Classes

The fourth edition of Amazonia Studio is located — one more time but with a more specific approach — in Manaus, the largest city in the region with 2.5 million people. Located at the border of Rio Negro, right before its junction with Rio Solimoes to become the Amazon River, Manaus has a hydrological condition that make it a cultural hub for ancestors and outsiders, as if it was a metropolis for native peoples well before its modern cosmopolitan incarnation after the arrival of post-Colombian colonizers. Today it remains a metropolis for two worlds at the same time.

The city of Manaus represents an extremely rich cultural amalgamation that produces artists whose work has been more and more recognized in their own voice, bringing the possibility of a horizontal intercultural dialogue.

Studio Focus
Carbon Cycle , Bio Systems, Dwelling, Hydrogen, Composite Production, Energy/Climate Policy/Principle, Carbon Nanotube, Carbon Foam, Numeric Command Machining, Finite Element Analysis, Life Cycle Analysis, Parametric Modeling, Automated Production, Integrated Services, Anti-Tectonics, More from Less

CarbonHouse is an on-going research initiative funded by ARPA-e (the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Dept of Energy) that involves MIT and 9 groups of international scientists, researchers, composite fabricators, all focused on emerging forms of Carbon for their holistic use in benign, high-performance buildings. The lead MIT architecture team is tasked with inventing a new material/production potential as a means to supplement hydrogen production at vast scale: only the building sector is held to be able to absorb carbon at the scale of C21 projected global energy production, with renewables seen as falling well short of global demand. 

In Towards a New Architecture, le Corbusier gave vision to steel and concrete buildings, evidenced in elegant pioneering prototypes (Villa Savoie, Phillips Pavilion, etc). The studio will be tasked with imagining a now-carbon material paradigm, similarly learning from boats and planes, but deploying the brilliant 6th element for its full architect potential, uniquely polyvalent and vividly polyfunctional. 

The site will be the arctic coastline of Norway's stunning but desolate Lotofen archipelago, recently subject to a government moratorium on exploratory drilling for oil owing to the environmental activism of young Norwegian activists, yet poised atop the vast oil and gas reserves that have supplemented the enviable lifestyle of the small Scandinavian populace. The history of the region is animated by successive commercial exploitation of natural resources, from fish to timber to whales and now to hydrocarbons, each time facing economic hardship as reserves have been depleted, often being forced to innovate to remain competitive. Here we seek innovation well in advance of depletion in response to the looming environmental threat posed by hydrocarbons: we seek to build-with rather than burn the precious organic legacy.  

You will devise a research institute, akin to the Aspen Institute (humanitarian issues), the Rocky Mountain Institute (Energy/CO2 Policy) or the Salk Institute (Biomedical Research) — all serene research retreats that have exerted profound influence on their respective fields. But this will be a Center For Biogeochemistry In The Anthropocene (CBA), looking to instantiate a carbon architecture as a means to lock carbon in solid form to help restore the magisterial but increasingly fragile carbon cycle described by the Norwegian biologist, Dag Olav Hessen, who heads the CBA Center. It is poignantly sited in an evidently fragile and despoiled ecosystem.  

The fourth edition of the Collective Architecture Studio will foreground and explore two key registers on which the concept of the common, collective good played out in Yugoslavian, and specifically Belgrade, architecture: first, the production and conception of urban and architectural space for the common good (with an emphasis on the material and architectural effects of Yugoslavia’s constitutional “right to housing”), and second, the conception of self-managed, group authorship and ownership that was implemented and performed through self-managed architectural enterprises. Important historical caveat: group authorship in such structures did not automatically mean no authorship. S25 Collective Architecture Studio will thus actively study and self-experiment with forms of coauthorship. We will focus on the architectural repair of existing, as well as the invention of new modes of cooperative housing in this context. Everything we make (including our building proposals) will also function as critical broadcasts, catalyzing discussion and/or revelation among our projected audiences.

AFTERSTUFF
We have made too much stuff. The pervasive production model of more, faster, cheaper has created a counterproductive muchness of simultaneous material excess and environmental precarity. This persistent push for newness makes what is culture today, product tomorrow, trash the next and is contributing to social inequity and climate crisis alike. From sites of extraction to storage units to distribution centers and Pinterest boards, architecture is implicated at all scales of this saturation.

AFTERSTUFF begins from this context of material excess, experimenting with tools and methods that point designers towards less extractive material paradigms, ones that divert resources out of existing commercial loops and towards an approach where resources are gathered, not purchased.

AFTERSTUFF proposes to design by rearranging what we have already made, by putting it towards different uses; by looking at the existing through a lens of newness rather than producing new. Instead of turning culture into a commodity we will use existing commodities and their sites towards the production of culture.

Throughout the term, each student will research the multiscalar world created by a commodity of their choice. From the Commodity itself (object scale) to Container (architectural scale) to Context (landscape scale) to Commerce (economic scale) and finally to Culture (socio-aesthetic scale). Students will pay equal regard to the material as well as the immaterial factors that affect it and our observations will span from the technical and the architectural to the aesthetic and the personal. Students will then design an intervention on a select scale of that research, by rearranging its components to point them towards more culturally beneficial outputs.

To do this, AFTERSTUFF proposes a specific 2 part formula for design which will divide the semester along 2 big exercises: First one titled ‘X1: Arranged (AS IS)’ which will serve mainly as the research portion and the second one titled ‘X2: Rearranged (AS IF)’ which will serve as the design portion.

1. X1: Arranged (AS IS): This phase will focus on mapping out how things are currently. Students will engage in creative research, accumulating not just information but gathering visual content, material samples, anecdotes, building components etc. Each week students will move up a scale with the goal of completing a fuller picture of the forces, sites and architectures that organize the circulation of this commodity. The exercise will ultimately take the shape of an amateur desktop documentary about their learnings, which will require them to develop a number of scenographic and animation skills. Students are expected to use this exercise as a prompt for research, as a time for representational skillbuilding, as a way to find new interests and unlikely sites of intervention towards meaningful change.

2. X2: Rearranged (AS IF): In the second half of the semester, students will select a scale upon which to intervene by rearranging the world of their commodity to serve less predictably commercial ends and instead pointing these resources towards more cultural outputs. Some students might choose to introduce a new way of distributing this commodity, some might choose to resassemble a building’s components while others might choose to introduce a new program to the site. Students may nudge the project towards their existing interests in design by choosing the scale and character of this intervention as long as it follows the commodity pointing towards the culture logics mentioned above. The output of this second exercise will vary from student to student but will all be required to make use of the animation / scenographic tools from the ‘X1: Arrange (AS IS)’ exercise, making the work of the semester cumulative. In addition to the research and design, we will develop a number of ‘low hanging fruit’ XR techniques to augment and further immerse the audience into the student’s final productions.

AFTERSTUFF will foreground designers and thinkers who set their practices in this moment of material reckoning and proposeother modes of operating within material culture. From adaptive reuse projects to those creating recycling tools to those advocating for a commercial antagonism. All in all, AFTERSTUFF focuses on developing creative architectural reuse strategies while using research as a way to get designers away from common sites of intervention and towards less likely candidates for architect’s design efforts.

This cumulative research and eventual design proposals will be published in a multi-year public website.

On Vessels is a studio concerned with architecture as an act of subtraction and the articulation of voids, rather than a process of addition and the making of objects. Space-making will be conceptualized as acts of removal, displacement, carving, sculpting, excavation, and erosion of material in contrast to the more typical methodologies associated with building; those oriented toward the assembly and orchestrations of parts, products, and constructions systems. The studio will find inspiration outside of the western cannon of architectural precedents in order to ground the studio’s research in, for example, industrial designed objects, works of land-art, and subterranean spaces not typically deemed “architectural.” At the outset of the studio, we will explore the “vessel” as a conceptual model for the containment of space, that will expand the way we imagine the shaping of space at an architectural scale.

The emphasis on the designing of voids is, in significant part, a pedagogical apparatus to draw focus to, and bring new modes of formal/figural rigor to, a relatively yet-undisciplined (this term to be unpacked and debated throughout the semester) realm of form-making in subterranean architecture. Historically, underground space-making has been informed by industrial, utilitarian, militaristic, apocalyptic, and sacred motivations. The studio will eschew programs that are deterministic and/or singular in their means to generate underground space, and instead identify programs that are more more pliable, ambiguous, and enigmatic in order to prompt students to develop new forms of discipline/guiding principles for the designing of voids.

Another important aspect to the pedagogical apparatus of the studio is the aim to distill the architectural problem to fewer, yet-more-fundamental, layers of consideration within architecture studio pedagogy. On Vessels is a studio intended to focus students’ attention and effort on the conjuring of form, light, experience, atmosphere, and the engagement with myriad modes of representation that will aid in bringing students’ imaginations to life. Although this studio is one which is ultimately concerned with voids, the studio will be heavily invested in the modeling of objects as a way to depict the voids students are conceptualizing, designing, and developing. The reciprocal relationship between the making of casts and the making of molds/formwork will provide a conceptual space within which students will revel during the testing of, the rehearsal of, and the refining of underground worlds.

Note 1/30/23: Schedule change from TR 1-6 pm to TR 2-6 pm.

As the US population continues to relocate to sunbelt states, Phoenix has become one of the fastest growing metros in the country. This influx of new people during recent extreme droughts has pushed water resources and heat impacts to their limits; Phoenix is now the hottest city in the US. For those who still live in the urban core, the lack of shaded landscape and abundance of heat absorptive building materials has produced dangerous living conditions. Our studio is tasked with the challenge of designing “cooling” infrastructure, through architectural and landscape, while providing housing solutions for the inner loop neighborhoods of Phoenix. We will examine the inner loop of Phoenix to reimagine how new landscapes, infrastructures and housing typologies can be combined for “cooler,” safer, and healthier living.

This joint urban studio presents a new pedagogical model that brings together planners (DUSP students) and designers (ARCH) around a shared urban challenge. The studio will be offered as 2 study modules. The first module, which takes place over 6-7 weeks and includes a spring break trip, will focus on research -‘reading’ the metro landscape through analytical representation and mapping, and then further programming and writing a project brief which will inform design projects goals and parameters. The second module, which takes place over the following 6-7 weeks, will advance the learnings and briefs created in the first module to work on the design project in two groups. Working collectively, one group will develop a vision plan for the future of the inner city loop, and the other will be working on designing a ~60 unit housing cluster within an existing ‘loop’ neighborhood. As a whole the studio, through its research and design components, seeks to promote new approaches to urban living that address environmental, social, and economic challenges as presented by the Phoenix inner loop.

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. Involves architecture and planning students in joint work; requires individual designs or design and planning guidelines.

This joint urban studio will focus on one of the most urgent climate, environmental, and urban challenges we face today: heat and urban growth.  

Combining research and design, the studio presents a pedagogical model that brings together designers  - SMArchS Urbanism  (ARCH) and planners (DUSP students) to work together around a shared urban challenge where professional lines are blurred.  

The City of Phoenix, and its Office of Heat Response and Mitigation, have asked us to consider three wicked problems facing sunbelt cities as they continue to rapidly grow: affordable infill housing, heat island effects,  

and better access to multiple modes of transportation. Students will conduct group planning research as well as site analysis and urban design to comprehensively innovate around the nexus of urban heat--intergenerational housing--autonomous mobility  

and universal access design. The goal is to create a new set of block and streetscape typologies for cooler, intergenerational, autonomous living in Phoenix’s South Central neighborhoods. 

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. Involves architecture and planning students in joint work; requires individual designs or design and planning guidelines.

The term "megalith" simply refers to a 'big stone,' but behind this seemingly simple definition lies centuries of human ingenuity and cultural significance. In this course, we delve into the cultural act of bringing a stone to life, exploring the techniques and technologies used by ancient civilizations to transport and position these monumental structures.
Through a combination of theoretical learning and hands-on practical exercises, students will gain a comprehensive understanding of calculus-based curvature modeling and solver computation, necessary to drive the location of a megalith's center of mass. By mastering these concepts, participants will unlock the secrets of effortlessly moving massive objects and performing feats of spectacular prowess.
Students will embark on a journey of discovery, learning how to design, compute, and execute the precise movements required to transport megalithic stones. From principles of leverage and mechanical advantage to employing cutting-edge computational techniques, participants will explore a range of strategies for overcoming the logistical challenges inherent in moving objects of such monumental scale.

Moreover, this course goes beyond mere technical proficiency, encouraging students to consider the broader cultural and historical contexts surrounding megalithic engineering. Through engaging discussions and interactive activities, participants will explore the societal implications of megalithic construction, examining how these monumental structures have shaped human civilizations throughout history.

Merely to think about cities and get somewhere, one of the main things to know is what kind of problem cities pose, for all problems cannot be thought about in the same way.
– Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Chapter 22, “The kind of problem a city is.”

While we have begun to understand the interconnected properties of our cities, we still lack the tools and methodologies to engage cities as designers along the grain of these insights. This has consequences not just for the inclusion of physical factors at different scales, but also to the lack of influence of those most affected by climate change on design for resilience in their communities.

In this workshop we will explore digital tools and methodologies to conceive distributed, environmentally validated design proposals, connecting principles behind urban networks with systematic design and evaluation of a large number of distributed design interventions. We will introduce Local Software, a set of tools and workflows to imagine, evaluate, and implement networked urban designs by connecting GIS and parametric CAD software.

The course will provide a critical introduction to computational tools and approaches for urban design. Students will familiarize themselves with design workflows that integrate geospatial information, parametric modeling, and geospatial modeling to develop networked urban proposals. We will also discuss the conceptual, social, and political framework for such networked action in urban environments.

In the workshop, we will be engaging with Green City Force, an AmeriCorps program that engages young adults from New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) communities in environmental service. The workshop will begin to prototype a set of distributed interventions – ‘eco-hubs’— across NYCHA properties. NYCHA sites represent a distributed landscape throughout New York City whose population approaches that of Atlanta, and which are in areas of the city most vulnerable to the effect of climate change. Participating students will have the potential to apply to join this ongoing collaboration after the conclusion of the workshop as well.

Open to DUSP and Architecture students, others by instructor permission as well.

For more information email Carlos Emilio Sandoval Olascoaga.

As cities, industries, and manufacturing systems have formed over centuries, their waste streams are producing an ever-growing accumulation of matter, a material stockpile that can be mined. In the present time of climate crisis, when resourcefulness and critical, creative practices are becoming imperative, the agency of the designer shifts to appreciate scavenged, processed, & off-cut materials, and hone new ways of imagining what they can produce.

For the OFFCUT/CUTOFF IAP Workshop, we will immerse ourselves in the environment of metal parts manufacturing that underpins the Bahrain’s HVAC and air conditioning industries. We will study, analyze, and map the Awal Group’s operations, material sources and waste streams. Offcuts from the manufacturing of ducts and HVAC systems will form a palette of materials that we will upcycle through a series of fabrication exercises and design prototypes. Students will explore techniques including but not be limited to metal rolling, bending, casting, and punching. Digital algorithmic inventory matching tools, developed in the MIT ODDS & MODS material circularity curriculum, will help us design with the irregular archive of offcut materials and guide the fabrication process.

The results of the workshop will be showcased along the Pearling Path in Muharraq. During our time on the island, we will be engaging with local metal smelters and design studios, including Bahraini-Danish, Civil Architecture and Studio Anne Holtrop.

Note: This class has some travel in Summer 2025 but will meet as a class in the Fall 2025 term. Limited enrollment by application only.

The global imagination of the Amazon river basin, covering around seven million square kilometers, is dominated by the tropical forest. However, cities and towns within this basin represent some of the fastest growing urban settlements on earth. Over the past decade, nearly one hundred Amazonian cities and towns have seen population growth rates of over 20 percent–far above the under-two percent average across Latin America. Manaus represents one of the cities seeing the most rapid change. With roughly 2.5 million inhabitants, it is today the largest city in the Amazon, located at what is popularly referred to as the “Encontro das Águas” or meeting of the rivers, namely the Negro River (one of the main tributaries and start of the Amazon River) and its confluence with the Solimões River. The city’s fluvial character has long situated it as a central meeting point for ancestral peoples as well as for foreigners who arrived in different migratory cycles. Critically, the Negro River’s annual variation (typically up to 14 meters) has translated into a unique—but also typical for the Amazon—landscape of the built and natural environment. Stilt housing (palafitas), flooded swamp-like forests (igapós), and long river channels (igarapés) traditionally define this landscape and speak to the fluvial culture of Manaus, as well as other urban agglomerations for which the city is a major reference.

Today, however, accelerating unplanned and ill-equipped urban growth in Manaus represents a major challenge to its resilience. Continued deforestation and environmental degradation of surrounding towns and villages, coupled by varied water-related risks from draught, flooding, and contamination, have translated into the displacement of Indigenous populations from traditional lands in the Amazon and migration into cities like Manaus. Adequate, resilient housing and infrastructure systems have not been able to keep pace with the demands of this growth. Irregular or informal housing represents more than half the housing stock in Manaus. The city’s waterways, the defining feature of its urban landscape, have become neglected and abused, evidenced in its treatment as the de facto sanitation “solution” for both untreated wastewater dilution and the accumulation of solid waste in igarapés. The waste clogging igarapés in turn represent immense vulnerabilities for the built environment during the rainy season, as Manaus discovered during the unprecedented floods the city experienced in 2021. Further, efforts to “upgrade” housing, most recently with major international funding, resettled communities living in palafitas into social housing that physically and culturally repress the city’s canals instead of incorporating them into improvements in the physical and socio-economic life of the city—creating further problems with flooding and heat within ill-designed buildings. This class aims to provide an alternative vision of housing and sanitation in this fluvial landscape, recognizing and leveraging the central character of water in Manaus to envision a more resilient Amazonian fluvial city. The products of this practicum/studio will be featured in a a major exhibit hosted by our client, the Inter-American Development Bank’s Cities Lab, at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 30) in Belém, Brazil in November 2025. In addition, the class instructors will host a symposium, ideally with the support of the Charles Correa (1955) Lecture on Housing and Urbanization lecture, featuring a lecture by instructors and panels featuring presentations by student participants on the arc of the class’s pedagogical journey from Manaus to Belém, featuring the Amazonian Fluvial City of the future.

Where is North? This question is crucial to humankind’s ability to orient ourselves in time and place. It is not only important for navigation, but also fundamental to aligning our places of being. This course seeks to engage in one possible origin of architectural thought: Polar Alignment. There are a range of methods that align with north in the northern hemisphere. Some are terrestrial and magnetic while others are celestial and observant. Each method brings with it a set of biases, error tolerance, and cultural meaning. To address the various anomalies of each method, scale becomes essential to build accuracy, confirm observations, and build cultural significance. Orienting ourselves involves geometry (earth measure) as much as it does geography (earth drawing). 

Students will build upon methods developed in the Crop Circle Kit to impart cardinal direction. This will involve historic analysis, geometric experimentation, and computational development. The workshop will culminate in a colossal field drawing that inscribes the earth with knowledge about orientation. 

Clients, funding, consultants, contracts–architects are enmeshed in financial mechanisms that forever remind us of our direct reliance on local and global economies. Money talks and architecture follows: our work articulating the interests of those served while fluctuating with the rapidity of the market. And while this relationship may be fixed, perhaps we can find ways to resist its normative logics, which exacerbate social inequalities and consolidate power in the hands of the few and the privileged. This workshop will explore alternative economies and financial arrangements to find ways to re-code capitalism’s tendencies, desires, and outcomes. We’ll draw from a range of writing–from queer theory to post-colonial studies to literary criticism–to undo dominant financial orientations.

We will ask whether in addition to designing architecture, we can also design the market that demands architecture – to produce economic scenarios under which we might build. Each week we will pair readings in economic anthropology (studying how economies are shaped by behavior, cultural values, and social relationships), texts from other disciplines, and case-studies to invent atypical demand-chains, work against models of optimal performance, and instrumentalize culture to undercut efficiency. We will look at how we might produce clients, programs, and actor networks rather than responding to the whims of the market. We will consider how we might think of economic arrangements as tools for designers.

We will read, write, and compile a compendium of research for a publication on the topic. Students are encouraged to find broad reaching examples–from the domestication of post-war military technology to the proliferation of sharing economies to recent trends in reuse and the circulation of materials.

We will focus on buildings, materials, and products, largely drawn from North America in the 20th and 21st centuries, but may also look further afield. The course will focus on real examples of immaterial and material phenomena, inventing new languages and representational strategies along the way.

Clients, funding, consultants, contracts–architects are enmeshed in financial mechanisms that forever remind us of our direct reliance on local and global economies. Money talks and architecture follows: our work articulating the interests of those served while fluctuating with the rapidity of the market. And while this relationship may be fixed, perhaps we can find ways to resist its normative logics, which exacerbate social inequalities and consolidate power in the hands of the few and the privileged. This workshop will explore alternative economies and financial arrangements to find ways to re-code capitalism’s tendencies, desires, and outcomes. We’ll draw from a range of writing–from queer theory to post-colonial studies to literary criticism–to undo dominant financial orientations.

We will ask whether in addition to designing architecture, we can also design the market that demands architecture–to produce economic scenarios under which we might build. Each week we will pair readings in economic anthropology (studying how economies are shaped by behavior, cultural values, and social relationships), texts from other disciplines, and case-studies to invent atypical demand-chains, work against models of optimal performance, and instrumentalize culture to undercut efficiency. We will look at how we might produce clients, programs, and actor networks rather than responding to the whims of the market. We will consider how we might think of economic arrangements as tools for designers.

Each week, students are asked to produce a written response to the reading and to help guide discussion, researching and exploring examples and references to ground our work. The task is to produce a collective and cumulative body of knowledge. Together, we will read, write, and compile a compendium of research for a publication on the topic. Students are encouraged to find broad reaching examples–from the domestication of post-war military technology to the proliferation of sharing economies to recent trends in reuse and the circulation of materials and everything in between. We will focus on buildings, materials, and products, largely drawn from North America in the 20th and 21st centuries but may also look further afield. The course will focus on real examples of immaterial and material phenomena, inventing new languages and representational strategies along the way.

Undergraduates welcome.

The Deep Time Project aims to expand architecture timescales of perception seeking to re-position architecture as a more sensitive response to its environment. The course is structured around an interdisciplinary series of guest lectures, screenings, readings and precedent analysis on time literacy with particular focus on art and philosophy. Looking at the multiple repertoires of subjectivities and agents involved in the architectural process each student will develop design experiments on time aiming to explore a different constellation of temporalities that architecture must account for.

Undergraduate students welcome!

Units: UG: register for 3-0-6 (9 units)
Units Grad: register for 3-0-9 (12 units)

The urgency of the climate crisis has motivated a growing interest in material reuse at scale in architecture to support an alternative, circular approach to building construction.  The Odds & Mods pedagogy platform will offer a multi-year curriculum focused on these topics from a variety of perspectives.  In this IAP workshop, students and instructors will focus on technologies and workflows for digital circularity, encompassing a range of methods to acquire, characterize, design with, engineer, fabricate, and assemble reused and undervalued materials.  Students will specifically develop skills to engage in existing and emerging frameworks for reuse of unconventional and undercharacterized materials in creative architectural contexts.  The workshop will involve both technology-augmented, hands-on making and the use of computational design tools.

2/7/23: Note: Recitation room changed to 9-450A

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

The Drawing Together Practicum is a social and ecological resilience effort in New York City that explores new methods to scale community participation in urban design. Bringing together Green City Force (GCF), NYC public housing residents, MIT faculty, students and researchers, this practicum will demonstrate a community-led planning and design process for the siting, co-design, and operation of community spaces, Eco-Hubs, using new digital platforms. GCF’s Eco-Hubs align local green services for food, water, waste and energy behavior change and neighborhood transformation strategically with local, city, state, national and global goals for climate and equity.

Alongside building a digital framework to scale-up community engagement in existing and future Eco-Hubs, we will engage in conversations about the role of technology and digital skills in workforce development training. Expanding on GCF’s capacity-building strategies and through guest lectures from experts in workforce development, and green economy employers, students will discuss the potentials for creating a sustainability-focused, data science curriculum that supports farm development and operations as part of GCF’s workforce training program.

This is an H1 Half-Term Subject which meets February 5 - March 22, 2024 (includes final exam period)

If the architectural drawing moves something unknown to something known (from vision to building), the reverse could be said of the architectural survey.

The potential of the architectural survey lies in its mobilizing of something known into unforeseeable future uses (from building to visions). This course centers on recasting the architectural survey from conveyor of building facts to instrument for building stories. Operating somewhere between the limits of absolute truth and virtual truth, our research will aim to uncover new ways of engaging architecture’s relationship to vision, documentation, and the art of renewal (or preservation) against the backdrop of racial, economic, and material conditions in the turn-of-the century South. More specifically, the site of the course will be Tuskegee University and the legacy of Robert R. Taylor, the first accredited Black architect, MIT graduate, and designer and builder of a significant portion of the campus’s brick buildings.

Students will consider Taylor’s work both in the present context and its inception under Booker T. Washington’s leadership.

In addition to rigorously surveying a building through traditional and non-traditional survey methods and media, students will engage Taylor’s legacy through on-site field work paired with archival research. Observations will be filtered through distinct ways of looking to describe an existing building not as it is but as it is seen by the student. The results, a set of unconventional as-built drawings, will question and advance visuality as architecture’s essential resource.

For this course, travel is required and will take place prior to the start of the spring semester (Sunday 1/28-Thursday 2/1). The travel week will involve a mix of tours, teaching, discussions, and on-site surveying. Following our travels, class days are formatted around lectures, readings, discussions, tutorials, desk and pin-up critiques.

Augmented Historical Pedagogies: Tiergarten’s Hidden Urban Narratives is a collaborative workshop bringing together three institutions: the MIT Department of Architecture, the Institute for Architecture at TU  Berlin, and The Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. The collaboration will foster a VR- and AR-based, interdisciplinary study of the Tiergarten, Berlin’s largest park and a site which has undergone unique historical transformations. Because of its complex history, not just in field of architecture and urban planning, but also within the history of film, literature, politics, zoology, hydrology, and botanics, Tiergarten is an exemplary location for a critical exploration of the ways through which urban history is written and produced.

In addition to engaging with the site’s history through readings and archival research, students will use advanced simulation techniques–such as environmental sensing, laser scanning, and photogrammetry–as well as game engines, and produce immersive representations of Tiergarten. These projects, virtual- and augmented-reality installations, will be conceived as digital spaces that present the multiplicity of the park’s historical narratives through a variety of mediums, techniques and materials. The aim is not to make a passive reconstruction, but to use these digital spaces as the sites for insightful historical investigations. The final results, a collection of virtual tours and ‘incisions’ through the layers of knowledge and representation, aim to provoke discussion not just about Tiergarten’s past, but also about a re-envisioned future.

Techniques of Resistance aims to create an archive of communal construction practices located across the heterogeneous territory of South America through the research and documentation of paradigmatic indigenous, vernacular, and popular buildings. This research will form the basis for the design proposal of a contemporary radical project that will emerge from these ancestral techniques and the cases studied in the course.

Architecture, when built, mobilizes a huge—and often invisible—network of resources, knowledge, beliefs, and people involved in the construction of a building. Techniques of Resistance will focus on the study of buildings that are strongly rooted in the environment and ecologies where they are located, with a sensitive understanding of communal cooperation and material cyclability. From the Uros Islands in Lake Titicaca and the Putucos in the Peruvian plateau, to the Shabonos and Churuatas’ large structures in the Amazon, the buildings that we will study offer a collection of construction techniques that serve as a resistance to the homogenization of architecture and the destruction of collective forms of construction.

The creation of an inventory of Techniques of Resistance presents the opportunity to broaden the definition of what a building could be in terms of its material technology and its role in a community, and will serve as the launching point for the development of a project that could redefine these techniques in a contemporary way through an understanding of material behavior, structural details, and geometry.

The course will consist of a combination of theoretical lectures, discussions, research, and design. During the first half of the semester, students will develop drawings and graphic essays as methods of research and documentation of the case studies. These deliverables will be compiled to create the archive of Techniques of Resistance, which will take the form of a publication.

In the second half of the semester, students will work on a conceptual design project for a communal building, structure, or infrastructure, proposing a critical revision of the cases and techniques previously documented. Considerable time will be given for the design process, working together to develop a conceptually and technologically strong project. Classes will take the form of workshop sessions, with design desk critiques and pin-ups. The projects will be communicated through large-scale, delicate, and well-developed drawings and, if possible, a small model.

The materials produced during the course—both the archive and the design projects—will be presented in an exhibition at the end of the fall semester. The course will value commitment, technical precision, detailed representation, and a radical and critical approach to design. Techniques of Resistance will also include contributions from guest speakers whose practices and built projects engage with the technologies and materials discussed during the semester.

Undergraduates welcome.

Cities, industries, & systems are material mines that have formed over centuries. As these artificial mines are built, voids they form, out of sight, grow. In a time when resourcefulness is the new imperative, the realm of design beckons a shift from a boundless creative aspiration towards an appreciation of scavenged, processed, & off-cut materials, allowing them to shape imaginative pursuits.

For OFFCUT/CUTOFF, we will travel to Bahrain and immerse ourselves in an environment of industrial production. We will study, analyze, and map Awal Group’s operations, material sources and waste streams. Offcuts from the manufacturing of ducts and HVAC systems will form a palette of materials that we will upcycle through a series of fabricated design solutions. Techniques used will include but not be limited to rolling, bending, casting, punching, and inflating. The resulting work will be showcased at the House of Heritage along the Pearling Path in Muharraq. 

During our time on the island, we will be engaging with local metal smelters and design studios, including bahraini-danish, Civil Architecture and Studio Anne Holtrop.

Limited Seats, please submit an application by midnight Dec 10 here: https://tinyurl.com/offcutbh 

*open to graduate students only, cross-registration available.

This workshop will offer a space for student-driven projects at the intersection of climate, community and careers as part of a series of courses that build on one another. Over the past year, students have been exploring the idea of a “climate corps” for MIT,  with partners of the MIT Civilian Climate Corps Initiative, on campus and in communities in Boston and Cambridge. We see an MIT climate corps as building student capacity to respond to needs identified by people and groups working on the front lines of addressing climate and equity issues, in the community and on campus, and to learn through collaborating on tangible projects. 

Students taking this workshop will advance and aim to complete a component of their climate corps projects while deepening their understanding of themes, their skills and practical experience. In order to hit the ground running, students should email the instructor with a description of what they would like to work on and why, what they would need to accomplish their goals (partner or mentor involvement, new partnership development, funding for materials, etc.) and whether they plan to work individually or as part of a team.  Students who have not been part of the previous courses or summer program, who wish to join a project led by another student who has, should write the instructor.

Undergraduates welcome.

Partners: Urban Risk Lab, SA+P, Eastie Farm Climate Corps, PowerCorpsBOS, the MIT Office of Sustainability, MIT Facilities, City of Cambridge.