Classes

Through a studio-based course in planning and urban design, builds on the foundation acquired in 11.328 to engage in creative exploration of how design contributes to resilient, just, and vibrant urban places. Through the planning and design of two projects, students creatively explore spatial ideas and utilize various digital techniques to communicate their design concepts, giving form to strategic thinking. Develops approaches and techniques to evaluate the plural structure of the built environment and offer propositions that address policies and regulations as well as the values, behaviors, and wishes of the different users.

Examines the evolving structure of cities and the way that cities, suburbs, and metropolitan areas can be designed and developed. Surveys the ideas of a wide range of people who have addressed urban problems. Stresses the connection between values and design. Demonstrates how physical, social, political and economic forces interact to shape and reshape cities over time.

Introduces critical theories and contemporary practices in the field of urbanism that challenge its paradigms and advance its future. Includes theoretical linkages between ideas about the cultures of urbanization, social and political processes of development, environmental tradeoffs of city making, and the potential of design disciplines to intervene to change the future of built forms. Events and lecture series co-organized by faculty and doctoral students further engage and inform research.

Notes: 

• Schedule change from T 2-5 to M 9-12
• Computation students now register for 4.588 instead of 4.288

Students select thesis topic, define method of approach, and prepare thesis proposal for SMArchS degree. Faculty supervision on an individual or group basis. Intended for SMArchS program students prior to registration for 4.THG.

This course introduces artistic practice and critical visual thinking through studio-based projects that explore diverse media, scales, and contexts. Through hands-on experimentation, perceptual games, and creative exercises, students activate their artistic curiosity—reimagining materials, objects, and everyday environments. Projects may incorporate sculptural construction, drawing and painting, weaving, performance, theater-based methods, sound and video, and/or site-specific interventions. Studio practice is complemented by lectures, screenings, field trips, readings, guest presentations, and discussions that examine the historical, cultural, and environmental forces shaping both the development of artistic vision and the reception of a work of art. Project themes such as Body Extensions / Embodied Knowledge, Public Making / Collaborative Practices, and Networked Cultres / Interdisciplinary Exchanges invite students to develop an expansive, interdisciplinary approach to art-making. Each project culminates in a final presentation and group critique. 

MIT Certificate Protected Syllabus

This interdisciplinary course fosters collaboration across art, science, and engineering, exploring the intersections of creative practice and research in science and technology. In partnership with MIT.nano and associated laboratories, students are introduced to advanced research environments and work alongside graduate mentors to develop projects that merge artistic vision with scientific methods and tools.

Emphasizing artistic practice as a form of critical inquiry, the course supports experimental research, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the development of both individual and collective projects. Students engage with the social, cultural, and ecological dimensions of technology, challenging traditional disciplinary boundaries to create new frameworks for transdisciplinary exploration and innovation.

Additional work required of students taking the graduate version. 

U: 4.324 | G: 4.325

This seminar connects the arts and sciences by exploring methodological similarities and differences across disciplines between the arts and architecture, the humanities and the social sciences, engineering, natural and material sciences, alongside exploring emerging technologies such as AR/XR, AI and ML. Aimed at fostering student collaborations across research interests, students develop their ideas for projects through targeted analysis of their disciplinary and interdisciplinary interests. Each student will either enter with a project in mind or develop their project ideas within the class. Students can choose to work individually or in groups. 

This seminar’s goal is to provide a blueprint for developing interdisciplinary projects. The final project is a written and visual presentation of a workable plan whose goals/outcomes will form the basis for a collaborative interdisciplinary project. Visitors to the class may include Caroline A. Jones, Paul Vanouse, Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits, Candice Hooper, Jens Hauser, Pierre Huyghe, Po-Hao Chi among others.

Additional work required of students taking the graduate version.

MIT Certificate Protected Syllabus

UG: 4.328 | G: 4.329

This course focuses on the production of artistic experiments catalyzed by research in art and climate, and eco-sociality of the locale. The workshop will engage the Herter community garden in Boston as a site where utopias for the future forms of environmental citizenship and new climate commons will be prototyped.

In conversation with local stakeholders the participants will develop hybrid projects of art and design suggesting an artistic instrumentarium for ecological repair, envisioning a future of cohabitation with more-than-humans, and probing alternative perspectives that catalyze a different climate for the future.

Inspired by counterculture experiments and emerging environmentalist design of the 60’s and 70’s, the course will discuss concepts such as anthropocene aesthetics, compossibility, critical zones, eco-activism, feminist fabulation, interspecies assemblies, permacomputing, and archipelagic thinking.

Readings will include those by Jane Bennet, Georges Canguilhem, TJ Demos, Eduardo Viveiro de Castro, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Astrida Neimanis, Andrew Pickering, Elizabeth Povinelli, Isabelle Stengers, Anna Tsing, and others.

Visits to the class and the field trips may include Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Tue Greenfort, Diane Borsato, Fernando García-Dory, Pelin Tan, Julie Kepes, D-Lab experts, FutureFarmers, Critical Art Ensemble, Platform London, The Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Additional work required of students taking the graduate version. 

4.341 U / 4.342 G

Introduces history and contemporary practices in artistic photography through projects, lectures, artist visits, group discussions, readings, and field trips. Fosters visual literacy and aesthetic appreciation of photography/digital imaging, as well as critical awareness of how images in our culture are produced and constructed. Provides instruction in the fundamentals of different camera formats, film exposure and development, lighting, black and white darkroom printing, and digital imaging. Assignments allow for incorporation of a range of traditional and experimental techniques, development of technical skills, and personal exploration. Throughout the term, present and discuss projects in a critical forum. 

Additional work required of students taking the graduate version. 

MIT Certificate Protected Syllabus

UG: 4.354; G: 4.355

This course introduces global traditions of counter-cinema and experimental video through a combined studio and seminar format. We trace how artists and collectives develop form under pressure, studying methods that arise from protest, censorship, displacement, and environmental crisis. Topics include montage and materiality, index and memory, sound as testimony, and architectures of spectatorship. Screenings, lectures, and readings provide a theoretical and historical framework for rigorous discussion. Short weekly exercises translate these frameworks into practice through image and sound manipulation, camera and editing experiments, and iterative prototyping toward a final piece. Peer-to-peer critique emphasizes clarity of intention, ethical stakes, and technical execution.

Additional work required of students taking the graduate version. 

Focused on the practices of varied practitioners — film directors, artists, musicians, composers, architects, designers — whose writings relay a process of thinking and feeling integral to their forms of material production. Testing various ways aesthetic forms and their shifts — historic and contemporary — have relations to still emerging contemporary subjectivities (felt emotion in a human body), the class studies productions created by participants and case studies of varied producers, and generates new work individually and/or collaboratively via diverse media explorations. Includes reading, writing, drawing, and publishing, as well as photographic, cinematic, spatial, and audio operations and productions. Activities include screenings, listening assignments, and guest visits, in addition to readings, discussions, and presentations. 

MIT Certificate Protected Syllabus