4.502 U / 4.562 G

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Advanced projects in architectural visualization with an emphasis on the use of computer graphics animation, interactive media, and video production tools. Introduces advanced visualization software and teaches exploration of spatial expressions in motion graphics format. Review and discussion of selected literature and video materials on architecture and film.

Additional work required of students taking the graduate version.

4.500 U / 4.505 G

Introduces digital fabrication as a method of home, hut, and shelter delivery/construction. Explores the progression of industrial-based building production from prefab to digital fab. Examines new computational techniques for rapid construction, as well as the basics of tiny building design, 3D modeling systems, scalable ways to prototype, and computer numerical control (CNC) fabrication. Students use lab time to design a prototype of a small building as a single packaged product. Additional work required of students taking graduate version. Lab fee required. 

Selection of thesis topic, definition of method of approach, and preparation of thesis proposal. Independent study supplemented by individual conference with faculty.

Selection of thesis topic, definition of method of approach, and preparation of thesis proposal. Independent study supplemented by individual conference with faculty.

Fundamental research methodologies and ongoing investigations in building tehnology to support the development of student research projects. Topics drawn from low energy building design and thermal comfort, building systems analysis and control, daylighting, structural design and analysis, novel building materials and construction techniques and resource dynamics. Organized as a series of two- and three-week sessions that consider topics through readings, discussions, design and analysis projects, and student presentations.

Addresses advanced structures, exterior envelopes, and contemporary production technologies. Continues the exploration of structural elements and systems, expanding to include more complex determinate, indeterminate, long-span, and high-rise systems. Topics include reinforced concrete, steel and engineered-wood design, and an introduction to tensile systems. The contemporary exterior envelope is discussed with an emphasis on the classification of systems, performance attributes, and analysis techniques, material specifications and novel construction technologies.

Explores the theory and criticism of intersections between art, culture, and technology in relation to contemporary artistic practice, critical design, and media. Students consider methods of investigation, documentation, and display and explore modes of communication. Students develop projects in which they organize research goals, engage in production, cultivate a context for practice, and explore how to communicate, display, and document work, with artistic practice as a method of critical inquiry/ knowledge dissemination. Regular presentation and peer-critiques, reviews with ACT faculty and fellows, and external guest reviewers provide feedback as projects develop. Simultaneously, students prepare for thesis through both foundational texts in contemporary theory and criticism and artist writings alongside presentations and discussions on methodological perspectives required of interdisciplinary approaches.

MIT Certificate Protected Syllabus

4.401 U (GIR REST) / 4.464J, 1.564J G

Introduction to the study of the thermal and luminous behavior of buildings. Examines the basic scientific principles underlying these phenomena and introduces students to a range of technologies and analysis techniques for designing comfortable indoor environments. Challenges students to apply these techniques and explore the role energy and light can play in shaping architecture.

Additional work required of students taking the graduate version.

Focused on the practices of varied practitioners — film directors, artists, musicians, composers, architects, designers — whose writings relay a process of thinking and feeling integral to their forms of material production. Testing various ways aesthetic forms and their shifts — historic and contemporary — have relations to still emerging contemporary subjectivities (felt emotion in a human body), the class studies productions created by participants and case studies of varied producers, and generates new work individually and/or collaboratively via diverse media explorations. Includes reading, writing, drawing, and publishing, as well as photographic, cinematic, spatial, and audio operations and productions. Activities include screenings, listening assignments, and guest visits, in addition to readings, discussions, and presentations. 

MIT Certificate Protected Syllabus

UG: 4.328 | G: 4.329

This course focuses on the production of artistic experiments catalyzed by research in art and climate, and eco-sociality of the locale. The workshop will engage the Herter community garden in Boston as a site where utopias for the future forms of environmental citizenship and new climate commons will be prototyped.

In conversation with local stakeholders the participants will develop hybrid projects of art and design suggesting an artistic instrumentarium for ecological repair, envisioning a future of cohabitation with more-than-humans, and probing alternative perspectives that catalyze a different climate for the future.

Inspired by counterculture experiments and emerging environmentalist design of the 60’s and 70’s, the course will discuss concepts such as anthropocene aesthetics, compossibility, critical zones, eco-activism, feminist fabulation, interspecies assemblies, permacomputing, and archipelagic thinking.

Readings will include those by Jane Bennet, Georges Canguilhem, TJ Demos, Eduardo Viveiro de Castro, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Astrida Neimanis, Andrew Pickering, Elizabeth Povinelli, Isabelle Stengers, Anna Tsing, and others.

Visits to the class and the field trips may include Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Tue Greenfort, Diane Borsato, Fernando García-Dory, Pelin Tan, Julie Kepes, D-Lab experts, FutureFarmers, Critical Art Ensemble, Platform London, The Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Additional work required of students taking the graduate version.