Canceled for Spring 2026
Class meets in-person every spring term.
Program of thesis research leading to the writing of an SB thesis. Intended for seniors. Twelve units recommended.
This hands-on studio explores the intersections of art, design, governance, and urban agriculture through the collaborative construction of two site-specific chicken coops—one for Common Good Farm and one for Eastie Farms—based on an open-source artist-designed framework. Cross listed and co-taught with Justin Blazier (Architecture) and Kate Brown (STS), the course connects critical histories of urban farming in Boston and Cambridge with practical skills in community-responsive design and fabrication. Students work directly with local farms and gardens to understand ecological, social, and political contexts, develop artistic, adaptive design proposals, and collectively build functional structures that examine how food systems, civic infrastructures, and public space shape one another.
Note for MArch students: Serves as an ACT elective
Note: Schedule change from W 9-12 to W 2-5 in room E14-251 (11/21/25)
This hands-on studio investigates how artistic, architectural and historiological methodologies can shape ecological and civic systems through the collaborative adaptation and construction of two mobile, site-specific chicken coops. Cross listed and co-taught with Nida Sinnokrot (ACT 4.s32 and Kate Brown (STS- STS.20), the course connects critical histories of urban farming in Boston with practical skills in community-responsive design and fabrication. Students will work to develop adaptive proposals for Eastie Farms and Common Good Farm that merge form, function, and narrative, while interrogating how food systems, civic infrastructures, and public space can be reimagined through creative, operational aesthetics.
This workshop represents the second part of Resilient Urbanism, a joint commitment with a community partner to envision and reimagine architectural infrastructure to support Common Good Coop a local community owned urban farm organization in the heart of Dorchester. Previously, students explored ideas pertaining to collective ownership structures, urban agricultural histories, the history of racial segregation in Boston. The outcomes produced a colorful, accessible zine documenting how a reader would navigate municipal code and regulation to start a community garden or urban farm along with a larger design proposal for the land in which the Co-Op occupies.
Undergraduates welcome.
Note for MArch students: Serves as an Urbanism elective
This workshop, along with MIT’s 4.154 studio taught by instructors Kennedy and Mueller, are integrated to support student research and learning beyond MIT. On Field Trips WASTE +1 students will learn from sawyers, indigenous knowledge keepers, foresters and manufacturers, and visit wood salvage yards and wood waste re-cycling centers. Studio students will travel to France over Spring Break, visiting manufacturers, artsis and experts in wood craft in Grenoble and Arles. Working with unwanted wood in climate threatened Mediterranean forests, studio students will select project sites and present their design work to support regional efforts for the creation of scalable, local industries for unwanted wood. Join us!
Note for MArch students: Serves as a BT elective credit (for 4.46x credit resolution or Certificate in Climate & Sustainability)
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.
The destruction of cities has historically functioned as an act of punishment, retribution, the projection of absolute power, or the fulfillment of an oath, a dream, or a divinely sanctioned intervention. In modern times, additional factors entered this causative inventory, linked to the enormous advances in the technologies and strategies of destruction and reconstruction, the modernist philosophical and legal reframing of the individual and the collective, and the rise of economics to the top of the modern state’s metrics of self-evaluation and international standing. Throughout history, the destruction of cities has been, first and foremost, an architectural and urban gesture of no less significance than the construction of cities themselves—a condition that gave rise to the critical term urbicide, coined in response to the destructive streak embedded in the grand American urban vision of the 1960s. These developments have had profound effects not only on architecture and urbanism, but—perhaps even more importantly—on urban identity and memory, on the mapping and definition of territories and states, on the conceptualization of ethics, and on the complex relationship between the city and the world’s political and religious systems.
This seminar examines the history of urbicide as it unfolds across time and space, from the divinely sanctioned destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, to the ancient obliteration of Babylon, Troy, Carthage, and Jerusalem, to the medieval devastation of Nishapur, Baghdad, Teotihuacan, and Cusco, moving onward to the ravages of the two World Wars and the wars of decolonization, and concluding with the destruction of Middle Eastern cities in the present. Through close analysis of paradigmatic cases, the seminar reframes urbicide as a privileged site where power, violence, and representation converge. Rather than treating the destruction of cities as a purely military, political, or technical phenomenon, the course interrogates how urbicide has been narrated, visualized, justified, aestheticized, and erased across imperial, colonial, and postcolonial contexts. In doing so, it positions the city as one of the most intricate artifacts human society has produced and organized itself around. Alongside urbicide, the seminar critically engages key concepts such as the city, ruins, violence, destruction, memory, and urbanism understood as a historically contingent sociospatial process.
Note for MArch students: Serves as an Urbanism elective
General study of modern architecture as a response to important technological, cultural, environmental, aesthetic, and theoretical challenges after the European Enlightenment. Focus on the theoretical, historiographic, and design approaches to architectural problems encountered in the age of industrial and post-industrial expansion across the globe, with specific attention to the dominance of European modernism in setting the agenda for the discourse of a global modernity at large. Explores modern architectural history through thematic exposition rather than as simple chronological succession of ideas.
GEO—DESIGN brings the agency of the “geo—” to bear on design at a moment when the planet—Earth, Gaîa—is a matter for thought and action.
In landscape architecture, regional land use and planning, and other environmental design fields, the term geodesign, as framed by Jack Dangermond and Carl Steinitz, has come to describe the application of computational tools, and in particular geographic information sciences, to model, visualize, and analyze ecological systems within design workflows. This course is a quest for a more material and situated context for geo—design, one that requires a more expansive and differentiated toolbox. The seminar distinguishes between the “globe” (the abstract, computational, anthropocentric view of the Earth) and the “planet” (complex Earth systems, and even cosmic forces, shared with other living beings and shaped by historical processes—geologic, ecological and political). A global perspective, also known as a God’s eye view, has often privileged a response from outside, maybe akin to geoengineering, in the form of promissory technologies and design solutioneering, at the risk of perpetuating the depleting forces and extractivist values that underpin the present climate crisis.
Where might and design touch down to counter such spatial abstraction? From a “planet-centered” perspective, geo-design focuses both on planetary-scale relations as well as on grounded places and situated practices. Such ability to respond (or response-ability) proposes a diffraction of the “global” viewpoint into a series of planetary portals or core samples, that look into a section of the Earth—its stories, matters, practices. The portal in speculative writing and science-fiction represents is an opening into time and space that connects seemingly unconnected geographies, and in this seminar, offers a theoretical framework for unearthing the systemic and situated logics of the climate crisis. The spatial framing of the Earth into such planetary portals is a lens to unearth the entanglements of climate, design, and politics and to speculate with different media on how to compose “Earths” that are worth living.
The course introduces theories and practices that seek to make (common) sense of the planet. The introduces voices from the humanities on the topic of Earth, planet, planetarity and planetarium (Spivak, Chakrabarty, Latour, Mbembe), along with allied practices of geohumanities, geo–philosophy, geopower, gerontology, geoaesthetics and geotrauma (Deleuze and Guattari, Grosz, Povinelli, Gabrys, Haraway, Tsing). The course then examines a series of planetary portals, many of which are iconic to the imagination of global commons, through practices that have addressed related climate controversies through design and architecture. Some such sites and practices include the Arctic and Antarctic Ice Sheet Melt (Susan Schuppli, Kathryn Yusoff, Olafur Eliasson, Design Earth), Amazonia deforestation (Ursula Biemann, Paolo Tavares), Oceans and Tidal Zones (Cooking Sections, TAB21, Ant Farm), the Great Coral Reef bleach (Karrabing Film Collective, Institute for Figuring), the atmosphere (Nerea Calvillo, Liam Young, Office for Political Innovation), the Caribbean (WAI Think Thank), as well as in planetary ruptures and geo-traumas in the form of disasters like plantations, landslides, heatwaves, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.
Throughout, the course explores the range of representational and discursive practices— emphasizes the roots of geo-graphy as “earth writing” or “earth drawing”—be it visual description, material sensors, computational processes, forensic reports, community activism, speculative narratives, institution building or unbuilding, and various combinations thereof. Collectively, we inquire into geo—design as a practice of life-support, and how it may be embodied, enacted, and imagined.
Note for MArch students: Serves as an Urbanism elective
The Temporal Commons is a multi-year research project that aims to bridge two millennia—one behind us & one to come—by integrating speculative futures with historical foundations. It will challenge the immediacy that dominates architectural discourse and the instinctive temporal narrowing of modernism’s legacy of presentism, proposing instead an approach grounded the expanded historical perspective of the longue dureé. The Temporal Commons workshops are offered in parallel to a sequence of research studios on topics in architecture and climate crisis. Each workshop adopts a historical perspective to pursue research in building materials, legal and regulatory frameworks, and environment.
The Spring 2026 version of the workshop will explore these areas in the context of mountain regions vulnerable to flash flooding and will focus on a range of topics including historical ecologies, timber extraction and use, riparian laws, cultural practices of riverine settlements, hydraulic science, property ownership, and other issues that will open new perspectives on the potentials for transformative architectural approaches.
Students may contribute to the workshop from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including building technology, design, history, material science, environmental science, computation, etc.
Students taking the Temporal Commons Option Studio are expected to also enroll in the workshop.
Note for MArch students: Serves as a HTC Non-Restricted OR Restricted Elective
