight Dec 10 here: https://tinyurl.com/offcutbh 

*open to graduate students only, cross-registration available.

(pre-approved for MArch Urbanism elective Fall 2023)

he last decades have seen the relentless acceleration of planetary-scale environmental and social challenges. Phenomena as widespread urbanization, human-induced climate change, or the operationalization of natural landscapes interrogate both the agency and the limits of architectural practices. The goal of this workshop is to explore how our architectural responses to the local impact of those planetary phenomena can trigger new forms of spatial and political organization — a possibility we will refer to as cosmopolitical design. 

We will study the idea of cosmopolitical design by investigating the relations between seven main areas of action: 1) Geovisualization, geoknowledge and geoimagination; 2) Architecture After Planetary Urbanization; 3)Territorial Design Across Scales; 4)Ecology as Planetary Praxis; 5)Climate Cosmotechnics; 6)Autonomy and Cosmopolitics; and 7)Decolonization and Cosmopolitics. Together, these seven areas aim to situate the local interventions that constitute the core of architectural practice as catalysts of broader processes of spatial and political structuring.  

The workshop is conceived as a collective design-research exercise, combining lectures, discussions and workshop sessions. In the lectures we will see how each of the seven aforementioned topics acted as a trigger of planetary-oriented architectural practices during modernity, and we will start reflecting upon and questioning the resulting modes of spatial production. Our discussions will build upon the lectures and upon a highly plural body of literature including thinkers from across the planet. We will read texts exploring the ideas of critical cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitics, cosmotechnics, pluriversality, world-ecology and decolonization.  

At the beginning of the course, each student will select a topic of design-research, conducing to the final production of a small individual book. Our emphasis will be on the production of strong and consistent visual narratives. Together, we will explore the synergies and convergences between your research topics, and conclude the term gathering the exercises in a collective volume. 

Clients, funding, consultants, contracts–architects are enmeshed in financial mechanisms that forever remind us of our direct reliance on local and global economies. Money talks and architecture follows: our work articulating the interests of those served while fluctuating with the rapidity of the market. And while this relationship may be fixed, perhaps we can find ways to resist its normative logics, which exacerbate social inequalities and consolidate power in the hands of the few and the privileged. This workshop will explore alternative economies and financial arrangements through the the lens of queer practice, with its history of instrumentalizing the language of power against itself, to find ways to re-code capitalism’s tendencies, desires, and outcomes.

We will ask whether in addition to designing architecture, we can also design the market that demands architecture–to produce economic scenarios under which we might build. Each week we will pair readings in economic anthropology (studying how economies are shaped by behavior, cultural values, and social relationships) and queer theory (identifying strategies of planned failure, makeshift assembly, and re-orientation) to invent atypical demand-chains, work against models of optimal performance, and instrumentalize culture to undercut efficiency. We will look at how we might produce clients, programs, and actor networks rather than responding to the whims of the market. We will consider how we might think of economic arrangements as tools for designers.

We will read, write, and compile a compendium of case studies for a publication on the topic. Students are encouraged to find broad reaching examples–from the domestication of post-war military technology to the proliferation of sharing economies to recent trends in reuse and the circulation of materials. We will focus on buildings, materials, and products, largely drawn from North America in the 20th and 21st centuries, but may also look further afield. And while queerness provides a shared framework for the workshop, students are encouraged to consider analogous lenses through which we might rewrite the relationship between practice and service. The course will focus on real examples of immaterial and material phenomena, inventing new languages and representational strategies along the way.

*A workshop not just for queer students, but for students curious to work with queer intention.

2/7/23: Note: Recitation room changed to 9-450A

This class is a pre-approved Architecture + Urbanism elective for Spring 2023.

The Drawing Together Practicum is a social and ecological resilience effort in New York City that explores new methods to scale community participation in urban design. Bringing together Green City Force (GCF), NYC public housing residents, MIT faculty, students and researchers, this practicum will demonstrate a community-led planning and design process for the siting, co-design, and operation of community spaces, Eco-Hubs, using new digital platforms. GCF’s Eco-Hubs align local green services for food, water, waste and energy behavior change and neighborhood transformation strategically with local, city, state, national and global goals for climate and equity.

Alongside building a digital framework to scale-up community engagement in existing and future Eco-Hubs, we will engage in conversations about the role of technology and digital skills in workforce development training. Expanding on GCF’s capacity-building strategies and through guest lectures from experts in workforce development, and green economy employers, students will discuss the potentials for creating a sustainability-focused, data science curriculum that supports farm development and operations as part of GCF’s workforce training program.

This is an H1 Half-Term Subject which meets February 5 - March 22, 2024 (includes final exam period)

If the architectural drawing moves something unknown to something known (from vision to building), the reverse could be said of the architectural survey.

The potential of the architectural survey lies in its mobilizing of something known into unforeseeable future uses (from building to visions). This course centers on recasting the architectural survey from conveyor of building facts to instrument for building stories. Operating somewhere between the limits of absolute truth and virtual truth, our research will aim to uncover new ways of engaging architecture’s relationship to vision, documentation, and the art of renewal (or preservation) against the backdrop of racial, economic, and material conditions in the turn-of-the century South. More specifically, the site of the course will be Tuskegee University and the legacy of Robert R. Taylor, the first accredited Black architect, MIT graduate, and designer and builder of a significant portion of the campus’s brick buildings.

Students will consider Taylor’s work both in the present context and its inception under Booker T. Washington’s leadership.

In addition to rigorously surveying a building through traditional and non-traditional survey methods and media, students will engage Taylor’s legacy through on-site field work paired with archival research. Observations will be filtered through distinct ways of looking to describe an existing building not as it is but as it is seen by the student. The results, a set of unconventional as-built drawings, will question and advance visuality as architecture’s essential resource.

For this course, travel is required and will take place prior to the start of the spring semester (Sunday 1/28-Thursday 2/1). The travel week will involve a mix of tours, teaching, discussions, and on-site surveying. Following our travels, class days are formatted around lectures, readings, discussions, tutorials, desk and pin-up critiques.

Note: 1st meeting, T 2/7, 10am on Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/97338571583

The Metropolitan Storage Warehouse was built in 1895, it is one of the oldest buildings in the MIT neighborhood and currently finds itself in the midst of redevelopment as it will become the new home of the School of Architecture and Planning in 2025. Upon completion the MET will provide approximately 110,000 square feet of academic, research, and gathering space including labs and studios for architecture students. As the building finds itself amidst active transformation this workshop will look back on the MET’s past lives, investigate its current working state, and ponder on its future through the tools of phonography, or field recording, to better understand the multiple layers of reality that converge at this site.

The MET Warehouse operated as a storage facility since its construction and its architectural elements– two-foot-thick-stone walls, vaulted ceilings, its medieval crenellations—all stood witness to years of internal life, the drama of the storage facility; the secret life of boxes that end up in secret rooms. In 2015, when the MET closed, much more than boxes were revealed to have occupied the nearly 1,500 internal units: private offices, satellite walk-in closets, a wine collection dating back to the mid-90’s, a saxophonist’s recording studio, extension art storage for Boston museums, the list goes on.  The MET Warehouse, like many other storage spaces, was a territory of exchange and protection for belonging(s): material, capital, life. How might the past lives of this building effect its future life as repository and vessel for a community of architects, designers, and thinkers (both academic and not, institutional and extra institutional)? In listening to the building might we learn more about its expansive ability to hold, archive, and safekeep and challenge our expectations for what forms of belonging might take place here next?

The impacts of climate change on World Heritage—from floods in Venice Lagoon to extinction in Galápagos Islands—have garnered attention in a world that has mostly otherwise failed to respond to the urgency of the climate crisis. In UNESCO reports, climate change has emerged as a top threat impacting the conservation of hundreds of heritage sites, with an array of risks including rising sea levels, wildfires, extinction, droughts, air pollution, melting glaciers, material vulnerability, unchecked tourism and the massive displacement of communities.

What world and heritage are possible through the climate crisis? Heritage sites are designated for their natural or cultural significance, considered to be of outstanding universal value, and protected for the benefit of future generations. However, the climate crisis renders it unclear what that future is and how to curate a world with inherent uncertainty and disaster. At a moment when the promises to arrest or reverse further decay are unsustainable in the face of planetary destruction, what are other possible experimental preservation practices—material and semiotic—both to live on a damaged planet and, to imagine other worlds that are possible, urgent, and necessary? How to devise a plot, how to give it a certain direction or intent of meaning, when climate change actively eludes, confounds, and evades narrative closure?

How do designers inherit a world in crisis?

“Climate Inheritance” is a design research and speculation workshop that investigates how to conceptualize, visualize, project and narrate the impacts of climate change on World Heritage.

The work is along the three axes below;

1. Construct: interdisciplinary conceptual framework and experimental design practices; including Caitlin DeSilvey, Rodney Harrison, David Gissen, Lucia Allais, Superstudio, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Amy Balkin, DAAR (Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti), Azra Akšamija, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Bryony Roberts.
2. Represent: visual atlas of World Heritage and Climate Change from UNESCO reports and data sets. Diagrams, and architectural chart primary climate factors affecting such properties and existing adaptation strategies. [Collaborative. See WORKac, 49 cities]
3. Project: Each student selects and researches an existing World Heritage site impacted by climate change (its history, mediatic “aura”, etc.) to propose a speculative future narrative in three drawings. [Individual. See DESIGN EARTH, Climate Inheritance]

This course asks: what if a familiar typological object—a chair, table or other common wooden element of furniture—could be designed to create its own energy sufficient to offset its manufacture, use lifetime and re-cycling. The Big ZERO Workshop brings together speculation, research, design and making at the scale of the human body and household object to explore whether and how it might be possible to design for carbon zero. 

Our present culture of fulfillment, of instant and seemingly effortless acquisition and consumption of products is built upon a not-so-hidden stream of energy expenditures across vast scales of extraction, production, and consumption of designed goods. Motivated by the challenges, the seemingly elusive chimera and mandate to find ways to design and implement furniture at carbon zero, students will study and re-evaluate the forms and aspirations of iconic plywood furniture precedents that were originally designed for mass-manufacture in the modern post war period. We’ll explore needs for typological transformations and energy “edits” to these precedents. Students will identify that which is essential to the design and eliminate many inherited familiar components of a table or chair.  We’ll work with flexible solar materials and kinetic energy scavenging to design and test if/how solar and kinetic energy could become integral to furniture objects that self-power, self-form, and self-compost. 

In this undertaking and work together, we will engage the architectural imagination to advance critical thinking and speculation on what a possible future world of the Big ZERO might hold and what its consequences—technical, cultural, and practices in everyday life-- might imply. To design for carbon zero is not an isolated technical problem of engineering. Nor is it a substitution of one piece of furniture for another. The enterprise will entail a radical rethinking and reconstruction of the architect’s relationship with design, production, and use.  When household objects in a Big ZERO world operate as hybrids of renewable biomass and infrastructure, new forms of partnership and care with their human owners can be explored-- more like living plants than products.

The workshop will include guest talks and hands-on sessions on wood sourcing, drying and design and computation for human scale hydrohygroscopic wood forming, a process that engages the inherent capacity of multilayered wood plies to self-form instead of being manufactured in a traditional high energy factory setting. Wood, solar and energy harvesting materials for this course will be provided.  Budget and COVID permitting, students will travel to Germany to share ideas and techniques of hydroscopic wood design and making.
 

9/6/23 - first meeting of class will be in room 7-336 (previously listed as 3-329)

(pre-approved for MArch Urbanism elective Fall 2023)

Through this class, students will explore the idea of creating a "climate corps" for MIT: a way for students (and potentially alumni) to take action for climate and environmental justice on campus and in Cambridge and greater Boston community, while building skills and experience.

The class will involve robust stakeholder engagement (fellow students and student groups, alumni, faculty, staff, administration, community partners ...) and the delivery of recommendations and scenarios for the creation of an MIT Climate Corps. MITOS will be 
either the client or at the least a close partner to the class.

Undergraduates welcome.

Note: The first meeting of this class is on Monday, February 12

Building towards a campus-wide climate corps, this workshop will host students who want to engage in campus and community-based climate projects. Students from across MIT will come together to develop ideas and design prototypes that respond to climate and climate justice imperatives, working with campus and community-based class collaborators. The workshop is part of the multi-year Civilian Climate Corps Initiative (MCCCI), conceived as a pilot for an annual course. Students will have the opportunity to engage in multi-faceted design of “climate pilots” at the intersection of climate, community and careers, learn from experts engaged in these facets of design on our campus and in the local communities of Cambridge and Boston, and from each other through reflection and teamwork. The project will respond to three major themes of farms, heat risk, and green careers. Students will be able to choose the “climate pilot” they would like to work on. Students with their own projects that fit the criteria may email the professors.  The course is open to undergraduate and graduate students from across the Institute. Key collaborators will include MITCCCI partners PowerCorps Boston; Eastie Farm, and the MIT Office of Sustainability (MITOS); and other campus and community partners. 

Students have the option to take the course for 3 or 9 units. In-class time will be devoted to guest lectures and group work. Out of class, students taking the course for 9 units will conduct weekly reflections, research, and work with each other, with site visits to get to know the organizations and sites. Students taking the class for 3 credits will conduct weekly reflections and make targeted contributions to team projects. 

Note: More detailed description coming soon.

Addresses design inquiry in a studio format. In-depth consideration of selected issues of the built world. The problem may be prototypical or a particular aspect of a whole project, but is always interdisciplinary in nature.

We will start with gathering individual research interests per student in the realm of computation with an emphasis on prototype-based experiments, then develop a hypothesis from it, create a preliminary precedent review, derive a design-based experiment to test the hypothesis, evaluate the experiment and summarize the method and results in a technical paper. The process is accommodated by labs that support the development of the computational approach bridging digital and physical using electronics and fabrication to develop prototypes in the sense of embodied computation.

Specific expectations and/or deliverable product resulting from course:

An experimental physical prototype and a technical paper reporting on the design experiment.

The workshop will include travel to local mills to choose hardwood pieces.
Students work will be showcased at the 2022 International MassTimber Conference.

WARM WOOD is an experimental, hands-on workshop where students will work with solid wood manufacturing processes and hardwood ‘thinnings’—small diameter trees and logs that are typically cleared and left to waste in forest clearing. This workshop will investigate a thermal paradigm shift in architecture, where heating (and cooling) may be provided through and integrated into solid wood (mass timber) radiant surfaces. Foreshadowed perhaps in Archigram’s 1961 proposal for an electric “plug-in” log, we will explore the aesthetics, thermal performance, and possible forms of hydronic, radiant WARM WOOD. This may include—designing the mass plywood Stack as a wood/form composed of layers and densities of hardwood species, pushing the boundaries of what Knot/Not wood can be, and exploring Effective/Defective wood.

The workshop will conduct research on cross-laminated timber (CLT) and mass plywood panel (MPP) manufacturers to understand sustainable forest management best practices and the automated production processes used in these mass timber industries.  Our shared objective will be to engage critical thinking and creative design to explore radiant heating/cooling in mass timber construction as a comfortable, tactile and embodied system with significant aesthetic, energetic and environmental benefits. Students in the WARM WOOD Workshop will create, test and fabricate small-scale wooden ‘hot-objects’ and design proposals for WARM WOOD furniture/infrastructure elements that can be installed for energy retrofits in public housing. Tools will include drawing in section, 3D modelling, heat imaging (thermography) and physical prototyping with local hardwoods and Mass Plywood panels.

This workshop will provide local hardwoods, mass plywood panels, material supplies, hydronic radiant technologies, fittings, and tools to support prototype fabrication by participating students.

Note 12/8/23: The subject number for this class has changed from 4.181 to 4.185

The ODDS & MODS Castaways Workshop in Spring 2024 will address research, and fabrication of prototypes for scalable material circularity in architecture, focusing on the use of up-cycled and re-used clay and earth brick. Graduate students in the MArch program may elect to take this workshop together with the ODDS & MODS Option Studio or independently.

Preliminary study in preparation for the thesis for the SMArchS degree in architecture design. Topics include literature search, precedents examination, thesis structure and typologies, and short writing exercise.