Classes

Introduction

Faculty and Students within the Department of Architecture at MIT have finished design of four small shelters for the H22 festival in Sweden, scheduled for summer 2022.  Shelter fabrication and hosting of students for the project will be sponsored by Ikea in Sweden with the expectation that students will assembly the structures they design. The four shelters will be set within the forest of Fredriksdalsskogen to explore new ways we can live together in face-to-face in community. Student designs below the address Ikea’s five democratic principles of design: Forms, functioning, sustainability, affordability and quality.

Expectations

Although the shelters will be constructed in a distant location using digital fabrication the project presents a great opportunity for the students to learn about ways to apply materials to a lightweight structure. Water is the greatest enemy of any wooden structure. It penetrates through layers of material, weakening the structure by trapping moisture. Research novelty in this project will come from the many ways we will use precision fabrication to align layers of plastic and wood for varying levels of performance and appearance. Our layering technique will allow water to drain from the structures and sustain is overall strength. Finally, we planning to exhibit the process, models and drawings as part of a gallery exhibition in 2023. We will devote the second half of the semester toward building museum quality materials for display.

The course is an introduction to the research field of digital cultural heritage through the spatial and emotional experience through immersive technologies. The course gives an overview of theories and principles in experiencing art/culture and design, affective computing such as wearable technologies/biosensors, immersive technologies such as AR/VR/XR and gamification, as well as providing a practical exploration of research methods in three areas related to digital humanities: collection/management, visualization/immersion, analysis/ interpretation.

The course is an introduction to the research field of digital cultural heritage through the spatial and emotional experience through immersive technologies. The course gives an overview of theories and principles in experiencing art/culture and design, affective computing such as wearable technologies/biosensors, immersive technologies such as AR/VR/XR and gamification, as well as providing a practical exploration of research methods in three areas related to digital humanities: collection/management, visualization/immersion, analysis/ interpretation.

MArch and undergraduate students welcome.

As part of the ongoing Programmable Mud research initiative, students will travel to Santa Barbara, CA, to engage in the design and fabrication of architectural scale 3D printing building elements made from locally sourced earthen materials. The focus of this workshop will be creating a 3D-printed earth building prototype for fire resilience, a pressing issue in California, and globally, as climate change exacerbates fire danger in urban communities. We will engage in on-site fabrication as well as thermal analysis, allowing students to implement their design ideas in real-time and create architectural systems relevant to the future of low carbon, climate-resilient architecture. The workshop will be structured around producing prototypes with reproducible, publishable methods to make the work accessible and relevant to developing standards in the field.

Explore fire-resilient earthen architecture through hands-on prototyping with locally sourced earth, clay, and robots. This workshop is open to graduate and undergraduate students interested in design, materials, and digital fabrication.

Please contact instructors with a short statement of interest.

Water comprises the majority of the earth's surface, and has shaped the creation of art, architecture, and objects as the means of travel and transport as well as a powerful cultural metaphor. This course offers students the opportunity to study the environmental conditions, imagery, and mechanisms used by artists and craftsmen as well as the everyday experiences of water. Each week will offer a particular case study and point of view through which to study the connections between liquid contexts and art objects. Themes will include flows, surfaces and depths, water edges, and technologies. Students may work on projects in their choice of geographical and historical moments.

4.s62 Syllabus (MIT Certificate protected)

(pre-approved for MArch HTC elective Fall 2023)

Art and Science are pursuits divided by modernity. As Aristophanes once theorized the sexes, the two domains act like divided halves of a once unified soul—in this case, we might call that prior soul philosophy. This course investigates the long history of “the Art/Science thing,” examining its chosen love objects and subject positions.  We look at the production of “fine” arts and investigations of natural phenomena as twinned Liberal Arts in the Renaissance, the artist as “natural philosopher” during the Enlightenment, the production of subjectivity/objectivity with the Scientific Method and the “science” of aesthetics, the division of science from “the liberal arts” in the industrial age, the creation of the two culture debate in the 20th century, the attempt to make a science of art (perception) in mid-century. With examples from contemporary art in each week’s discussions, we examine the compelling history of image-making in both regimes, and the raiding of each others’ epistemic toolkits beginning in the late 20th century. We place particular emphasis on the emergence of new hybrid domains (such as “bio-art”) in the 21st century.

“Scientists” was a name chosen in emulation of “artists” — a generalized professional category that could include multiple modes of empirical, proof-based activity just as “artist” included media as diverse as sculpture, painting, drawing, and print-making. Increasingly, art becomes a field in which scientific concepts can be brought into public discourse with more than “illustration” in mind. Biofiction, critical fabulation, loyal opposition, and skeptical love are contemporary characteristics of the art-science thing.

4.s62 Syllabus (MIT Certificate Protected)

Note: the room for this class has changed to 9-450

Modernist fantasies of infinite growth, premised on the relentless exploitation of natural environments, can be traced back in large part to the early modern period (ca. 1400–1750) in Europe. At this time, artisans, practitioners, intellectuals, and politicians gradually became convinced that humans could master nature, through art and industry, to yield endless abundance and material wealth. Often assimilated by its proponents and later historians under the rubric of “improvement,” it was an explosive and ultimately dangerous idea, and did not go unchallenged: to its detractors, in fact, we owe some our earliest notions of natural balance and sustainability.

 This class will study these debates and their manifestation in designed natures across scales, from art and decorative objects, to gardens, to engineered territories, focusing on Europe and its overseas empires. Throughout, we will explore how nature came to be seen as a resource, and examine how concepts of ingenuity, labor, value, abundance, and scarcity inflected early modern thinking across the interconnected realms of natural philosophy, political economy, and art and architecture.

4.s63 Syllabus (MIT Certificate protected)

There is no queer space; there are only spaces used by queers or put to queer use. Space has no natural character, no inherent meaning, no intrinsic status as public or private. As Michel de Certeau has argued, it is always invested with meaning by its users as well as its creators, and even when its creators have the power to define its official and dominant meaning, its users are usually able to develop tactics that allow them to use the space in alternative, even oppositional ways that confound the designs of its creators.

– George Chauncey, “‘Privacy Could Only Be Had in Public’: Gay Uses of the Streets” (1996)

Is there a “queer space?” The concepts of identity and its spatial experience as we know them today are rigidly compartmentalized. Binaries surround us, both physically and psychologically. All the world’s a stage, but the sphere always seems to split: exit stage left or stage right. Despite our best efforts to upend these conditioned distinctions, we still live and move through them every day. The pathological alienation of one thing (“normal”) from the other (“abnormal”) can differ from one locale to the next, even by mere steps. While internal identities may seem to be more fluid, external pressures carefully build partitions: one is gay or straight, queer or not, transgender or cisgender, just to name a few. How do these issues relate to space, both real and imagined?

Queer-identifying or not (yet another binary), how do you feel when you walk down the street? Do you change your bodily demeanor based on the neighborhood? Are you fearful or fearless? Do you ever wonder, “are my jeans too tight? Is my hair too long or too short? Will my makeup be ‘socially acceptable’ here? Do I ‘look queer?’ Am I in danger? How can I safely blend in as I walk from point A to point B?”

This experimental and compact course will explore the long histories and current states of queerness—a broad term that necessitates discussion without definitive conclusions—, inviting students to reflect on their own experiences, regardless of personal identities, sexuality, gender, or otherwise. That is to say, queer-identifying or not, how do you encounter the urban landscape? Who manufactures urban meaning? Who builds our spatial experiences? Who, how, and why might one want to confound the designs of its creators?

Using positionality as our primary method of inquiry, this course asks participants to question their own identities within space, including—and especially—the complications that arise from that very term, “identity.” By interrogating past and current laws (social, stately) that govern neighborhoods here and everywhere, students are encouraged to challenge and consider a wide range of phenomenological messages and experiences through personal reflections on select and invited sources (written, felt, built, painted). This course is open to all.

If you are interested, please email the instructor at aflynn@mit.edu.

A historical exploration of the ways in which human societies interact with and shape waters in their environments in the premodern and early modern world, with a focus on Eurasian geographies.
Topics to be explored include water rights and property; terraforming hydraulic landscapes; building with water; water's use in ritual; flooding/disaster management; water's industrial and mechanical uses; water and aesthetics; the history of hydraulics and early hydrology.

(pre-approved for MArch HTC restricted elective Fall 2023)

Seminar or lecture on a topic in Islamic or non-western architecture that is not covered in the regular curriculum. Requires original research and presentation of oral and written reports, varying at the discretion of the instructor.

4.s65 Syllabus (MIT Certificate Protected)

Color cuts through several realms of human activity, present and past. As “qualia” (an aspect of experience rather than a measurable or material entity), it has posed intriguing problems for cultural practitioners and theorists for centuries. Color is philosophically understood as living in the mind, raising the question of whether or not it “belongs” to objects in the world. Beginning from a central discipline of art history (histories of pigments, materials, minerals, and values) we will also explore color in the contexts of: chemical innovation, conventional naming systems, racialized concepts, psychophysics, trade, empire, and industry. A sometimes anxiety-provoking discourse in art and architecture, color is today a huge industry that exists to stabilize chroma, standardize color, and capitalize on the branding capacities and emotional connotations of hue. We will explore the philosophy and practice of color across the history of art and architecture, and the instructor welcomes final research projects that support your own work.

This graduate-level seminar will have an undergraduate track and can be negotiated for variable credit.

4.s67 Syllabus (MIT certificate protected)

This is a class about reading and, to a lesser extent writing, popular criticism, looking at the profession and production of architecture and design criticism in the United States from its inception in the late 19th century to the present day. Class sessions are devoted to thematic groupings of reviews—on the tower, the museum, the mall, and so on—in order to compare critical language, approach, audience, and taste, while also tracking changes in writing and design style from 1900 to the present. Thus, we read classics of architectural theory, like Louis Sullivan’s “The Tall Building Artistically Considered,” as well as Ada Louise Huxtable on the Twin Towers, and Paul Goldberger on Hearst Tower. But we will also watch Louisa Whitmore, the TikTok teen who hates 432 Park Avenue with the passion that translates so well to video. 
 
The goal of this seminar is to introduce you to the wide variety of critical voices and forms and, by the end, let you play critic yourself. During the semester, we will do close readings of specific texts together, and we will practice one-the-spot critique of some recent local projects. Two field trips led by architects will offer students the opportunity to ask questions in the field, and to think about the difference between what architects say and what the user can observe. Independently, students will research and present on an individual critic, giving the opportunity to read deeply while the in-class sessions are a necessary skim. One late session, on video games, will be programmed collaboratively, as many of you know more than I about what constitutes effective critique of games. The final project for the course will be to write, or film, or record, or otherwise produce a piece of criticism on the design of your choice.

4.s68 Syllabus (MIT Certificate protected)

(pre-approved for MArch HTC elective Fall 2023)

This seminar looks at the emerging culture and crisis of ‘bigness’ that emerged in the field of architectural history in the 1980s – early 2000’s. There are now things like Long History, Deep History, Global History and so forth. Whereas much has been made of microhistories, little has been made of macrohistories. We will, therefore, try to make sense of this shift and embodied critiques of Eurocentrism as well as their on-going transformations, potentials, and problematics. Since secondary literature and analysis of this phenomenon is practically non-existent, we will study the phenomenon by trying to assemble different takes and perspectives to get a more critical understanding of the field. Students will be asked to develop a lecture/syllabus as a way to experiment with these scalar perspectives. Though a reading intensive course, MArchs are welcome to develop a better and more critical understanding of new directions in contemporary architecture.

4.s68 Syllabus (MIT Certificate Protected)

Archive Fever: Theory and Method deals with how architects, artists, historians, urbanists, and social scientists have faced the myriad archive fevers and archival turns of the 20th and 21st century.

This period as seen a marked shift between archives being understood as ‘source’ to archives becoming a subject of critical inquiry. Critical scholarship asks which ‘rules of classification, rules of framing and rules of practice’ determine the contents of an archive and enable ‘knowledge’ to be recognized (Tuhiwai Smith, 2021). And these questions are motivated by the argument that political power is inextricably linked with who can create, access, participate in, and interpret the archive and by extension, an institutionalized collective memory (Derrida, 1995). The course thus, interrogates the ways in which “the architect and the archive are inseparable” and how seeing the “city-as-an-archive” can help us attend to contested memories and denied histories embodied within its buildings, infrastructures, and architectures (Wigley, 1995; Borgum, 2020). Through visits and hands-on research in architectural and urban archives, students will develop a critical methodology that can be applied to their research and practice. Students will learn to interpret and triangulate primary sources, such as texts, films, maps, blueprints, correspondence, documents, photographs, illustrations, and master plans. And weekly readings will cover concepts like the archival gaze, archival science, the imperial archive, postcolonial archive, counter-archives, community-based, ethnographic, photographic, film, parafictional archives, and AI datasets.

Program of research and writing of thesis; to be arranged by the student with supervising committee. 

Program of research and writing of thesis; to be arranged by the student with supervising committee. 

Program of research and writing of thesis; to be arranged by the student with supervising committee. 

Program of research and writing of thesis; to be arranged by the student with supervising committee. 

Program of research and writing of thesis; to be arranged by the student with supervising committee. 

Program of research and writing of thesis; to be arranged by the student with supervising committee. 

Program of research and writing of thesis; to be arranged by the student with supervising committee. 

Program of research and writing of thesis; to be arranged by the student with supervising committee. 

Designed for students writing a thesis in Urban Studies and Planning or Architecture. Develop research topics, review relevant research and scholarship, frame research questions and arguments, choose an appropriate methodology for analysis, and draft introductory and methodology sections.