Realize design intentions materially, by hand and by machine. Learn techniques of lasercutting, 3D printing, textiles, light electronics, 3D scanning, design software, and generative processes. Explore the Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) makerspace during this weekly one-hour playground for prototyping.
Fold DNA to create nanometer-scale art! Learn the basic theory, CAD tools, and methods for folding DNA to create designed geometric shapes. This seminar will provide participants with hands-on experience in creating art using DNA origami technology, from design to assembly. We will also explore DNA imaging techniques utilizing atomic force microscopy. Students will integrate scientific approaches with aesthetics and design, considering the cultural implications of this emerging technology.
Fold DNA to create nanometer-scale art! Learn the basic theory, CAD tools, and methods for folding DNA to create designed geometric shapes. This seminar will provide participants with hands-on experience in creating art using DNA origami technology, from design to assembly. We will also explore DNA imaging techniques utilizing atomic force microscopy. Students will integrate scientific approaches with aesthetics and design, considering the cultural implications of this emerging technology.
Undergraduates welcome.
Clients, funding, consultants, contracts–architects are enmeshed in financial mechanisms that forever remind us of our direct reliance on local and global economies. Money talks and architecture follows: our work articulating the interests of those served while fluctuating with the rapidity of the market. And while this relationship may be fixed, perhaps we can find ways to resist its normative logics, which exacerbate social inequalities and consolidate power in the hands of the few and the privileged. This workshop will explore alternative economies and financial arrangements to find ways to re-code capitalism’s tendencies, desires, and outcomes. We’ll draw from a range of writing–from queer theory to post-colonial studies to literary criticism–to undo dominant financial orientations and to engineer collective values.
We will ask whether in addition to designing architecture, we can also design the market that demands architecture–to produce economic scenarios under which we might build. We will read constellations of texts that include economic anthropology (studying how economies are shaped by behavior, cultural values, and social relationships), work from other disciplines, and case-studies to invent atypical demand-chains, resist models of optimal performance, and instrumentalize culture to undercut efficiency. We will look at how we might produce clients, programs, and actor networks rather than responding to the whims of the market. We will consider how we might think of economic arrangements as tools for designers.
Each week, students are asked to produce written responses to the reading and to help guide discussion, researching and exploring examples and references to ground our work. The task is to produce a collective and cumulative body of knowledge. Together, we will read, write, and compile a compendium of research on the topic. Students are encouraged to find broad reaching examples–from the domestication of post-war military technology to the proliferation of sharing economies to recent trends in reuse and the circulation of materials and everything in between. We will focus on buildings, materials, and products, largely drawn from North America in the 20th and 21st centuries but may also look further afield. The course will focus on real examples of immaterial and material phenomena, inventing new languages and representational strategies along the way.
Undergraduates also welcome.
Exquisite Simulation
Complex atmospheric and oceanic systems, changing through time, have been rendered brilliantly legible through sophisticated simulations by groups such as NASA absorbing decades of satellite data into distilled visual narratives:
Such elegant depictions offer startling and simple clarity to otherwise intractable systems. By offering visual legibility, such issues are absorbed into everyday thinking, despite their complexity.
By contrast, there are few sophisticated depictions of earth-surface exploitation and the ant-like spoil-heaping at civilizational scale of materials and energy – their re-distribution and transformation into flows of late-industrial “stuff”. Undergirding commodity markets is a seemingly limitless energy supply and a post-WW2 global free-trade economic order, both largely invisible given their ubiquity.
Material Realism
We will learn principally from two masterful accounts of our energy and material civilization: The Many Lives of Carbon by Dag Olaf Hessen (all organically derived materiality), and The Material World by Ed Conway (focusing on 6 base mineral/metal commodities that essentially underpin the contemporary world – sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium), both engaging and accessible.
Part 1 of the workshop (working individually or in pairs) will seek to de-mystify key aspects of contemporary materialism to graphically portray the fragility or threat implicit in its geo-political and environmental portent, evidently with focus on architectural materials/methods, against a backdrop of mounting environmental stringency and a doubling of buildings by mid-century. In other words, we’ll deploy architectural aptitude to offer striking new ways to capture the complex reality of our material world, which will likely benefit from being witnessed through time (for instance in the startling new efficiencies of copper production that seems to have even outpaced Moore’s Law).
“Autarky is an economic system of self-sufficiency and limited trade. A country is said to be in a complete state of autarchy if it has a closed economy, which means that it does not engage in international trade with any other country.”
- Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations
Part 2 of the workshop will focus on the consequences when the assumptions of limitless material and energy availability are disrupted, as during Covid (supply-chain and labor disruption), or the Ukrainian war (imminent European recession through loss of natural gas), or the current imposition of tariffs and the vision of autarky that they imply – a significant rebuke to what has been a pervasive global free-trade hegemony. Akin to putting sticky tape on a balloon and then inflating it, so restrictions of material and energy supply necessarily distort architectural form (no-labor reconstruction in Ukraine, for instance). Copper might be mined and crushed in Chile, the dust shipped to China for refining, shipped back to the US to be drawn into wires, before being trucked to an east coast building site subject to US electrical codes; what happens when any of the regimes become autarkic?
Each student will be asked to develop or analyze an architectural element or assembly that allows for varying degrees of autarky in being able to adjust the material and/or energy assumptions of the project as parametric variants: what design and technical aptitude would this require?
This course introduces artistic practice and critical visual thinking through studio-based projects that explore diverse media, scales, and contexts. Through hands-on experimentation, perceptual games, and creative exercises, students activate their artistic curiosity—reimagining materials, objects, and everyday environments. Projects may incorporate sculptural construction, drawing and painting, weaving, performance, theater-based methods, sound and video, and/or site-specific interventions. Studio practice is complemented by lectures, screenings, field trips, readings, guest presentations, and discussions that examine the historical, cultural, and environmental forces shaping both the development of artistic vision and the reception of a work of art. Project themes such as Body Extensions / Embodied Knowledge, Public Making / Collaborative Practices, and Networked Cultres / Interdisciplinary Exchanges invite students to develop an expansive, interdisciplinary approach to art-making. Each project culminates in a final presentation and group critique.
4.s37 UG | 4.s33 G
This is an incredible opportunity to dive into the basics of biomimicry and natural algorithms in computational design and artificial life. Prior programming or modeling software experience is not needed. Advanced folks will be accommodated on an individual project-based track. Students learn about the cultural and visual implications of automation and biotechnological advancements driven by computational technology, exploring their aesthetic significance through the analysis of data and algorithms.
This course is designed as a beginner's guide to ethical solutions to design problems in computational design and data concerning nature through visualization and art. It is structured to be accessible and considerate of the broader impact of design decisions on communities, society, and culture. Students will receive a low-level, beginner-friendly introduction to the basics of data visualization in processing and Python, biomimicry, agent-based systems in Grasshopper visual coding, and C# and animation in Maya.
This course investigates the interdisciplinary and generative possibilities of publication, emphasizing its role as a practice of expanding public engagement and imagination. Throughout the semester, students will explore worldmaking strategies, speculative fiction and an array of publication methods ranging from traditional techniques—leveraging ACT and MIT’s extensive resources such as riso printing, book binding and maker labs—to experimental approaches in digital media, performance, political systems, architecture, contemporary art, design and AI.Specific expectations and/or deliverable product resulting from course.
UG: 4.641 | G: 4.644
Investigation of visual culture in the nineteenth century with an emphasis on Western Europe, the United States, and Japan. Topics include art and industry, artists and urban experience, empire and its image, and artistic responses to new technologies from the telegraph to the steam engine to the great refractor telescope. Strikes a balance between historical and contemporary critical perspectives to assess art's engagement with the social and political experience of modernity.
Additional work required of students taking the graduate version.
UG: 4.354; G: 4.355
This course introduces global traditions of counter-cinema and experimental video through a combined studio and seminar format. We trace how artists and collectives develop form under pressure, studying methods that arise from protest, censorship, displacement, and environmental crisis. Topics include montage and materiality, index and memory, sound as testimony, and architectures of spectatorship. Screenings, lectures, and readings provide a theoretical and historical framework for rigorous discussion. Short weekly exercises translate these frameworks into practice through image and sound manipulation, camera and editing experiments, and iterative prototyping toward a final piece. Peer-to-peer critique emphasizes clarity of intention, ethical stakes, and technical execution.
Additional work required of students taking the graduate version.
