Classes

This Option Studio operates within The Deep Time Project, an ongoing research framework that examines architecture as a polytemporal assemblage: the convergence of multiple time trajectories across vastly different temporal scales: from geological and planetary time to human, cultural, and political time as well as event-time and duration-time.

Deep Time Architecture examines architecture as a planetary process, asking how architectural cycles operate alongside—and within—Earth’s cycles. Particular attention is given to the temporal implications of material choice, construction techniques, and environmental context, situating architectural design within broader ecological and geological systems.

Building as Material Event challenges the conventional understanding of buildings as static objects, proposing instead that architecture be understood as a material event shaped by a multitude of agentic forces, human and more-than-human.

Deep Time Architecture positions architecture not only as a cultural practice, but as a mode of planetary engagement, one that demands expanded time-literacy and a renewed ethical responsibility toward the future.

The Temporal Commons is a multi-year research project that aims to bridge two millennia—one behind us & one to come—by integrating speculative futures with historical foundations. In doing so, it challenges the immediacy that dominates architectural discourse and the instinctive temporal narrowing of modernism’s legacy of presentism, proposing instead a pedagogy and practice grounded in the longue durée: an expanded historical horizon attentive to cycles of continuity, transformation, and stewardship.

This year’s studio, FLOOD, will situate architectural thinking within the fragile ecologies of mountain and riverine systems—landscapes increasingly vulnerable to flash flooding. Here, water is both a destructive force and a generative agent, revealing how architectural, legal, and ecological structures are intertwined. The studio will examine how forest depletion, timber extraction, and shortened building lifespans accelerate hydrological instability—how the rhythms of design and demolition reverberate through riparian systems. Through design speculation, students will explore how altering and extending the lifespan and regulatory contexts of materials and structures might stabilize these environments, fostering architectures of stewardship rather than extraction.

Operating between research & design, the studio will adopt a dual structure:

• As a seminar, students will pursue historical and theoretical investigations into topics such as riparian law, forest governance, cultural practices of riverine settlements, timber economies, and hydraulic science. These inquiries will establish a shared intellectual foundation and critical vocabulary.
• As a studio, students will translate this research into speculative architectural proposals—projects that test new modes of temporality, adaptation, and ecological reciprocity. Design will serve as both method and argument, transforming research into spatial, material, and environmental propositions.

Territory as Interior: Post-Carbon Landscapes of the Eume River explores the role of architecture as a mediator between ecologies and economies in the Eume River Basin, Galicia — a region once defined by coal production and now a hub for renewable energy. Treating the basin as a corridor of material, energy, and labor flows, the studio examines the social and ecological challenges of this transition and explores how architecture can shape a sustainable post-carbon future. Students will map territorial resources and economies to design projects that reactivate the region through new productive programs and constructions rooted in proximity resources. The goal is to define architectural interventions that reactivate the region’s economy and reveal how territorial conditions can be understood and experienced in a building’s interior space.

WASTE +1: UNWANTED WOOD is the third curriculum of the ODDS & MODS research and design initiative on material circularity in architecture. This Spring, we explore what is termed UNWANTED WOOD. This encompasses the enormous scale of wood construction waste and “low value” timber such as small diameter hardwoods, invasive species and “unmerchantable” trees that, if removed from forests, would improve forest health and resiliency. Students will engage the field of Discard Studies to question what wood “waste” might mean and stake out positions that redefine structural and spatial material value in larger cultural, economic and disciplinary contexts. Departing from Odds & Mods mono-material research, we invite students in WASTE +1 to bring a guest material, a plus one to their design work with unwanted wood.

Working first in the deciduous forests of New England, students will learn from precedents, explore unwanted wood hands-on, and fabricate experimental building components for a multi-use Forest Made cabin. The Studio will leverage MIT’s Circularity Toolkit and computational design to explore a fuzzy architectural form making that can accommodate varying inventories of waste wood. Our approach moves away from architecture made with physically continuous, uniformly milled wood. Instead, we will explore relationships of part to whole, density and distribution, in a transformative ‘alchemy’ where many small pieces of unwanted wood operate together by design. In the second half of the semester, students will fabricate prototypes and apply their findings to design a 15-meter clear-span pavilion of unwanted wood, scaled for collective programs of use that support bioregionalism in the Mediterranean Alpilles Forests of France.

Mandatory lottery process.

Note: Schedule change from W 9-12 to W 2-5 in room E14-251 (11/21/25)

This hands-on studio investigates how artistic, architectural and historiological methodologies can shape ecological and civic systems through the collaborative adaptation and construction of two mobile, site-specific chicken coops. Cross listed and co-taught with Nida Sinnokrot (ACT 4.s32 and Kate Brown (STS- STS.20), the course connects critical histories of urban farming in Boston with practical skills in community-responsive design and fabrication. Students will work to develop adaptive proposals for Eastie Farms and Common Good Farm that merge form, function, and narrative, while interrogating how food systems, civic infrastructures, and public space can be reimagined through creative, operational aesthetics.

This workshop represents the second part of Resilient Urbanism, a joint commitment with a community partner to envision and reimagine architectural infrastructure to support Common Good Coop a local community owned urban farm organization in the heart of Dorchester. Previously, students explored ideas pertaining to collective ownership structures, urban agricultural histories, the history of racial segregation in Boston. The outcomes produced a colorful, accessible zine documenting how a reader would navigate municipal code and regulation to start a community garden or urban farm along with a larger design proposal for the land in which the Co-Op occupies.

Undergraduates welcome.

Note for MArch students: Serves as an Urbanism elective

12/17/25 note: Room has changed to 5-216

Techniques of Resistance aims to create an archive of communal construction practices located across the heterogeneous territory of South America through the research and documentation of paradigmatic indigenous, vernacular, and popular buildings. This research will form the basis for the design proposal of a contemporary radical project that will emerge from these ancestral techniques and the cases studied in the course.

Architecture, when built, mobilizes a huge—and often invisible—network of resources, knowledge, beliefs, and people involved in the construction of a building. Techniques of Resistance will focus on the study of buildings that are strongly rooted in the environment and ecologies where they are located, with a sensitive understanding of communal cooperation and material cyclability. From the Uros Islands in Lake Titicaca and the Putucos in the Peruvian plateau, to the Shabonos and Churuatas’ large structures in the Amazon, the buildings that we will study offer a collection of construction techniques that serve as a resistance to the homogenization of architecture and the destruction of collective forms of construction.

The creation of an inventory of Techniques of Resistance presents the opportunity to broaden the definition of what a building could be in terms of its material technology and its role in a community, and will serve as the launching point for the development of a project that could redefine these techniques in a contemporary way through an understanding of material behavior, structural details, and geometry.

The course will consist of a combination of theoretical lectures, discussions, research, and design. During the first half of the semester, students will develop drawings and graphic essays as methods of research and documentation of the case studies. These deliverables will be compiled to create the archive of Techniques of Resistance, which will take the form of a publication.

In the second half of the semester, students will work on a conceptual design project for a communal building, structure, or infrastructure, proposing a critical revision of the cases and techniques previously documented. Considerable time will be given for the design process, working together to develop a conceptually and technologically strong project. Classes will take the form of workshop sessions, with design desk critiques and pin-ups. The projects will be communicated through large-scale, delicate, and well-developed drawings and, if possible, a small model.

The materials produced during the course—both the archive and the design projects—will be presented in an exhibition at the end of the fall semester. The course will value commitment, technical precision, detailed representation, and a radical and critical approach to design. Techniques of Resistance will also include contributions from guest speakers whose practices and built projects engage with the technologies and materials discussed during the semester.

The Temporal Commons is a multi-year research project that aims to bridge two millennia—one behind us & one to come—by integrating speculative futures with historical foundations. It will challenge the immediacy that dominates architectural discourse and the instinctive temporal narrowing of modernism’s legacy of presentism, proposing instead an approach grounded the expanded historical perspective of the longue dureé. The Temporal Commons workshops are offered in parallel to a sequence of research studios on topics in architecture and climate crisis. Each workshop adopts a historical perspective to pursue research in building materials, legal and regulatory frameworks, and environment.

The Spring 2026 version of the workshop will explore these areas in the context of mountain regions vulnerable to flash flooding and will focus on a range of topics including historical ecologies, timber extraction and use, riparian laws, cultural practices of riverine settlements, hydraulic science, property ownership, and other issues that will open new perspectives on the potentials for transformative architectural approaches.
Students may contribute to the workshop from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including building technology, design, history, material science, environmental science, computation, etc.

Students taking the Temporal Commons Option Studio are expected to also enroll in the workshop. 

Note for MArch students: Serves as a HTC Non-Restricted OR Restricted Elective

This seminar invites architects to step away from the design of buildings and toward the choreography of behaviors. Instead of treating game engines as tools to simulate physical architecture, we will explore them as spaces of agency, interaction, and emergent systems - approached through the lens of the Non-Playable Character (NPC).

Non-Player-Characters can be understood as supporting characters without agency in the design process - figures who move through, occupy, and animate spaces but do not participate in shaping them. In games like The Sims or Animal Crossing, their behaviors are bounded by pre-set logics: they water flowers where flowers exist, gather where furniture is placed, or follow circulation paths laid out by the player. This dynamic mirrors how some architectural users are often positioned: not as co-designers but as bodies that test, confirm, or reveal the affordances of constructed environments. Thinking of NPCs this way allows us to frame game engines and digital twins as laboratories where human and more-than-human presence is simulated, not negotiated, offering architects a way to study occupation and spatial legibility while questioning the confines of agency within design practice.

In the world of simulated environments, particularly in computer games, NPCs are not players that the world is actively designed around; they are zero-sum rules, behaviors, consequences. They react, they loop, and perhaps most importantly, they adapt. What happens when we begin to think of design not in terms of form, but in terms of relationships, reactions, and responses? This course frames the NPC as a design actor; a system-aware inhabitant of simulated space. Through the logic of NPCs, we’ll explore how spatial environments are less about static structures and more about the relationships, scripts, and feedback loops they host. We’ll treat NPCs as both products and producers of space, understanding them as narrative tools, systems-thinking proxies, and spatial collaborators.

Throughout the semester, we will be joined by guest speakers working in level design, game development, and interactive storytelling, who will share insights into the production of behavior-driven environments and the role of NPCs in shaping user experience. These conversations will give students a lens into game-design practices and help situate architectural thinking within broader world-building and digital design ecosystems.

Participants in the seminar will learn to prototype not walls, but worlds - not elevations, but behaviors - using the affordances of game engines to build interactive ecologies rather than inert environments. If architecture traditionally answers what stands still, dynamic environmental design methods ask: what moves, what interacts and why? The seminar introduces game engines, and their respective asset development pipelines, as design laboratories where spatial form, character logic, and environmental systems converge, enabling new ways to imagine architecture as dynamic, lived experience. We will investigate the different opportunities to explore complex relationships within constructed environments through the lens of changing and adaptive game environments, illustrate interactions, responses, and challenges within architectural space, and investigate the limits and possibilities within simulated space. Creating processes and pipelines that weave architectural observations and design strategies into the logics of game development, we explore the opportunities and limitations that derive from the conversion of 3D assets, material mapping, and digital environments into interactive and adaptive worlds.

Note for MArch students: Serves as a COMP Non-Restricted OR Restricted Elective

This workshop, along with MIT’s 4.154 studio taught by instructors Kennedy and Mueller, are integrated to support student research and learning beyond MIT. On Field Trips WASTE +1 students will learn from sawyers, indigenous knowledge keepers, foresters and manufacturers, and visit wood salvage yards and wood waste re-cycling centers. Studio students will travel to France over Spring Break, visiting manufacturers, artsis and experts in wood craft in Grenoble and Arles. Working with unwanted wood in climate threatened Mediterranean forests, studio students will select project sites and present their design work to support regional efforts for the creation of scalable, local industries for unwanted wood. Join us!

Note for MArch students: Serves as a BT elective credit (for 4.46x credit resolution or Certificate in Climate & Sustainability)

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.

Weds the theory and practice of city design and planning as a means of adaptation with the insights of ecology and other environmental disciplines. Presents ecological urbanism as critical to the future of the city and its design, as it provides a framework for addressing challenges that threaten humanity — such as climate change, rising sea level, and environmental and social justice — while fulfilling human needs for health, safety, welfare, meaning, and delight. Applies a historical and theoretical perspective to the solution of real-world challenges.