Alex Stewart

Designer, MArch Candidate '26

Alex Stewart is a multidisciplinary designer currently pursuing a Master of Architecture degree at MIT. Originally from Weeki Wachee, Florida, he earned his Bachelor of Arts in Art, Film, and Visual Studies from Harvard University, where he graduated with highest honors and was awarded the Peter Cai Prize.

In his time at MIT, Alex has gained design and creative experience working for studios such as Dami Lee’s NolliStudio in Vancouver, Meaningful in Paris, and KieranTimberlake in Philadelphia. In these positions, he has used a range of research, sketching, modeling, rendering, and fabrication techniques to contribute to a wide range of projects across mediums and scales, including housing, a design book, and products.

Alex is passionate about meeting the challenges of increasing urban density, rising costs of living, income inequality, and repressive trends in design by reimagining city living. He pushes for design from the scale of an apartment complex all the way down to the scale of the plugin, interchangeable amenities in its rooms. Specializing in rendering images, diagrams, and videos to communicate his ideas, he investigates how architectural and product design can work in tandem to create flexible, adaptable living spaces that empower individuals in increasingly dense and complex urban landscapes. By designing such spaces, he aims to provide individuals with greater autonomy and adaptability in their environments.

Projects
Interaction Intelligence: A retrofuturistic fully-functional 2-player video game console. Designed alongside Jacob Payne and Kyrylo Beskorovainyi.
Option Studio III What Would Wood: A bird blind for the snowy owl during its irruption to Crane Beach in Ipswich, MA, designed using a combination of minimally processed wildwood and discarded messy mass timber.
Personal project: A proposal for retrofuturistic headphones with adjustable dials and an LED indicator. Eclectically drawing from the forms, colors, and materials of traditional headphone typologies to deliver something ultimately new.
Option Studio II Kit for a Bit: An easy-assembly warehouse with flexible amenities on Governor's Island in New York City, designed to host a climbing gym now and something new in the future.
How to Make Almost Anything: A walking table.
Professional work: A student apartment complex outside Paris designed from the inside out. Completed for Meaningful Studio in Paris.
Professional work: An AI-assisted children's travel buddy.
Option Studio I Space Architectures: An inflatable lunar habitat. Completed alongside Tanya Estrina, Chris Tommila, Carissma McGee, and Ireland Brown.
Furniture Workshop: A custom, handmade stool of carefully cut, sanded, and treated cherry and hybrid woods.
Core Studio III: A community-supported agriculture and food residency embedded in the hill between Marginal Street and Brigham Street in East Boston.
Core Studio III: A multi-compartment portable food storage container.
Core Studio II: An intervention, product, artifact, accessory, and supplement for the historic Strand Theatre in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester.
Geometric Disciplines: A sci-fi sculptural lamp carefully fabricated with hand-casted cement and laser cut copper.
Core Studio I: Academic spaces for archive, discourse, and community in a currently underutilized lot on MIT's campus.
Geometric-Disciplines: a table using steel cables in tensegrity to defy gravity.
Geometric Disciplines: A concept for a biomimetic deployable bridge.
Core Studio I: A rearrangement of MIT's Long Lounge--for one, for some, and for all. Completed alongside Jin Li and Manavi Dixit.
Geometric Disciplines: A children's educational geometric toy using a combination of motion-sensitive lights and haptic feedback to foster imagination in 3D space.
MIT Jumpstart: An ergonomic rocking chair designed to be fabricated via a five-part injection mold.
Harvard GSD Michelangelo Architect: A digital 3D recreation of Donato Bramante's unrealized designs for the dome of St. Peter's Basilica. The original architect of the project, Bramante died before construction was completed; the design for the dome as it stands today is largely credited to Michelangelo.
Harvard GSD Design Discovery: A reinterpretation of the archetypal suburban home, converted to sustainable community housing for disadvantaged communities.