The Affordable Housing Development Competition, organized by the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston, annually brings together teams of graduate students in architecture, planning, finance, and policy with affordable-housing organizations to develop comprehensive proposals to address the needs of the organizations and local communities. Two interdisciplinary student teams received prizes for their projects that respect local interests and propose comprehensive design and development strategies. 

Stephanie Lee (MArch '19) and Ellen Shakespear (MArch/MCP '19) founded Spaceus to address issues of artistic practice and community engagement in a gentrifying city. Spaceus "rethinks how artists and communities interact and come together outside of galleries and museums. We do this by finding affordable, shared studio spaces for artists in vacant storefronts. We are experimenting with new ways of engaging the broader community with art through workshops, open studios—anything we can dream of together," they explain.

Architecture faculty and alumni received numerous awards at the Boston Society of Architects 2018 Design Awards, held on January 18, 2018. See the entire list of BSA honorees and more information about the awards on the BSA website.  

Awards for Design Excellence:

Fall 2017 Studio and Thesis Reviews

Monday, December 11
4.151 Architecture Design Core 1 Studio
Liam O’Brien (coordinator), Jennifer Leung, Rachely Rotem
Long Lounge/7-429 + adjacent pin-up space
1:00 to 5:00 pm

Tuesday, December 12
4.154 Architecture Option Studios
1-6 PM 

Two projects led by MIT faculty—a greenhouse in Massachusetts heralded as a “virtuosity of integration” and a plan to weave together working and living in a neighborhood in Cartagena, Colombia—were recognized in this year’s LafargeHolcim Awards for Sustainable Construction.

The professional master's of architecture program at MIT has again been ranked among the top five in the nation in the latest DesignIntelligence rankings. 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 second in research.

DESIGN EARTH, the design practice of Assistant Professor Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, is among four design firms selected as winners of the 2017 Design Biennial Boston, which seeks to support emerging architects, landscape architects, and designers from the New England area and provide a platform to test their ideas in the public realm.

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

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)

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. 

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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

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.

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."

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. 

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. 

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.