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 artist 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/seminar, part workshop, this class will examine translation as method and practice for visual experimentation. The course will start by examining typographic printing history, where students will gain knowledge of the various technological precedents for fixing forms of language. Students can also expect to experiment with calligraphic form, modular alphabets, notational conventions, musical transposition, and image-to-text as well as text-to-image translations. These experiments will be supplemented with guest visits from artists, writers, and technologists, as well as references of theoretical writings from Walter Benjamin, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Albrecht Dürer, Donald Knuth, Louis Lüthi, Hito Steyerl, Byung-Chul Han, Édouard Glissant, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, among others. By the end of the term, each student will have researched a specific topic of translation and developed it through a publication, broadly defined.

Undergraduates, especially those who are interested in visual language and history, are welcome!

This is the second in a 2-class project; register for 15 units. You must also register for 6 units of 11.s938 for the IAP 2025 term (21 units total).

INFO SESSION: Friday Nov 15 @ 1:10PM Stella Room 7-338 (also on zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/96150219429)

Format: Studio ; Required IAP Travel - Intensive workshop in Mexico City in January (01/20- 01/30) (Expenses covered)* 

The studio is an international collaboration with UNAM School of Architecture, Sustainable Environments Lab  (LES) and Generadora FENIX, S.A.P. an energy company that manage and run Bordo Poniente. It is part of a long-term partnership between DUSP, the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) MIT and the Mexico City Government with the purpose of addressing the city's environmental, and planning goals through research, innovation, design and civic discourse.  

Building on the Spring 2024 Mexico City practicum studio, this year's effort will explore landscape planning, alternative energy, and potential industrial development at Bordo Poniente—Latin America's largest urban landfill.  Identified through collaborations with partners in Mexico, the project will test new design ideas, landscape strategies, and energy transition approaches for Bordo Poniente, situated in Mexico City's outskirts. This 1,000-acre capped waste site, closed in 2011, offers redevelopment and ecological restoration opportunities despite its environmental challenges. Methane gas and leachate wastewater production continue, presenting economic development potential. The project's objective is to apply innovative planning, ecological restoration, and integrate production through an "industrial remix." The strategy combines industrial urbanism, landscape restoration, and energy transition, leveraging the site's energy potential, natural environment, and proximity to disadvantaged communities. This work aims to provide insights and expertise applicable to other disturbed sites in Mexico and globally. 

Some specific goals include:

• To explore landfill zones focusing on site planning, infrastructure, ecological systems, design and policy recommendations.
• Examine Mexico City’s environmental and industrial history, highlighting the spatial impacts of hydrology, ecology, and industrial development.
• To contribute to a strategic plan proposing sustainable design for the integration of energy production and urban development of Bordo Poniente.
• To provide new insights and design techniques in areas such as site planning, clean energy integration and industrial urbanism that can be utilized for the future development of the city.

Application Process

Please submit by November 19th by 5pm in PDF format and as one file : a one-page letter of interest, a one-page CV, as well as up to three 8.5" x 11" pages of visual material/portfolio (class or professional work).

* Note that per sponsored travel policies if an enrolled student decides to drop the course after the paid trip, they will be
responsible to reimburse the department for all covered expenses.
† The studio will count both as an M.Arch option studio and fulfill the studio requirement for SMArchS Urbanism

Focuses on the synthesis of urban, mixed-use real estate projects, including the integration of physical design and programming with finance and marketing. Interdisciplinary student teams analyze how to maximize value across multiple dimensions in the process of preparing professional development proposals for sites in US cities and internationally. Reviews emerging real estate products and innovative developments to provide a foundation for studio work. Two major projects are interspersed with lectures and field trips. Integrates skills and knowledge in the MSRED program; also open to other students interested in real estate development by permission of the instructors.

Examines ways that urban design contributes to distribution of political power and resources in cities. Investigates the nature of relations between built form and political purposes through close study of public and private sector design commissions and planning processes that have been clearly motivated by political pressures, as well as more tacit examples. Lectures and discussions focus on cases from both developed and developing countries.

Examines the evolving structure of cities and the way that cities, suburbs, and metropolitan areas can be designed and developed. Surveys the ideas of a wide range of people who have addressed urban problems. Stresses the connection between values and design. Demonstrates how physical, social, political and economic forces interact to shape and reshape cities over time. Introduces links between urban design and urban science.

Students continue to work in their venture teams to advance innovative ideas, products, and services oriented to design, planning, and the human environment. Presented in a workshop format with supplementary lectures. Teams are matched with external mentors for additional support in business and product development. At the end of the term, teams pitch their ventures to an audience from across the school and MIT, investors, industry, and cities. Registration limited to students accepted to the MITdesignX accelerator in the fall.

Examines innovations in urban design practice occurring through the work of leading practitioners in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning. Features lectures by major national and global practitioners in urban design. Projects and topics vary based on term and speakers but may cover architectural urbanism, landscape and ecology, arts and culture, urban design regulation and planning agencies, and citywide and regional design. Focuses on analysis and synthesis of themes discussed in presentations and discussions.

WHAT WOULD WOOD is the second installment of the multiyear ODDS & MODS research and design initiative at MIT on material circularity in architecture. The WHAT WOULD WOOD option studio and adjacent fabrication workshop will explore experimental and innovative approaches to the use of wood in the design of collective worker housing for US Forest Service firefighters and community service providers. Our partners in this venture will be representatives of the US Forest Service and Washoe first nation sawmill start-ups and stewards of the Palisades Tahoe Forest region of what is now called California.

Studio and Workshop will explore experimental wood construction with two unconventional and seemingly opposite typologies of wood. Messy Mass Timber (MMT) is our term for irregular pieces of dimensional lumber and CLT offs cuts harvested from factory waste streams. Extracted as commercial crop in industrially cultivated soft wood forests, mainstream CLT production is based on a modern era system of standardization and wood waste. The abundant by-product supply of ‘waste’ wood cut-offs can be stacked and assembled, inspired by design imagination to create new forms of un-wholly wood – thick beams and floor slabs that can resist large forces in compression.

At the other end of the industrial-forest spectrum, Wild Wood is our term for minimally processed, small diameter logs with varying branch geometries that retain wood’s unique mechanical properties as an orthotropic material. Wild Wood encompasses small-diameter hard wood tree species and tree forks of varying branch geometries that can be harvested to support forest regeneration. In natural varying forms, the junction of forking branches conserves much more strength in tension than if it were cut and sliced. Messy Mass Timber and Wild Wood can be utilized independently or together to create regenerative wood building systems that respond to forces in tension and compression.

Students will travel to local forest land in New Hampshire or Maine where we will immerse ourselves immediately in all things forest to discover and represent its many spatial qualities and diverse aesthetics. Our departure point will be the design of a bird blind—a small, stealthy structure that can disappear into the landscape of woods. Working with digital design toolkits, students will draw inspiration from a design inventory of specific wood pieces that they choose to work with. With intelligent design visualization and assembly protocols, the studio will explore a fundamentally new relationship of part to whole in architecture. Our approach moves away from the traditional value accorded to physically continuous, uniform wood in favor of a transformative ‘alchemy’ where diverse sets of small wood pieces, considered in the mainstream as ‘waste’, can be aggregated and designed to take on high value spatial properties and structural capacities.

Over Spring Break we’ll travel to Washoe first nation forest lands to visit and document collective housing sites and sawmills. There, we’ll converse and share design ideas with artisanal wood knowledge keepers, forest fire fighters, community leaders and industrial wood manufacturers. At MIT and at the legendary UC Berkeley Wood Lab, students will fabricate models and large-scale wood components of their design proposals for collective worker housing.

Against the visible context of ongoing forest fires and climate crisis, students will study the different histories and ways of thinking about the forest to stake out a range of design positions on the utilization of wood in architecture.  Messy Mass Timber and Wild Wood are undervalued, provocative and increasingly combustible parts of a fragile, and fast disappearing ecological commons. WHAT WOULD WOOD asks a fundamental question: how could building with wood – and the architectural discourse around design with wood— be redefined and reimagined to enable wood circular materiality and envision possible futures for wood in architecture.

Undergraduate: 4.s38 | Graduate: 4.s32

This course explores the evolving role of monuments and public memory through the lens of racial justice, decolonization, and the politics of space. Students will critically engage with historical and contemporary monuments, as well as concepts of “ReMemory” (Toni Morrison) that are not yet materialized outside the bodies that hold these traces of the past. Subject focuses on interventions that challenge dominant narratives and foster inclusive, participatory spaces of memory. Deliverables include a semester-long project showcased in an exhibition and/or collaborative publication, aligning with the course’s focus on research, scholarship and creative practice, and public engagement.

The sequence of weekly meetings intends to scrutinize typical atmospheres that tend to surround designers along with the design process. In other words, it is the world affecting architects and pushing them to react by producing architectural propositions. Following a series of proposed 14 topics (as listed below), the discussion will be guided with the purpose of checking their pertinence and validity. Exactly how it happens in a design process, those topics are presented as a first outline, to gain a sharper contour throughout the sequence of discussions. The focus will be on the design process, specifically on the successive moods it inescapably implies.

For over thirty years my academic and professional activities have been closely related to this research. The book: Sao Paulo, reasons for architecture, resulting from my PhD, focuses on how experiencing a city impacts in one’s way to imagine architecture, but it was informed directly and reflects continuously in everyday practice of designing.

Topics (on process)

1. about design process
   (a supposedly infallible method that, by definition, can never be completed)
   (on source, design as a tool to apprehend the world)
2. design as reading (the language of the physical world, given or constructed)
3. design as walking (promenade is an architectural experience)
4. design as talking (a sequence of dialogues and its specific way to record it)
   (design and abstract thinking)
5. design and concept (the strength and permanence of an idea before becoming a thing)
6. design and precision (geometry and aesthetic rigor, lineaments)
7. design and imagination triggers (genealogy of imagination; abstract thinking)
   (on concepts)
8. design and purpose (know why and know what)
9. design and synthesis (an increasingly demanding filter)
10. design and tolerance (cultural and industrial meaning)
11. design and dissolution (as dissemination of meanings)
12. design opposes to alienation (purpose, pleasure, engagement, fulfilment are require
    (on the nature of architecture)
13. architecture is an open source (vulnerability and strength)
    (on architecture and humanism)
14. architecture to refrain human madness 
    (For Alberti, architecture takes one single task of refraining the madness that dominate mankind; M. Tafuri)

Structure

The dynamic of the classes would be:

• each topic will be introduced in the previous session to allow a week to students for preparing evidences or references (texts, drawings or images) for the discussion in the following week.
• each session will start with students’ presentations followed by discussions; at the end of each session, a short lecture will introduce the topic for next session;

Pedagogical Objectives

The attempt of naming typical moods, strategies and dilemmas potentially experienced along with a design process, has two clear goals:

• to make students more familiar about crossing different moods in the process.
• to made students more comfortable dealing with uncertainties, unknowns, fallibilities, errors; in short, all that one has been trained to avoid.