Classes

The design of urban environments. Strategies for change in large areas of cities, to be developed over time, involving different actors. Fitting forms into natural, man-made, historical, and cultural contexts; enabling desirable activity patterns; conceptualizing built form; providing infrastructure and service systems; guiding the sensory character of development. Involves architecture and planning students in joint work; requires individual designs or design and planning guidelines.

Note: This class has some travel in Summer 2025 but will meet as a class in the Fall 2025 term. Limited enrollment by application only.

The global imagination of the Amazon river basin, covering around seven million square kilometers, is dominated by the tropical forest. However, cities and towns within this basin represent some of the fastest growing urban settlements on earth. Over the past decade, nearly one hundred Amazonian cities and towns have seen population growth rates of over 20 percent–far above the under-two percent average across Latin America. Manaus represents one of the cities seeing the most rapid change. With roughly 2.5 million inhabitants, it is today the largest city in the Amazon, located at what is popularly referred to as the “Encontro das Águas” or meeting of the rivers, namely the Negro River (one of the main tributaries and start of the Amazon River) and its confluence with the Solimões River. The city’s fluvial character has long situated it as a central meeting point for ancestral peoples as well as for foreigners who arrived in different migratory cycles. Critically, the Negro River’s annual variation (typically up to 14 meters) has translated into a unique—but also typical for the Amazon—landscape of the built and natural environment. Stilt housing (palafitas), flooded swamp-like forests (igapós), and long river channels (igarapés) traditionally define this landscape and speak to the fluvial culture of Manaus, as well as other urban agglomerations for which the city is a major reference.

Today, however, accelerating unplanned and ill-equipped urban growth in Manaus represents a major challenge to its resilience. Continued deforestation and environmental degradation of surrounding towns and villages, coupled by varied water-related risks from draught, flooding, and contamination, have translated into the displacement of Indigenous populations from traditional lands in the Amazon and migration into cities like Manaus. Adequate, resilient housing and infrastructure systems have not been able to keep pace with the demands of this growth. Irregular or informal housing represents more than half the housing stock in Manaus. The city’s waterways, the defining feature of its urban landscape, have become neglected and abused, evidenced in its treatment as the de facto sanitation “solution” for both untreated wastewater dilution and the accumulation of solid waste in igarapés. The waste clogging igarapés in turn represent immense vulnerabilities for the built environment during the rainy season, as Manaus discovered during the unprecedented floods the city experienced in 2021. Further, efforts to “upgrade” housing, most recently with major international funding, resettled communities living in palafitas into social housing that physically and culturally repress the city’s canals instead of incorporating them into improvements in the physical and socio-economic life of the city—creating further problems with flooding and heat within ill-designed buildings. This class aims to provide an alternative vision of housing and sanitation in this fluvial landscape, recognizing and leveraging the central character of water in Manaus to envision a more resilient Amazonian fluvial city. The products of this practicum/studio will be featured in a a major exhibit hosted by our client, the Inter-American Development Bank’s Cities Lab, at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 30) in Belém, Brazil in November 2025. In addition, the class instructors will host a symposium, ideally with the support of the Charles Correa (1955) Lecture on Housing and Urbanization lecture, featuring a lecture by instructors and panels featuring presentations by student participants on the arc of the class’s pedagogical journey from Manaus to Belém, featuring the Amazonian Fluvial City of the future.

Undergraduates welcome.

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 and to engineer collective values.

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. We will read constellations of texts that include economic anthropology (studying how economies are shaped by behavior, cultural values, and social relationships), work from other disciplines, and case-studies to invent atypical demand-chains, resist 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.

Each week, students are asked to produce written responses to the reading and to help guide discussion, researching and exploring examples and references to ground our work. The task is to produce a collective and cumulative body of knowledge. Together, we will read, write, and compile a compendium of research 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 and everything in between. 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.

Undergraduates also welcome.

Exquisite Simulation
Complex atmospheric and oceanic systems, changing through time, have been rendered brilliantly legible through sophisticated simulations by groups such as NASA absorbing decades of satellite data into distilled visual narratives:

• depictions of sea-level change allowing for melting ice, changing oceanic currents, and the spin of the earth, show surging swell on the east coast of Asia and the US, peaking at the faster-spinning equator
• the seasonal production and absorption of CO2 by diminishing biomass, augmented by dispersed plumes from increasing urban energy-use, are made legible as a decades-long planetary “breathing”
• economists have compiled eerily beautiful videos depicting filigree shipping lines, color-coded per commodity, as vectorial lines of desiring-production (Deleuze), demystifying billion-ton markets

Such elegant depictions offer startling and simple clarity to otherwise intractable systems. By offering visual legibility, such issues are absorbed into everyday thinking, despite their complexity.

By contrast, there are few sophisticated depictions of earth-surface exploitation and the ant-like spoil-heaping at civilizational scale of materials and energy – their re-distribution and transformation into flows of late-industrial “stuff”. Undergirding commodity markets is a seemingly limitless energy supply and a post-WW2 global free-trade economic order, both largely invisible given their ubiquity. 

Material Realism
We will learn principally from two masterful accounts of our energy and material civilization: The Many Lives of Carbon by Dag Olaf Hessen (all organically derived materiality), and The Material World by Ed Conway (focusing on 6 base mineral/metal commodities that essentially underpin the contemporary world – sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium), both engaging and accessible. 

Part 1 of the workshop (working individually or in pairs) will seek to de-mystify key aspects of contemporary materialism to graphically portray the fragility or threat implicit in its geo-political and environmental portent, evidently with focus on architectural materials/methods, against a backdrop of mounting environmental stringency and a doubling of buildings by mid-century. In other words, we’ll deploy architectural aptitude to offer striking new ways to capture the complex reality of our material world, which will likely benefit from being witnessed through time (for instance in the startling new efficiencies of copper production that seems to have even outpaced Moore’s Law). 

“Autarky is an economic system of self-sufficiency and limited trade. A country is said to be in a complete state of autarchy if it has a closed economy, which means that it does not engage in international trade with any other country.” 
- Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations

Part 2 of the workshop will focus on the consequences when the assumptions of limitless material and energy availability are disrupted, as during Covid (supply-chain and labor disruption), or the Ukrainian war (imminent European recession through loss of natural gas), or the current imposition of tariffs and the vision of autarky that they imply – a significant rebuke to what has been a pervasive global free-trade hegemony. Akin to putting sticky tape on a balloon and then inflating it, so restrictions of material and energy supply necessarily distort architectural form (no-labor reconstruction in Ukraine, for instance). Copper might be mined and crushed in Chile, the dust shipped to China for refining, shipped back to the US to be drawn into wires, before being trucked to an east coast building site subject to US electrical codes; what happens when any of the regimes become autarkic?

Each student will be asked to develop or analyze an architectural element or assembly that allows for varying degrees of autarky in being able to adjust the material and/or energy assumptions of the project as parametric variants: what design and technical aptitude would this require? 
 

Preparatory research development leading to a well-conceived proposition for the MArch design thesis. Students formulate a cohesive thesis argument and critical project using supportive research and case studies through a variety of representational media, critical traditions, and architectural/artistic conventions. Group study in seminar and studio format, with periodic reviews supplemented by conference with faculty and a designated committee member for each individual thesis.

Through formal analysis and discussion of historical and theoretical texts, seminar produces a map of contemporary architectural practice. Examines six pairs of themes in terms of their recent history: city and global economy, urban plan and map of operations, program and performance, drawing and scripting, image and surface, and utopia and projection.

Aims to create a discourse across the various SMArchS discipline groups that reflects current Institute-wide initiatives; introduce SMarchS students to the distinct perspective of the different SMarchS discipline groups; and provide a forum for debate and discussion in which the SMarchS cohort can explore, develop and share ideas. Engages with interdisciplinary thinking, research, and innovation that is characteristic of MIT's culture and can form a basis for their future work. 

Gives a critical orientation towards a career in architectural practice. Uses historical and current examples to illustrate the legal, ethical and management concepts underlying the practice of architecture. Emphasis on facilitating design excellence and strengthening connections between the profession and academia. 

This is a fantastic course for those of you that are interested in investigating the breadth of positions, systems, and values that constitute the contemporary urban condition and its spatial manifestations. Not only is the course designed to help students both understand and represent—through drawing—the forces at play that shape our cities and the planet at large, but it also provides space for you to speculate on alternatives for what it might mean to inhabit our planet more responsibly. In short, the class is a great chance to conduct research and advocate for an urban/territorial/planetary concern of yours in conversation with an array of theories and real-world practices that reflect the complexity, nuance, and often obscured realities of urban production. 

While the course is requisite for incoming SMArchS Urbanism students, it is open to all MArchs, MCPs, and urbanists alike—past iterations of the class have benefitted greatly from the variety of perspectives and backgrounds that each student brings to the table. It is also a great chance for students that are thinking about their thesis, or other research projects, to enrich their work through explorations in theory and representation. This course also fulfills the seminar requirement for the Urban Design certificate (see the architecture website for more detail) and can be used for the M.Arch urbanism elective.

MIT Certificate Protected Syllabus

Introduces methods for observing, interpreting, and representing the urban environment. Students draw on their senses and develop their ability to deduce, question, and test conclusions about how the built environment is designed, used, and valued. The interrelationship of built form, circulation networks, open space, and natural systems are a key focus. Supplements existing classes that cover theory and history of city design and urban planning and prepares students without design backgrounds with the fundamentals of physical planning. Intended as a foundation for 11.329.

Students investigate how landscapes and cities shape them — and vice versa — by examining the literature of walking and the environments in which they move. Through extensive walking, students explore the city to analyze its design and varied histories, drawing on cartography, art, sociology, and memory to create fresh narratives. Students write architecture and city criticism, design "story maps," and are invited to walk as an art practice. Emphasis is on the relationship between the human body and freedom, or a lack thereof, and between pathways and the complex emotions that emerge from traversing them.