This is an H1 Half-Term Subject which meets February 5 - March 22, 2024 (includes final exam period)

If the architectural drawing moves something unknown to something known (from vision to building), the reverse could be said of the architectural survey.

The potential of the architectural survey lies in its mobilizing of something known into unforeseeable future uses (from building to visions). This course centers on recasting the architectural survey from conveyor of building facts to instrument for building stories. Operating somewhere between the limits of absolute truth and virtual truth, our research will aim to uncover new ways of engaging architecture’s relationship to vision, documentation, and the art of renewal (or preservation) against the backdrop of racial, economic, and material conditions in the turn-of-the century South. More specifically, the site of the course will be Tuskegee University and the legacy of Robert R. Taylor, the first accredited Black architect, MIT graduate, and designer and builder of a significant portion of the campus’s brick buildings.

Students will consider Taylor’s work both in the present context and its inception under Booker T. Washington’s leadership.

In addition to rigorously surveying a building through traditional and non-traditional survey methods and media, students will engage Taylor’s legacy through on-site field work paired with archival research. Observations will be filtered through distinct ways of looking to describe an existing building not as it is but as it is seen by the student. The results, a set of unconventional as-built drawings, will question and advance visuality as architecture’s essential resource.

For this course, travel is required and will take place prior to the start of the spring semester (Sunday 1/28-Thursday 2/1). The travel week will involve a mix of tours, teaching, discussions, and on-site surveying. Following our travels, class days are formatted around lectures, readings, discussions, tutorials, desk and pin-up critiques.

UG: 4.s00 | G: 4.s12

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 typographic designer 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, part workshop, this class will iterate around translation as method and practice for typographic experimentation. Using language as an organizing framework and structure, students will engage with calligraphic form, modular alphabets, and notational conventions and experiment with 1:1 translations, direct transpositions, and transliterations. By the end of the term, students will have researched and developed a project that translates a known and observed system into a visual language of their own creation. This will be supplemented by theoretical writing from artists, writers, and technologists that may include Ferdinand de Saussure, Walter Benjamin, Albrecht Dürer, Donald Knuth, Charles Gaines, Tan Lin, Louis Lüthi, Édouard Glissant, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Students can expect to learn basic typographic rules and typesetting techniques.

Explores three-dimensional art work, including sculptures and installations, from design to model to finished piece. Addresses challenges associated with design and fabrication, process, context, and relationships between objects, the body, and physical or cultural environments. Lectures, screenings, field trips, readings, and debates supplement studio practice.

The class will introduce students to the foundations of volume and sculpture centered around the human body and embodied experiences. Through research and design experiments, the class will explore structures, design and movement for the body inspired by nature (ie. flora, leaves, wings and insects).

Students are invited to propose subjects and themes to develop individually and collectively.

Activities are based on core elements in the creation of a performance and will be categorized into the following four program activity areas history and research; presentation design: costume/garment/wearable sculpture design and construction, and movement vocabulary; production design: theater and performance strategies with visual arts; and strategic planning: site specific logistics.

The project will focus on 4 areas (listed below) and will develop specific activities based on those areas.  Participants will develop innovation and creativity skills, develop and implement collaboration strategies, develop thematic design skills, and learn costume/garment construction skills.

4.322/4.323 Syllabus (MIT Certificate protected)

In the context of the climate crisis and rising temperatures, building enclosure technologies must respond to a plurality of requirements--including solar radiation control, thermal insulation, and heat storage--ideally, with minimal embodied carbon and at low cost.  While contemporary normative approaches tackle this with assemblies of highly specialized layers, alternative solutions are emerging that use geometric specificity and variation to integrate multiple high-performance behaviors in a humble and simplified material palette.  Shape-forward wall systems are well situated to leverage advances in digital fabrication, such as additive manufacturing of low-carbon materials like minimally processed earth, but can also be materialized with a range of traditional and emerging assembly and fabrication methods.

In this seminar, students will first study historical and contemporary precedents of relevant multi-functional wall and enclosure systems.  They will then learn to use state-of-the-art digital tools for designing, modeling, simulating, and optimizing these types of wall systems, accounting for the described thermal requirements along with embodied carbon and structural behavior.  The seminar will also include hands-on physical prototyping and experimental tests.  The final project will be an evidence-based design proposal, supported by digital simulations and physical experiments, for novel thermally performative enclosure systems and their potential impact on architectural expression.

Last summer, not a week passed without reminding us that climate change is increasingly impacting the life and livelihood of millions of people worldwide, be it through flooding, forest fires, heat waves or droughts.

These catastrophic events often destroy already fragile ecosystems and trigger heartbreaking human migration. To limit further tragedy, there is a growing consensus that we need to transition towards a carbon neutral global economy by 2050. This means that the use of all fossil fuels – with exception of some very limited carbon capture offsets – must be ended. For MIT this means, that we must eliminate all greenhouse gases from operating out campus buildings and vehicles.

To address this titanic challenge, MIT has initiated a series of interconnected activities including plans to decisively reduce energy demand from our buildings and reimaging our on and off campus energy supply infrastructure. While MIT hired a consultant to study the technical and economic feasibility of a number of decarbonization pathways a Decarbonization Working Group made of students, faculty and staff with expertise in different low- and zero-carbon technology areas and related topics will also to evaluate and prioritize potential applications to campus.

This class will function as an extension of the activities of this working group.

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.

Undergraduates are welcome to enroll.

4.s34 Syllabus (MIT Certificate protected)

UG: 4.s30 | G: 4.s32

Students will learn the basics of capturing documentary footage and sounds in real world scenarios. Learn to navigate the ethics and complexities of capturing “reality” and depicting real people and representing “truth”.

Students will learn how to edit for the desired final product, be it a film or alternative medium such as interactive, web, installation, location intervention and more.

From Robert Flaherty (Silent Era) to John Grierson (British Model) to Morin & Rouch (Cinema Verite) to George Stoney (Community Engagement) to Errol Morris (Epistomological Interview) to Adam Curtis (Journalistic Essay), learn the history and context of documentary and the various ways people have attempted to represent the real world, including newer hybrid forms that mix fiction and non-fiction and non-linear interactive works.

Students will produce a documentary short on the subject and in the medium of their choice.

Introduces artistic practice and critical visual thinking through three studio-based projects using different scales and media, for instance, "Body Extension," "Shaping Time," "Public Making," and/or "Networked Cultures." Each project concludes with a final presentation and critique. Students explore sculptural, architectural, performative artistic methods; video and sound art; site interventions and strategies for artistic engagement in the public realm. Lectures, screenings, guest presentations, field trips, readings, and debates supplement studio practice. Also introduces students to the historic, cultural, and environmental forces affecting both the development of an artistic vision and the reception of a work of art.