Description coming soon.

Undergraduates welcome.

GEO—DESIGN asks how design might learn to think with the Earth rather than seek to neutralize it or contain its forces. Against a narrow lineage of geodesign as quantitative optimization — the computation-engineering-planning stack associated with GIS and scenario modeling — the seminar reclaims the term for a wider field of practice: one that returns design to the deep temporalities, elemental forcefulness, and dynamic stratification of the Earth. In place of the view from nowhere, we search for representational modes through which air, water, rock, soil, ice, and life become available to design thought — a planetary literacy grounded in trans-scalar material encounters.

The seminar situates earth practices within geophilosophy, environmental humanities, and feminist situated knowledges as a transdisciplinary mode of planetary design. Five units — atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, biosphere — pair readings with talks by guests from Earth and Planetary Sciences, anthropology, and STS. Each student adopts one Earth force — lightning, ocean currents, monsoon winds, volcanic eruption, sediment transport, permafrost thaw, fire weather, among others — and develops a three-part dossier: the process and how climate change is altering it; the apparatus through which it was made knowable; and the design practices that engage it otherwise. Student projects are assembled into a single collective artifact — a chronogram of the Earth that holds multiple temporalities, scales, and geographies within one drawing.

Undergraduates welcome.

4.606 UG | 4.656 Grad

Drawing on case studies from the ancient world to the present day, considers how the creation of architecture has involved the modification of natural environments and climates and the exploitation of resources across the globe. Investigates the metabolic processes of raw material extraction, transportation, and manipulation that make the creation of buildings, infrastructures, and designed landscapes possible. Explores how material and climatic considerations have played into the design and aesthetics of buildings at various points in time and promotes an awareness of the largely invisible, increasingly far-flung networks of environmental management and labor that underpin our built environment. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments.

How can a drawing capture architecture’s movement, and how have movements in architectural thought transformed the ways architects draw? Since the 1960s, architects have experimented with representational techniques that challenge the image of architecture as a fixed and finished object. From the social and technological imaginaries of radical architecture to the spatial dynamism of avant-garde painting, the sequential narratives of comics, and the hybrid images of the post-digital, architectural drawings have proposed different ways of understanding buildings, bodies, materials, and societies in motion.

Drawing Movements surveys the movements, media, and cultural conditions that have shaped architectural representation over the past six decades. Through lectures, readings, and discussions, the course examines how architectural images have both reflected and contributed to the aesthetic, social, and political ambitions of their time. We will consider how drawing conventions have been challenged and reinvented through encounters with popular culture, cinema, computation, and contemporary image culture, and how these experiments have expanded what architecture can imagine and communicate.

Alongside the survey, students will develop critical and technical representational skills through a series of cumulative drawing exercises. Working with a building, building fragment, event, or spatial arrangement, students will experiment with ways of representing movement, change, and relationships across different scales and durations. Through exercises in observation, projection, collage, notation, sequence, and graphic composition, they will investigate how different drawing techniques construct different understandings of the same subject. Students will consider what their images make visible, but also what they omit, whom they address, and how their representational choices construct future projections of the world.

Undergraduates welcome.

Note: More detailed description will be posted here closer to the start of the Spring 2027 term.

Offers a broad range of advanced-level investigations in architectural design in various contexts, including international sites. Integrates theoretical and technological discourses into specific topics. Studio problems may include urbanism and city scale strategies, habitation and urban housing systems, architecture in landscapes, material investigations and new production technologies, programmatic and spatial complex building typologies, and research centered studies. Mandatory lottery process.

Note: More detailed description will be posted here closer to the start of the Spring 2027 term.

Offers a broad range of advanced-level investigations in architectural design in various contexts, including international sites. Integrates theoretical and technological discourses into specific topics. Studio problems may include urbanism and city scale strategies, habitation and urban housing systems, architecture in landscapes, material investigations and new production technologies, programmatic and spatial complex building typologies, and research centered studies. Mandatory lottery process.

Note: More detailed description will be posted here closer to the start of the Spring 2027 term.

Offers a broad range of advanced-level investigations in architectural design in various contexts, including international sites. Integrates theoretical and technological discourses into specific topics. Studio problems may include urbanism and city scale strategies, habitation and urban housing systems, architecture in landscapes, material investigations and new production technologies, programmatic and spatial complex building typologies, and research centered studies. Mandatory lottery process.

Coming soon.

The MIT-LUMA Lab proseminar questions the role architecture and urbanism play in the use and transformation of material and energetic resources, investigating the potential for non-extractive territorial and construction systems. Grounded in literature spanning political ecology, territorial theory, cosmopolitics, geography, and architecture, the class provides students a framework to explore the interplay between geographical and ecological conditions, modes of production, labor relations, and architecture. The course is structured along a scalar continuum, simultaneously studying the processes and spaces of extraction, circulation, and transformation. By analyzing these dynamics, the proseminar examines how build new equilibria between architecture and territory that produce alternatives to the dominant processes of planetary urbanization. Through guest lectures, reading discussions, and a semester-long design research project, students will investigate how to conceptualize and produce new, equitable territorial and construction systems.

Undergraduates welcome.

The site called Dique Vila Gilda, located over the mangrove along the Bugres River at the border of municipalities of Santos and Sao Vicente. It is the largest 'favela' built on stilts in Brazil.

Housing and infrastructure systems in unplanned urbanizing fluvial neighborhoods and in wealthier gated communities alike are increasingly inadequate, under-funded, and uninspected by misaligned regulatory bodies for the level of population growth being experienced and for the nature of living with water in this context. Much is to be learned, nonetheless, from communities therein, for communities therein and for those in other geographies increasingly defined by the nature of living with water. Our research is centered on this task: how can communities sustainably and resiliently live with water in contexts where the very challenge is, in major part, water variability and water vulnerabilities: too much, too little, too polluted, too hot, too salinized, all in short and shifting timespans. Dique Vila Gilda is one in a sequence of case studies on the planning and design of housing and sanitation-related infrastructures to both leverage traditional regional knowledge and introduce novel proposals for how to live with water.

Undergraduates welcome.