Students present research and travel for the Schlossman Research Award, the Louis C. Rosenberg Travel Fellowship, and the Julian Beinart Research Award. More information on each award and applications is available here.
Lectures
See all lectures (archive)
Spring 2017 Lecture Series
Lectures are free and open to the public. For some lectures, members of the MIT community with IDs will be admitted 30 minutes prior to the lecture and the general public will be admitted as space permits.
Except as noted, lectures are at 6:00 pm in Room 7-429, located at 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA. An interactive map may be found on-line at: http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg
Feb 10, 2017 - 5:00pm
Long Lounge/Room 7-429
Feb 10, 2017 - 12:00pm
7-429
Hosted by the MIT Chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architecture Students (NOMAS)Moderated by Jessica Varner
Feb 16, 2017 - 7:00pm
Room 7-429/Long Lounge
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 16, 5:30 - 7pm, Wolk Gallery (7-338)
Volker Staab, principal of Staab Architects, Berlin
Respondent: Annemarie Jaeggi, Director of Bauhaus Archive, Berlin
Organized and curated by Gary van Zante, MIT Museum
Feb 13, 2017 - 6:00pm
E15-001: 20 Ames Street, Wiesner Building
Magid will be discussing recent projects, her engagements with the law, and permission as a material of the work.
Feb 23, 2017 - 6:00pm
7-429
Assemble are a collective based in London who work across the fields of art, architecture and design. They began working together in 2010 and are comprised of 18 members. Assemble’s working practice seeks to address the typical disconnection between the public and the process by which places are made. Assemble champion a working practice that is interdependent and collaborative, seeking to actively involve the public as both participant and collaborator in the on-going realisation of the work.
Feb 24, 2017 - 5:00pm
7-429
While embodiment takes many forms, this talk will carve out a modest space for discussion as a way of illustrating a larger shift in our cultural technologies. The modest space?
Feb 27, 2017 - 6:00pm
3-133
The contemporary environmental, political and financial crises have brought energy to the forefront of design concerns, emphasizing once again that geography has a significant role to play for the design of oil infrastructure. This talk will review findings from DESIGN EARTH research on Hassi Messaoud Oil Urbanism, After Oil in the Gulf, and the Future of Oil Company Towns to discuss ways in which representation could play an instrumental in discussions about energy transition.
Feb 28, 2017 - 6:00pm
7-429
For nearly fifty years “the building” has primarily been viewed as a means rather than an end within architectural history and theory. This volume presents an alternative to that trend by reconceiving it as a central discursive category in its own right. Contributors—including architects and academics from world-renowned institutions—offer insightful discussions of key architectural structures conceived in Europe, Asia, and the U.S.A. over the last three decades. In doing so they propel architectural thinking’s importance as a domain of knowledge.
Mar 2, 2017 - 6:00pm
7-429
This is the story behind the Fuji Kindergarten, well known from the TED talk, "The best kindergarten you've ever seen.” In this lecture, we will present several new and ongoing projects which evolved from the philosophy that the human being is designed to be a part of the environment. We are waterproofed. Architecture is not just a shelter but also the setting to merge humans with this planet.
Photographs: Katsuhisa Kida／FOTOTECA
Mar 3, 2017 - 12:00pm
7-429
Hosted by the MIT Chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architecture Students (NOMAS)
Mar 6, 2017 - 6:00pm
7-429
Image 1: Original Model of Virginia Statehouse by Jean-Pierre Fouquet for Thomas Jefferson, 1786
Image 2: Samuel Jennings, Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences or the Genius of America of America Encouraging the Emancipations of the Blacks, 1792. Library Company of Philadelphia.
Mar 8, 2017 - 6:00pm
Long Lounge Room 7-429
Mar 13, 2017 - 6:00pm
E15-001: 20 Ames Street, Wiesner Building
By creating proposals and aesthetic models for others to use and adapt, she defines herself as an initiator rather than an author, and often collaborates with multiple institutions as well as many individuals so that the full realization of her artwork occurs when others adopt and perpetuate it.
This presentation will show some of Bruguera’s work-strategies and discuss some of her key concepts like Arte de Conducta (Behavior Art), Arte Útil (Art as a tool), Political-timing specific and Aest-ethics in the context of current political events.
Mar 16, 2017 - 6:00pm
7-429
Architects play a marginal role in the production of built environments today, often entering a project long after its critical limits have already been defined. OUALALOU+CHOI seeks to render the architect’s role once more necessary and pertinent, to expand and redefine the architect’s perimeter of action.
Mar 17, 2017 - 5:00pm
7-429
Sensing space – the world around us and our position in it – is one of the most important jobs the brain faces. Spatial information derives from many sources – vision, hearing, balance, touch, proprioception, movement and memory – and these systems must coordinate with each other to synthesize our spatial knowledge. I will describe some of the computations that are essential to knitting together visual and auditory information, which requires not only coordination across different reference frames but also different formats for encoding information (akin to digital vs.
Mar 20, 2017 - 5:30pm
3-133
SPRING 2017 AGA KHAN PROGRAM LECTURES
Mar 21, 2017 - 6:00pm
7-429
SPRING 2017 HTC FORUM LECTURE
Apr 3, 2017 - 5:30pm
3-133
SPRING 2017 AGA KHAN PROGRAM LECTURES
Apr 5, 2017 - 6:30pm
3-270
SPRING 2017 HTC FORUM LECTURE
Apr 10, 2017 - 6:00pm
Long Lounge/Room 7-429
Part of the Dinner with the In-Laws Series, hosted by the Architecture Student Council
Apr 14, 2017 - 5:00pm
7-429
The Agendas series brings together prominent thinkers and practitioners to address modes of research. The goal of the series is to accumulate knowledge on research methodologies that engage diverse topics across the fields of visual culture and the built environment. Agendas is an invitation and platform for ongoing engagement between MIT and individuals who play a role in creating challenging and timely discourse.
Apr 20, 2017 - 6:00pm
7-429
*NOTE: THIS LECTURE IS CANCELLED AND WILL BE RESCHEDULED FOR FALL 2017.
Boris Groys presents the second lecture in the Agendas: Politics of Production series. The Agendas series brings together prominent thinkers and practitioners to address modes of research. The goal of the series is to accumulate knowledge on research methodologies that engage diverse topics across the fields of visual culture and the built environment. Agendas is an invitation and platform for ongoing engagement between MIT and individuals who play a role in creating challenging and timely discourse.
Apr 21, 2017 - 1:00pm
E52, Samberg Center
April 21-22, 2017
MIT Samberg Conference Center, Building E52
50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02139
Apr 24, 2017 - 12:00pm
Long Lounge / Room 7-429
Hosted by the MIT Chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMAS)
Apr 24, 2017 - 5:30pm
3-133
A World War II hero, pioneering critic of racism in France, revolutionary psychiatrist, spokesman of the Algerian national liberation movement: Frantz Fanon lived many lives for a man who died at 36. But what thread links these “lives,” and how are we to make sense of Fanon’s writings today, several decades after the collapse of the colonial regimes he opposed? This lecture will explore how Fanon invented himself on the page while responding to a series of extreme situations. It will also reflect on Fanon’s contemporary “after-lives”.
Apr 24, 2017 - 6:00pm
E15-001: 20 Ames Street, Wiesner Building
Pedro Reyes’s practice sews together the usually uneven goals/ends of art, architecture, psychology, theater, activism, and more. It’s understood that an expanded notion of sculpture is expanding into the social. His solutions engage us in the same way a practical joke would. According to Pedro, jokes have a particular mechanism, like an airbag, that cushions the collision of our expectations of reality and reality itself. So then, the sudden clash of thesis and antithesis leads to laughter—the only way we can handle the shock.
Apr 27, 2017 - 6:00pm
10-250
An Essential Nature (or Landscape): The Otherness
The 28th Arthur H. Schein Memorial Lecture
Apr 28, 2017 - 5:00pm
7-429
This presentation argues that the digitization, proliferation, and mobility of contemporary screens has transformed what was once a "screen-scape" to an all-encompassing "screen-sphere"—a new topologically-bounded, systemically-organized, and n-dimensional domain that has not only radically changed our lifeworld but also our ontological existence, behavior, and spatiotemporal orientation within it. My argument proceeds in three parts that correspond to the three stages of phenomenological method: description, reduction (or thematization), and interpretation.
May 1, 2017 - 5:30pm
3-133
SPRING 2017 AGA KHAN PROGRAM LECTURES
May 5, 2017 - 3:30pm
7-429: Long Lounge
Professor Anderson's legacy at MIT stretched from his scholarship and teaching to program building. This symposium will be an opportunity to reflect on his efforts by means of three roundtables chared by HTC alumni and his former students. The History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art program and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture co-host the Memorial Symposium in honor of Professor Emeritus Stanford Anderson (1934-2016).