This workshop will offer a space for student-driven projects at the intersection of climate, community and careers as part of a series of courses that build on one another. Over the past year, students have been exploring the idea of a “climate corps” for MIT,  with partners of the MIT Civilian Climate Corps Initiative, on campus and in communities in Boston and Cambridge. We see an MIT climate corps as building student capacity to respond to needs identified by people and groups working on the front lines of addressing climate and equity issues, in the community and on campus, and to learn through collaborating on tangible projects. 

Students taking this workshop will advance and aim to complete a component of their climate corps projects while deepening their understanding of themes, their skills and practical experience. In order to hit the ground running, students should email the instructor with a description of what they would like to work on and why, what they would need to accomplish their goals (partner or mentor involvement, new partnership development, funding for materials, etc.) and whether they plan to work individually or as part of a team.  Students who have not been part of the previous courses or summer program, who wish to join a project led by another student who has, should write the instructor.

Undergraduates welcome.

Partners: Urban Risk Lab, SA+P, Eastie Farm Climate Corps, PowerCorpsBOS, the MIT Office of Sustainability, MIT Facilities, City of Cambridge.
 

Note: we will have detailed descriptions of all sections posted with instructor names right before the term begins.

Offers a broad range of advanced-level investigations in architectural design in various contexts, including international sites. Integrates theoretical and technological discourses into specific topics. Studio problems may include urbanism and city scale strategies, habitation and urban housing systems, architecture in landscapes, material investigations and new production technologies, programmatic and spatial complex building typologies, and research centered studies. Mandatory lottery process.

Note: we will have detailed descriptions of all sections posted with instructor names right before the term begins.

Offers a broad range of advanced-level investigations in architectural design in various contexts, including international sites. Integrates theoretical and technological discourses into specific topics. Studio problems may include urbanism and city scale strategies, habitation and urban housing systems, architecture in landscapes, material investigations and new production technologies, programmatic and spatial complex building typologies, and research centered studies. Mandatory lottery process.

Place is location, but it’s also people, relationships, and memories, the site of things forgotten, suppressed or unrecorded, terrible and ordinary ways of being. The experience of people and peoples who have migrated, been displaced or exiled add further complexity to place: perhaps, an unshakeable orientation to elsewhere or a sense of in-betweenness; or, a simultaneous yet imperfect belonging to both here and there, to neither here nor there; an intermittent or constant feeling of being entirely out of place. What is a diasporic sense of place, how do we image or describe it, and how might it reimage space and place to define a territory for spatial practice?

This workshop is part of Self and Work, a series that began in 2018 as part of Experiments in Pedagogy at MIT Architecture. Self and Work centers the personal, the body, and lived experience as site of knowledge. In this workshop we will center the diasporic experience as a place from which we might draw upon to produce non-hegemonic understandings of space and place.
We will study work by authors and artists whose lives and works are profoundly influenced by their own relation to place.

Our goal in this class is to reclaim architectural and urban design as active tools to operate territorially. Whereas most of our attention as architects and urbanists is devoted to cities, there is an increasing need of territorial interventions capable of addressing our most pressing contemporary concerns — from energy transition, to ecological stewardship, to the securing of necessary materials and resources; from decolonization processes, to the resolution of urban challenges concerning mobility, right to housing, or ecological performance. 

Students will have the opportunity to tackle some of those issues through their own approach to territorial design. The course will support this effort through a combination of seminar and lecture sessions, where we will unpack the geographic, political, economic, ecologic and social layers we need to consider when working with territories. Similarly, through our readings we will both mobilize and problematize existing discourses on territorial articulation.  Ultimately, our objective is to use territorial design to question and challenge existing spatial orders, and explore the agency of architecture to foster new possibilities of socio-economic and socio-ecological redistribution.

This course looks at interrelating critical theory, economic anthropology, and case studies in the built environment to understand how architects might use market tools to invent new kinds of work by resisting typical client/service models.

While the weekly assignments are quite structured, the final project is relatively open-ended, allowing students to produce a research dossier (an essay, collected interviews, archival research, etc.) that demonstrates a contribution to the interdisciplinary framework developed within the class.

Critical introduction to key contemporary positions in urbanism to the ends of researching, representing, and designing territories that respond to the challenges of the 21st century. Provides an overview of contemporary urban issues, situates them in relation to a genealogy of urban precedents, and constructs a theoretical framework that engages the allied fields of architecture, landscape architecture, political ecology, geography, territorial planning, and environmental humanities. Comprised of three sections, first section articulates a framework on the urban as both process and form, shifting the emphasis from city to territory. Second section engages a series of related urban debates, such as density/sprawl, growth/shrinkage, and codes/exception. Third section calls upon urban agency in the age of environment through the object of infrastructures of trash, water, oil, and food.

Through extensive reading and writing, students will explore the promise and perils of the variegated city, focusing on topics that demand urgent attention: climate change, inequality, racial injustice, and public space. Students will work to create artful narratives by examining how various forms—essay, memoir, longform journalism, poetry, fiction, film, photography, and song—illuminate our understanding of cities. Special emphasis will be on the imagination as a rich reservoir for inhabiting and understanding cities, the writer as the reader's advocate, and on the indispensability of the writer-editor relationship, with the goal of better engaging with and understanding cities, not to mention writing with greater creativity and sophistication for specialized and general-interest audiences. 

Admission is only by application. Prerequisite: Submit by Saturday, September 10, at 8:00 p.m. an application letter (no longer than 600 words, and as a Microsoft Word document with your full name in the top right margin) that explains your interest in the class, and discuss a work—novel, essay, film, painting, sculpture, song, play, building—that influences how you see a particular city.

Examines the evolving structure of cities and the way that cities, suburbs, and metropolitan areas can be designed and developed. Surveys the ideas of a wide range of people who have addressed urban problems. Stresses the connection between values and design. Demonstrates how physical, social, political and economic forces interact to shape and reshape cities over time.

Through a studio-based course in planning and urban design, builds on the foundation acquired in 11.328 to engage in creative exploration of how design contributes to resilient, just, and vibrant urban places. Through the planning and design of two projects, students creatively explore spatial ideas and utilize various digital techniques to communicate their design concepts, giving form to strategic thinking. Develops approaches and techniques to evaluate the plural structure of the built environment and offer propositions that address policies and regulations as well as the values, behaviors, and wishes of the different users.