Seminar connecting the arts and sciences by exploring methodological similarities and differences across disciplines: arts/architecture, humanities/social sciences, engineering, natural and material sciences et al. Aimed at fostering student collaborations across research interests: students develop their ideas for projects through targeted analysis of their disciplinary and interdisciplinary  interests. Each student will either enter with a project in mind, or develop their project ideas within the class. Students can choose to work individually or in groups.

This seminar’s goal to provide blueprints for developing interdisciplinary projects: final is a paper/ plan with goals/outcomes forming the basis for collaborative interdisciplinary projects.  Examples of such projects: artwork that makes use of cross-species communication, (Tomás Saraceno); project engaging the natural sciences, composed of material that endlessly transform, simultaneously functioning as an artwork, (Neri Oxman).

First half semester is targeted reading (articles) across disciplines – based in student interests – alongside discussion of case studies of successful collaborations in these disciplines. Analyzing case studies plus reading will enable an understanding of methodological specificities in different disciplines in relation to aesthetics and fabrication issues, and directly in context of the particular disciplines under consideration. Together this fosters reciprocal knowledge of the strengths and differences across disciplines. Case studies drawn from MIT’s history: CAST and CAVS, and from across the global ‘artworld’. Second half semester will be geared toward aiding students in better connecting across disciplines at MIT (and possibly beyond). This is trial and error, of course. However, final project, as a working plan for interdisciplinary collaboration, will provide the knowledge base and research skills applicable to future projects.
 

Welcome to MIT! If you are coming because you love building, let this seminar be your red carpet. You will be meeting once a week with two faculty, Profs. Steve Leeb (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) and Les Norford (Architecture), who love building cool systems. We will learn about MIT together while we are understanding and building exciting systems that use and convert energy. We will drive an electric go-cart and compare it to a gasoline-powered vehicle. You will design and build your own set of stereo speakers and a power amplifier to audio system you can keep. We'll look at motors and circuits to control these devices. We will be working in an amazing new prototyping laboratory, and you will get to develop an energy experiment of your own design. Join us!

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Les Norford will be the advisor to this section 4.A22. Les is a mechanical engineer who teaches in the Department of Architecture and has a special interest in environmental issues. He's studied buildings and how people live and work in them around the world. Les earned his BS in engineering science from Cornell University and his PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University.

All Advising Seminars receive six units of credit and are graded P/D/F.

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.

The European Enlightenment has been described as a “revolution of the mind,” a fundamental turning point in the way Europeans imagined the world and their place in it, and a crucible of western modernity—a wellspring both of its ideals and its moral failures.

Designed in conjunction with the exhibition Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment on view at the Harvard Art Museums this fall, this hands-on seminar investigates the Enlightenment from the perspective of the visual media that were its agents and vividly exemplified its complexities and contradictions.

Through exhibition and collections visits and class discussion, we will investigate how the attempts to place knowledge on new foundations that characterized the so-called age of reason impacted art and architectural thinking and, at the same time, were mediated by them. How did new ideas about nature, human nature, and “civilization” shift thinking about the place of the arts and architecture in society, and how, conversely, did visual media, from paper architecture and imagined city plans to transparencies (early moving pictures), anatomical images, and salacious prints help to mediate such new ideas such as progress, empathy, public opinion, taste, and hygiene? And how were aesthetics and the arts shaped by, and imbricated in, scientific exploration, the expansion of trade, and their darker consequences: colonization and slavery?

Assigned readings balance recent scholarly interpretations with period texts ranging from the proto science fiction of Voltaire and Louis-Sébastien Mercier to works by Diderot, Kant, and others. Throughout, we will attend to the active role of images – whether painted, drawn, or printed – in constituting the new forms of knowledge and new practices we have come to associate with Enlightenment and whose mixed legacies we grapple with today.

Because this class includes several visits to the exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums and other local collections, class enrollment is limited to 15.

4.677 Syllabus (MIT Certificate protected)

Introduces students to the world of French photography from its invention in the 1820s to the present. Provides exposure to major photographers and images of the French tradition and encourages students to explore the social and cultural roles and meanings of photographs. Designed to help students navigate their own photo-saturated worlds; provides opportunity to gain practical experience in photography.

Taught in English.

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.

4.661 Syllabus (MIT Certificate required)

4.648, 21A.507 U / 4.649, 21A.519 G

Examines the sonic phenomena and experiences that motivate scientific, humanistic, and artistic practices. Explores the aesthetic and technical aspects of how we hear; measure or describe vibrations; record, compress, and distribute resonating materials; and how we ascertain what we know about the world through sound. Although the focus is on sound as an aesthetic, social, and scientific object, the subject also investigates how resonance is used in the analysis of acoustics, architecture, and music theory. Students make a sonic artifact or research project as a final requirement.

Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments.

Course Syllabus (MIT Certificate required)