This seminar introduces students to environmental challenges in the US and across the globe. We will do this by meeting and talking with amazing professors across MIT who are working on science, technology, design, and policy related to many of the major issues of the planet. In visiting these professors in their labs and workplaces we will discuss the principles of sustainability and explore topics like a circular economy, the bioeconomy, and more. Prof. Fernandez, as co-founder of MIT Environmental Research + Action (ERA), will guide the seminar through various departments, research groups, and labs and enlist more than a dozen professors, including a Nobel laureate, a US National Medal of Science Winner, former head of ARPA-E and director of MIT's Climate Project, the director of the Office of Sustainability, and others. The goal of this seminar is to introduce first-year students to the rich mosaic of work at MIT oriented toward the environment and the prospect of improving human life, and all life on Earth.   

John E. Fernandez is professor of architecture, urbanism, and building technology in the Department of Architecture. His research and teaching centers on sustainability, climate change, and biodiversity as co-founder of MIT Environmental Research +Action (ERA), a new model for environmental research and action at MIT uniting cities, the biosphere, and artificial intelligence asco-evolving systems. Fernandez also serves as Head of House at Baker House, supports student-athletes, mentors UROPs, and is a member of the MIT class of 1985.

Description posted here close to start of term.

Mandatory lottery process.

Focuses on innovative propositions for shaping the cities of tomorrow, responding to emerging trends, technologies, and ecological imperatives. Students take part in "what-if?" scenarios to tackle real-world challenges. Through collaborative, project-based learning in small teams, students are mentored by researchers from the City Science group. Projects focus on the application of these ideas to case study cities and may include travel. Invited guests from academia and industry participate. Repeatable for credit with permission of instructor.

Undergraduates welcome!

How do we exhibit or narrate something as unfathomable as the ocean? The sea comes to us through myths, specimens, archives, aquariums, museum displays, research vessels, hydrophones, wave buoys, satellite images, novels, and public stories. Rather than treating the ocean as a distant backdrop, the course asks how it is made perceptible, knowable, and public. This workshop takes the mediation of the ocean as both a research question and a pedagogical project.

The course takes the whale as a figure through which ocean worlds come into view. The whale is not only an animal, but also a conservation icon, a hunted commodity, a mythic being, a museum specimen, a legal subject, an acoustic presence, and a story-bearing figure through which multiple oceanic relations become visible. Around the whale gather ships, ropes, charts, hydrophones, buoys, satellites, labels, and legal regimes that translate the sea into knowledge, risk, labor, spectacle, and care. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s invitation to think with speculative figures, the workshop treats the whale as a figure that gathers relations across science, law, extraction, tourism, environmental care, mythology, and climate storytelling. The aim is not only to document oceanic change, but to imagine forms through which it can become legible, affective, and public.

Architecture is approached here as a medium of inquiry: a way of assembling evidence, staging relations, and rendering perceptible forms of environmental change that are otherwise diffuse, submerged, and difficult to grasp. Drawing on my ongoing research with DESIGN EARTH on speculative environmental storytelling and forms of climate communication, the workshop brings architectural representation into conversation with environmental media, museum practice, and ethnographic research in order to make oceanic climate change public.

The course is shaped in part by the MIT Museum’s Oceans theme and related public programming, including my proposed panel After Whales, which traces a line from the whale-oil era that lit cities and fueled industry to the present, asking how shipping, fishing, warming waters, and whale-watching continue to shape whales’ lives, and how the legacy of whaling persists in the environmental imagination.

Experiential learning is central to the course. The mediation of the ocean will be studied not only through texts and seminar discussion, but also through visits to sites of knowledge production and public display, including the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the New England Aquarium, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a whale-watching trip, and related museum and archival collections in the Northeast. The pedagogical aim is to expand the role of architectural representation toward environmental history and climate storytelling, while giving students concrete experience in synthesizing research into material and narrative forms for public audiences.

This interdisciplinary course fosters collaboration across art, science, and engineering, exploring the intersections of creative practice and research in science and technology. In partnership with MIT.nano and associated laboratories, students are introduced to advanced research environments and work alongside graduate mentors to develop projects that merge artistic vision with scientific methods and tools.

Emphasizing artistic practice as a form of critical inquiry, the course supports experimental research, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the development of both individual and collective projects. Students engage with the social, cultural, and ecological dimensions of technology, challenging traditional disciplinary boundaries to create new frameworks for transdisciplinary exploration and innovation.

Additional work required of students taking the graduate version. 

Explores photography as a disciplined way of seeing, and as a medium of inquiry and of expressing ideas. Readings, observations, and photographs form the basis of discussions on landscape, light, significant detail, place, poetics, narrative, and how photography can inform research, design and planning, among other issues. Recommended for students who want to employ visual methods in their theses. 

Introduces methods for observing, interpreting, and representing the urban environment. Students draw on their senses and develop their ability to deduce, question, and test conclusions about how the built environment is designed, used, and valued. The interrelationship of built form, circulation networks, open space, and natural systems are a key focus. Supplements existing classes that cover theory and history of city design and urban planning and prepares students without design backgrounds with the fundamentals of physical planning. Intended as a foundation for 11.329.

Students investigate how landscapes and cities shape them — and vice versa — by examining the literature of walking and the environments in which they move. Through extensive walking, students explore the city to analyze its design and varied histories, drawing on cartography, art, sociology, and memory to create fresh narratives. Students write architecture and city criticism, design "story maps," and are invited to walk as an art practice. Emphasis is on the relationship between the human body and freedom, or a lack thereof, and between pathways and the complex emotions that emerge from traversing them. 

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.

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.