This is a class about reading and, to a lesser extent writing, popular criticism, looking at the profession and production of architecture and design criticism in the United States from its inception in the late 19th century to the present day. Class sessions are devoted to thematic groupings of reviews—on the tower, the museum, the mall, and so on—in order to compare critical language, approach, audience, and taste, while also tracking changes in writing and design style from 1900 to the present. Thus, we read classics of architectural theory, like Louis Sullivan’s “The Tall Building Artistically Considered,” as well as Ada Louise Huxtable on the Twin Towers, and Paul Goldberger on Hearst Tower. But we will also watch Louisa Whitmore, the TikTok teen who hates 432 Park Avenue with the passion that translates so well to video. 
 
The goal of this seminar is to introduce you to the wide variety of critical voices and forms and, by the end, let you play critic yourself. During the semester, we will do close readings of specific texts together, and we will practice one-the-spot critique of some recent local projects. Two field trips led by architects will offer students the opportunity to ask questions in the field, and to think about the difference between what architects say and what the user can observe. Independently, students will research and present on an individual critic, giving the opportunity to read deeply while the in-class sessions are a necessary skim. One late session, on video games, will be programmed collaboratively, as many of you know more than I about what constitutes effective critique of games. The final project for the course will be to write, or film, or record, or otherwise produce a piece of criticism on the design of your choice.

4.s68 Syllabus (MIT Certificate protected)

Undergraduates are welcome to enroll.

This class is a pre-approved ACT elective for Spring 2023.

Annexation, greenwashing, and destructive notions of progress have all but wiped out the memory of an indigenous mythology once deeply rooted in an embodied, balanced stewardship of nature. How can the merging of artistic methodologies with agricultural practices address this loss of cultural capital?

Common Ground is a transdisciplinary experiment in learning from the land, seeking to develop a new field of inquiry at the intersection of art, science and agriculture. The history of art is also a history of agriculture, marking humanity’s complex relationship with the environment. This course will examine historic typologies of indigenous architectural and agrarian technologies, bringing them into conversation with contemporary techno-scientific and artistic discourses. Through this synthesis, our class will explore artistic methods to decolonize the social, political, economic and narrative structures that govern our relationship to nature. Following the semester, project documentation and research developed over the semester will contribute to a publication.

Applicants from across artistic and scientific disciplines are highly encouraged. Interested students should attend the first class.

2/3/23 Note: Room change from 5-216 to 7-429 (Long Lounge)

This class is a pre-approved Architecture + Urbanism elective for Spring 2023.

Geo—Design aims to articulate the “geo—” (from the Greek gaîa for 
“earth”) and to bring it to bear on the agency of design in a world facing climate change. Such ability to respond, or response-ability, requires a  shift from the framing of the planet as “global” and “common” to ground, situated, and diffract geography, climate, and technology. Geo—Design  also begs a transformation of the framework through which design engages the Earth and climate––of the concepts, scales, domains, modes  of representation, methodologies, and formats of work. Approached as such, design acts as media between the geographic and technological, within what it means to represent and to live with the Earth in ethical  deliberation and in aesthetic practice. 

Act I: What planet are you on? The Globe as Data Model 

From this critical moment on, the good old-fashioned Earth may no longer be envisaged in terms of natural dimensions, but is rather to be conceived of as a colossal work of art. It was no longer a foundation but instead a construct; it was no longer a basis but instead a vessel. 
― Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1968.  

The term “geodesign” has a history in the global vision of a “Whole Earth” or “Spaceship Earth.” In the Cold War, the large-scale deployment of satellite technologies and increased computational capacity made it possible to view the Earth as an interconnected whole, both visually—through the iconic “blue marble” photograph—and conceptually, through the use of global computer models and simulations. In landscape architecture, regional land use and planning, and other environmental design fields, the term geodesign, as framed by Jack Dangermond and Carl Steinetz, has come to describe the application of such computational tools, and in particular geographic information sciences, to model, visualize, and analyze ecological systems within design workflows.  

The climate crisis has brought the Earth once again as a site, system, and an artifact for disciplinary thought and action. Over the past thirty years since the establishment of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has gone from 352 Parts Per Million (PPM) to 417 PPM in 2022. In 2006, Paul Crutzen—Nobel Laureate in chemistry and coiner of the term “Anthropocene”—noted with alarm the “grossly unsuccessful” policy efforts to get anthropogenic greenhouse emissions under control and posited climate engineering—the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the environment—as the “escape route.” Beyond mitigation and adaptions, geoengineering has come to refer to heterogenous, mostly hypothetical, set of technologies that extend modern weather control technologies—ranging from cloud seeding to mimicking volcanic eruptions with aerosol stratospheric injection through Cold War large-scale weather Arctic modification schemes, and carbon dioxide sequestration in the deep layers of the earth and the ocean.  

Critics on the Left have warned that with it’s easier to imagine the deliberate transformation of the entire planet than that of our political economy. Enthusiasts for a ‘good’ Anthropocene have seen in “today’s unprecedented crises an opportunity to invest in nature,” in the words of the new European Bauhaus Earth initiative; an enthusiasm echoed in other Masterplanet portfolios of project pitches. Beyond critics and enthusiasts of geoengineering, the abstraction of climate change into an archetypal global problem has shaped a planetary promissory response, with little attention to the specificities of the geographies of deployment or to the histories of each climate technology.  

No one lives on the globe. This model, we are often reminded, is a hypothetical Archimedean viewpoint of an outside from which an “objective” agent, standing at a point that is firm and immovable, can move the entire construct. The global imaginary had legitimatized Imperialism and the forced displacement of matter—humans, plants, animals, molecules, and technologies—across the planet. The depleted globe has since become a reflection of the paradoxicality of global governance—a scientific consensus on global warming and the failure to take action on the climate. Where does geo-design “land” amidst and beyond the violence of such planetary abstraction?  

Act II: Down to Earth

There is no Earth corresponding to the infinite horizon of the Global, but at the same time the Local is much too narrow, too shrunken, to accommodate the multiplicity of beings belonging to the terrestrial world. 
― Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, 2018. 

The climate crisis calls for a form of inquiry and engagement that is down to Earth.  
The course Geo—Design is an inquiry into models and imaginaries that seeks to open other practices on how to engage with climate, geography, and design. In doing so, geo-design reckons with geopolitics—both the old geopolitics of nation states competing for their interests and a new called for geo-politics, which “is not about human politics overlaid on the Earth’s static frame, but politics concerning contradictory portions, visions, aspects of the Earth and its contending humans.” In this respect, the course asks: How might designers work assiduously from the midst of such systems and situations—grapple with and inherit the planetary mine and plantation—to reclaim a future still worth living? How does design think speculatively (like a planet?) around proposed interventions in earth systems? And what kinds of worlds are such proposed programs or projects likely to produce 200 years from now? 

Act II is informed by contemporary scholarship on the Earth, such as the “terrestrial,” “planetary,” and “world,” and explores approaches to climate and technology in geo-philosophy, geo-humanities, geo-aesthetics, and geo-engine. In particular, it engages the work of Bruno Latour (Down to Earth), his exhibitions (Reset Modernity! and Critical Zones) and his engagement with the political arts (in performance, see Trilogie Terrestre; and in architectural speculative cartography, see Terraforma).  

Act III: An Uncommon Planetarium

We need researchers able to participate in the creation of the responses in which the possibility of a future that is not barbaric depends. 
―Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, 2015. 

Act III proposes to “diffract” and “situate” the geographies of climate change and of proposed climate engineering solutions within a series of sites of concern that are iconic to the global imagination such as the “global commons”. Each week grounds a climate engineering technology—speculative or deployed—within its own history and in a specific relevant geography. The sites include: Mount Tambora (volcanic eruption, aerosol injection into the stratosphere), Amazonia (carbon offsets, deforestation, and fires), Arctic (glacial melt/ Surface Albedo Modification), Pacific Ocean (ocean acidification, salmon, and deep-sea mining), Indian Ocean (Monsoon, Cloud Seeding, Sky Rivers). Each pairing of - geography/technology will serve 1) to ground the crisis into specific geographies; 2) to unearth the ecological and political controversies brought forth by the climate crisis and proposed climate engineering solutions; and 3) to explicate a design research method on earth matters—air, water, ice, vapor, carbon, rock, trees.  

Throughout, the course draws on and discusses the work of designers who seek to reclaim the Earth towards new geo-political engagements and deploy an array of media towards that—visual description, material sensors, computational processes, building, forensic reports, community activism, speculative narratives, institution building, and various combinations thereof of. Practices include: Formafantasma, Andres Jaque–Office for Political Innovation, Cooking Sections, Susan Schuppli, Paulo Tavares, Lindsay Bremner, WAI Think Tank, Design Earth, Harrison Atelier, Peter Fend, Lateral Office, Cave Bureau, Terreform ONE, Liam Young, Nerea Calvillo, Studio Folder, Karrabing Film Collective, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, amongst others.  

In a semester-long design research, each student produces their own research on controversies surrounding a specific geography of concern/geoengineering technology of concern as it is impacted by the climate crisis. Students will develop this design research in textual, graphic, and model form, including interviews with experts at MIT and beyond. The final submission format is a planetarium that mediates your design research findings to a broad audience. This format learns, amongst other references, from Smout Allen’s model-devices and Formfafantasma’s Cambio exhibition and publication. 

4.s22 Syllabus (MIT Certificate protected)

Focuses on understanding the emerging field of human-centered design and its approach to real-world design challenges. Through group working sessions, design reviews, and presentations by leading design practitioners, thinkers, and business leaders, the class explores core methodologies on how design brings value to human experiences and to the contemporary marketplace. 

For Spring 2023, serves as 4.051 restricted elective.

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.

Preliminary study in preparation for the thesis for the SMArchS degree in History, Theory and Criticism. Topics include literature search, precedents examination, thesis structure and typologies, and short writing exercise.

Preliminary study in preparation for the thesis for the SMArchS degree in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. Topics include literature search, precedents examination, thesis structure and typologies, and short writing exercise.

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.

Examines themes in the history of design, with emphasis on Euro-American theory and practice in their global contexts. Addresses the historical design of communications, objects, and environments as meaningful processes of decision-making, adaptation, and innovation. Critically assesses the dynamic interaction of design with politics, economics, technology, and culture in the past and at present. 

4.657 Syllabus (MIT Certificate protected)