Note: Students interested must have participated in a climate corps workshop (4.183 or 4.184 ) or internship (MITOS Summer cohort ‘24 or PKG Climate IAP ‘25) or by permission of the instructor. 

Description

Part of a multi-partner, multi-year collaboration, the workshop operates as a corps where students (graduates or undergraduates) work on tangible projects that advance campus, local city or neighborhood climate or climate justice plans and goals. Working individually or in teams, students drive projects, which build on the MIT Office of Sustainability strategic approach to the campus as a test bed and ongoing partnerships with community-based organizations or city agencies in Boston and Cambridge. Ongoing themes we have been exploring include:

• Extreme heat
• Circularity and designing out waste
• Community farms
• Equitable career paths
• Climate and resiliency hubs.

Students develop a project plan with the partner and support of the instructor, setting personal learning goals to deepen their understanding of their chosen theme, their skills and practical experience in project development and implementation. Students learn from each other through weekly reflections and discussion of intersecting dimensions of design and impact: climate, community and careers. 

In order to hit the ground running, students should email the instructor a description of what they would like to work on and why. 

Partners and collaborators: MITOS; PKG; Urban Risk Lab; DesignX; SA+P; Eastie Farm Climate Corps; PowerCorpsBOS; MIT Facilities; City of Cambridge. 

Note on units: Students taking the course for 3 units will propose projects that can be completed during weekly class time, with targeted research and meetings outside of class. Students taking the course for 9 units will undertake projects involving more extensive outside research, partner engagement.

This course examines the challenges faced by the oasis agro-ecosystems, focusing on Tunisia's Nefzawa region as a case study and delves into the historical, environmental, and socio-economic factors at play in the region. By reviewing the literature, analyzing climate projections, and utilizing Earth observation data, students will learn about the unsustainable use of natural resources, worsened by climate change and land/water dispossession processes.

The course will highlight pathways to resilience and alternative economic models centered on “commons” and “oasis connectivity.” We will identify ways to integrate/combine traditional low-tech commoning practices with modern technology to enhance community resilience and promote biodiversity, while seeking innovative approaches that go beyond simply preserving environmental and agricultural heritage.

Students will participate in scenario-building exercises for the Nefzawa oases, drawing insights applicable to broader urban areas across the Arab world, many of which are projected to become uninhabitable by the end of the century. The course will emphasize social and climate justice as essential components of sustainable futures, positioning design as a tool for societal transformation and collective action.

In this interdisciplinary setting, that bridges humanities and STEM fields, students will critically assess the balance between innovation and remembrance in design. They will explore how these unique eco-social landscapes can inform broader decolonial frameworks in architecture, urban planning, and design, addressing urgent challenges like climate change, resource scarcity, and socio-economic inequality. In this studio, we will delve into the dual narratives of the heavenly aspects and imaginaries of oases while confronting the harsh realities of plunder, drought, and ecological destruction.

This course examines the challenges faced by the oasis agro-ecosystems, focusing on Tunisia's Nefzawa region as a case study and delves into the historical, environmental, and socio-economic factors at play in the region. By reviewing the literature, analyzing climate projections, and utilizing Earth observation data, students will learn about the unsustainable use of natural resources, worsened by climate change and land/water dispossession processes.

The course will highlight pathways to resilience and alternative economic models centered on “commons” and “oasis connectivity.” We will identify ways to integrate/combine traditional low-tech commoning practices with modern technology to enhance community resilience and promote biodiversity, while seeking innovative approaches that go beyond simply preserving environmental and agricultural heritage.

Students will participate in scenario-building exercises for the Nefzawa oases, drawing insights applicable to broader urban areas across the Arab world, many of which are projected to become uninhabitable by the end of the century. The course will emphasize social and climate justice as essential components of sustainable futures, positioning design as a tool for societal transformation and collective action.

In this interdisciplinary setting, that bridges humanities and STEM fields, students will critically assess the balance between innovation and remembrance in design. They will explore how these unique eco-social landscapes can inform broader decolonial frameworks in architecture, urban planning, and design, addressing urgent challenges like climate change, resource scarcity, and socio-economic inequality. In this studio, we will delve into the dual narratives of the heavenly aspects and imaginaries of oases while confronting the harsh realities of plunder, drought, and ecological destruction.

According to some scientists we are at the beginning of the ‘sixth extinction process.’ No-one seems to really care too much. After all what are we to do. One of the problems is that it seems to be easier to imagine the cosmos - and for some even God - than it is to imagine the nature and history of our species despite the thousands years of pontificating on the subject. We seem to have something missing in our cognitive bandwidth. But we all know what is coming. “She went for a Walk on the Beach and found a Rare “Doomsday Fish’” was a recent headline in the New York Times. Our end is now everyday news. The seminar/workshop will research the problem, myth, and the very probable reality of human extinction. Students will be expected to develop a project that explores these conditions, whether on a real or fictive site or as an exhibition.

Weekly class attendance and site visits are mandatory for this course. Weekend volunteer days with the Common Good Co-Operatives will provide hands-on opportunities for engaging the values of commoning, placemaking and placekeeping, and co-design and community participation.

This class represents the beginning of joint commitment with a community partner to develop a feasible plan for transforming a real-world site. Common Good Co-Operatives currently occupies seven parcels of land (0.5 acres) in the heart of Dorchester. Five of the seven land parcels that constitute the site of the Farm are owned by the City of Boston and are currently in agreement with Common Good Co-Operatives to be used as an agricultural site. In order to combat increasing development pressures, Common Good Co-Operatives want to solidify and increase its infrastructural capacity to facilitate community-based programming and economic development for the neighborhood. Working with Common Good Co-Operatives, this course will engage Architecture and Planning students to envision and plan expansive possibilities for the farm as a comprehensive farming system that can support, among others, essential workforce development and readiness programs, small-business incubation, co-op services, and community empowerment.

At the end of the first semester of work, students will produce a comprehensive document (diagrams of processes, design principles, historical analysis, architectural drawings and diagrams) that outlines the possibilities and opportunities on this site. Non-design students will produce as a final assignment a guide for non-profits on the history of zoning in Boston and how to navigate a zoning change for common use. Students will present to the City of Boston a plan for rezoning, establishing land tenure, and possibilities for Common Good.

Undergraduates welcome.

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 to find ways to re-code capitalism’s tendencies, desires, and outcomes. We’ll draw from a range of writing–from queer theory to post-colonial studies to literary criticism–to undo dominant financial orientations.

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), texts from other disciplines, and case-studies 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.

Each week, students are asked to produce a written response to the reading and to help guide discussion, researching and exploring examples and references to ground our work. The task is to produce a collective and cumulative body of knowledge. Together, we will read, write, and compile a compendium of research 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 and everything in between. 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. The course will focus on real examples of immaterial and material phenomena, inventing new languages and representational strategies along the way.

Undergraduates welcome.

In his essay, “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin writes: “it is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.” The same can be said of the artist who must give an idea visual form: form beholden to the syntactic constraints of whatever shape it must materialize in, whether as a series of marks etched into stone, a block of text living in the codex, or a pixel activated on a screen. How does the grammar behind tool and substrate set the rules for translation? When do these translations fail, and why—and what do those failures generate instead? How can translations, good and bad, productively challenge an idea’s core?

Part visual language study/seminar, part workshop, this class will examine translation as method and practice for visual experimentation. The course will start by examining typographic printing history, where students will gain knowledge of the various technological precedents for fixing forms of language. Students can also expect to experiment with calligraphic form, modular alphabets, notational conventions, musical transposition, and image-to-text as well as text-to-image translations. These experiments will be supplemented with guest visits from artists, writers, and technologists, as well as references of theoretical writings from Walter Benjamin, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Albrecht Dürer, Donald Knuth, Louis Lüthi, Hito Steyerl, Byung-Chul Han, Édouard Glissant, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, among others. By the end of the term, each student will have researched a specific topic of translation and developed it through a publication, broadly defined.

Undergraduates, especially those who are interested in visual language and history, are welcome!

This is the second in a 2-class project; register for 15 units. You must also register for 6 units of 11.s938 for the IAP 2025 term (21 units total).

INFO SESSION: Friday Nov 15 @ 1:10PM Stella Room 7-338 (also on zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/96150219429)

Format: Studio ; Required IAP Travel - Intensive workshop in Mexico City in January (01/20- 01/30) (Expenses covered)* 

The studio is an international collaboration with UNAM School of Architecture, Sustainable Environments Lab  (LES) and Generadora FENIX, S.A.P. an energy company that manage and run Bordo Poniente. It is part of a long-term partnership between DUSP, the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) MIT and the Mexico City Government with the purpose of addressing the city's environmental, and planning goals through research, innovation, design and civic discourse.  

Building on the Spring 2024 Mexico City practicum studio, this year's effort will explore landscape planning, alternative energy, and potential industrial development at Bordo Poniente—Latin America's largest urban landfill.  Identified through collaborations with partners in Mexico, the project will test new design ideas, landscape strategies, and energy transition approaches for Bordo Poniente, situated in Mexico City's outskirts. This 1,000-acre capped waste site, closed in 2011, offers redevelopment and ecological restoration opportunities despite its environmental challenges. Methane gas and leachate wastewater production continue, presenting economic development potential. The project's objective is to apply innovative planning, ecological restoration, and integrate production through an "industrial remix." The strategy combines industrial urbanism, landscape restoration, and energy transition, leveraging the site's energy potential, natural environment, and proximity to disadvantaged communities. This work aims to provide insights and expertise applicable to other disturbed sites in Mexico and globally. 

Some specific goals include:

• To explore landfill zones focusing on site planning, infrastructure, ecological systems, design and policy recommendations.
• Examine Mexico City’s environmental and industrial history, highlighting the spatial impacts of hydrology, ecology, and industrial development.
• To contribute to a strategic plan proposing sustainable design for the integration of energy production and urban development of Bordo Poniente.
• To provide new insights and design techniques in areas such as site planning, clean energy integration and industrial urbanism that can be utilized for the future development of the city.

Application Process

Please submit by November 19th by 5pm in PDF format and as one file : a one-page letter of interest, a one-page CV, as well as up to three 8.5" x 11" pages of visual material/portfolio (class or professional work).

* Note that per sponsored travel policies if an enrolled student decides to drop the course after the paid trip, they will be
responsible to reimburse the department for all covered expenses.
† The studio will count both as an M.Arch option studio and fulfill the studio requirement for SMArchS Urbanism

Focuses on the synthesis of urban, mixed-use real estate projects, including the integration of physical design and programming with finance and marketing. Interdisciplinary student teams analyze how to maximize value across multiple dimensions in the process of preparing professional development proposals for sites in US cities and internationally. Reviews emerging real estate products and innovative developments to provide a foundation for studio work. Two major projects are interspersed with lectures and field trips. Integrates skills and knowledge in the MSRED program; also open to other students interested in real estate development by permission of the instructors.

Examines ways that urban design contributes to distribution of political power and resources in cities. Investigates the nature of relations between built form and political purposes through close study of public and private sector design commissions and planning processes that have been clearly motivated by political pressures, as well as more tacit examples. Lectures and discussions focus on cases from both developed and developing countries.