Spring 2022 Public Program

MIT’s Department of Architecture is pleased to announce our spring 2022 public program; a continuing conversation on where we are now. 

Welcoming in-person visitors as well as remote audiences, our events take place, above all, at our intellectual home: the intersection of design and research. This semester, we will confront thermal dynamics in architecture, performance, globalism and racialization, power systems, and the ‘Climatic Turn,’ the mythology of architectural authorship, and the complex relationship between people, place and building. Through it all, we seek architecture’s role in helping us understand the world, and its responsibilities and possibilities in transforming it.

This series is a collaboration between the diverse faculty, staff, and students of MIT’s Department of Architecture, which includes architects, designers, urbanists, historians, critics, theorists, artists, social entrepreneurs, and experts in computation and building technology. Alongside these academic programs and public events, student-run exhibits, publications and platforms advance and shape our agenda as well.

Spring 2022 features two exhibitions in our Keller Gallery: The Architects Collaborative 1945–1995: Tracing a Diffuse Architectural Authorship, opening March 1; Thresholds 50: Before | After, opening April 22.

Events are held online and streamed on our FacebookInstagram, and Twitter channels. Lectures are posted afterward on our YouTube channel. We invite you to explore the full public program below and find more details including links to webcasts on our events calendar. 

Spring 2022 Public Program, MIT Department of Architecture

Dorit Aviv
Assistant Professor of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design
“Thermal Architecture”
Presented with the Building Technology Group
February 17

J. Yolande Daniels
Associate Professor, MIT Department of Architecture & Co-founding Principal, studioSUMO
“Building | UnBuilding”
Presented with the Architecture and Urbanism Program
February 24

Hakim Sameer Hamdani
AKPIA@MIT Postdoctoral Fellow
“From Sectarian to Muslim Ecurmenicalism: Changing Contours of Muslim Sacred Landscape in 19th Century Kashmir”
Presented by the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture
February 28

The Architects Collaborative 1945–1995: Tracing a Diffuse Architectural Authorship
Keller Gallery Exhibition
March 1

Frederick Moten
Professor of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature, New York University
“Building and Bildung und Blackness: Some Architectural Questions for Fela”
Presented with the NOMAS, MIT
March 10

Xiaoji Chen
Microsoft Researcher, Urban Computing Foundation
“Our own legacy: from passion projects to sustainable solutions with open source community building”
Presented with the Design and Computation Group
March 17

Nadi Abusaada
AKPIA@MIT Postdoctoral Fellow
“The Profession’s Vanguards: Arab Architects in Mandate Jerusalem”
Presented by the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture
April 4

Marlon Blackwell
“Abstract Unions”
The 31st Arthur H. Schein Memorial Lecture
April 14

Matthias Sauerbruch & Louisa Hutton with Mark Wigley
“draw love build”
The Ahmad Tehrani Symposium
April 21

Thresholds 50: Before | After
Launch Event / Keller Exhibit
April 22

Nida Sinnokrot
“Palestine is not a Garden”
Presented with the Art, Culture and Technology Program
April 28

AKPIA@MIT Conference
“The Profession’s Foundations: Architects and Architecture in the Modern Middle East”
Presented by the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture
April 30

Hentyle Yapp
“The Ubiquity of Asia”
Presented with the History, Theory + Criticism Program
May 5

Our spring 2022 public program is supported in-part by the Arthur H. Schein (1951) Memorial Fund.

#BlackLivesMatter.

Above image: Marlon Blackwell Architects, Bike Barn, photograph by Timothy Hursley.