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While on location in remote areas of Kenya, researching automation and home manufacturing for his doctoral dissertation, Kenfield Griffith PhD Computation ’12 encountered a significant lack of data.
For example, information he needed about whether people had access to indoor plumbing was scarce or nonexistent — and conducting traditional surveys to gather the data would be arduous and time consuming. But nearly all rural Kenyans, he realized, had texting-capable cell phones.
Special congratulations go to the following students who were the recipients of the 2017 Departmental Awards:
William Emerson Prize
to an Architecture Senior for Academic Excellence
SOFIE BELANGER
Henry Wentworth Gardner (1894) Prize
to an Architecture Senior for Academic Excellence and Achievement in Design
MARIA E. ROLDAN
The Graham Foundation has announced over $560,000 in new grants to individuals around the world that engage original ideas in architecture. Five of this year's seventy-two funded projects were from members of the SA+P community including: Architecture's Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy; DUSP PhD candidate Suzanne Harris-Brandts; Caitlin Berrigan SMVisS ’09; Daniel Cardoso Llach SMArchS ’07, PhD ’12; and Nathan Friedman SMArchS ’15.
When Professor György Kepes founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) in 1967, he provided a home at MIT for “artistic tasks that have authentic roots in our present condition.”
Friday, May 12, 9:30 - 11:30 AM
4.032/4.S02 Undergraduate Design Studio, 9:30 - 11:30 AM
Information and Visualization
Ben Fry and James Grady, Room 3-442
Tuesday, May 16, 1:00 to 6:00 PM
4.154 Graduate Architecture Option Studios
Ground Up: Transfiguring the Abattoirs of Casablanca
Linna Choi and Tarik Oualalou, Long Lounge/7-429
IN NO TIME:
a garden party
A night of installations, performances and outdoor screenings by Graduate Students in the Art Culture and Technology
Program at MIT. Schedule of events will be uploaded soon. Stay tuned!
Friday, May 19, 2017
Featuring works by:
Angel Chen
Jessica Sarah Rinland
Jessika Khazrik or The Society of False Witnesses
Jose Rivera
Laura Serejo Genes
Neil Sanzgiri
Nicolas Kisic Aguirre
Nolan Oswald Dennis
Pedro Zylbersztajn
Raafat Mazjoub
SKATKA
Yusef Audeh
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).
Public Space? Lost and Found explores the contemporary evolution of public space from the milieu of design and artistic thinking and practice at the civic scale. It gathers an eclectic cast of practitioners and theorists of the public domain and welcomes all readers interested in how the production of public space plays out (or could play out) under interrelated, accelerating conditions shaping the present, such as ubiquitous computing, climate change, economic austerity, and the rise of various stripes of political extremism and isolationism.
Olivia Huang (M.Arch '18) and Akshita Sivakumar (SMArchS '17) were nominated and honored at the 2017 Graduate Women of Excellence Reception. Each honoree was nominated by a member of the MIT Community in recognition of her leadership and service, dedication to mentorship and drive to improve the student experience. Below, Olivia and Akshita answer a few questions on their work inside and outside of MIT for the Office of the Dean of Graduate Education (ODGE).
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Olivia Huang (MArch 2018)
Brandon Clifford, Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture, has been awarded The Founders Rome Prize for 2017-2018 from the American Academy in Rome for his project titled "Ghosts of Rome."
Associate Professor William O'Brien Jr.'s exhibit 'Other Masks' is on view at Balts Projects in Zurich, Switzerland, from April 12 - May 14, 2017.
‘Being Material,’ the second MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology Symposium takes place on April 21-22, 2017.The conference is convened by Professor Stefan Helmreich, Anthropology; Leila Kinney, Arts at MIT Executive Director Leila Kinney; Assistant Professor Skylar Tibbits, Architecture; CAST Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer Rebecca Uchill (PhD HTC ‘15), Architecture; and Professor Evan Ziporyn, Music and Theater Arts.
The Art of the Dealers
Who doesn’t like a good story about art, international espionage, and global commerce? Consider this one. In 1765, the French government of Louis XV dispatched two emissaries to China with six large tapestries intended for the Qianlong emperor. In theory, this was a gesture of Enlightenment universalism by France’s minister of state, Henri-Leonard Bertin.
Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy of DESIGN EARTH are among four designers chosen to create installations on the Rose Kennedy Greenway as part of the fifth Design Biennial Boston. “The powerful drawings and installations of these exceptional designers make visible—in a profound and terrifyingly beautiful way—the deep and damaging impact that human activity has had on the earth and the consequences of that impact for our continued inhabitation of the planet,” said juror Keith Krumwiede on DESIGN EARTH’s work.
Azra Aksamija, Associate Professor in the Program in Art, Culture and Technology, and Nasser Rabbat, Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, talk to The Tech about their immigrant experience and how it informs their work and teaching as part of the Tech Transfers project, a photo series by Professor Daniel Jackson that features immigrant members of MIT.
“Imagine a structure that is quick to assemble, easy to transport and offers shelter in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Now, imagine one that can assemble itself in mid-air. This is the vision of a group of students from the Masters of Architecture Options Studio at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)," writes Alexandra Simon-Lewis for Wired Magazine on the Fall 2016 Options Studio 'Fast, Cheap and Out of the Box'.
The Tozzer Anthropology Building by Kennedy Violich Architecture, the architectural practice of Professor Sheila Kennedy, received an Architecture Merit award from the 2017 American Institute of Architects New York (AIANY) Design Awards. The project will be part of the Center for Architecture 2017 Design Awards Exhibition, on view April 21 through June 20, 2017.
Zain Karsan (M.Arch ‘18) is the recipient of the 2017 QuarraMatter Fellowship. Now in its third year, the QuarraMatter Fellowship allows students to spend a summer working with Quarra Stone, a stone fabricator in Madison, Wisconsin. Two fellows work closely with fabricators at Quarra to develop and implement a large-scale stone artifact; the intent of the research is to build processes that improve accuracy in production techniques and reduce the gap between drawing, modeling, and making.
HTC PhD Candidate Nisa Ari, whose research explores the relationships between cultural politics and the development of art and art institutions in the Middle East, won the 2017 Rhonda A. Saad Prize for Best Paper in Modern and Contemporary Arab Art from the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran and Turkey.
Pacific Aquarium, a project by DESIGN EARTH, led by Assistant Professor Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, won the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) 2017 Faculty Design Award.
On Thursday, April 6th, Caroline A Jones, MIT Professor of Art History, and Rebecca Uchill, MIT Center for Art Science & Technology Postdoctoral Fellow, along with Harvard University Professor Peter Galison, will be the opening keynote panel for the graduate student conference “Technical Landscapes: Aesthetics and the Environment in the History of
Kristel Smentek's presentation entitled “Bouchardon, P.-J. Mariette, and the ‘Pure Taste’ of the Antique” is part of The Getty Center's symposium "Bouchardon and His Contemporaries" and examines mid-eighteenth-century conceptions of ancient Greek art and the role of antique engraved gems in constructions of a "pure" Greek style.
Announcing a Call for Papers for the MIT History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture + Art Graduate Student Conference to held on October 14, 2017
polemic… Polemic? POLEMIC!
For the third year in a row, MIT has been named the top university in the world for “Architecture/Built Environment” in the latest subject rankings from QS World University Rankings. In “Art and Design,” the Institute ranked No. 2 globally for the second year in a row.
Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age
University of Minnesota Press, 2016
MIT professor John Ochsendorf has been named as the 23rd Director of the American Academy in Rome (AAR). Ochsendorf, a professor with dual appointments in the Departments of Architecture and Civil and Environmental Engineering, will serve a three-year term beginning July 1, 2017, after which he will return to MIT.
Thresholds 46: SCATTER!
Editors: Anne Graziano and Eliyahu Keller
Designing energy-efficient buildings can be challenging: Incorporating features that decrease the energy needed to run them often increases the energy-intensive materials required to build them, and vice versa. Now an MIT team has demonstrated a computer simulation that can help architects optimize their designs for both future operational energy and the initial energy required for making structural materials — at the same time.
Building 7 is most known for the soaring four-story lobby that greets visitors who enter the campus from Massachusetts Avenue. Not as widely recognized is that the building is home to four galleries that feature regular exhibitions of art, architecture, and design.
Freshman seminar inspires students to see the world with fresh eyes.
On a crisp afternoon in early September, seven MIT freshmen set out on a campus tour with their faculty advisor, John Ochsendorf, the Class of 1942 Professor in Architecture and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Their first stop was “The Big Sail,” the 33-ton steel sculpture by Alexander Calder that stands in McDermott Court.
Research shows how rebuilding Britain’s Houses of Parliament in the 1800s helped create clean-air laws.
Britain’s dazzling Houses of Parliament building, constructed from 1840 until 1870, is an international icon. But the building’s greatest legacy may be something politicians and tourists don’t think about much: the clean air around it.
Oscar Rosello, pursuing a Master degree in SMarchS Design and Computation, received Best Poster Award at the 29th ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium in October in Tokyo. The ACM Symposium (UIST) is the premiere forum for human-computer interface design and brings together research in virtual/augmented reality, multimedia, input/output devices, and graphical interfaces.
The School of Architecture and Planning and the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) at MIT have established a long-term initiative to rethink the future of affordable housing in Brazil, which faces an estimated shortage of 7 million units.
Faculty Rania Ghosn, Joel Lamere, and William O’Brien Jr. were recognized for their design work in The Architect’s Newspaper and Architect magazine’s 2016 Design Awards.
Faculty members Timothy Hyde and Lauren Jacobi and Alumni Lucia Allais (PhD 2008) and Martin Bressani (SMArchS 1985) will be speaking at St. Catherine’s College in Oxford England on January 14, 2017.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) a $1.5 million grant in continued support for the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC).
Monday, December 12
10:00 am to 6:00 pm, 4.154 Architecture Option Studio (G), Future Heritage, Maria Segantini and Carlo Cappai, Long Lounge/7-429
12:00 to 6:00 pm, 4.154 Architecture Option Studio (G), Architecture as Landscape, Fabrizio Barozzi and Jongwan Kwan, South Dome + South Corner
1:00 to 6:00 pm, 4.154 Architecture Option Studio (G), Fast, Cheap & Out of the Box, Skylar Tibbits, Aran Chadwick and Neil Thomas, location to be announced
Tuesday, December 13
The School of Architecture and Planning has announced that seven faculty members have been recognized by being promoted, granted tenure, or given significant new roles, and four new faculty joined their ranks. Among these are six faculty from the Department of Architecture.
A number of alumni and faculty are participating in the annual Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) Conference, October 24-28, 2016. This year’s theme “Posthuman Frontiers: Data, Designers and Cognitive Machines” aims to discuss work at the intersection of procedural design, designed environments, and autonomous machines.
Professor and Department Head J. Meejin Yoon will receive the ACADIA 2016 Teaching Award of Excellence and deliver a keynote lecture on October 28.
Exhibition Opening & Reception: September 30, 2016, 6:30 PM
On View September 23 - November 1, 2016
Seattle-based mwworks, an architecture studio best known residences and strong contextual work that knits into landscape, has received the 2016 Northwest and Pacific Region Emerging Firm Award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA). The award recognizes emerging firms less than ten years old that are challenging traditional perceptions and methods of architecture. The AIA Northwest and Pacific Region (NWPR) includes the states of Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho and Hawaii, and the territory of Guam.
Please join us on Thursday, October 27th for our Fall Graduate Programs Open House. Come learn about one of the top ranked architecture schools in the world!
The post-professional Master of Science in Architectural Studies (SMArchS) program session will begin at 11 AM. Schedule below:
SMArchS Open House
Long Lounge, Building 7 Room 429
The professional master's of architecture program at MIT has tied for second in the nation in the latest DesignIntelligence rankings, a jump from fifth position last year. MIT's architecture program has consistently appeared among the top 10 in this annual assessment of nationally accredited graduate programs.
In ratings of specific skills areas, MIT’s graduate architecture program ranked first in computer applications, second in sustainability, and third in construction methods and materials.
Please join us in congratulating Jongwan Kwon, M.Arch '16, on receipt of the 2016 SOM Prize in Architecture, an annual $50,000 research and travel prize. Jongwan's research proposal, "After Efficiency: Logistics Infrastructure from a Regional Perspective," focuses on the impact of major international gateways (ports, airports, canals and tunnels) on their regional environments.
Grove, a project by Assistant Professor Joel Lamere and Cynthia Gunadi, GLD Architecture, received an Honorable Mention in Architect magazine's 2016 R+D Awards.
“Grove represents a significant advancement in architectural form-making. By combining composite-based structural analysis with inflatable vinyl forms, GLD has developed a workflow that embeds structural logic into design from the very start—and at a low cost,” writes Nate Berg.
One graduate student and two recent alumni are recipients of the 2016-2017 Fulbright Grants. PhD Candidate Christianna Bonin and alumni Aurimas Bukauskas and Elizabeth Yarina will spend the coming year in Russia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand, respectively.
The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded MIT’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) of the School of Architecture and Planning an NEA Art Works grant to support the digitization and online presentation of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) Special Collection.
Alumnus Robert White, (M.Arch '15), J. Meejin Yoon, Professor, Department Head, and Principal of Höweler + Yoon Architecture, and Alex Anmahian, Lecturer and Principal of Anmahian Winton Architects, are three of four winners of the Northern Avenue Bridge Ideas Competition organized by the City of Boston and the Boston Society of Architects.
Congratulations to all of our 2015-2016 Department of Architecture graduates!
A special congratulations goes to the following students who were the recipients of the 2016 Departmental Awards:
William Emerson Prize
to an Architecture Senior for Academic Excellence
MARIANA BALLINA
Henry Wentworth Gardner (1894) Prize
to an Architecture Senior for Academic Excellence and Achievement in Design
DOHYUN LEE
The department congratulates the recipients of the 2016 Schlossman Research Fellowship, Louis C. Rosenberg (1913) Travel Fellowship, the Marvin Goody Award, and the Julian Beinart Research Award. Students will present their research in Spring 2017.
Schlossman Research Fellowship
"Uncamping: Rethinking Refugee Housing”
Grisha Enikolopov
M.Arch 2017
"Design Analysis and Digital Archive of Korean Dancheong Patterns”
Hunmin Koh
SMArchS Design and Computation, 2017
Faculty, researchers, graduate students, and alumni represented in 15 exhibitions and pavilions.
Architects, artists, and designers from the MIT community constitute a robust presence at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Suk Lee, MA'15, is winner of the First Award in the area of Institutional Building for his thesis concept, MIT I2—Idea Incubator, a project that explores the future of the campus and online learning with structures on and below the Charles River.
Learn more about MIT I2 — Idea Incubator
The Architectural League of New York has honored two members of the School of Architecture and Planning community with its annual prize for young architects and designers.
Design Earth, a collaborative practice led by MIT Assistant Professor Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, and The Open Workshop, the practice of Neeraj Bhatia SM '07, are two of six architecture and design offices selected for the 2016 prize. The award is given to architects and designers who are no more than 10 years out of school.
Associate Professor Ana Miljacki, and alumna Zeynep Çelik Alexander, PhD '07, are among the 2016 winners of the Graham Foundation grants.
1:00 to 6:00 pm
4.163J/11.332J Urban Design Studio (G)
RENACIMIENTO: Reviving Mexico’s Abandoned Towns
Rafi Segal and Brent Ryan
Long Lounge/7-429 + adjacent pin-up areas
11:00 am to 6:00 pm
4.152 Architecture Design Core Studio II (G)
Ana Miljacki (coordinator), Cristina Parreno-Alonso, Ryan Murphy
Long Lounge/7-429 + North & South Domes
MIT has named its Center for Advanced Urbanism (CAU) in honor of Norman B. Leventhal '38, a visionary developer and philanthropist at the center of Boston’s postwar revival. A life member emeritus of the MIT Corporation who died last year, Mr. Leventhal was a vital member of the MIT community for three-quarters of a century.
The center was officially named the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism today at a signing ceremony attended by Alan and Sherry Leventhal and other members of Norman Leventhal’s extended family.
HTC alumnus Karl Haglund PhD '97 and faculty/alumnus Mark Jarzombek PhD '86 featured in MIT Alumni Associations' s VIDEO: "Island on the Charles" as part of the MIT Centennial Celebration on the MIT Campus. The following article describes the video. Images above include only one of the island ideas.
by JULIE BARR on April 22, 2016
MITArchA is the newly formed MIT Architecture Alumni affinity group, within the MIT Alumni Association. Open to all MIT Architecture Alumni, undergraduates and graduates, as well as current students and friends of the program, MITArchA is our forum to connect with each other, with current students and faculty, the School of Architecture and Planning and the Institute at Large.
Professor and Department of Architecture head J. Meejin Yoon has been awarded the 2016 Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) Teaching Award of Excellence. The jury cited Yoon’s “innovative and critical pedagogical approach to integrating new ideas, techniques and technologies into her teaching and research. This approach is supported by excellence in academic leadership, scholarship and professional practice.”
"MIT2016: Celebrating a century in Cambridge" commemorates the Institute’s 1916 move from Boston’s Back Bay as it honors MIT’s special relationship with the City of Cambridge and looks toward the frontiers of the future. On Saturday, April 23, 2016, the entire campus will be open for a day-long participatory Open House.
The Department of Architecture will launch a new Minor in Design (D-Minor) in Fall 2016. "Undergraduates across MIT are excited about design. They’re participating in increasing numbers in classes and research projects that engage challenging, multi-disciplinary design problems. We are delighted to now offer our very creative and talented undergrads a more structured opportunity to pursue their particular design interests," says Terry Knight, Professor of Design and Computation and Design Minor Advisor.
Join us to toast the release of thresholds 44: workspace and the opening of the exhibition “The Contingent Space of Work” this Friday, April 15 at 5:30pm at the MIT Keller Gallery (Building 7-408).
Featuring a public talk by Shelly Ronen (of Object Solutions) and copies of thresholds available for $5
(Exhibition on view in Keller Gallery April 7 - May 6)
Christoph Reinhart, (https://architecture.mit.edu/faculty/christoph-reinhart) associate professor of architecture, and Carlos Cerezo, a PhD student in the Building Technology Program, together with their Sustainable Design Lab (http://mit.edu/SustainableDesignLab/) colleagues, have developed a citywide urban building energy model of unprecedented scale and spatio-temporal detail.
The Department of Architecture welcomes admitted freshmen and their parents to an Open House, Department Tour and an Open Studio, April 7-10. Visitors can sit in on classes and participate in other related events.
Friday, April 8
Nineteen from the Department of Architecture Alumni, Faculty and Students are participating at the Annual Conference of the Scoiety of Architectural Historians. Sorted by group, each list is in event order by date and time of the panel session or roundtable, so some people are listed twice.
Nathan Brown, Architecture student in the Master of Science in Building Technology Program is the recipient of the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) Foundation 2016 Structural Engineering Traveling Fellowship.
The Institute will commemorate its move to Cambridge and the dedication of the Main Group with academic and celebratory programming beginning on the last day of February and concluding on Commencement and Reunion weekend. Festivities are outlined in the event schedule below and will include a special centenary exhibit at the MIT Museum, academic symposia, music and theater arts performances, and events—including an Open House—that welcome members of the MIT community, our neighbors, and friends.
David Adjaye presents his keynote lecture, "Geography, History, Community: Designing to Context", as part of his McDermott Prize in the Arts at MIT Residency on Tuesday, March 29 at 5:00 PM in Lecture Hall 10-250.
MIT faculty, students, and alumni consistently find creative ways to apply their knowledge to local contexts, collaborating with partners around the globe to make the world a better place. Arguably, no MIT exchange is more fertile than the one the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) enjoys with Mexico.
Matter Design and Quarra Stone have announced this week that Inés Ariza of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Shan Sutherland of the University of Michigan have been selected as the 2016 QuarraMatter Fellows.
The following obituary was graciously provided to us by the family of Professor Myer:
John Randolph Myer, known as Jack to his friends and family, died of natural causes on February 17th, surrounded by his family. He was 89 years old. Mr. Myer was a prominent Boston architect, founder of Arrowstreet, Inc. and was department head of MIT’s Department of Architecture from 1982-1987. With Kevin Lynch, and others, Jack Myer was instrumental in the Downtown Waterfront Renewal Plan, the Boston Architectural Center, and the Massachusetts State Archives Building.
The "Heart of Hearts” pavilion, designed by Collective—LOK, opened in Father Duffy Square in Times Square, NYC on February 9th, 2016. It will remain on view through March 6, 2016.
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Love for Times Square: MIT professor, PhD candidate design Valentine’s Day pavilion for New York City.
http://news.mit.edu/2015/love-for-times-square-art-installation-1228
A team of four students – David Birge, Gabriel Kozlowski, Difei Xu (SMArchS Urbanism ’15) and Barry Beagan (M.Arch ’15) received Second Prize in the invited International Student Urban Design Competition for Shanghai Railway Station Area.
Congratulations to Dessen Hillman (SMArchS 2014) and Erioseto Hendranata (MArch 2014) recipients of the 2015 Lawrence B. Anderson Award for their proposal, "Rediscovering Communal Spaces Through The Everyday Rituals in Indonesia.” The award will help them to study traditional cultures and their rituals across Indonesia in order to learn and uncover knowledge on communal spaces that can inform larger current architecture design discussions.
Landlines: Drawing Terrain is an exhibition of drawings that reflect on the capacity of line to represent a contentious surface. There are eight methods of representing islands in this exhibition; the grouping of drawings positions these methods in relation to one another. There are a total of 24 drawings and 6 animations, organized into eight sets: projecting, hatching, growing, graining, slitting, animating, dashing, and boiding.
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Launched last year by Master of Architecture students, Tengjia Liu, Kun Qian and Marwan Abou Dib, Micro-gallery site Tekuma is recently featured in articles, from Boston to China.
Architecture Professor of the Practice Sheila Kennedy, Lecturer Ryan Murphy, and Professor J. Meejin Yoon received awards at the Boston Society of Architects 2016 Design Awards, held January 28, 2016.
Professor Stanford Anderson, in the History, Theory and Criticism discipline group of the Department of Architecture, died on Jan. 5. He will be missed by many in the School, as well as those touched by his 50 years at MIT. His obituary is available on the MIT News website.
Claudia Bode, M.Arch 2015, is included in Wallpaper Magazine’s Graduate Directory for 2016. Bode’s thesis examines the challenges of the ‘Green Heart’, an agricultural area situated in the center of the Randstad, a metropolis in the western Netherlands. The region faces multiple challenges, including the need to accommodate for water as a strategy to deal with climate change, and the difficult task of operating small family dairy farms in an increasingly globalized market.
Skylar Tibbits, Research Scientist and Director of the Self-Assembly Lab, was named the Innovator of the Year by R&D Magazine at the annual R&D 100 Awards. The award is presented each year to an “individual or team who has demonstrated leadership, creativity, entrepreneurial spirit and success in the pursuit of science and technology.” It is the magazine’s top individual award.
The arc of technological innovation in the practices of architecture and construction have continually emerged out of a ritual desire for improved mechanical advantage, control over material behaviour and enhanced complexity in design and making. Despite these advances the material world has never ceased to provide ample resistance to this attempt of control; matter remains dynamic, undomesticated, and wild. It is through this wildness that materials challenge the design ideas and intentions that we base so much of our efforts on.
Eight student-led teams hoping to launch ventures ranging from real estate development, to urban diagnostics, to novel design solutions for schoolchildren have been selected as the inaugural cohort for DesignX, the new entrepreneurship accelerator from MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P).
Archinect's Paul Petrunia and Amelia Taylor-Hochberg sat down with SA+P Dean Hashim Sarkis to hear his perspective in comparing architecture education and practice.
"Our interview revolves around the same questions we ask in our Deans List series – how architecture education and practice are changing, how to address student needs, MIT’s particular take on how to cultivate exceptional architects, and the culture of the school in a global urban context."
Tuesday, December 8, 10:30 to 5:00 pm
4.153 Architecture Design Core 3 Studios: BAJA WINERY: Architecture in Times of Drought
Sheila Kennedy, Alex Anmahian, Andrew Scott
Long Lounge/ 7-429
Wednesday, December 9, 2:00 to 7:00 pm
4.151 Architecture Design Core 1 Studios
Liam O'Brien and Brandon Clifford
Long Lounge/7-429
An architectural exploration into ancient building techniques led students to create a 2,000 pound monument in honor of classmate Carrie McKnelly's parents who were lost in a fire.
Last May, students in Brandon Clifford's Megalithic Robotics class each designed small-scale models, but decided to create McKnelly's sculpture in full size: http://architecture.mit.edu/architectural-design/project/mcknelly-megalith
Design Earth, a collaborative practice led by Assistant Professor Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy won first prize in the Jacques Rougerie Foundation International Architecture Competition for their project, Neck of the Moon.
Daniel Cardoso Llach (SMArchS and Ph.D. in Architecture from MIT) recently published a book titled Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design (New York: Routledge, 2015). His investigations shed light on the social and political histories of digital design software in the years following World War II through the present.
Professor of the Practice Sheila Kennedy and her team at Kennedy Voilich Architecture (KVA), designed an innovative entryway as part of their transformation of Harvard's Tozzer Building, which was recently awarded a Best in Class prize from the Brick Industry Association of America. The entryway evokes ancient monuments while harnessing state-of-the-art computational design.
A former SMArchS thesis project has found its way into outer space! Pupil Lab, founded by alumni Will Patera and Moritz Kassner (SMArchS Computation, ’12), created custom vision headsets for Space Application Services as part of the Mobile Procedure Viewer (mobiPV) project. The headset captures the astronaut’s field of vision and allows for real-time video to be streamed to mission control where specialists can engage astronauts in real-time consultation and without lengthy delays.
J. Meejin Yoon, a professor and head of the Department of Architecture, was honored this week with the 2015 New Generation Leader award at a ceremony held Oct. 6 by Architectural Record as part of the magazine’s second annual Women in Architecture Forum and Awards event.
Joining faculty from different discipline groups, the Cross-Studios are a new model of teaching studios in the Department of Architecture. The cross-studios allow students to experience novel and innovative research that bridges between design, history, and engineering.
Thank you so much for joining us for the MIT Architecture Graduate Open House! We had a wonderful time meeting you and we hope that you had a great time learning about MIT. You can find the Open House booklet with schedule and departmental information to the right under "download".
If you have any questions or missed the Open House and would like to arrange a visit, please contact arch@mit.edu.
Images:
The first issue of 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing was released under the editorship of Skylar Tibbits, faculty and Director of the Self-Assembly Lab. Tibbits takes over the position from Hod Lipson of Cornell University.
A new film highlights the Course 4 Undergraduate Program in Architecture. Watch the video to see the work and hear from our current Course 4 students and recent alumni, here.
"The magical thing about Course 4 is it teaches you how to take your creativity and design ideas and translate them into physical realities that are spatial, occupiable, inhabitable and have a powerful cultural resonance," said Meejin Yoon, Professor and Department Head.
A new group has formed to offer opportunities for alumni of MIT architecture to connect and re-connect with each other, current students, and the Department of Architecture, as well as the School of Architecture and Planning and the Institute at large.
The MIT Architecture Alumni group—or MITArchA, pronounced "mit-ARK-ah", for short—was proposed and formed by alumni of the school, led by Jacob Kain MArch ’00. Official approval by the Alumni Association is pending, with a formal vote schedule for Sept. 24, 2015.
Two events will help launch MITArchA later this month:
Three MArch students, Tengjia Liu, Kun Qian and Marwan Abou Dib recently created Tekuma, to help bridge the divide between creators of art and potential clientele, with the help of the MIT Global Founders’ Skills Accelerator. Their goal is to set up physical exhibition spaces in apartments listed on rental sites that can be accessed digitally, and to facilitate the sale of exhibited artwork.
The architectural design firms of Professors Brandon Clifford and Joel Lamere are highlighted in interviews by Modelo and published on Design Manifestos. Design Manifestos, "Feature Interviews with Architects & Designers from Around the World."
BUST brings together eleven established architects and firms to reconsider the relevance of a seemingly anachronous means of evaluation for a work of architecture: the façade.
The exhibition at JAI & JAI Gallery, in Los Angeles, features works by: Andrew Kovacs, Bureau Spectacular, CODA, First Office, MILLIØNS, MOS, Norman Kelley, Pita + Bloom, PARA Project, SO-IL, WOJR.
Assistant Professor Joel Lamere and his firm GLD, lecturer Cristina Parreño Alonso of Cristina Parreño Architecture, and Marie Law Adams MArch '06 with Landing Studio, designed three of four installations for the 2015 Design Biennial Boston.
The installations are on view on the Rose Kennedy Greenway in downtown Boston through Sept. 25, 2015.
NESEA will be awarding nine scholarships to students and recent graduates through the Kate Goldstein Award for Emerging Professionals in Sustainable Energy. Award recipients will receive scholarships to attend NESEA conferences or enrollment in a Masters Series online course in sustainability.
The Nomination Period for the scholarships has been extended to September 10. Take a moment today to nominate yourself or someone you know.
Three students from our MArch and SMArchS program have joined the faculties at Rice School of Architecture, Knowlton School of Architecture at the Ohio State University and School of the Art Institute of Chicago:
David Costanza (MArch '13, SMBT '15) joins Rice School of Architecture as First Technology Fellow
Aurimas Bukauskas, BSA '15, won the Carroll R. Wilson Award last Spring for his project "Whole-Section Timber and Bamboo: Naturally-Engineered High-Performance Structures". The award comes with a financial stipend of $25,000 to cover research travel costs.
Höweler + Yoon's ShadowPlay opened recently in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. The project is a public parasol at an urban scale formed by an aggregation of geometric modules. Together, the modules create a hovering canopy which filters the intense Phoenix sun, casting variable shadows on the pedestrian space throughout the day. Photovoltaic panels mounted to the top surface of several cells generates the power to illuminate the parasol in the evening.
Tozzer Anthropology Building by Kennedy & Violich Architecture Featured in Architect Magazine
Timothy Hyde is guest editor of the latest issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Architectural Education. Entitled "Crisis," the issue includes an editorial by Hyde, as well as the work of Rania Ghosn and alumna Panayiota Pyla (PhD'02).
View digital version: http://www.jaeonline.org/issues/crisis#/page1/
Last winter painfully highlighted the public transportation challenges facing the Greater Boston region, as the struggles of the T became the struggles of Bostonians and Massachusetts residents to get to work and manage their daily lives.
The architecture firm of [#J. Meejin Yoon and partner Eric Höweler is featured in an article describing the firm's diverse range of projects.
Elizabeth Yarina is the first runner-up for the 2015 RAMSA Travel Fellowship, while alumna Kayla Manning, BSAD '11, received honorable mention.
Yarina's runner-up proposal, Littoral Urbanism: Vernacular Stilt Architecture Communities as Models for Coastal Living, "impressed the judges for its clarity."
Caleb Harper, SM '14, and Research Scientist and lecturer for the Department of Architecture, Skylar Tibbits, were recently named among National Geographic's 2015 Emerging Explorers. Four were chosen from the School of Architecture + Planning, including two from the Media Lab.
Michael Kubo, PhD Candidate, and Michael Rakowitz, SMVisS '98, are among the 2015 winners of the Graham Foundation grants.
Kubo's work, HEROIC: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston, co-authored with Chris Grimley and Mark Pasnik, won in the Publication group. The piece examines the "powerful, civic-minded legacy" of Boston's architecture from 1960 until 1976.
Matter Design and Quarra Stone have announced this week that Dustin Brugmann of the University of Michigan and Luisel Zayas of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been selected as the inaugural 2015 QuarraMatter Fellows.
Architectural Design Professor Sheila Kennedy's work with inexpensive materials to create flexible public infrastructure, such as cardboard street lights, is featured in a CBS News video. Prof. Kennedy describes the project and its applications, and discusses the ideas behind it. In her position as visiting professor at UC Berkeley, where she is the 2014 Berkeley-Rupp Prize winner, she has developed a studio called Here There to design practical solutions for the developing world.
The Eyeo Festival is celebrating its fifth year with talks, workshops and interactions with open source instigators and practitioners.
J. Meejin Yoon will present "Interactive Play in Public Space" as the keynote lecture on Tuesday, June 2.
"[W]hat I most want is for us to have a debate about what is appropriate for an engineer to do when approaching a structure that’s more than a century old and where we have an obligation to think beyond our own lifetimes when we intervene," says Professor John Ochsendorf in a recent interview with Nautilus Magazine for its issue on Error. Ochsendorf, who teaches architecture and engineering, discusses the Masonry Research Group's current work testing the structural limits of the Pantheon, his past work on Incan woven suspension bridges, engineering interventions in historical buildings, amo
Landing Studio, founded in 2005 by Marie Adams (MArch ’06) and Dan Adams, was named one of the six recipients of the 2015 Architectural League Young Architects and Designers Award. Landing Studio’s work focuses on the intersections of architecture, infrastructure, and landscape in industrial settings, which often dwell in uneasy alliance. Their clients and projects range from port facilities and ocean transport to demolition plans and shared industrial/public park landscapes.
by Scott R Campbell
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded MIT's School of Architecture + Planning (SA+P) a $1 million grant to help create a Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative.