Goal: Understanding the Conceptual Elegance Carbon might offer Architecture

A broad range of carbo/composite specialists that contributed to DOE and ARPA-e CarbonHouse research will offer insight into the properties and usage of Carbon:

Prof Dag Olav Hessen (carbon cycle geo-biologist), Prof Matteo Pasquali (CNT chemist), Dr Nicola Ferralis (carbon material scientist), Dr Dave Gailus (carbon nanotube scientist), Dirk Kramers (America’s Cup composite structural Engineering), Dr Roger Avakian (polymer compounding), Jeff Kent @ Moore Bros, RI (composite fabrication), Stephan Vaast (CNC milling / composite production), Dr Gus Bosse (carbon research chemist), Doron Levin (carbon research chemist), Dr Steve Nolet (wind-turbine production manager).

Part 1  The History and Potential of Carbon 

Part 1 will engage Dag Olav Hessen’s rueful, The Many Lives of Carbon, that explains the carbon cycle through eons of planetary history with a degree of foreboding. But we will diagram the majestic waltz of bio-systems in their temporal balancing of earth-/ocean-/atmospheric-carbon, with architectural sensibility, looking to capture the discordant breakdown of established biorhythms and its ominous portent with a speculative clarity that science seems to have failed to do.  

Part 2: Towards a Carbon Architecture

Part 2 will turn to use of Carbon as a polyfunctional material, already well-established in most other high-performance structural applications such as boats, planes, trains, wind turbine blades, etc via  fiber-based composites. The development of such materials and methods over the past 50 years has occurred hand-in-glove with emerging digital engineering and fabrication capability, with finite element will turn to use of Carbon as a polyfunctional material structural analysis essential to computing load-path in a zillion layered fibers. But it has equally been enabled by remarkable development of all manner of specialist materials such as cores, resins, adhesives, that testify to the polyvalence of Carbon, allowing order-of-magnitude advantage over mineral/metal structures – more akin to wood in its fibrous base-carbon morphology. The ability to orient fibers along non-isotropic stress-lines is more akin to biological systems than mechanical ones, as perhaps are the use of heat and atmospheric pressure to bind multi-material continuities.  

With leading engineers and fabricators based in Bristol, RI – a pioneering center of composite fabrication – we will consider how the widespread adoption of carbon composites might now be brought to bear on buildings, just as le Corbusier, say, brought forward steel and reinforced concrete by considering the boats and planes of the early 20th century (in Vers Une Architecture).  

Having absorbed the material, engineering, fabrication and environmental potentials this remarkable class of materials offers, students will be asked to envisage a small pavilion or a building component that conveys the tectonic (or anti-tectonic!) principles of such a Carbon  Architecture, looking to capture the brilliant formal and aesthetic qualities of a potentially electrothermal-structural new materiality. While this may speculate on emerging morphologies such as carbon nanotube or carbon foam (that hold promise of hydrogen as a corollary clean fuel, say) at issue will be to demonstrate realism in prescribing manufacturing methods with technical acuity. 

The IAP winter workshop is an architectural investigation focused on developing unconventional tectonic forms and fresh professional approaches. The main goal is to create a full-scale prototype of “Rare-Earth” Composites by synthesizing natural earth materials. Building on the #mattertodata Fall Studio, the program now focuses on a hands-on methodology using physical testing and spatial models to explore materials and structural knowledge. The experience promotes collaboration, speculation, and learning from mistakes to achieve breakthroughs.

You can take a look at a class outline at this link.

Please send your applications to ensamble@mit.edu

Design+ is a first-year undergraduate advising seminar made up of approximately 30 first-year undergraduate students, 4 faculty advisors, and 4 or more undergraduate associate advisors.

The academic program is flexible to account for diverse student interests within the field of design, and students work with advisors to select a mix of academic and experiential opportunities.

Design+ assists incoming first-year students in their exploration of possibilities in design across MIT. 

Design+ includes a dedicated study space, kitchen, lounge, and a variety of maker spaces which offer Design+ students a second campus home for making and braking.

Design+ introduces first year undergraduate students to opportunities 
Design+ around design such as internships, international travel, and 
Design+ UROPs with some of the most exciting design labs at MIT

For registration and other administrative questions contact The Office of the First Year.

Design+ is a first-year undergraduate advising seminar made up of approximately 30 first-year undergraduate students, 4 faculty advisors, and 4 or more undergraduate associate advisors.

The academic program is flexible to account for diverse student interests within the field of design, and students work with advisors to select a mix of academic and experiential opportunities.

Design+ assists incoming first-year students in their exploration of possibilities in design across MIT. 

Design+ includes a dedicated study space, kitchen, lounge, and a variety of maker spaces which offer Design+ students a second campus home for making and braking.

Design+ introduces first year undergraduate students to opportunities 
Design+ around design such as internships, international travel, and 
Design+ UROPs with some of the most exciting design labs at MIT

For registration and other administrative questions contact The Office of the First Year.

This course is aimed for architecture and urban planning students. It will introduce the synthesis of data-driven research and urban / architectural design. The workshop will walk participants through their own data collections using gaze tracking glasses and heart rate monitors on campus.

Contact Isabel Waitz to sign up by January 1, 2026.

We all feel it - fear of the climate crisis is pervasive, and it’s hard to imagine the future without fatalism and dread. Worldwide, surveys show that a majority of people believe ‘the future is frightening’ and that ‘humanity is doomed.’ 

Yet, despite the dangers we face today, the world isn’t actually any scarier than it has been in the past. It’s our present outlook on the future, devoid of direction, possibility, and hope, which is far more terrifying. It doesn’t have to be this way. Past social movements have shown that humans are capable of radically steering the direction of the future through collective action.

Waking up to our destiny is a deliberate practice - a collective effort of forward-thinking to escape the sense of doom that pervades our generation. In the wave of cynicism that surrounds us, imagining a hopeful climate future isn’t naive - it’s radical.

This workshop invites participants to engage in a radical imagining of a climate-positive future, beginning at the scale of their own personal community. Through design exercises, games, and interactions with guest speakers, participants will find ways to inhabit these future ecologies today - to move from “What If?” to “What’s Next?” 

The final outcome of this workshop will be an exhibition celebrating our collective time travel into a hopeful climate future, which will be expressed through a series of “dress rehearsals:” speculative glimpses into optimistic new worlds and how we can practice inhabiting them today. The results of this collective worldmaking will be exhibited in the Wiesner Gallery at the end of January - details TBD.

Contact Sam Owen by 1/16/26 if interested.

This three-day workshop explores assembly and disassembly as a method for architectural thinking. Participants will engage with a set of modular objects through short theoretical prompts, design exercises, and hands-on construction. Each day introduces a new task emphasizing how bodily interaction, material resistance, and temporary structures shape spatial understanding. The workshop generates documented configurations and reflections that will feed directly back into the development of our architectural critical thinking. Contact Alexandros Gravalos for more information.

What happens when we try to formalize creativity? Can rules, structures, and models actually make design more imaginative? This workshop invites curious minds and interdisciplinary folks to explore how ideas from mathematics, computation, and creative reasoning shape the way we think, draw, and build. Through hands on exercises, we test how formalizations can plug into computational workflows, from parametric design to generative AI, without losing the spontaneity that fuels creative work. It is a conversational, experiment-as-you-go session for anyone interested in how intuition and structure collide, collaborate, or transform. Join us to question assumptions, prototype ideas, and rethink how structure might unlock new modes of design and making.

Advance sign-up required by 1/21/26; contact bailey_f@mit.edu.

This one-week IAP workshop invites a small, dedicated cohort of MIT students to advance the design of a root cellar for Hannan Healthy Foods (HHF) farm in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Conceived as a community-oriented food preservation resource, the project supports capacity building on the farm while engaging broader questions of equitable food access, agricultural resilience, and sustainable land stewardship. The workshop includes a site visit and direct conversations with the farmer, local community members, and experts in natural building. 

Participants will iterate design concepts, test material and structural strategies, and explore natural building systems specific to the climatic and geological conditions of the Greater Boston region. Hands-on exploration with natural materials will be part of the week; however, given the short timeframe, the primary focus will be on research-driven investigation and small-scale testing rather than full prototyping. Students will also visit potential sourcing sites, including those offering surplus or reclaimed resources. A detailed program of requirements for the root cellar, including size, capacity, food storage types, ventilation needs, and environmental performance criteria, will be a key deliverable. 

Throughout the week, the cohort will play an active role in shaping the workshop’s direction. Together, participants will develop a robust design proposal that advances the performance and spatial intent of the root cellar while strengthening its role as a long-lasting shared asset for the farm and surrounding community. This proposal will lay essential groundwork for continued development leading toward construction in summer 2026. 

Interested students should email Aleks Banas (aleksb@mit.edu) and Zachary Rapaport (zrap@mit.edu) with a short (2-4 sentence) summary of their interests by December 20.

Also open to undergraduates.

This design studio and seminar explores translation as both a prompt and a method for publishing. Through readings, guest lectures, and site visits, students will examine the histories of typographic printing and the technological precedents for fixing forms of language. Students will work with and expand on various “translation” machines, starting with the printing press, to consider what tools can copy, transform, and reproduce texts and images. Students can expect to test these methods, build their own fonts, and learn how to bind their own books. By the end of the term, each student will have developed a printed and bound publication, grounded in a specific translation topic of their choosing.

Skill-building workshops and site visits will be arranged outside of the class time listed, in consultation with the group.