Classes

Practical experience through summer and January IAP internships secured by the student in the field of architecture, urbanism, digital design, art, or building technology. Before registering for this subject, students must have an offer from a company or organization and complete the Department of Architecture application signed by the advisor. Upon completion of the internship, students must submit an evaluation form available from the departmental academic office. Students are limited to a total of three approved experiences. 

Intensive introduction to architectural design tools and process, taught through a series of short exercises. Covers a broad range of topics relating to the discourse of geometry as the basis of architectural design process. Focuses on projective drawings, explicit 3D modeling, and the reciprocity between representation and materialization. Lectures, workshops, and pin-ups address the architectural arguments intrinsic to geometry and its representation. 

Intensive introduction to architectural design tools and process, taught through a series of short exercises. Covers a broad range of topics relating to the discourse of geometry as the basis of architectural design process. Focuses on projective drawings, explicit 3D modeling, and the reciprocity between representation and materialization. Lectures, workshops, and pin-ups address the architectural arguments intrinsic to geometry and its representation. 

Provides the material system knowledge and fabrication process skills to successfully engage with all areas of the shop, from precision handwork to multi-axis computer numerically controlled (CNC) machining. Progresses through a series of basic exercises that introduce the material and workflow, concluding with more complex problems that explore opportunities and issues specific to architecture.

Inspired by Charles and Ray Eames' canonical Powers of Ten, explores the relationship between science and engineering through the lens of design. Examines how transformations in science and technology have influenced design thinking and vice versa. Provides interdisciplinary skills and methods to represent, model, design and fabricate objects, machines, and systems using new computational and fabrication tools. Aims to develop methodologies for design research of interdisciplinary problems.

2/7/23: Note, recitation room for all is now 9-451

Inspired by Charles and Ray Eames' canonical Powers of Ten, explores the relationship between science and engineering through the lens of design. Examines how transformations in science and technology have influenced design thinking and vice versa. Provides interdisciplinary skills and methods to represent, model, design and fabricate objects, machines, and systems using new computational and fabrication tools. Aims to develop methodologies for design research of interdisciplinary problems.

Dedicated to bridging the gap between the virtual and physical world, the subject embraces modes of computation that hold resonance with materials and methods that beg to be computed. Students engage in bi-weekly exercises to solve complex design problems. Each exercise is dedicated to a different computation approach (recursion, parametric, genetic algorithms, particle-spring systems, etc.) that is married to a physical challenge, thereby learning the advantages and disadvantages to each approach while verifying the results in physical and digitally fabricated prototypes. Through the tools of computation and fabrication, it empowers students to design as architects, engineers and craftspeople.

Additional work required of students taking for graduate credit.

UG: 4.118, G: 4.117

Dedicated to bridging the gap between the virtual and physical world, the subject embraces modes of computation that hold resonance with materials and methods that beg to be computed. Students engage in bi-weekly exercises to solve complex design problems. Each exercise is dedicated to a different computation approach (recursion, parametric, genetic algorithms, particle-spring systems, etc.) that is married to a physical challenge, thereby learning the advantages and disadvantages to each approach while verifying the results in physical and digitally fabricated prototypes. Through the tools of computation and fabrication, it empowers students to design as architects, engineers and craftspeople.

Additional work required of student taking for graduate credit.

Provides instruction in designing and building a functional piece of furniture from an original design. Develops woodworking techniques from use of traditional hand tools to digital fabrication. Gives students the opportunity to practice design without using a building program or code. Surveys the history of furniture making. 

Provides instruction in designing and building a functional piece of furniture from an original design. Develops woodworking techniques from use of traditional hand tools to digital fabrication. Gives students the opportunity to practice design without using a building program or code. Surveys the history of furniture making. 

Additional work required of students taking for graduate credit. 

Fosters a holistic understanding of the architectural-building cycle, enabling students to build upon the history of design and construction to make informed decisions towards developing innovative building systems. Includes an overview of materials, processing methods, and their formation into building systems across cultures. Looks at developing innovative architectural systems focusing on the building envelope. Seeks to adapt processes from the aerospace and automotive industries to investigate buildings as prefabricated design and engineering assemblies. Synthesizes knowledge in building design and construction systems, environmental and structural design, and geometric and computational approaches.

Fosters a holistic understanding of the architectural-building cycle, enabling students to build upon the history of design and construction to make informed decisions towards developing innovative building systems. Includes an overview of materials, processing methods, and their formation into building systems across cultures. Looks at developing innovative architectural systems focusing on the building envelope. Seeks to adapt processes from the aerospace and automotive industries to investigate buildings as prefabricated design and engineering assemblies. Synthesizes knowledge in building design and construction systems, environmental and structural design, and geometric and computational approaches.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Core 2 provides students with conceptual tools and practical skills to address contemporary social and environmental issues with architecture’s means of operation. Considering various temporalities while designing an intervention in the Strand Theater in Dorchester, the studio aims to address diverse subjectivities and ecological practices through the organization of movement and flows of subjects and material. As a pedagogical strategy, the studio will distinguish three main systems of organization (program, circulation and structure) and encourage students to consider how they could overlap, be integrated, or remain differentiated as they relate to issues of order, choreography, tectonics, form, space, event and experience.

Builds on Core I skills and expands the constraints of the architectural problem to include issues of urban site logistics, cultural and programmatic material (inhabitation and human factors), and long span structures. Two related projects introduce a range of disciplinary issues, such as working with precedents, site, sectional and spatial proposition of the building, and the performance of the outer envelope. Emphasizes the clarity of intentions and the development of appropriate architectural and representational solutions.

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.

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.

“The birth of the body in the 17th century also marked its end, as the concept of the body would cease to define a specific organic reality, and become instead a political signifier of class relations, and of the shifting, continuously redrawn boundaries which these relations produce in the map of human exploitation.”

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch

Half a century ago the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose to have an abortion, a landmark decision known as Roe v. Wade. Throughout the past 50 years the decision has been challenged continuously, a tug o' war between different actors, instead of being firmly cemented as a human right and health care issue, culminating in the last decade in a particularly effective political tool. Today Texas, the second largest state and home to 30 million people (a size equaling half the population of Italy), succeeded in banning abortion. There are six additional bans that have been signed into law but are not currently in effect in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio. Yet According to the WHO (World Health Organization) restricting legal access to abortion does not decrease the need, but increases the number of womxn seeking illegal and unsafe abortion. Nearly a fourth of womxn in America will have an abortion by age 45, yet 6 states have only one abortion-care provider, an emergency situation which falls especially hard on people with low incomes. 

What does Space have to do with it?

Given Roe v. Wade, politicians have been seeking round-about ways of banning abortion, as they were unable to do so directly. Space became a primary weapon in the Texas Omnibus Abortion Bill, known as HB 2, signed into law in 2013, which required all abortions to be done in ambulatory surgical centers. Essentially mini-hospitals, these spaces have very specific code requirements regarding width and size of spaces, mechanical equipment and others. This automatically disqualified most if not all Planned Parenthood and other clinics. The entire established medical profession, both in Texas and nationally, disagreed that such provisions were necessary. The law faced immediate legal scrutiny, and in July 2016, the United States Supreme Court held some parts of the law to be unconstitutional in its decision on Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt. 

“When a State severely limits access to safe and legal procedures, women in desperate circumstances may resort to unlicensed rogue practitioners. ... Laws like H. B. 2 that 'do little or nothing for health, but rather strew impediments to abortion' cannot survive judicial inspection.” 

Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt

In addition to codes, the clinics have become a quite literal battle ground and both people seeking healthcare services, as well as healthcare providers are harassed and attacked by protesters who disagree with one’s choice over their own body. What should be a routine gesture in any developed country, let alone the richest in the world, that of seeking medical care, is more dangerous before one makes it to the door of the clinic, then anything happening inside. Nobody should be persecuted for seeking medical care, and nobody providing care, either. This results in added costs, stress or outright inability to access medicare care to those most in need and with the least resources, as well as severely limiting the day-to-day activities of abortion clinics and in time require them to shut down.

The studio will be working in partnership with sexual health care clinics in the US that struggle to exist within the restrictions in order to examine how law and space interact, understanding the ways in which space is being weaponized against the body.

In memory of co-creator Virgil Abloh 

Studio trip: during Spring Break

“To be truly visionary, we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.”
bell hooks

“A revolution on a world scale will take a very long time. But it is also possible to recognize that it is already starting to happen. The easiest way to get our minds around it is to stop thinking about revolution as a thing — “the” revolution, the great cataclysmic break—and instead ask “what is revolutionary action?” We could then suggest: revolutionary action is any collective action which rejects, and therefore confronts, some form of power or domination and in doing so, reconstitutes social relations—even within the collectivity—in that light. Attempts to create autonomous communities in the face of power, would, for instance, be almost by definition revolutionary acts. And history shows us that the continual accumulation of such acts can change (almost) everything.”
David Graeber

This studio explores the structural frameworks and spatial implications of the climate crisis in its various manifestations, as well as, crucially, the role of the architect within the climate movement. The ambition is to ask , as Denise Ferreira da Silva writes in Difference Without Separability, “..what sort of ethical opening can be envisioned with the dissolution of the grip of the Understanding and the releasing of The World to the imagination”.

The environmental crisis is not a question of scientific advancement, or innovation and just as little a design problem. It is a political crisis: we know what we should do, we know what we could do, we even know how to. Yet we don’t.

Predicated on the idea that "justice" does not have a clear definition or measure, the studio will be working closely with the Stanford Legal Design Lab to map and challenge political structures - historic and current ones, raising questions of policy, code and laws in direct relation to the environmental crisis.

With a sober yet imaginative sense of what is possible, the studio will identify and propose a range of projects at various scales, ranging from tactical strategies (Extinction Rebellion’s use of tensegrity structures being a prime example), to questions of managed retreat (specifically looking at the program recently launched by the Biden administration, the first of its kind, to fund the relocation of communities) and as far as A Global Moratorium on New Construction, questioning the architect’s very own role.

The studio will be working closely with marine biologist, policy expert and co-founder of the non-profit think tank Urban Ocean Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, as well as journalists, activists and community members.

“We are all projects of collective self-creation. What if, instead of telling the story about how our society fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?”
David Graeber & David Wengrow

This past century we have seen skyscrapers proliferate throughout cities worldwide. The realities of climate change, the global pandemic, the drive for renewable energy and their corollary in high-performance, energy efficient electrified buildings has precipitated a massive unprecedented movement towards the comprehensive repositioning of skyscrapers. Whether necessitated by obsolete and failing mechanical systems and building envelopes, by structures that require remediation and augmentation, by spaces and environments that are outdated and fail to meet contemporary market expectations — there are now powerful cultural, technical and economic forces that have catalyzed the need and desire for the radical transformation of existing tall and large-scale buildings. A global design and construction industry has emerged around the world to meet these fascinating opportunities.