Utopias, Camps, and the Architecture of War, is proposed as a design-research workshop that examines the layered histories of Terezín as a way to think critically about how architecture participates in the making of trauma, memory, and recovery. Conceived as a fortified utopian city and later transformed into a Nazi transport camp, Terezín embodies the shifting functions of urban space and architecture as both agent and witness. Its bastions, mounds, and urban fabric are not merely remnants but active carriers of political and historical meaning. By tracing the trajectory from fortification to camp, from architecture of war to the ongoing dilemmas of inhabitation, memorialization, restoration and reconstruction, this workshop foregrounds the ethical and epistemological challenges of engaging with sites where architecture itself was complicit in violence.

The studio is offered as collaborative project together with confirmed participating architecture schools: Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic (lead by Veronika Sindlerova); TU Dresden, Germany (lead by Angela Mensing-de Jong); Technion -Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel (lead by Eliyahu Keller, Aaron Sprecher). Pending on funding, students should be prepared to travel to the Czech Republic and Germany during spring break.

Spatializes large technological systems of energy, analyzes existing and speculative energy visions, and imagines energy futures in relation to concerns of ecology, politics, and aesthetics. Identifies different scales of thinking about the territory of energy from that of environmental systems, to cities, regions, and global landscapes. Readings and students' research projects draw on critical geography, history of technology, environmental history to synthesize energy attributes within the design disciplines.

Class meets in-person every spring term.

Program of thesis research leading to the writing of an SB thesis. Intended for seniors. Twelve units recommended.

Coming soon.

This workshop represents the second part of joint commitment with a community partner to envision and reimagine architectural infrastructure to support Common Good Coop & their wider community. Common Good Co-Operatives is a local community owned urban farm organization that currently occupies five parcels of land (0.25 acres) in the heart of Dorchester. Previously, with students, we explored ideas pertaining to collective ownership structures, urban agricultural histories, the history of racial segregation in Boston, and heard from guest speakers within the community and City Hall about urban agriculture code and legislation. The outcomes produced a colorful, accessible zine documenting how a reader would navigate municipal code and regulation to start a community garden or urban farm. Students also created a larger design proposal for the land in which the Co-Op occupies. This spring 2026 studio will further design and build an aspect of that vision, the mobile chicken coop, a proposal rich in architectural precedent that will trigger inquiries regarding scale, form, and function. This will take place while also deepening students understanding of the history of urban farming as community resilience and providing the tools needed to project and propose what the future of urban farming can become.

Undergraduates welcome.

The Forest Made Workshop will focus on the design of experimental architecture and furniture that uses what the forest naturally provides. Rather than milling softwood for the mainstream dimensional lumber industry, the workshop will explore a diverse mix-species 
of hardwoods, undersized and low value “unmerchantable” wood that must be removed from the forest to improve resiliency and lower risks of forest fire. This class engages wood fabrication techniques and aesthetics along the uncanny ‘slider’ of natural occurence and intentional design.

GEO—DESIGN brings the agency of the “geo—” to bear on design at a moment when the planet—Earth, Gaîa—is a matter for thought and action.

In landscape architecture, regional land use and planning, and other environmental design fields, the term geodesign, as framed by Jack Dangermond and Carl Steinitz, has come to describe the application of computational tools, and in particular geographic information sciences, to model, visualize, and analyze ecological systems within design workflows. This course is a quest for a more material and situated context for geo—design, one that requires a more expansive and differentiated toolbox. The seminar distinguishes between the “globe” (the abstract, computational, anthropocentric view of the Earth) and the “planet” (complex Earth systems, and even cosmic forces, shared with other living beings and shaped by historical processes—geologic, ecological and political). A global perspective, also known as a God’s eye view, has often privileged a response from outside, maybe akin to geoengineering, in the form of promissory technologies and design solutioneering, at the risk of perpetuating the depleting forces and extractivist values that underpin the present climate crisis.

Where might and design touch down to counter such spatial abstraction? From a “planet-centered” perspective, geo-design focuses both on planetary-scale relations as well as on grounded places and situated practices. Such ability to respond (or response-ability) proposes a diffraction of the “global” viewpoint into a series of planetary portals or core samples, that look into a section of the Earth—its stories, matters, practices. The portal in speculative writing and science-fiction represents is an opening into time and space that connects seemingly unconnected geographies, and in this seminar, offers a theoretical framework for unearthing the systemic and situated logics of the climate crisis. The spatial framing of the Earth into such planetary portals is a lens to unearth the entanglements of climate, design, and politics and to speculate with different media on how to compose “Earths” that are worth living.

The course introduces theories and practices that seek to make (common) sense of the planet. The introduces voices from the humanities on the topic of Earth, planet, planetarity and planetarium (Spivak, Chakrabarty, Latour, Mbembe), along with allied practices of geohumanities, geo–philosophy, geopower, gerontology, geoaesthetics and geotrauma (Deleuze and Guattari, Grosz, Povinelli, Gabrys, Haraway, Tsing). The course then examines a series of planetary portals, many of which are iconic to the imagination of global commons, through practices that have addressed related climate controversies through design and architecture. Some such sites and practices include the Arctic and Antarctic Ice Sheet Melt (Susan Schuppli, Kathryn Yusoff, Olafur Eliasson, Design Earth), Amazonia deforestation (Ursula Biemann, Paolo Tavares), Oceans and Tidal Zones (Cooking Sections, TAB21, Ant Farm), the Great Coral Reef bleach (Karrabing Film Collective, Institute for Figuring), the atmosphere (Nerea Calvillo, Liam Young, Office for Political Innovation), the Caribbean (WAI Think Thank), as well as in planetary ruptures and geo-traumas in the form of disasters like plantations, landslides, heatwaves, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.

Throughout, the course explores the range of representational and discursive practices— emphasizes the roots of geo-graphy as “earth writing” or “earth drawing”—be it visual description, material sensors, computational processes, forensic reports, community activism, speculative narratives, institution building or unbuilding, and various combinations thereof. Collectively, we inquire into geo—design as a practice of life-support, and how it may be embodied, enacted, and imagined.
 

Beginning in the 1980s, the critique of Eurocentrism opened up an increasingly large domain for historical analysis and reassessment in both architectural and art history. . We will try to make sense of this shift and its embodied critiques as well as their on-going transformations, potentials, and problematics. Since secondary literature and analysis of this phenomenon is practically non-existent, we will study the phenomenon by trying to assemble different takes and perspectives.

The Temporal Commons is a multi-year research project that aims to bridge two millennia—one behind us & one to come—by integrating speculative futures with historical foundations. It will challenge the immediacy that dominates architectural discourse and the instinctive temporal narrowing of modernism’s legacy of presentism, proposing instead an approach grounded the expanded historical perspective of the longue dureé. The Temporal Commons workshops are offered in parallel to a sequence of research studios on topics in architecture and climate crisis. Each workshop adopts a historical perspective to pursue research in building materials, legal and regulatory frameworks, and environment.
The Spring 2026 version of the workshop will explore these areas in the context of mountain regions vulnerable to flash flooding and will focus on a range of topics including historical ecologies, timber extraction and use, riparian laws, cultural practices of riverine settlements, hydraulic science, property ownership, and other issues that will open new perspectives on the potentials for transformative architectural approaches.
Students may contribute to the workshop from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including building technology, design, history, material science, environmental science, computation, etc.

Students taking the Temporal Commons Option Studio are expected to also enroll in the workshop. 

If the architectural drawing moves something unknown to something known (from vision to building), the reverse could be said of the architectural survey. The potential of the architectural survey lies in its mobilizing of something known into unforeseeable future uses (from building to visions). This course centers on recasting the architectural survey from conveyor of building facts to instrument for building stories. Operating somewhere between the limits of absolute truth and virtual truth, our research will aim to uncover new ways of engaging architecture’s relationship to vision, documentation, and the art of renewal (or preservation) against the backdrop of racial, economic, and material conditions in the turn-of-the century South. More specifically, the site of the course will be Tuskegee University and the legacy of Robert R. Taylor, the first accredited Black architect, MIT graduate, and designer and builder of a significant portion of the campus’s brick buildings. Students will consider Taylor’s work both in the present context and its inception under Booker T. Washington’s leadership.

In addition to rigorously surveying a building through traditional and non-traditional survey methods and media, students will engage Taylor’s legacy through on-site field work paired with archival research. Observations will be filtered through distinct ways of looking to describe an existing building not as it is but as it is seen by the student. The results, a set of unconventional as-built drawings, will question and advance visuality as architecture’s essential resource.