Practical experience through summer and January IAP internships secured by the student in the field of architecture, urbanism, digital design, art, or building technology. Before registering for this subject, students must have an offer from a company or organization and complete the Department of Architecture application signed by the advisor. Upon completion of the internship, students must submit an evaluation form available from the departmental academic office. Students are limited to a total of three approved experiences. 

As we come increasingly under the spell of AI, which raises questions as to whether it offers genuine creativity or legitimate artwork, we might gain insight in surveying some of the pioneering cultural figures in C19th + C20th whose methods offered incisive and influential new aptitude. I use the term autopoiesis to name the emerging man-machine symbiosis that conjured vivid textual, graphic, plastic, sonic, kinetic artworks, asking whether their creative and receptive cadence might nurture fertile new generative practices at this new threshold of technical capability.

The light-hearted course will introduce figures that have fascinated me in witnessing daring and often fanatical creative methods, and ask students to each explore the works' lucid delinquency, to both illuminate it for the class, but also to engage it using any contemporary methods that seem effective. My sense is that they have already rehearsed fertile generative methods, and offer psychological clarity as to their aspiration (which is not to say that they weren't a little mad)!

Mark Goulthorpe and Marc Downie have interest in these precedents as we are trying to devise an architectural design methodology that is AI-nascent.

Raymond Roussel, Alban Berg, Antoni Gaudi, Kurt Schwitters, James Joyce, Thom Mayne, Paul Steenhuisen, Marc Downie.

Undergraduates welcome.

Buildings are made up of materials, assemblies, and parts that carry stories. Deconstruction Party! is a one-week IAP course that frames taking things apart as a collective and celebratory act: a gathering around materials to uncover their pasts and discover the future possibilities they afford. The course serves as a prelude to the Spring Architectural Workshop, House( )ing: Messy Models, where the deconstructed materials will take on new lives.

Through conversations with industry experts and creative practitioners, students will rethink deconstruction as an integral part of the design process. Starting with existing architectural models, we will carefully take them apart and develop creative methods for documenting, sorting, and repairing their parts, asking how these acts might add new layers of history, meaning, and possibility to the materials.

Rather than making something new, students will focus on the process of deconstruction itself. This process will culminate in a short narrative project using time-based media, such as stop-motion animation or videos, in which the physical models and their materials become protagonists of the story.

Undergraduates welcome.

Introduces fundamental design principles as a way to demystify design and provide a basic introduction to all aspects of the process. Stimulates creativity, abstract thinking, representation, iteration, and design development. Equips students with skills to have more effective communication with designers, and develops their ability to apply the foundations of design to any discipline.

This workshop engages students in hands-on stone sculpting and working with stone by hand. Given the limited infrastructure at MIT for stone-based work, the course aims to support students in developing a deeper material understanding through direct making. The workshop also expands students’ knowledge of stone as a building material, situating it within broader historical, architectural, and artistic contexts.

The IAP winter workshop is an architectural investigation focused on developing unconventional tectonic forms and fresh professional approaches. The main goal is to create a full-scale prototype of “Rare-Earth” Composites by synthesizing natural earth materials. Building on the #mattertodata Fall Studio, the program now focuses on a hands-on methodology using physical testing and spatial models to explore materials and structural knowledge. The experience promotes collaboration, speculation, and learning from mistakes to achieve breakthroughs.

You can take a look at a class outline at this link.

Please send your applications to ensamble@mit.edu

This course is aimed for architecture and urban planning students. It will introduce the synthesis of data-driven research and urban / architectural design. The workshop will walk participants through their own data collections using gaze tracking glasses and heart rate monitors on campus.

Contact Isabel Waitz to sign up by January 1, 2026.

We all feel it - fear of the climate crisis is pervasive, and it’s hard to imagine the future without fatalism and dread. Worldwide, surveys show that a majority of people believe ‘the future is frightening’ and that ‘humanity is doomed.’ 

Yet, despite the dangers we face today, the world isn’t actually any scarier than it has been in the past. It’s our present outlook on the future, devoid of direction, possibility, and hope, which is far more terrifying. It doesn’t have to be this way. Past social movements have shown that humans are capable of radically steering the direction of the future through collective action.

Waking up to our destiny is a deliberate practice - a collective effort of forward-thinking to escape the sense of doom that pervades our generation. In the wave of cynicism that surrounds us, imagining a hopeful climate future isn’t naive - it’s radical.

This workshop invites participants to engage in a radical imagining of a climate-positive future, beginning at the scale of their own personal community. Through design exercises, games, and interactions with guest speakers, participants will find ways to inhabit these future ecologies today - to move from “What If?” to “What’s Next?” 

The final outcome of this workshop will be an exhibition celebrating our collective time travel into a hopeful climate future, which will be expressed through a series of “dress rehearsals:” speculative glimpses into optimistic new worlds and how we can practice inhabiting them today. The results of this collective worldmaking will be exhibited in the Wiesner Gallery at the end of January - details TBD.

Contact Sam Owen by 1/16/26 if interested.

This three-day workshop explores assembly and disassembly as a method for architectural thinking. Participants will engage with a set of modular objects through short theoretical prompts, design exercises, and hands-on construction. Each day introduces a new task emphasizing how bodily interaction, material resistance, and temporary structures shape spatial understanding. The workshop generates documented configurations and reflections that will feed directly back into the development of our architectural critical thinking. Contact Alexandros Gravalos for more information.

What happens when we try to formalize creativity? Can rules, structures, and models actually make design more imaginative? This workshop invites curious minds and interdisciplinary folks to explore how ideas from mathematics, computation, and creative reasoning shape the way we think, draw, and build. Through hands on exercises, we test how formalizations can plug into computational workflows, from parametric design to generative AI, without losing the spontaneity that fuels creative work. It is a conversational, experiment-as-you-go session for anyone interested in how intuition and structure collide, collaborate, or transform. Join us to question assumptions, prototype ideas, and rethink how structure might unlock new modes of design and making.

Advance sign-up required by 1/21/26; contact bailey_f@mit.edu.