Classes

While design is frequently deployed as a problem-solving instrument, it can unintentionally result in ethical dilemmas and unanticipated outcomes. This course uniquely combines the critical lens of art with the transdisciplinary framework of DesignX, promoting introspection and thoughtful deliberation before diving into design solutions. This class initiates a collaboration between ACT and the Morningside Academy of Design through DesignX. Students engage with a transdisciplinary ensemble of influential speakers. The lecture series also allow students to innovate and explore a social impact design. Undergraduates are welcome. 

4.s36 Syllabus (MIT Certificate Protected)

Undergraduate: 4.s37 | Graduate: 4.s33

This hands-on studio class will expose students to the technical skills needed for successful screen printing. Students will produce single and multicolor prints on paper and fabric using a variety of methods.

4.s33 + 4.s37 Syllabus (MIT Certificate Protected)

In this seminar, you will learn how to learn about and design a HVAC system that complements the environmental concept of a medium sized commercial or multi-unit residential building. You will learn the pros and cons of different HVAC systems  in terms of their spatial requirements, costs and operational energy use. This class is particularly geared towards students who have previously taken 4.401/4.464 since we assume basic knowledge of building energy modeling techniques. Our goal is to give participants the skills to advocate for their design ideas when in practice to empower architects and building designers to have a greater understanding of HVAC systems with the aim of improving the integrated design process.

Knowledge of Rhino and Grasshopper is required. We will be using the ClimateStudio simulation environment long with custom spreadsheets and grasshopper definitions. You are strongly encourage to bring your own design and further develop it during the seminar. The final outcome of the class will be a presentation of the environmental concept of your design and if accompanying HVAC system. He material will lend itself for inclusion in a design portfolio.

Undergraduates with appropriate experience welcome.

Last summer, not a week passed without reminding us that climate change is increasingly impacting the life and livelihood of millions of people worldwide, be it through flooding, forest fires, heat waves or droughts.

These catastrophic events often destroy already fragile ecosystems and trigger heartbreaking human migration. To limit further tragedy, there is a growing consensus that we need to transition towards a carbon neutral global economy by 2050. This means that the use of all fossil fuels – with exception of some very limited carbon capture offsets – must be ended. For MIT this means, that we must eliminate all greenhouse gases from operating out campus buildings and vehicles.

To address this titanic challenge, MIT has initiated a series of interconnected activities including plans to decisively reduce energy demand from our buildings and reimaging our on and off campus energy supply infrastructure. While MIT hired a consultant to study the technical and economic feasibility of a number of decarbonization pathways a Decarbonization Working Group made of students, faculty and staff with expertise in different low- and zero-carbon technology areas and related topics will also to evaluate and prioritize potential applications to campus.

This class will function as an extension of the activities of this working group.

Introduces advanced topics in building simulation for design and control of envelope and thermal systems for architects, engineers, environmental consultants, and beyond. Students will gain conceptual knowledge and technical skills to drive design decisions based on environmental performance. The focus of final design projects will be to reduce operational energy usage and carbon intensity. Course format will include a combination of traditional lectures, hands-on exercises, and design project development.

In the context of the climate crisis and rising temperatures, building enclosure technologies must respond to a plurality of requirements--including solar radiation control, thermal insulation, and heat storage--ideally, with minimal embodied carbon and at low cost.  While contemporary normative approaches tackle this with assemblies of highly specialized layers, alternative solutions are emerging that use geometric specificity and variation to integrate multiple high-performance behaviors in a humble and simplified material palette.  Shape-forward wall systems are well situated to leverage advances in digital fabrication, such as additive manufacturing of low-carbon materials like minimally processed earth, but can also be materialized with a range of traditional and emerging assembly and fabrication methods.

In this seminar, students will first study historical and contemporary precedents of relevant multi-functional wall and enclosure systems.  They will then learn to use state-of-the-art digital tools for designing, modeling, simulating, and optimizing these types of wall systems, accounting for the described thermal requirements along with embodied carbon and structural behavior.  The seminar will also include hands-on physical prototyping and experimental tests.  The final project will be an evidence-based design proposal, supported by digital simulations and physical experiments, for novel thermally performative enclosure systems and their potential impact on architectural expression.

Considers the multiple trade-offs at various abstraction levels and scales when designing complex, multi-component systems. Covers topics from foundational principles to advanced applications, emphasizing the role of compositional thinking in engineering. Introduces category theory as a mathematical framework for abstraction and composition, enabling a unified and modular approach to modeling, analyzing, and designing interconnected systems. Showcases successful applications in areas such as dynamical systems and automated system design optimization, with a focus on autonomous robotics and mobility. Offers students the opportunity to work on their own application through a dedicated project in the second half of the term. 

Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments.

Note: This course was held in June 2022

Rebuilding the Edge is a summer workshop offered by the MIT Department of Architecture for MIT students that will be taking place during the month of June 2022 in the Italian region of Abruzzo. Through an on-site experience, the workshop invites students to think about the future of Italian inner and southern areas, as well as the relationship between regional infrastructure projects and small communities affected by them.

Rebuilding the Edge is the result of a partnership between Liminal A.P.S., MIT’s Urban Risk Lab, MISTI Italy and Fondazione Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane–the foundation of the Italian state railway system. The workshop focuses on the issues faced by small municipalities along the Sulmona–Carpinone rail line, where a public-private partnership is beginning to revive rail activity after decades of disinvestment. For two-and-a-half weeks, students have the opportunity to experience the territory traversed by the rail line, working out of a popup research outpost within the recently renovated station at Roccaraso.

Rebuilding the Edge will allow students to engage the particular circumstances along one rail line in the Italian Apennines, and take away larger lessons about methodologies of design research, and the degrees to which design can play a role in addressing issues of social consequence.

During this workshop participants will learn about the design, engineering, and fabrication of rope structures in the work of MIT Distinguished Visiting Artist, Janet Echelman. They will then explore the design and fabrication of tensioned networks through physical modeling and computational tools. First they will individually explore small scale structures and then they will collaboratively produce an architectural scale rope structure.

Midway through the week there will be a session teaching the basics of rope splicing led by structural engineer, Nicole Wang, who has deep expertise in the engineering of Janet Echelman’s sculptures. This session will provide a foundation for the final stage of the workshop where a room scale structure will be collaboratively fabricated using spliced connections.
Participants will need a laptop and Rhino 7 installed on their computer prior to the workshop to work with the design tool.

Space and materials are limited so registration is required. Please contact aburke3@mit.edu if you have any questions.
 

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.

MArch and undergraduate students welcome.

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.

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.

We will explore the design potential of 3d printing building with local earthen materials for the specific context of fire prone climates.

Undergraduates welcome.

4.s60 Undergraduate | 4.s62 Graduate

Note: for the Spring 2025 term, 4.s60 is a HASS-H subject

How does architecture impact the environment? How does the environment impact architecture? Drawing on case studies from the ancient world to the present day, and from geographies across the globe, this class will explore the myriad ways in which the creation of architecture has involved the modification of natural environments and climates and the exploitation of resources. Rather than examining architecture’s history as a succession of monuments, this course investigates the metabolic processes of raw material extraction, transportation, and manipulation that made the creation of buildings, infrastructures, and designed landscapes possible in the first place. Students will explore how material and climatic considerations played into the design and aesthetic of buildings at various points in time, while gaining an awareness of the largely-invisible, increasingly far-flung networks of environmental management and labor that underpin our built environment.

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)

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.

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 seemingly ordinary substance, water is at once a fount of life and a terrible force of destruction. Across time and space, human societies have sought to manage its paradoxical qualities by harnessing and designing its natural flows, from the scale of the domestic household to that of the larger urban settlement and region. Because of its vital utility, water has also been a carrier of symbolic and ritual meaning in cultures across the globe. This seminar will study how human-water interactions have given shape to the built environment in the era before industrialization, focusing on architectures, infrastructures, and landscapes of water supply, irrigation, transport, energy, health and sanitation, and flood mitigation, among other functions. Throughout, we will remain attentive to the aesthetics, sacred meanings, and political economies of water as they emerge in our case studies.

The foregoing themes will be examined comparatively using examples from across the globe, with an emphasis on the Mediterranean world and Europe during the Middle Ages and early modern period (ca. 1000–1750 CE), the times and places that I know best. On occasion, we will look deeper into the past, at ancient precedents, as well as engage with canonical scholarship on our theme that brings us into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such a vast chronological and temporal range will help students to appreciate both continuity and change in how water has been managed over the longue durée, and to gain insight, in turn, into the potential effects of present water policy and design decisions on our built environments and political and economic systems into the future. Another goal is to expose students to a broad range of humanistic approaches to water from the perspectives of architectural, art, and environmental histories, as well as anthropology and science and technology studies.

MIT Certificate Protected Syllabus