Classes

2/24/23 - class will now meet in room 5-216

Master/Piece wordshop will study 6 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.

Visiting masters: Alberto Campo Baeza, Diébédo Francis Kéré & Alejandro Aravena

Fabrication workshop in madrid ensamble fabrica. We will produce a mineral composite envelope and build a full-scale prototype.

This course continues the Imprint publication workshops begun in 2020, which led to the student-designed and produced Imprint 01, 02, and 03. This class will help conceive the Imprint 04 publication, and a student team will be hired from its members to produce the publication in Summer 2023. This spring's class will function in a workshop format with three primary goals: 1.) To help students engage and acquire skills needed to conceive and produce a complex graphic design project like Imprint; 2.) To help students ask, and answer fundamental questions guiding this year's publication’s strategy: What can a book be? How do individuals curate a selection of essays in an edited volume or journal of a larger and complex community?; 3.) To catalyze exploration, and engagement with the intricate connections between text and image authorship in publications across design history. The class will be an opportunity (for all students in each graduate degree area in the Department of Architecture) to reflect on previous Imprint issues, revise the project’s structure and future goals, and as a way for new students to get involved in bringing the Imprint 04 project forward in summer 2023.

This course continues the Imprint publication workshops begun in 2020, which led to the student-designed and produced Imprint 01 & 02 last year. This class will help conceive the Imprint 03 publication, and a student team will be hired from its members to produce the publication in Summer 2022. This spring's class will function in a workshop format with three primary goals: 1.) To help students engage and acquire skills needed to conceive and produce a complex graphic design project like Imprint; 2.) To help students ask, and answer fundamental questions guiding this year's publication’s strategy: What can a book be? Who decides? And how does one curate a selection of essays in an edited volume or journal?; 3.) To catalyze exploration, and engagement with the intricate connections between text and image authorship in publications across design history. The class will be an opportunity (for all students in each graduate degree area in the Department of Architecture) to reflect on previous Imprint issues, revise the project’s structure and future goals, and as a way for new students to get involved in bringing the Imprint 03 project forward in summer 2022.

This Fall workshop will work on the design and production of a paneling system for a sound installation designed by faculty and Belluschi Fellow, Deborah Garcia, for exhibition in Spring 2023. The installation centers on the design of an interactive sound system and seating space. This course will focus on the development of shop drawings, material tests, and a production plan for the fabrication of the installation’s paneling system. We will work with material donated by the Ecovative Mycelium Foundry and will work closely with an engineer to develop a cladding system that utilizes a combination of wood and mycelium. Students will work collaboratively with the faculty member as well as an engineer, a software developer, and a robotics fellow to define the project's formal and material details.

Master/Piece wordshop will study 6 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.

2/9/23 note: Schedule change:

Lecture: M 2-5 in N52-399
Lab: F 2-5 in N52-399

This design-research and fabrication workshop invites both students with research interests and those with fabrication skills to join in the design development of an installation in the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. The class will travel to Venice to install over spring break.

The approved installation design proposal combines two-dimensional line drawings of maps and timelines of the African diaspora into a three-dimensional space-time field centered on the diasporic settlement of diasporic working women.

For a brief historical period during the COVID-19 pandemic, domestic workers were recognized as “essential workers,” however, the period of honoring them for the risks they took so that the privileged class could remain safe at home was brief and eclipsed by the rush to normalcy. Domestic workers are essential to the functioning of capitalist economies, yet most receive low wages and lack access to critical services.

The workshop will consist of interrogation, development, and fabrication in two tracks: one for the development, and material fabrication of a design concept; and one for research on women in the African diaspora, cities, settlement, and labor. Both tracks are essential to the installation and development of the design components. Students may opt to focus on one or the other.

Workshop participants will continue the development of an approved design concept and material studies from the 2023 IAP on the same subject. The goal is to produce a full-scale woven construction that concretizes linear drawings and maps in explorations of cord (lengths of thread, filament, and rope) held in tension by an armature supported from above.

The BLACK City explores the dynamics of race, housing segregation, and Black community building in American cities over time. The BLACK City Editions explore both general and specific conditions of Blackness in America by representing socio-spatial phenomena that reflect customs, laws, and events at the national and local scales from gentrification to restrictive covenants to racial expulsions and sundown towns to the enduring topographies of segregation and integration.

This workshop extends research on the Black City through the lens of gender.

The intent of the workshop is to spatialize the systems that produce racialized female identities while also revealing female agents and moments of transactional agency within architectural and urban contexts. The installation as an architectural object will reveal hidden systems and provide a setting for participants to explore the process of tracing pasts, situating presents, and projecting futures.

Undergraduates welcome.
 

“Architecture &” is a course framework that situates architecture (and cities) relative to a shifting subject that ranges from material, light, use, limits, time, memory, narrative, posthumanism, thresholds, etc.

This course is an exploration of the later stages of architectural design that occurs in architectural detailing and construction mock-ups. To initiate this course, students will select a building threshold from a project that they have previously designed and use it as a basis to produce 5-10 new threshold variations. The threshold variations will be a detailed response and study of select architectural precedents. For the final project, students will select one threshold design to build a physical model at full (or half) scale.

This course offers students the opportunity to explore the design potential passages, openings and closures. Choosing and isolating the threshold allows for an in-depth study of the passage between interiors, and exteriors, and the space in between. Each threshold is on the verge of; as illustrated in Marcel Duchamp’s door 11 rue Larrey from 1927, it is both an opening to and closure of and holds the space between two conditions.

Students will design and detail openings in response to atmospheres and spaces and inhabitants. Students will also explore multiple design options as each design will be approached through a different tectonic lens. Students will not redesign the entire building—only the threshold. Since the threshold is from a design that each student gave much consideration previously, each speculation on the threshold design hints toward alternative design approaches and potentials for building design.

The approach to tectonic studies is informed by a range of precedents from literature, mathematics, art, music and architecture. In art and music, instructional compositions informed by repetition, variation, and singularity (uniqueness) from the chance compositions of John Cage to the wall drawings of Sol Le Witt. Other models for this exploration are the books Elements of Style by Raymond Queneau and 99 Variations on a Proof by Philip Ording, two works that begin with a simple premise that is reinvented one hundredfold by a new set of principles, techniques, contexts, and histories.

Queneau the cofounder of OuLiPo (workshop of potential literature) begins with a narrative, while Ording begins with a theorem, yet each uses the same method to generate new perspectives of the original through an exploration of style. The OuLiPo group applied constraints and mathematical rules to conceive of and structure narratives. Architectural precedents will be drawn from editions of GA Detail, Global Architecture, El Croquis, and when possible, detailed vernacular, traditional African, Islamic, Japanese, and European examples. 
 

A workshop that explores the identity of Western/Modern Architecture through four lenses (Objects, Modes, Positioning, and Agency) from a cultural studies perspective. In each section, we will analyze the ways that the field of architecture mediates and constructs spatial forms and spatial knowledge.

In Objects and Modes, a range of material tropes may be explored from machine aesthetics, structural rationalism, vaporization (transparency, whiteness), object v. space, model v. analogue, abstraction v. ornamentation, etc.  In Positioning and Agency, polemics by which the discipline is identified may be explored including autonomy, agency, socio-spatial subjectivities, public v. private hierarchies, duration v. temporality, etc. 

The course will be structured by group discussions of assigned readings and precedents that will inform several experiments in form that explore threshold conditions defined by each student. All experiments will be modeled and represented orthographically. Each student will select one experiment to be fabricated (at a scale to be determined). The goal is to parallel the analysis of texts with an analysis through making.

How can we expand the capacity for architecture as a discipline to address heterogeneous visions and desires? The spaces we inhabit are social constructions that begin in the mind before they are materialized as objects and spaces. This course explores connections between thought and forms in a non-linear manner along two adjacent and conversant paths. Each theme introduced is considered through the lens of the standard cannon of Western/Modern Architecture: Architecture + “X”. The primacy of Western/Modern thought and forms has been predicated on an (often) absent “other.” In a turn toward a heterogeneous understanding of the discipline, the themes are also considered through the lens of power relations and hierarchies ( i.e. what the cannon leaves out: Architecture + “X” + subordination).

Readings and discussions are intended to guide discussions and production that asks “What is below the surface of forms (objects, buildings, spaces)? Readings encourage looking beneath the formal language of objects, buildings, and spaces, to ask “By what social relations and confluence of ideas did this come to be?” Assignments encourage looking at the formal language of objects, buildings, and spaces, to encourage individual formal explorations of the themes and issues uncovered in the texts. The workshop is intended to encourage productive discussions between the two modalities on the creation of ideas and forms historically and in the moment.

Note: this subject was formerly listed under subject number 4.164, but students should register for 4.s15 instead. The class should appear as an available class in the Registration system by Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2022.

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.  Requires individual designs or design and planning guidelines.

Each day we wake up at the foothills of a new mountain of air, with a stream running above.

Use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to study watersheds, then HYSPLIT (from NOAA’s Air Resources Lab) to analyze structures in the air and visualize our web of ecological impacts.

Engage with fluid models, as well as forecast and climate data to understand the relation of mass and circulation in the atmosphere.

We will produce our own Atlas of Geographical Wonders.

Meet in the GIS lab of Rotch Library (first meeting) and Fluids Lab of Building 54.

2/3/23 Note: Room change from 5-216 to 7-429 (Long Lounge)

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

Geo—Design aims to articulate the “geo—” (from the Greek gaîa for 
“earth”) and to bring it to bear on the agency of design in a world facing climate change. Such ability to respond, or response-ability, requires a  shift from the framing of the planet as “global” and “common” to ground, situated, and diffract geography, climate, and technology. Geo—Design  also begs a transformation of the framework through which design engages the Earth and climate––of the concepts, scales, domains, modes  of representation, methodologies, and formats of work. Approached as such, design acts as media between the geographic and technological, within what it means to represent and to live with the Earth in ethical  deliberation and in aesthetic practice. 

Act I: What planet are you on? The Globe as Data Model 

From this critical moment on, the good old-fashioned Earth may no longer be envisaged in terms of natural dimensions, but is rather to be conceived of as a colossal work of art. It was no longer a foundation but instead a construct; it was no longer a basis but instead a vessel. 
― Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1968.  

The term “geodesign” has a history in the global vision of a “Whole Earth” or “Spaceship Earth.” In the Cold War, the large-scale deployment of satellite technologies and increased computational capacity made it possible to view the Earth as an interconnected whole, both visually—through the iconic “blue marble” photograph—and conceptually, through the use of global computer models and simulations. In landscape architecture, regional land use and planning, and other environmental design fields, the term geodesign, as framed by Jack Dangermond and Carl Steinetz, has come to describe the application of such computational tools, and in particular geographic information sciences, to model, visualize, and analyze ecological systems within design workflows.  

The climate crisis has brought the Earth once again as a site, system, and an artifact for disciplinary thought and action. Over the past thirty years since the establishment of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has gone from 352 Parts Per Million (PPM) to 417 PPM in 2022. In 2006, Paul Crutzen—Nobel Laureate in chemistry and coiner of the term “Anthropocene”—noted with alarm the “grossly unsuccessful” policy efforts to get anthropogenic greenhouse emissions under control and posited climate engineering—the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the environment—as the “escape route.” Beyond mitigation and adaptions, geoengineering has come to refer to heterogenous, mostly hypothetical, set of technologies that extend modern weather control technologies—ranging from cloud seeding to mimicking volcanic eruptions with aerosol stratospheric injection through Cold War large-scale weather Arctic modification schemes, and carbon dioxide sequestration in the deep layers of the earth and the ocean.  

Critics on the Left have warned that with it’s easier to imagine the deliberate transformation of the entire planet than that of our political economy. Enthusiasts for a ‘good’ Anthropocene have seen in “today’s unprecedented crises an opportunity to invest in nature,” in the words of the new European Bauhaus Earth initiative; an enthusiasm echoed in other Masterplanet portfolios of project pitches. Beyond critics and enthusiasts of geoengineering, the abstraction of climate change into an archetypal global problem has shaped a planetary promissory response, with little attention to the specificities of the geographies of deployment or to the histories of each climate technology.  

No one lives on the globe. This model, we are often reminded, is a hypothetical Archimedean viewpoint of an outside from which an “objective” agent, standing at a point that is firm and immovable, can move the entire construct. The global imaginary had legitimatized Imperialism and the forced displacement of matter—humans, plants, animals, molecules, and technologies—across the planet. The depleted globe has since become a reflection of the paradoxicality of global governance—a scientific consensus on global warming and the failure to take action on the climate. Where does geo-design “land” amidst and beyond the violence of such planetary abstraction?  

Act II: Down to Earth

There is no Earth corresponding to the infinite horizon of the Global, but at the same time the Local is much too narrow, too shrunken, to accommodate the multiplicity of beings belonging to the terrestrial world. 
― Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, 2018. 

The climate crisis calls for a form of inquiry and engagement that is down to Earth.  
The course Geo—Design is an inquiry into models and imaginaries that seeks to open other practices on how to engage with climate, geography, and design. In doing so, geo-design reckons with geopolitics—both the old geopolitics of nation states competing for their interests and a new called for geo-politics, which “is not about human politics overlaid on the Earth’s static frame, but politics concerning contradictory portions, visions, aspects of the Earth and its contending humans.” In this respect, the course asks: How might designers work assiduously from the midst of such systems and situations—grapple with and inherit the planetary mine and plantation—to reclaim a future still worth living? How does design think speculatively (like a planet?) around proposed interventions in earth systems? And what kinds of worlds are such proposed programs or projects likely to produce 200 years from now? 

Act II is informed by contemporary scholarship on the Earth, such as the “terrestrial,” “planetary,” and “world,” and explores approaches to climate and technology in geo-philosophy, geo-humanities, geo-aesthetics, and geo-engine. In particular, it engages the work of Bruno Latour (Down to Earth), his exhibitions (Reset Modernity! and Critical Zones) and his engagement with the political arts (in performance, see Trilogie Terrestre; and in architectural speculative cartography, see Terraforma).  

Act III: An Uncommon Planetarium

We need researchers able to participate in the creation of the responses in which the possibility of a future that is not barbaric depends. 
―Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, 2015. 

Act III proposes to “diffract” and “situate” the geographies of climate change and of proposed climate engineering solutions within a series of sites of concern that are iconic to the global imagination such as the “global commons”. Each week grounds a climate engineering technology—speculative or deployed—within its own history and in a specific relevant geography. The sites include: Mount Tambora (volcanic eruption, aerosol injection into the stratosphere), Amazonia (carbon offsets, deforestation, and fires), Arctic (glacial melt/ Surface Albedo Modification), Pacific Ocean (ocean acidification, salmon, and deep-sea mining), Indian Ocean (Monsoon, Cloud Seeding, Sky Rivers). Each pairing of - geography/technology will serve 1) to ground the crisis into specific geographies; 2) to unearth the ecological and political controversies brought forth by the climate crisis and proposed climate engineering solutions; and 3) to explicate a design research method on earth matters—air, water, ice, vapor, carbon, rock, trees.  

Throughout, the course draws on and discusses the work of designers who seek to reclaim the Earth towards new geo-political engagements and deploy an array of media towards that—visual description, material sensors, computational processes, building, forensic reports, community activism, speculative narratives, institution building, and various combinations thereof of. Practices include: Formafantasma, Andres Jaque–Office for Political Innovation, Cooking Sections, Susan Schuppli, Paulo Tavares, Lindsay Bremner, WAI Think Tank, Design Earth, Harrison Atelier, Peter Fend, Lateral Office, Cave Bureau, Terreform ONE, Liam Young, Nerea Calvillo, Studio Folder, Karrabing Film Collective, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, amongst others.  

In a semester-long design research, each student produces their own research on controversies surrounding a specific geography of concern/geoengineering technology of concern as it is impacted by the climate crisis. Students will develop this design research in textual, graphic, and model form, including interviews with experts at MIT and beyond. The final submission format is a planetarium that mediates your design research findings to a broad audience. This format learns, amongst other references, from Smout Allen’s model-devices and Formfafantasma’s Cambio exhibition and publication. 

4.s22 Syllabus (MIT Certificate protected)

How do you go from a moment of obligation to starting or accelerating a movement?

This course explores the difference between innovation, social innovation, and systems change for social impact. Students interested in navigating complex environmental and social problems will explore frameworks and case studies from real systems change innovators to develop a more comprehensive view of complex problems and the systems they are part of —systems that often keep those problems in place.

In the course, you will apply experiential tools and methods to interrogate your own call to action, strengths, and gaps to address complex problems or needs. You will gain an understanding of the importance of understanding problems from the impact target’s perspective and explore innovative ways to create a scalable movement that ultimately can change a system. The final deliverable from the course is writing a case study on system change based on detailed actor mapping and interviews where you share your deeper understanding of a system you care about.
 

Drones are providing us with new ways to map, monitor, and measure our changing landscape. Advances in digital image processing enable one to go from flying a drone to working with accurate maps and 3D models in a matter of hours. This course examines the applications of drones in which the aerial perspective can be integrated into architecture, engineering and construction practice. In this course, students will gain hands-on experience with drone vehicles, sensors, image processing software and applications. Students will learn how to use drones to help them better understand our changing environment. With the proliferation of drones there are increasing opportunities to use drones for scientific remote sensing data acquisition and applications. 

This course focuses on understanding the fundamentals behind acquiring imagery data with drone-based cameras (e.g. multi-spectral and thermal) and processing the data for various applications. Students will also get to know the fundamentals of open source and proprietary software packages as they relate to UAV technology, drone operations, flight planning and data collection and management as well as how to integrate resulting data into other software tools such as GIS, BEM and Python libraries. Recognizing the critical role that AI will play in defining the future international competition, many countries now regard AI as a national priority. The United States launched the American Artificial Intelligence Initiative in 2019 with the mission to promote its leadership in AI research, development, and application. One of the eight national strategies identified in this initiative is to “provide education and training opportunities to prepare the American workforce for the new era of AI”.  

In this course, students will go through aerial data processing, mainly data collected from drones, including working with Orthomosaic, Digital Terrain models (DTMs), Digital Surface Models (DSMs), Point Cloud, and 3D mesh modeling. This course will also provide technical and applied knowledge on using drones for building assessment through aerial thermography and the use of UAVs in various applications. The course will also cover the technical foundation of enhanced data processing using AI, including image segmentation and object identification, and feature extraction basics using computer vision techniques in Python. Upon completion of this course, students will have theoretical and applied and technical knowledge that will aid them to use UAVs in various applications. This course is the extended version of Eyes in The Sky Workshop that was offered during IAP 2022, which resulted in 2D mapping of Briggs field and 3D modelling of Simmons Hall at MIT campus. 

2/15/23 - this subject number was previously 4.s22

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) dates back over 80 years when digital computers were developed during World War II. Using binary code to represent various phenomena made it possible to solve previously unsolvable numerical problems. AI has rapidly become a transformative technology in various fields, including the built environment. This course offers a thorough understanding of AI's role in the built environment, including hands-on examples of utilizing AI to tackle various urban challenges. Through data-driven case studies, this course will explore how emerging data and AI models are changing the assessment of the built environment. The structure of this course focuses on four key areas: 

• Data Analysis in Satellite Imagery
• Fundamental of Graph Theory and its applications in cities
• Computer vision and  image processing
• Theories of Artificial Neural Networks and image data classification. 

In this project-based course, students will work in teams to develop a computational approach that addresses the use of these four methods to solve an urban problem.  
 

2/15/23 - this subject number has been changed to 4.s23

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) dates back over 80 years when digital computers were developed during World War II. Using binary code to represent various phenomena made it possible to solve previously unsolvable numerical problems. AI has rapidly become a transformative technology in various fields, including the built environment. This course offers a thorough understanding of AI's role in the built environment, including hands-on examples of utilizing AI to tackle various urban challenges. Through data-driven case studies, this course will explore how emerging data and AI models are changing the assessment of the built environment. The structure of this course focuses on four key areas: 

• Data Analysis in Satellite Imagery
• Fundamental of Graph Theory and its applications in cities
• Computer vision and  image processing
• Theories of Artificial Neural Networks and image data classification. 

In this project-based course, students will work in teams to develop a computational approach that addresses the use of these four methods to solve an urban problem.  
 

Our goal in this class is to reclaim architectural and urban design as active tools to operate territorially. Whereas most of our attention as architects and urbanists is devoted to cities, there is an increasing need of territorial interventions capable of addressing our most pressing contemporary concerns — from energy transition, to ecological stewardship, to the securing of necessary materials and resources; from decolonization processes, to the resolution of urban challenges concerning mobility, right to housing, or ecological performance. 

Students will have the opportunity to tackle some of those issues through their own approach to territorial design. The course will support this effort through a combination of seminar and lecture sessions, where we will unpack the geographic, political, economic, ecologic and social layers we need to consider when working with territories. Similarly, through our readings we will both mobilize and problematize existing discourses on territorial articulation.  Ultimately, our objective is to use territorial design to question and challenge existing spatial orders, and explore the agency of architecture to foster new possibilities of socio-economic and socio-ecological redistribution.

Biodiversity is declining worldwide, driven foremost by the intensification in land management and the transformation of natural areas for agriculture, production forestry, and settlements. Urban areas have doubled since 1992 and, in comparison with 2020, are projected to expand between 30% and 180% until 2100, depending on the scenario applied. Notably, most of the urban growth is often located in regions of high biodiversity and affects ecosystems far beyond urban areas, through resource demands, pollution, and climate impacts. Therefore, biodiversity conservation in urban areas needs to be shaped in a way that supports global conservation efforts. This course introduces the relationships between urban environments and biodiversity, how urban biodiversity influences ecosystem functions and underlying services that affect human well-being and whether urban habitats are hotspots or ecological traps (or neither) for biodiversity. The course will focus on six key topics: Socioeconomic and social ecological drivers of urban biodiversity, urban biodiversity response to technological change, relationships with ecosystem services, urban areas as refugia, spatiotemporal scale in urban biodiversity assessment, and ecological networks. The course will answer several questions such as: which synergies and trade-offs among biodiversity and ecosystem services exist in urban areas, which factors drive the relationships between socioeconomic, and environmental drivers with biodiversity at different spatial scale, and how do urbanization-induced changes in ecological network complexity and diversity affect ecosystem functions.

As there are gaps in our understanding critical to improving biodiversity conservation policies and management in urban areas that need to be filled to improve global biodiversity outcomes. Students will work on developing strategies for improving and managing biodiversity in three cities in Colombia.

Working on three cities in Colombia, students will various data types to first assess the performance of existing biodiversity policies, design methodology for biodiversity management in urban areas using novel approaches such as aerial technology and artificial intelligence, and develop a research framework to accommodate biodiversity conservation with urban areas and highlight ways forward at the science-policy interface. Throughout the class, students will gain skills to understand how to improve urban habitat mapping; (2) integrate multiple urban gradients in the biodiversity assessment framework; (3) using satellite data and AI based methods to improve our mechanistic understanding of the relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services; and (4) approaches to extend the involvement of citizens in biodiversity management in urban areas.  The course is meant to provide a solid framework, broad overview, and a rich set of references for future pursuits involving urban biodiversity.

This course is assumed that enrolled students are interested in learning about and discussing the topic of urban biodiversity. Although the course will generally cover the topic of urban biodiversity and urban ecology, it will be flexible enough to allow for individual student outreach into topics of specific interest with regard to urban, big data, AI applications in urbanizing areas.

8/24/23: New class meeting time and room: R 10-12 in room 10-485. Units changed to 2-0-6.

Note: this is an H1 (half-term) subject.

In an AI-enhanced future, humans will become better at everything. The machine targets real-world artificial intelligence challenges designed to help address issues related to climate change, and urbanization in cities.

X Machine is an accelerator workshop designed to bring computer science and architecture together to create the most innovative and impactful technology solutions. The program's aim is to provide mentorship and technical support, with a focus on the problem statement and early-stage technology design ideation.

AI technology is being developed, deployed, and used in a growing number of domains to perform complex tasks such as driving cars and speech recognition; actions that could only have been performed in the past by humans. A recent study by McKinsey Global Institute estimates that about 70% of companies will have adopted at least one type of AI technology by 2030, and that 60% of current occupations can be automated in the next 10 years. Therefore, AI could potentially become the most disruptive technology in human history and will have profound impacts on every aspect of our lives, especially on the technology design and labor market. 

Recognizing the critical role that AI will play in defining the future not only of technology, but also geopolitical interactions, many countries now regard AI as a national priority. The United States launched the American Artificial Intelligence Initiative in 2019 with the mission to promote its leadership in AI research, development, and application. One of the eight national strategies identified in this initiative is to “provide education and training opportunities to prepare the American workforce for the new era of AI”.  

X Machine is a mini accelerator workshop course designed to unite computer science and design/architecture together to create innovative and impactful technological solutions to problems in the built and human environment. This half semester course promotes the development of strategic thinking and technical exploration in the realm of AI, with a focus on problem framing and early-stage ideation. The course will provide students with an opportunity to extend a foundational knowledge of AI within an interdisciplinary context. Working in small teams, students will incorporate design thinking approaches that put the user at the center of the creative process as they develop AI-empowered technological solutions. Teams will work on the ideation and conceptualization of either a product, process, or service-based solution that solves real world problems. Students will learn how to design and create a prototype, learn how to maximize their engage with their users/customers, and learn how to determine the value proposition that will make the startup successful.

By the end of this class, student will be able to develop a conceptual business plan for an AI-based technology solution and apply for other programs at MIT such as Sandbox, DesignX, The Engine, etc. 
 

Departing from a PhD entitled ‘Sao Paulo, reasons for architecture'. The dissolution of buildings and how to pass through walls’ on how the experience of a city impacts in our way to act as architect, students will be: (1) introduced to the architectural context of Sao Paulo, its historic and geographical conditions and some of its iconic buildings; (2) followed by specific presentation and group discussion in order to identify the most significant aspects of the specific ‘constructive culture’ (3) asked to do their choices for case study (relationship between building and geography, structural principle, gradation between inside and outside) to research through physical models, drawings and descriptions; (4) the result of this workshop, potentially, could be shared with the academic community through a small exhibition.

Undergraduates welcome.

Note: this is an H1 (half-term) subject.

In an AI-enhanced future, humans will become better at everything. The machine targets real-world artificial intelligence challenges designed to help address issues related to climate change, and urbanization in cities.

X Machine is an accelerator workshop designed to bring computer science and architecture together to create the most innovative and impactful technology solutions. The program's aim is to provide mentorship and technical support, with a focus on the problem statement and early-stage technology design ideation.