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. 

Techniques of Resistance aims to create an archive of communal construction practices located across the heterogeneous territory of South America through the research and documentation of paradigmatic indigenous, vernacular, and popular buildings. This research will form the basis for the design proposal of a contemporary radical project that will emerge from these ancestral techniques and the cases studied in the course.

Architecture, when built, mobilizes a huge—and often invisible—network of resources, knowledge, beliefs, and people involved in the construction of a building. Techniques of Resistance will focus on the study of buildings that are strongly rooted in the environment and ecologies where they are located, with a sensitive understanding of communal cooperation and material cyclability. From the Uros Islands in Lake Titicaca and the Putucos in the Peruvian plateau, to the Shabonos and Churuatas’ large structures in the Amazon, the buildings that we will study offer a collection of construction techniques that serve as a resistance to the homogenization of architecture and the destruction of collective forms of construction.

The creation of an inventory of Techniques of Resistance presents the opportunity to broaden the definition of what a building could be in terms of its material technology and its role in a community, and will serve as the launching point for the development of a project that could redefine these techniques in a contemporary way through an understanding of material behavior, structural details, and geometry.

The course will consist of a combination of theoretical lectures, discussions, research, and design. During the first half of the semester, students will develop drawings and graphic essays as methods of research and documentation of the case studies. These deliverables will be compiled to create the archive of Techniques of Resistance, which will take the form of a publication.

In the second half of the semester, students will work on a conceptual design project for a communal building, structure, or infrastructure, proposing a critical revision of the cases and techniques previously documented. Considerable time will be given for the design process, working together to develop a conceptually and technologically strong project. Classes will take the form of workshop sessions, with design desk critiques and pin-ups. The projects will be communicated through large-scale, delicate, and well-developed drawings and, if possible, a small model.

The materials produced during the course—both the archive and the design projects—will be presented in an exhibition at the end of the fall semester. The course will value commitment, technical precision, detailed representation, and a radical and critical approach to design. Techniques of Resistance will also include contributions from guest speakers whose practices and built projects engage with the technologies and materials discussed during the semester.

Undergraduates welcome.

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

Program of research and writing of thesis; to be arranged by the student with supervising committee. 

This seminar examines the relationship between political ecology, ecological crises, and the process of (de)colonization. Students will critically analyze historical understandings of decolonization and contemporary proposals for decolonial ecologies. Following Stefanie K. Dunning’s invocation “May our egos die so that the world may live,” this seminar asks, how can we continually transform our praxis on a personal and structural level to create the possibility and space for decolonial ecologies? And whose imaginations are presently shaping our collective futures? Open for cross-registration. And open to undergraduates with instructor’s permission.

This seminar deals with how artists, archivists, architects, and historians have faced the myriad archive fevers and archival turns of the 20th and 21st centuries. This period has seen a marked shift between archives being used as ‘source’ to becoming a ‘subject’ of critical inquiry. However, these questions are not limited to the past few centuries. Rather, the philosophical questions of history and its relationship with the archive spans millennia from Assyrian clay tablets and Shang dynasty oracle bones to later examples of city- or trade-based archives in Florence and the post-revolutionary foundation of the French national archives. Critical scholarship asks which ‘rules of classification, rules of framing and rules of practice’ determine the contents of an archive and enable ‘knowledge’ to be recognized (Tuhiwai Smith, 2021). And these questions are motivated by an argument that political power is inextricably linked with who can create, access, participate in, and interpret the archive and by extension, an institutionalized collective memory (Derrida, 1995). In Milan Kundera’s words, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” This course thus interrogates how “the architect and the archive are inseparable” and how the archivist and the historian are entangled to attend to the contested memories and denied histories embodied within buildings, cultural institutions, and architectures (Wigley, 1995).

Through visits and hands-on research in archives, students will develop a critical methodology that can be applied to their own research and practice. Students will learn to interpret and triangulate primary sources, such as texts, films, maps, drawings, manuscripts, correspondence, government documents, photographs, illustrations, and archive-based artworks. Weekly readings will cover concepts like the origins of the archive, architectural legacy, archives as spatial structures, projects to expand the canon, restitution, the art of crafting archives, the digital turn, parafictional archives, and the archives of critical theory.

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.

Required for doctoral students in HTC as a prerequisite for work on the doctoral dissertation. Prior to candidacy, doctoral students are required to write and orally defend a proposal laying out the scope of their thesis, its significance, a survey of existing research and literature, the methods of research to be adopted, a bibliography and plan of work. Work is done in consultation with HTC Faculty, in accordance with the HTC PhD Degree Program guidelines.

Required of doctoral students in HTC as a prerequisite for work on the doctoral dissertation. The Minor Exam focuses on a specific area of specialization through which the student might develop their particular zone of expertise. Work is done in consultation with HTC faculty, in accordance with the HTC PhD Degree Program Guidelines.

Required of doctoral students in HTC as a prerequisite for work on the doctoral dissertation. The Major Exam covers a historically broad area of interest and includes components of history, historiography, and theory. Preparation for the exam will focus on four or five themes agreed upon in advance by the student and the examiner, and are defined by their area of teaching interest. Work is done in consultation with HTC faculty, in accordance with the HTC PhD Degree Program Guidelines.