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.

This seminar invites architects to step away from the design of buildings and toward the choreography of behaviors. Instead of treating game engines as tools to simulate physical architecture, we will explore them as spaces of agency, interaction, and emergent systems - approached through the lens of the Non-Playable Character (NPC).

Non-Player-Characters can be understood as supporting characters without agency in the design process - figures who move through, occupy, and animate spaces but do not participate in shaping them. In games like The Sims or Animal Crossing, their behaviors are bounded by pre-set logics: they water flowers where flowers exist, gather where furniture is placed, or follow circulation paths laid out by the player. This dynamic mirrors how some architectural users are often positioned: not as co-designers but as bodies that test, confirm, or reveal the affordances of constructed environments. Thinking of NPCs this way allows us to frame game engines and digital twins as laboratories where human and more-than-human presence is simulated, not negotiated, offering architects a way to study occupation and spatial legibility while questioning the confines of agency within design practice.

In the world of simulated environments, particularly in computer games, NPCs are not players that the world is actively designed around; they are zero-sum rules, behaviors, consequences. They react, they loop, and perhaps most importantly, they adapt. What happens when we begin to think of design not in terms of form, but in terms of relationships, reactions, and responses? This course frames the NPC as a design actor; a system-aware inhabitant of simulated space. Through the logic of NPCs, we’ll explore how spatial environments are less about static structures and more about the relationships, scripts, and feedback loops they host. We’ll treat NPCs as both products and producers of space, understanding them as narrative tools, systems-thinking proxies, and spatial collaborators.

Throughout the semester, we will be joined by guest speakers working in level design, game development, and interactive storytelling, who will share insights into the production of behavior-driven environments and the role of NPCs in shaping user experience. These conversations will give students a lens into game-design practices and help situate architectural thinking within broader world-building and digital design ecosystems.

Participants in the seminar will learn to prototype not walls, but worlds - not elevations, but behaviors - using the affordances of game engines to build interactive ecologies rather than inert environments. If architecture traditionally answers what stands still, dynamic environmental design methods ask: what moves, what interacts and why? The seminar introduces game engines, and their respective asset development pipelines, as design laboratories where spatial form, character logic, and environmental systems converge, enabling new ways to imagine architecture as dynamic, lived experience. We will investigate the different opportunities to explore complex relationships within constructed environments through the lens of changing and adaptive game environments, illustrate interactions, responses, and challenges within architectural space, and investigate the limits and possibilities within simulated space. Creating processes and pipelines that weave architectural observations and design strategies into the logics of game development, we explore the opportunities and limitations that derive from the conversion of 3D assets, material mapping, and digital environments into interactive and adaptive worlds.

Note for MArch students: Serves as a COMP Non-Restricted OR Restricted Elective

Our primary inquiry will be on the diversification of the aesthetic, cultural and political fields in the twentieth century through the intersection of “high” art forms (e.g. painting, sculpture) with widely disseminated forms of mass culture (e.g. movies, advertisements, posters, mass-produced and circulated commodities, and ‘folk’ culture). Students will be introduced to some of the most controversial and influential themes in modernism, including Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Constructivism, Social Realism, and various forms of abstraction. We will also look at Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, as well as Earth Art. Along the way, we will analyze terms such as “avant-garde,” “aesthetic autonomy,” the “culture industry,” “mass culture” and “kitsch.”  Just what “mass culture,” and related concepts such as “the masses” and the “culture industry” are will be a special focus. Questions of identity and difference will also come to the fore as we look at visual production as it intertwines with issues of gender, race, and class. Further issues will be the transformation of the role of the artist, expanded definitions of art, institutional critique, and art’s utopian aspirations.

Rather than following the traditional and, by now, untenable model that limits review of modern art to Europe and the United States, we will examine the period within a more global framework, bringing in material from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. One of the principal arguments of this course will therefore be that it is impossible to understand modern art without considering it from a global perspective. We will examine, for instance, how Surrealism’s encounter with Africa and the African diaspora opened a decolonial perspective on Western modernism. We will also look at the transformative utopian aspirations of Geometric Abstraction as it crossed from Europe to South America. And so on.   

Additional work required of students taking graduate version.

MIT Certificate Protected Syllabus

Territory as Interior: Post-Carbon Landscapes of the Eume River explores the role of architecture as a mediator between ecologies and economies in the Eume River Basin, Galicia — a region once defined by coal production and now a hub for renewable energy. Treating the basin as a corridor of material, energy, and labor flows, the studio examines the social and ecological challenges of this transition and explores how architecture can shape a sustainable post-carbon future. Students will map territorial resources and economies to design projects that reactivate the region through new productive programs and constructions rooted in proximity resources. The goal is to define architectural interventions that reactivate the region’s economy and reveal how territorial conditions can be understood and experienced in a building’s interior space.

*Fulfills the Urbanism studio requirement for the Urban Design certificate

This interdisciplinary studio brings together students from MIT Architecture and Atelier LUMA to imagine, design, and realize new approaches to building in extreme environments on Earth, landscapes that are increasingly shaped by climate change. Building on the Space Architecture studios of the past two years, which focused on lunar and orbital habitats, this course shifts its lens to terrestrial extremes through three guiding principles: In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) adapted from space exploration, bioregional and natural material design rooted in Atelier LUMA’s practice, and the ethos of Building with Nature informed by the Self-Assembly Lab’s work in the Maldives and Iceland. In this studio, students will design, fabricate, test, and deploy high-performance, packable shelters, habitats, or field stations made exclusively from natural materials and tailored to conditions such as wind, rain, temperature, snow, and sun. Through a sequence of concept research, intensive prototyping and testing, and full-scale field deployment, both at Atelier LUMA and in New England ecosystems, the studio challenges students to harness local materials, environmental forces, and emerging fabrication techniques to create adaptive, resilient architectures for extreme conditions.

1/26/26 note: 4.440/1.056 Friday lab time is now 9:30-11:30.

UG: 4.440, 1.056; Grad: 4.462

Introduces the design and behavior of large-scale structures and structural materials. Emphasizes the development of structural form and the principles of structural design. Presents design methods for timber, masonry, concrete and steel applied to long-span roof systems, bridges, and high-rise buildings. Includes environmental assessment of structural systems and materials. In laboratory sessions, students solve structural problems by building and testing simple models. 

Graduate and undergraduate students have separate lab sections.

GIR LAB (4.440)

WASTE +1: UNWANTED WOOD is the third curriculum of the ODDS & MODS research and design initiative on material circularity in architecture. This Spring, we explore what is termed UNWANTED WOOD. This encompasses the enormous scale of wood construction waste and “low value” timber such as small diameter hardwoods, invasive species and “unmerchantable” trees that, if removed from forests, would improve forest health and resiliency. Students will engage the field of Discard Studies to question what wood “waste” might mean and stake out positions that redefine structural and spatial material value in larger cultural, economic and disciplinary contexts. Departing from Odds & Mods mono-material research, we invite students in WASTE +1 to bring a guest material, a plus one to their design work with unwanted wood.

Working first in the deciduous forests of New England, students will learn from precedents, explore unwanted wood hands-on, and fabricate experimental building components for a multi-use Forest Made cabin. The Studio will leverage MIT’s Circularity Toolkit and computational design to explore a fuzzy architectural form making that can accommodate varying inventories of waste wood. Our approach moves away from architecture made with physically continuous, uniformly milled wood. Instead, we will explore relationships of part to whole, density and distribution, in a transformative ‘alchemy’ where many small pieces of unwanted wood operate together by design. In the second half of the semester, students will fabricate prototypes and apply their findings to design a 15-meter clear-span pavilion of unwanted wood, scaled for collective programs of use that support bioregionalism in the Mediterranean Alpilles Forests of France.

Given their outsized contribution to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and unique ability to provide shelter to occupants, buildings are a key lever for both climate mitigation and adaptation. As weather events become more extreme, many buildings will fail to protect human health and provide economic security, causing an estimated 14.5million deaths and US$12.5trillion in losses by 2050. While the stakes could not be higher, we have surprisingly limited climate-actionable information on individual buildings worldwide, be it their propensity to overheat, potential to be retrofitted or evolving impact on their surrounding energy infrastructure. This class first introduces students to physics-based methods to derive this information for case study cities under current and future climate scenarios. Working directly with US and international policymakers, we will then develop concrete strategies to ensure resident health and prosperity for all.

Additional work required of students taking the graduate version.

Note for MArch students: 4.433 serves as a BT elective credit (for 4.46x credit resolution or Certificate in Climate & Sustainability)

Describes interactions between people and sound, indoors and outdoors, and uses this information to develop acoustical design criteria for architecture and planning. Principles of sound generation, propagation, and reception. Properties of materials for sound absorption, reflection, and transmission. Design implications for performance and gathering spaces. Use of computer modeling techniques.

Note for MArch students: Serves as a BT elective credit (for 4.46x credit resolution or Certificate in Climate & Sustainability)

12/17/25 note: Room has changed to 5-216

Techniques of Resistance aims to create an archive of communal construction practices located across the heterogeneous territory of South America through the research and documentation of paradigmatic indigenous, vernacular, and popular buildings. This research will form the basis for the design proposal of a contemporary radical project that will emerge from these ancestral techniques and the cases studied in the course.

Architecture, when built, mobilizes a huge—and often invisible—network of resources, knowledge, beliefs, and people involved in the construction of a building. Techniques of Resistance will focus on the study of buildings that are strongly rooted in the environment and ecologies where they are located, with a sensitive understanding of communal cooperation and material cyclability. From the Uros Islands in Lake Titicaca and the Putucos in the Peruvian plateau, to the Shabonos and Churuatas’ large structures in the Amazon, the buildings that we will study offer a collection of construction techniques that serve as a resistance to the homogenization of architecture and the destruction of collective forms of construction.

The creation of an inventory of Techniques of Resistance presents the opportunity to broaden the definition of what a building could be in terms of its material technology and its role in a community, and will serve as the launching point for the development of a project that could redefine these techniques in a contemporary way through an understanding of material behavior, structural details, and geometry.

The course will consist of a combination of theoretical lectures, discussions, research, and design. During the first half of the semester, students will develop drawings and graphic essays as methods of research and documentation of the case studies. These deliverables will be compiled to create the archive of Techniques of Resistance, which will take the form of a publication.

In the second half of the semester, students will work on a conceptual design project for a communal building, structure, or infrastructure, proposing a critical revision of the cases and techniques previously documented. Considerable time will be given for the design process, working together to develop a conceptually and technologically strong project. Classes will take the form of workshop sessions, with design desk critiques and pin-ups. The projects will be communicated through large-scale, delicate, and well-developed drawings and, if possible, a small model.

The materials produced during the course—both the archive and the design projects—will be presented in an exhibition at the end of the fall semester. The course will value commitment, technical precision, detailed representation, and a radical and critical approach to design. Techniques of Resistance will also include contributions from guest speakers whose practices and built projects engage with the technologies and materials discussed during the semester.