Classes

Preliminary study in preparation for the thesis for the SMArchS degree in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. Topics include literature search, precedents examination, thesis structure and typologies, and short writing exercise.

Preliminary study in preparation for the thesis for the SMArchS degree in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. Topics include literature search, precedents examination, thesis structure and typologies, and short writing exercise.

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

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

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

Required for doctoral students in HTC as a prerequisite for work on the doctoral dissertation. Prior to candidacy, doctoral students are required to write and orally defend a proposal laying out the scope of their thesis, its significance, a survey of existing research and literature, the methods of research to be adopted, a bibliography and plan of work. Work is done in consultation with HTC Faculty, in accordance with the HTC PhD Degree Program guidelines.

Required for doctoral students in HTC as a prerequisite for work on the doctoral dissertation. Prior to candidacy, doctoral students are required to write and orally defend a proposal laying out the scope of their thesis, its significance, a survey of existing research and literature, the methods of research to be adopted, a bibliography and plan of work. Work is done in consultation with HTC Faculty, in accordance with the HTC PhD Degree Program guidelines.

Required for doctoral students in HTC as a prerequisite for work on the doctoral dissertation. Prior to candidacy, doctoral students are required to write and orally defend a proposal laying out the scope of their thesis, its significance, a survey of existing research and literature, the methods of research to be adopted, a bibliography and plan of work. Work is done in consultation with HTC Faculty, in accordance with the HTC PhD Degree Program guidelines.

Required for doctoral students in HTC as a prerequisite for work on the doctoral dissertation. Prior to candidacy, doctoral students are required to write and orally defend a proposal laying out the scope of their thesis, its significance, a survey of existing research and literature, the methods of research to be adopted, a bibliography and plan of work. Work is done in consultation with HTC Faculty, in accordance with the HTC PhD Degree Program guidelines.

Required for doctoral students in HTC as a prerequisite for work on the doctoral dissertation. Prior to candidacy, doctoral students are required to write and orally defend a proposal laying out the scope of their thesis, its significance, a survey of existing research and literature, the methods of research to be adopted, a bibliography and plan of work. Work is done in consultation with HTC Faculty, in accordance with the HTC PhD Degree Program guidelines.

Required for doctoral students in HTC as a prerequisite for work on the doctoral dissertation. Prior to candidacy, doctoral students are required to write and orally defend a proposal laying out the scope of their thesis, its significance, a survey of existing research and literature, the methods of research to be adopted, a bibliography and plan of work. Work is done in consultation with HTC Faculty, in accordance with the HTC PhD Degree Program guidelines.

Required for doctoral students in HTC as a prerequisite for work on the doctoral dissertation. Prior to candidacy, doctoral students are required to write and orally defend a proposal laying out the scope of their thesis, its significance, a survey of existing research and literature, the methods of research to be adopted, a bibliography and plan of work. Work is done in consultation with HTC Faculty, in accordance with the HTC PhD Degree Program guidelines.

Design+ is a first-year undergraduate advising seminar made up of approximately 30 first-year undergraduate students, 4 faculty advisors, and 4 or more undergraduate associate advisors.

The academic program is flexible to account for diverse student interests within the field of design, and students work with advisors to select a mix of academic and experiential opportunities.

Design+ assists incoming first-year students in their exploration of possibilities in design across MIT. 

Design+ includes a dedicated study space, kitchen, lounge, and a variety of maker spaces which offer Design+ students a second campus home for making and braking.

Design+ introduces first year undergraduate students to opportunities 
Design+ around design such as internships, international travel, and 
Design+ UROPs with some of the most exciting design labs at MIT

For registration and other administrative questions contact The Office of the First Year.

Design+ is a first-year undergraduate advising seminar made up of approximately 30 first-year undergraduate students, 4 faculty advisors, and 4 or more undergraduate associate advisors.

The academic program is flexible to account for diverse student interests within the field of design, and students work with advisors to select a mix of academic and experiential opportunities.

Design+ assists incoming first-year students in their exploration of possibilities in design across MIT. 

Design+ includes a dedicated study space, kitchen, lounge, and a variety of maker spaces which offer Design+ students a second campus home for making and braking.

Design+ introduces first year undergraduate students to opportunities 
Design+ around design such as internships, international travel, and 
Design+ UROPs with some of the most exciting design labs at MIT

For registration and other administrative questions contact The Office of the First Year.

Design+ is a first-year undergraduate advising seminar made up of approximately 30 first-year undergraduate students, 4 faculty advisors, and 4 or more undergraduate associate advisors.

The academic program is flexible to account for diverse student interests within the field of design, and students work with advisors to select a mix of academic and experiential opportunities.

Design+ assists incoming first-year students in their exploration of possibilities in design across MIT. 

Design+ includes a dedicated study space, kitchen, lounge, and a variety of maker spaces which offer Design+ students a second campus home for making and braking.

Design+ introduces first year undergraduate students to opportunities 
Design+ around design such as internships, international travel, and 
Design+ UROPs with some of the most exciting design labs at MIT

For registration and other administrative questions contact The Office of the First Year.

Welcome to MIT! If you are coming because you love building, let this seminar be your red carpet. You will be meeting once a week with two faculty, Profs. Steve Leeb (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) and Les Norford (Architecture), who love building cool systems. We will learn about MIT together while we are understanding and building exciting systems that use and convert energy. We will drive an electric go-cart and compare it to a gasoline-powered vehicle. You will design and build your own set of stereo speakers and a power amplifier to audio system you can keep. We'll look at motors and circuits to control these devices. We will be working in an amazing new prototyping laboratory, and you will get to develop an energy experiment of your own design. Join us!

_________________________

Les Norford will be the advisor to this section 4.A22. Les is a mechanical engineer who teaches in the Department of Architecture and has a special interest in environmental issues. He's studied buildings and how people live and work in them around the world. Les earned his BS in engineering science from Cornell University and his PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University.

All Advising Seminars receive six units of credit and are graded P/D/F.

Welcome to MIT! If you are coming because you love building, let this seminar be your red carpet. You will be meeting once a week with two faculty, Profs. Steve Leeb (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) and Les Norford (Architecture), who love building cool systems. We will learn about MIT together while we are understanding and building exciting systems that use and convert energy. We will drive an electric go-cart and compare it to a gasoline-powered vehicle. You will design and build your own set of stereo speakers and a power amplifier to audio system you can keep. We'll look at motors and circuits to control these devices. We will be working in an amazing new prototyping laboratory, and you will get to develop an energy experiment of your own design. Join us!

_________________________

Les Norford will be the advisor to this section 4.A22. Les is a mechanical engineer who teaches in the Department of Architecture and has a special interest in environmental issues. He's studied buildings and how people live and work in them around the world. Les earned his BS in engineering science from Cornell University and his PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University.

All Advising Seminars receive six units of credit and are graded P/D/F.

UG: 4.s00 | G: 4.s12

In his essay, “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin writes: “it is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.” The same can be said of the typographic designer who must give an idea visual form: form beholden to the syntactic constraints of whatever shape it must materialize in, whether as a series of marks etched into stone, a block of text living in the codex, or a pixel activated on a screen. How does the grammar behind tool and substrate set the rules for translation? When do these translations fail, and why—and what do those failures generate instead? How can translations, good and bad, productively challenge an idea’s core?

Part visual language study, part workshop, this class will iterate around translation as method and practice for typographic experimentation. Using language as an organizing framework and structure, students will engage with calligraphic form, modular alphabets, and notational conventions and experiment with 1:1 translations, direct transpositions, and transliterations. By the end of the term, students will have researched and developed a project that translates a known and observed system into a visual language of their own creation. This will be supplemented by theoretical writing from artists, writers, and technologists that may include Ferdinand de Saussure, Walter Benjamin, Albrecht Dürer, Donald Knuth, Charles Gaines, Tan Lin, Louis Lüthi, Édouard Glissant, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Students can expect to learn basic typographic rules and typesetting techniques.

Note:  For spring 2022 BSAD and Design minor students can take 4.s00 as a restricted elective in place of 4.043. Consult your advisor for details. Design Intelligence is a new subject that introduces students to a practical, hands-on approach to machine learning and artificial intelligence. Providing a new lens through which to engage machine learning through aesthetic, form-finding and behavior, the course introduces students to topics such as k-nearest neighbors, regression and classification, neural networks, and generative adversarial networks, as well as how to collect and prepare data for training their own models. Situated within a graphic, product and interaction design context, students will learn to develop a new kind of creative practice that not only actively engages in shaping the future of artificial intelligence, but is also instrumental in addressing its biases and failures in creating a more equitable and just society. 

Focuses on understanding the emerging field of human-centered design and its approach to real-world design challenges. Through group working sessions, design reviews, and presentations by leading design practitioners, thinkers, and business leaders, the class explores core methodologies on how design brings value to human experiences and to the contemporary marketplace. 

For Spring 2023, serves as 4.051 restricted elective.

This part-seminar, part-workshop looks to identifying changing patterns of creativity across the arts under influence of new technical apparati (phono, photo, filmic…) looking to trace the emergence of rule-based generative processes and their accelerating proclivity via current computational media. While there is evidence of parametric praxis as far back as the Roman engineer, Vitruvius, and iterative geometric processes implicit in historic Islamic and Oriental art forms, it is in the late 19th century and early 20th century that vivid new modes of auto-poietic praxis take hold, as if aspiring to a far greater degree of machinic salience. The resulting artworks - literary, sonic, kinetic, plastic - quite radical in their disjunctive form, were often scorned as bizarre in their novelty and aspiration. Yet their influence, looking to exceed intuition and direct creative aptitude in favor of symbiotic (human-machine) drives, was formative for modes of avant-garde production early C20th, and extends to ever-more normative generative practices late C20th and early C21st. As computation then absorbs all such prior disruptive apparati, imbuing them with powerful generative potency, so such lineage seems destined to become established, even dominant, in mainstream patterns of production and reception. We will look at a variety of cultural fields, but architecture will be the prime focus here, since despite being held to be slow to adapt to technical change, one finds pioneering works that offer plastic counterpoint to more agile literary or kinetic art forms...

This seminar component encourages looking backwards to vivid pioneers of auto-poiesis (in areas of your choosing), intending that you recognize that such creative method is vital to the final artwork (how working in a new manner leads to a new art-form). But pivoting to the workshop component, this prompts a looking forwards in you attempting precisely-indeterminate formative-isms, deploying such insights into creative experimentation via a now-digital imagination (whether using a computer or not). The lineage of experimental creativity intends to offer framing to new aptitude and imagination, and to theorize changing artistic motivations under influence of emerging technologies, as a means to release auto-poietic aptitude in your own work. At root is the idea that creativity or design is not static, but shifts through history under influence of the various technical systems that society adopts, none more powerful than the  current shift to digital media. This invites profound changes in cultural production and reception, aided by gaining insight into prior autopoietic habitudes as a key to emerging creative drives: it requires technical acuity and aesthetic openness.

This course looks at interrelating critical theory, economic anthropology, and case studies in the built environment to understand how architects might use market tools to invent new kinds of work by resisting typical client/service models.

While the weekly assignments are quite structured, the final project is relatively open-ended, allowing students to produce a research dossier (an essay, collected interviews, archival research, etc.) that demonstrates a contribution to the interdisciplinary framework developed within the class.

This class is a pre-approved Computation elective for Spring 2023.

Though industrial robotic arms are common tools for automotive and engineering practices, they are an emerging subfield in architecture and design. Academic research labs and explorative design practices have demonstrated the power of robotic fabrication for mass-customized design and construction. Still, there is a high barrier to entry to the computational methods used to control these machines.

Understanding the fundamentals of robotic programming is key to unlocking the potential applications of robotics in architecture and design. This workshop introduces the MIT Department of Architecture's robotic arm through parametric design tools and digital fabrication. We will explore architectural robotics through a series of short projects that will introduce users to the basic operations of robotic arms.

In collaboration with the University of Cape Town, this three-week workshop will focus on the design of affordable and mixed-income housing in Woodstock and Salt River, two of South Africa’s oldest suburbs. Situated near the city center, adjacent to District Six and other neighborhoods that witnessed the brutality of the Group Areas Act (1950), both Woodstock and Salt River are home to a diverse community of Capetonians who rely on the many factories and industrial sites scattered along the railway. While the apartheid state failed to divide their lands and displace their inhabitants, rising property prices today continue to jeopardize their cultural and economic diversity.

For their narrow streets, Victorian row houses, and location at the base of Table Mountain have attracted several predatory developments that accelerated the grabbing of properties owned by working-class residents and small businesses. Raising the flags of gentrification are countless refurbishments, new developments, and ‘beautification’ projects that have, consistently, prompted the involuntary displacement of those who can no longer afford any proximity to their own heritage.

With housing shortage in Cape Town sounding the alarm of permanent displacement, the need for affordable developments (and policies that regulate access to them) is clear. But in the absence of substantive frameworks that reclaim the right to housing, this need has too often been mitigated by mediocre provision schemes that achieve affordability at the expense of quality and social/spatial justice. Such is the case of the infamous “Reconstruction and Development Program,” which dotted the edges of the city with poorly designed and executed single story houses (later known as the notorious RDP houses). This inability to generate convincing urban alternatives rallied under a banner of resistance several NGOs and activist groups that mobilized in the last few years for the provision of medium to high density social housing that is affordable, well-designed, and well-located. In 2016, the “Reclaim the City” movement succeeded in its campaign to earmark city-owned parcels for social housing, protecting them from the grip of pure profit. And by 2019, the City of Cape Town identified several sites in Woodstock and Salt River, with new housing typologies yet to be realized.

In building on these recent developments, the workshop will propose and design affordable strategies that leverage the potential of public-private partnerships. Through meetings and collaborations with stakeholders, community members, and housing experts in Cape Town, students will develop mixed-income and mixed-use approaches that champion the right to the city.

Together, these proposals will center on the role of housing in combatting involuntary displacement, generating new modes of social and economic mixity, improving the inner-city fabric, and providing equitable typologies that maximize spatial quality and opportunities for income generation.

The workshop will culminate in an exhibition, a public presentation, and a publication.

Travel to Cape Town June 12-July 4.

Master/Piece workshop will study 3 buildings that are considered seminal in contemporary architecture, built by architects that remain active in practice. We will discuss why those works are key and the chain of reactions and trends that detonate in architecture culture, their traces and impact in peers and in other projects. We will focus deep in the conceptual to constructive scales and the masters will join the class to culminate the analysis and conversation.