Classes

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 through the the lens of queer practice, with its history of instrumentalizing the language of power against itself, to find ways to re-code capitalism’s tendencies, desires, and outcomes.

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) and queer theory (identifying strategies of planned failure, makeshift assembly, and re-orientation) 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 case studies 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. And while queerness provides a shared framework for the workshop, students are encouraged to consider analogous lenses through which we might rewrite the relationship between practice and service. The course will focus on real examples of immaterial and material phenomena, inventing new languages and representational strategies along the way.

*A workshop not just for queer students, but for students curious to work with queer intention.

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.

Note: 1st meeting, T 2/7, 10am on Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/97338571583

The Metropolitan Storage Warehouse was built in 1895, it is one of the oldest buildings in the MIT neighborhood and currently finds itself in the midst of redevelopment as it will become the new home of the School of Architecture and Planning in 2025. Upon completion the MET will provide approximately 110,000 square feet of academic, research, and gathering space including labs and studios for architecture students. As the building finds itself amidst active transformation this workshop will look back on the MET’s past lives, investigate its current working state, and ponder on its future through the tools of phonography, or field recording, to better understand the multiple layers of reality that converge at this site.

The MET Warehouse operated as a storage facility since its construction and its architectural elements– two-foot-thick-stone walls, vaulted ceilings, its medieval crenellations—all stood witness to years of internal life, the drama of the storage facility; the secret life of boxes that end up in secret rooms. In 2015, when the MET closed, much more than boxes were revealed to have occupied the nearly 1,500 internal units: private offices, satellite walk-in closets, a wine collection dating back to the mid-90’s, a saxophonist’s recording studio, extension art storage for Boston museums, the list goes on.  The MET Warehouse, like many other storage spaces, was a territory of exchange and protection for belonging(s): material, capital, life. How might the past lives of this building effect its future life as repository and vessel for a community of architects, designers, and thinkers (both academic and not, institutional and extra institutional)? In listening to the building might we learn more about its expansive ability to hold, archive, and safekeep and challenge our expectations for what forms of belonging might take place here next?

The impacts of climate change on World Heritage—from floods in Venice Lagoon to extinction in Galápagos Islands—have garnered attention in a world that has mostly otherwise failed to respond to the urgency of the climate crisis. In UNESCO reports, climate change has emerged as a top threat impacting the conservation of hundreds of heritage sites, with an array of risks including rising sea levels, wildfires, extinction, droughts, air pollution, melting glaciers, material vulnerability, unchecked tourism and the massive displacement of communities.

What world and heritage are possible through the climate crisis? Heritage sites are designated for their natural or cultural significance, considered to be of outstanding universal value, and protected for the benefit of future generations. However, the climate crisis renders it unclear what that future is and how to curate a world with inherent uncertainty and disaster. At a moment when the promises to arrest or reverse further decay are unsustainable in the face of planetary destruction, what are other possible experimental preservation practices—material and semiotic—both to live on a damaged planet and, to imagine other worlds that are possible, urgent, and necessary? How to devise a plot, how to give it a certain direction or intent of meaning, when climate change actively eludes, confounds, and evades narrative closure?

How do designers inherit a world in crisis?

“Climate Inheritance” is a design research and speculation workshop that investigates how to conceptualize, visualize, project and narrate the impacts of climate change on World Heritage.

The work is along the three axes below;

1. Construct: interdisciplinary conceptual framework and experimental design practices; including Caitlin DeSilvey, Rodney Harrison, David Gissen, Lucia Allais, Superstudio, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Amy Balkin, DAAR (Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti), Azra Akšamija, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Bryony Roberts.
2. Represent: visual atlas of World Heritage and Climate Change from UNESCO reports and data sets. Diagrams, and architectural chart primary climate factors affecting such properties and existing adaptation strategies. [Collaborative. See WORKac, 49 cities]
3. Project: Each student selects and researches an existing World Heritage site impacted by climate change (its history, mediatic “aura”, etc.) to propose a speculative future narrative in three drawings. [Individual. See DESIGN EARTH, Climate Inheritance]

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.

This course asks: what if a familiar typological object—a chair, table or other common wooden element of furniture—could be designed to create its own energy sufficient to offset its manufacture, use lifetime and re-cycling. The Big ZERO Workshop brings together speculation, research, design and making at the scale of the human body and household object to explore whether and how it might be possible to design for carbon zero. 

Our present culture of fulfillment, of instant and seemingly effortless acquisition and consumption of products is built upon a not-so-hidden stream of energy expenditures across vast scales of extraction, production, and consumption of designed goods. Motivated by the challenges, the seemingly elusive chimera and mandate to find ways to design and implement furniture at carbon zero, students will study and re-evaluate the forms and aspirations of iconic plywood furniture precedents that were originally designed for mass-manufacture in the modern post war period. We’ll explore needs for typological transformations and energy “edits” to these precedents. Students will identify that which is essential to the design and eliminate many inherited familiar components of a table or chair.  We’ll work with flexible solar materials and kinetic energy scavenging to design and test if/how solar and kinetic energy could become integral to furniture objects that self-power, self-form, and self-compost. 

In this undertaking and work together, we will engage the architectural imagination to advance critical thinking and speculation on what a possible future world of the Big ZERO might hold and what its consequences—technical, cultural, and practices in everyday life-- might imply. To design for carbon zero is not an isolated technical problem of engineering. Nor is it a substitution of one piece of furniture for another. The enterprise will entail a radical rethinking and reconstruction of the architect’s relationship with design, production, and use.  When household objects in a Big ZERO world operate as hybrids of renewable biomass and infrastructure, new forms of partnership and care with their human owners can be explored-- more like living plants than products.

The workshop will include guest talks and hands-on sessions on wood sourcing, drying and design and computation for human scale hydrohygroscopic wood forming, a process that engages the inherent capacity of multilayered wood plies to self-form instead of being manufactured in a traditional high energy factory setting. Wood, solar and energy harvesting materials for this course will be provided.  Budget and COVID permitting, students will travel to Germany to share ideas and techniques of hydroscopic wood design and making.
 

9/6/23 - first meeting of class will be in room 7-336 (previously listed as 3-329)

(pre-approved for MArch Urbanism elective Fall 2023)

Through this class, students will explore the idea of creating a "climate corps" for MIT: a way for students (and potentially alumni) to take action for climate and environmental justice on campus and in Cambridge and greater Boston community, while building skills and experience.

The class will involve robust stakeholder engagement (fellow students and student groups, alumni, faculty, staff, administration, community partners ...) and the delivery of recommendations and scenarios for the creation of an MIT Climate Corps. MITOS will be 
either the client or at the least a close partner to the class.

Undergraduates welcome.

Note: Students interested must have participated in a climate corps workshop (4.183 or 4.184 ) or internship (MITOS Summer cohort ‘24 or PKG Climate IAP ‘25) or by permission of the instructor. 

Description

Part of a multi-partner, multi-year collaboration, the workshop operates as a corps where students (graduates or undergraduates) work on tangible projects that advance campus, local city or neighborhood climate or climate justice plans and goals. Working individually or in teams, students drive projects, which build on the MIT Office of Sustainability strategic approach to the campus as a test bed and ongoing partnerships with community-based organizations or city agencies in Boston and Cambridge. Ongoing themes we have been exploring include:

• Extreme heat
• Circularity and designing out waste
• Community farms
• Equitable career paths
• Climate and resiliency hubs.

Students develop a project plan with the partner and support of the instructor, setting personal learning goals to deepen their understanding of their chosen theme, their skills and practical experience in project development and implementation. Students learn from each other through weekly reflections and discussion of intersecting dimensions of design and impact: climate, community and careers. 

In order to hit the ground running, students should email the instructor a description of what they would like to work on and why. 

Partners and collaborators: MITOS; PKG; Urban Risk Lab; DesignX; SA+P; Eastie Farm Climate Corps; PowerCorpsBOS; MIT Facilities; City of Cambridge. 

Note on units: Students taking the course for 3 units will propose projects that can be completed during weekly class time, with targeted research and meetings outside of class. Students taking the course for 9 units will undertake projects involving more extensive outside research, partner engagement.

The Professor has been steering a start-up housing group (DECOi) looking at automated composites via robotics. As part of this, they have developed design>build software to be able to generate complex detail quickly enough to keep pace with automated production. This has involved a highly skilled team of programmers and digital architects, mostly from MIT: Marc Downie (Media Lab PhD), Jorge Duro-Royo (Media Lab PhD), Kii Kang (SMArchS Computation), with framing and oversight offered by Professor Mark Burry, who pioneered parametric modeling for the Sagrada Famila in Barcelona over 30 years ago. As yet, this has focused on accelerating design>build capability, but all of the team members have a keen interest in how computation alters design imagination, and all have flirted with rule-based generative processes in their architectural work. All are intrigued by AI as it applies to design, yet there are as many versions of what AI "is", or might be.

The workshop aims to probe these differences, with students selecting what they feel are salient opportunities to develop some aspect of generative spatial/material aptitude, in the hope that it starts to offer clarity by being worked through into actual designs. The general premise is that the rule-based generative processes that emerged late C19th and steadily developed through the C20th are already taking hold in mainstream practice, and are destined to become the dominant mode of architectural production C21.

Students will be asked to step into speculative design protocols to gain insight into some aspect of auto-generated objects or buildings. The DECOi team is friendly, daring, and very team-oriented. There is no real expectation of computation as it's more adopting a creative mindset; but there is certainly a rare team of computational expertise to draw upon.

What we are finding is that once there is a high-speed and exact generative capability, so things like energy analysis, life-cycle analysis, techno-economic analysis can also take place "in seconds", offering technical feedback during the design process, which seems to be a real breakthrough. We also see opportunity for real-time co-design with clients, or even self-design in deploying the parameters offered by a cloud-based generative system. This seems to then offer potential for a vast expansion of architectural expertise, which currently involves itself in just 2% of global buildings! The expansion of architectural expertise and the liberation of design practice is then also an area that will merit our collective discussion, perhaps couched in terms of environmental benefit.

Note: The first meeting of this class is on Monday, February 12

Building towards a campus-wide climate corps, this workshop will host students who want to engage in campus and community-based climate projects. Students from across MIT will come together to develop ideas and design prototypes that respond to climate and climate justice imperatives, working with campus and community-based class collaborators. The workshop is part of the multi-year Civilian Climate Corps Initiative (MCCCI), conceived as a pilot for an annual course. Students will have the opportunity to engage in multi-faceted design of “climate pilots” at the intersection of climate, community and careers, learn from experts engaged in these facets of design on our campus and in the local communities of Cambridge and Boston, and from each other through reflection and teamwork. The project will respond to three major themes of farms, heat risk, and green careers. Students will be able to choose the “climate pilot” they would like to work on. Students with their own projects that fit the criteria may email the professors.  The course is open to undergraduate and graduate students from across the Institute. Key collaborators will include MITCCCI partners PowerCorps Boston; Eastie Farm, and the MIT Office of Sustainability (MITOS); and other campus and community partners. 

Students have the option to take the course for 3 or 9 units. In-class time will be devoted to guest lectures and group work. Out of class, students taking the course for 9 units will conduct weekly reflections, research, and work with each other, with site visits to get to know the organizations and sites. Students taking the class for 3 credits will conduct weekly reflections and make targeted contributions to team projects. 

Note: More detailed description coming soon.

Addresses design inquiry in a studio format. In-depth consideration of selected issues of the built world. The problem may be prototypical or a particular aspect of a whole project, but is always interdisciplinary in nature.

We will start with gathering individual research interests per student in the realm of computation with an emphasis on prototype-based experiments, then develop a hypothesis from it, create a preliminary precedent review, derive a design-based experiment to test the hypothesis, evaluate the experiment and summarize the method and results in a technical paper. The process is accommodated by labs that support the development of the computational approach bridging digital and physical using electronics and fabrication to develop prototypes in the sense of embodied computation.

Specific expectations and/or deliverable product resulting from course:

An experimental physical prototype and a technical paper reporting on the design experiment.

The Castaways Brick Fogon Fabrication Workshop is a direct extension of the spring 2024 Spoon Climate Studio & Workshop exploring the material properties and circularity of ‘waste’ brick. The Fall 2024 Fogon Workshop will be specifically focused on a selected, single brick stove design from the studio that was developed over the summer, and how it is fabricated in San Gregorio, a traditional farming community of chinampera farmers in Mexico City. The Workshop will continue to work with Cocina Collaboratorio, a local non-profit and will hold online reviews and discussions with local members of the San Gregorio community who will use the fogon.

The fogon, a traditional open hearth and wood cooking stove has its origins in Mesoamerican Nahuatl culture and family life. The development of the selected fogon design and its fabrication raise intriguing challenges: the fogon must mediate heat for cooking, hold cooking utensils, safely channel smoke in a chimney, be structurally stable and be scaled in size to provide a public gathering place for inter-generational cooks to prepare and share traditional food for community events.

The Workshop offers a hands-on opportunity to learn how an unconventional material—broken and irregular waste brick—can have new life in a functional prototype that can be replicated and adjusted as needs be on additional sites in San Gregorio. Students will produce detailed fabrication documents, brick jigs and layout tools and innovative instructions for building the fogon. The Nahuatl language has no word for ‘waste,’ which inspires a larger scale circularity project that represents how this ‘waste’ brick fogon could include local brick makers, undervalued forms of wood for fuel, and excess food harvested from local restaurants and chinampas. The Workshop will travel to Mexico City during a portion of the IAP period in January 2025 to build the fogon.

The workshop will include travel to local mills to choose hardwood pieces.
Students work will be showcased at the 2022 International MassTimber Conference.

WARM WOOD is an experimental, hands-on workshop where students will work with solid wood manufacturing processes and hardwood ‘thinnings’—small diameter trees and logs that are typically cleared and left to waste in forest clearing. This workshop will investigate a thermal paradigm shift in architecture, where heating (and cooling) may be provided through and integrated into solid wood (mass timber) radiant surfaces. Foreshadowed perhaps in Archigram’s 1961 proposal for an electric “plug-in” log, we will explore the aesthetics, thermal performance, and possible forms of hydronic, radiant WARM WOOD. This may include—designing the mass plywood Stack as a wood/form composed of layers and densities of hardwood species, pushing the boundaries of what Knot/Not wood can be, and exploring Effective/Defective wood.

The workshop will conduct research on cross-laminated timber (CLT) and mass plywood panel (MPP) manufacturers to understand sustainable forest management best practices and the automated production processes used in these mass timber industries.  Our shared objective will be to engage critical thinking and creative design to explore radiant heating/cooling in mass timber construction as a comfortable, tactile and embodied system with significant aesthetic, energetic and environmental benefits. Students in the WARM WOOD Workshop will create, test and fabricate small-scale wooden ‘hot-objects’ and design proposals for WARM WOOD furniture/infrastructure elements that can be installed for energy retrofits in public housing. Tools will include drawing in section, 3D modelling, heat imaging (thermography) and physical prototyping with local hardwoods and Mass Plywood panels.

This workshop will provide local hardwoods, mass plywood panels, material supplies, hydronic radiant technologies, fittings, and tools to support prototype fabrication by participating students.

WHAT WOULD WOOD is the second installment of the multiyear ODDS & MODS research and design initiative at MIT on material circularity in architecture. The WHAT WOULD WOOD option studio and adjacent fabrication workshop will explore experimental and innovative approaches to the use of wood in the design of collective worker housing for US Forest Service firefighters and community service providers. Our partners in this venture will be representatives of the US Forest Service and Washoe first nation sawmill start-ups and stewards of the Palisades Tahoe Forest region of what is now called California.

Studio and Workshop will explore experimental wood construction with two unconventional and seemingly opposite typologies of wood. Messy Mass Timber (MMT) is our term for irregular pieces of dimensional lumber and CLT offs cuts harvested from factory waste streams. Extracted as commercial crop in industrially cultivated soft wood forests, mainstream CLT production is based on a modern era system of standardization and wood waste. The abundant by-product supply of ‘waste’ wood cut-offs can be stacked and assembled, inspired by design imagination to create new forms of un-wholly wood – thick beams and floor slabs that can resist large forces in compression.

At the other end of the industrial-forest spectrum, Wild Wood is our term for minimally processed, small diameter logs with varying branch geometries that retain wood’s unique mechanical properties as an orthotropic material. Wild Wood encompasses small-diameter hard wood tree species and tree forks of varying branch geometries that can be harvested to support forest regeneration. In natural varying forms, the junction of forking branches conserves much more strength in tension than if it were cut and sliced. Messy Mass Timber and Wild Wood can be utilized independently or together to create regenerative wood building systems that respond to forces in tension and compression.

Students will travel to local forest land in New Hampshire or Maine where we will immerse ourselves immediately in all things forest to discover and represent its many spatial qualities and diverse aesthetics. Our departure point will be the design of a bird blind—a small, stealthy structure that can disappear into the landscape of woods. Working with digital design toolkits, students will draw inspiration from a design inventory of specific wood pieces that they choose to work with. With intelligent design visualization and assembly protocols, the studio will explore a fundamentally new relationship of part to whole in architecture. Our approach moves away from the traditional value accorded to physically continuous, uniform wood in favor of a transformative ‘alchemy’ where diverse sets of small wood pieces, considered in the mainstream as ‘waste’, can be aggregated and designed to take on high value spatial properties and structural capacities.

Over Spring Break we’ll travel to Washoe first nation forest lands to visit and document collective housing sites and sawmills. There, we’ll converse and share design ideas with artisanal wood knowledge keepers, forest fire fighters, community leaders and industrial wood manufacturers. At MIT and at the legendary UC Berkeley Wood Lab, students will fabricate models and large-scale wood components of their design proposals for collective worker housing.

Against the visible context of ongoing forest fires and climate crisis, students will study the different histories and ways of thinking about the forest to stake out a range of design positions on the utilization of wood in architecture.  Messy Mass Timber and Wild Wood are undervalued, provocative and increasingly combustible parts of a fragile, and fast disappearing ecological commons. WHAT WOULD WOOD asks a fundamental question: how could building with wood – and the architectural discourse around design with wood— be redefined and reimagined to enable wood circular materiality and envision possible futures for wood in architecture.

Note 12/8/23: The subject number for this class has changed from 4.181 to 4.185

The ODDS & MODS Castaways Workshop in Spring 2024 will address research, and fabrication of prototypes for scalable material circularity in architecture, focusing on the use of up-cycled and re-used clay and earth brick. Graduate students in the MArch program may elect to take this workshop together with the ODDS & MODS Option Studio or independently.

Preliminary study in preparation for the thesis for the SMArchS degree in architecture design. Topics include literature search, precedents examination, thesis structure and typologies, and short writing exercise. 

Preliminary study in preparation for the thesis for the SMArchS degree in architecture design. Topics include literature search, precedents examination, thesis structure and typologies, and short writing exercise. 

Preparatory research development leading to a well-conceived proposition for the MArch design thesis. Students formulate a cohesive thesis argument and critical project using supportive research and case studies through a variety of representational media, critical traditions, and architectural/artistic conventions. Group study in seminar and studio format, with periodic reviews supplemented by conference with faculty and a designated committee member for each individual thesis.

Preparatory research development leading to a well-conceived proposition for the MArch design thesis. Students formulate a cohesive thesis argument and critical project using supportive research and case studies through a variety of representational media, critical traditions, and architectural/artistic conventions. Group study in seminar and studio format, with periodic reviews supplemented by conference with faculty and a designated committee member for each individual thesis.

4.189 Syllabus (MIT Certificate protected)

Preparatory research development leading to a well-conceived proposition for the MArch design thesis. Students formulate a cohesive thesis argument and critical project using supportive research and case studies through a variety of representational media, critical traditions, and architectural/artistic conventions. Group study in seminar and studio format, with periodic reviews supplemented by conference with faculty and a designated committee member for each individual thesis.

Preparatory research development leading to a well-conceived proposition for the MArch design thesis. Students formulate a cohesive thesis argument and critical project using supportive research and case studies through a variety of representational media, critical traditions, and architectural/artistic conventions. Group study in seminar and studio format, with periodic reviews supplemented by conference with faculty and a designated committee member for each individual thesis.

Preparatory research development leading to a well-conceived proposition for the MArch design thesis. Students formulate a cohesive thesis argument and critical project using supportive research and case studies through a variety of representational media, critical traditions, and architectural/artistic conventions. Group study in seminar and studio format, with periodic reviews supplemented by conference with faculty and a designated committee member for each individual thesis.