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.

Note: Schedule change from W 12:30-3 to R 9-11:30

Designed for students writing a thesis in Urban Studies and Planning or Architecture. Develop research topics, review relevant research and scholarship, frame research questions and arguments, choose an appropriate methodology for analysis, and draft introductory and methodology sections.

Research and project activities, which cover the range represented by the various research interests and projects in the Department.

Research and project activities, which cover the range represented by the various research interests and projects in the department. Students who wish a letter grade option for their work must register for 4.URG.

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

Group discussions and presentation of ongoing graduate student research in the Computation program.

4.583 Syllabus (MIT Certificate Protected)

4.451 U / 4.450, 1.575 G

Research seminar focusing on emerging applications of computation for creative, early-stage structural design and optimization for architecture. Incorporates computational design fundamentals, including problem parameterization and formulation; design space exploration strategies, including interactive, heuristic, and gradient-based optimization; and computational structural analysis methods, including the finite element method, graphic statics, and approximation techniques. Programing experience and familiarity with structural mechanics necessary.

Additional work required of students taking graduate version. 

Note: This course was held in June 2022

Rebuilding the Edge is a summer workshop offered by the MIT Department of Architecture for MIT students that will be taking place during the month of June 2022 in the Italian region of Abruzzo. Through an on-site experience, the workshop invites students to think about the future of Italian inner and southern areas, as well as the relationship between regional infrastructure projects and small communities affected by them.

Rebuilding the Edge is the result of a partnership between Liminal A.P.S., MIT’s Urban Risk Lab, MISTI Italy and Fondazione Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane–the foundation of the Italian state railway system. The workshop focuses on the issues faced by small municipalities along the Sulmona–Carpinone rail line, where a public-private partnership is beginning to revive rail activity after decades of disinvestment. For two-and-a-half weeks, students have the opportunity to experience the territory traversed by the rail line, working out of a popup research outpost within the recently renovated station at Roccaraso.

Rebuilding the Edge will allow students to engage the particular circumstances along one rail line in the Italian Apennines, and take away larger lessons about methodologies of design research, and the degrees to which design can play a role in addressing issues of social consequence.

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 through the the lens of queer practice, with its history of instrumentalizing the language of power against itself, to find ways to re-code capitalism’s tendencies, desires, and outcomes.

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. Each week we will pair readings in economic anthropology (studying how economies are shaped by behavior, cultural values, and social relationships) and queer theory (identifying strategies of planned failure, makeshift assembly, and re-orientation) to invent atypical demand-chains, work against 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.

We will read, write, and compile a compendium of case studies for a publication 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. 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. And while queerness provides a shared framework for the workshop, students are encouraged to consider analogous lenses through which we might rewrite the relationship between practice and service. The course will focus on real examples of immaterial and material phenomena, inventing new languages and representational strategies along the way.

*A workshop not just for queer students, but for students curious to work with queer intention.

The Deep Time Project aims to expand architecture timescales of perception seeking to re-position architecture as a more sensitive response to its environment. The course is structured around an interdisciplinary series of guest lectures, screenings, readings and precedent analysis on time literacy with particular focus on art and philosophy. Looking at the multiple repertoires of subjectivities and agents involved in the architectural process each student will develop design experiments on time aiming to explore a different constellation of temporalities that architecture must account for.

Undergraduate students welcome!

Units: UG: register for 3-0-6 (9 units)
Units Grad: register for 3-0-9 (12 units)