Program of research and writing of thesis; to be arranged by the student with supervising committee.
Decolonial Ecologies examines the relationship between political ecology, architecture, and processes of (de)colonization. Students critically interrogate histories and futures of (de)colonization and evaluate theories of political ecology and architecture. 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 most importantly, whose imaginations are presently shaping our collective futures?
Weekly themes include architecture in the avant-apocalypse, origin myths of the state, the allure of abstraction, evolutionary materialism, epistemology and political ecologies of production, homo economicus v. homo reciprocans, growth and the trophic structure of the economy, accelerationism, the 'dark enlightenment,' and the cult of intelligence. For their final projects, students will be asked to produce original interdisciplinary scholarship or creative work.
Open for cross-registration. And open to undergraduates with instructor’s permission.
The course deals with how 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 span millennia from Assyrian clay tablets and Shang dynasty oracle bones to the post-revolutionary foundation of the French national archives. This seminar examines 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 in Boston and New York City, 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, newspapers, photographs, and architectural models.
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.
Studies theoretical and historiographical works pertaining to the fields of art and architectural history. Members of seminar pursue work designed to examine their own presuppositions and methods.
Advanced seminar. Looks at architecture and planning doctrines in what has come to be known as the “development decades,” the high period of state intervention into so-called Third World economies under the aegis of the Bretton Woods exchange system (c. 1945-1971), followed by its aftermath in the dismantlement and restructuring of state power, reflecting “privatization” and austerity doctrines. The course will take up various components that intersected with architectural and urban thinking in this era of development: land and tenure, infrastructure, housing, finance, administration, and cultural forms relating them to influential economic doctrines of the time as well as the ideological tendencies of governments in the Third World. Particular attention will be paid to the circuit of technocratic “experts” patronized by the Bretton Woods organizations, and later global consultancies (McKinsey’s) as well as the neocolonial politics of foreign aid. Particular attention will be paid to how architects and related experts on questions of space responded to the bureaucratic and institutional frameworks of international and national development, and the sundry “clubs (Paris, Rome), think-tanks, consultancy mechanisms, as well as elite university-based forms of expertise that were entangled in these circuits. Also of interest is the intersection, in the course of these engagements, of the latter history of architectural modernism with the social sciences, from anthropology, econometrics to systems theory, etc. Comparisons with American and European (“Northern”) examples of space and city planning and mechanisms (instruments such as location theory, zoning, etc.), as also cultural forms (cinema, theater) will be elicited to highlight key structures of comparison, contrast, or influence.
Requires original research and presentation of oral and written report.
Can one divide human reality, as indeed human reality seems to be genuinely divided, into clearly different cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races, and survive the consequences humanly?"
- Edward Said, Orientalism, 45
The locus of intellectual courage isn’t factuality, it’s oppositionality—an interior relation of conviction rather than an external condition of falsifiability
- FT, NYR Online, Aug 19, 2023
This seminar explores the politics of representation as a central concern in the production and dissemination of knowledge about cultures. It examines how political, cultural, historical, ideological, and religious forces not only shape but often determine the ways in which knowledge is produced, codified, and visually or textually represented — and how, in turn, such knowledge reconfigures those very forces.
At the core of the seminar lies the concept of Orientalism, understood not merely as a body of scholarship or a mode of artistic expression, but as a discursive and institutional formation that evolved over centuries of interaction — frequently asymmetrical and fraught — between the “West” and the “Orient.”
Students will engage critically with a range of historical episodes, analyzing their textual, visual, architectural, theoretical, and institutional legacies to show how representations of the Islamic world were constructed, circulated, and normalized within Western epistemologies. At the same time, it considers how these representations were received, contested, internalized, or reappropriated within Islamic societies, thereby shaping the modalities of modern self-representation.
Through these inquiries, the seminar aims to foster a historically grounded and theoretically informed understanding of representation as a field of power. It interrogates claims of empirical neutrality in the humanities and social sciences, contending instead that all acts of representation — however scholarly or aesthetic in form — are embedded within shifting structures of authority, legitimacy, and imagination.
Research paper required. Open to qualified undergraduates.
