This course explores the concept of resilient aging in the built environment, addressing two interconnected dimensions: the aging of people and the aging of cities and buildings that no longer meet contemporary needs. By reframing aging as both a challenge and an opportunity, the course examines strategies to understand, intervene in, and transform the built environment to better support evolving societal needs. Rather than relying solely on top-down design and planning approaches, this class emphasizes bottom-up interventions and participatory design methods to understand and engage vulnerable populations. The course approaches aging through three interrelated topics: the adaptive reuse and activation of aging urban infrastructure, the retrofitting of aging suburbs through innovative housing and real estate models, and the application of advanced urban technologies to analyze and understand resident behavior in aging and informal settlements. These topics aim to provide students with the knowledge and tools to reimagine the built environment, fostering resilience and equity for aging populations and the spaces they inhabit. The first half of each session will be lectures, providing foundational knowledge and sharing related research works, while the second half will be dedicated to discussions, allowing students to engage with the materials and collaborate on the topics.

Technology is vital for local governments to deliver services. But when technologists "move fast and break things" in the public sector, systems fail and people suffer. Governments must responsibly innovate and integrate ideas from the private sector, while safeguarding the public interest. This seminar examines how local governments and the tech sector can collaborate to best serve their short and long-term shared goals.

Sign up by December 20, 2024 by emailing Lina Bondarenko.

SSS is a workshop for the development of improvisational movements that survey sloped landscapes, negotiate with public infrastructures, and activate architectural sites. Inspired by dancer Anna Halprin’s Experiments in the Environment, we will practice foundational intuitive physical exercises and hand-drawing scores that recalibrate our notions of time and space. We will explore the historical relationship between urban design, choreography, and gravity, interrogating the persistence of horizontal surfaces and two dimensional representations in a tilted multi-dimensional world. By traveling locally on field trips to public parks and cultural sites, we will test a spatial practice for place-based learning inspired by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin’s RSVP cycles.

SSS is a workshop for slorgs– sloped organisms. For millennia, human organisms have been collaborating with, traversing, inhabiting, perceiving, and relating to sloped terrain. Within the steep escarpments of the Great Rift Valley, a unique bioregional climate, landscape, and ecology fostered the evolution of our ancestors into upright hominids.  The original stewards of this land, the Massachuseuk people, derived their name after the sacred hill Massa-adchu-es-et, massa meaning "large," adchu meaning "hill," et an identifier of place, translating roughly as "large hill place" (Jarzombek). The city of Boston was even founded as a colony in search of the “city upon a hill.” The condition of the slope is fundamentally coded within our very existence, the slorg’s physiology and cognition driven by the undulations of the land.

Through learning to slow our attention to the subjective intelligence sensed by the body in space, slorgs are able to tune our pulse to the rhythms of the earth’s cycles, revealing environmental entanglements and response-abilities. We engage in sympoeisis—making with our communities of humans and non-humans (Haraway)—by moving with. SSS will culminate in the creation of a site-specific, collective happening in the legacy of the 1960’s Fluxus artists.

SSS welcomes participants of all backgrounds and abilities with no prior familiarity with dance to experiment freely, embedding their own daily patterns within local ecology. As we transition between seasons and semesters, SSS is a method for grounding and acknowledging our position with this moment.

COMMENTS/QUESTIONS

1:00-3:00 Field Trips and score drawing (weather permitting)
3:00-4:00 Break/Rest/Commute
4:00-6:00 Movement in dance studio, guest speakers

Participants can 
Bring: a sketchbook and pens
Wear: loose, comfortable, breathable clothing for studio sessions and warm weather-resistant layers for field trips.

Lina Bondarenko is a current graduate student in SMArchS Urbanism at MIT Architecture, following a career practicing architecture and urbanism, teaching design at an arts high school, and a lifetime dancing and performing with various dance troupes. SSS follows her research on urban infrastructure of sloped terrain as spaces of subjugation and solidarity, presented as public happenings at architecture conferences in San Francisco titled “Steep Urbanist.”

Telltales of Tide and Terra is a participatory art project addressing the climate crisis through collaborative art making, public data visualization, and installations, which include shading structures and giant community meals. Upcycled textiles and its patterns transform complex climate data into accessible, emotionally engaging visual experiences that inspire climate action. The project is produced though collaborative screen printing and cyanotype workshops, for an exhibition at the MIT Art Festival (March 1-16, 2025) and the Venice Biennale of Architecture (May '25).

Register by 1/20/2025 by emailing Merve Akdogan.

We will explore the design potential of 3d printing building with local earthen materials for the specific context of fire prone climates.

Undergraduates welcome.

This is the first in a 2-class project; register for 6 units. You must also register for Part 2, 5 units of 4.255 or 11.304 for the Spring 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

How to create art with DNA origami technology, from design through manufacturing to imaging with atomic force microscopy. Students will learn aesthetics and think through critical and speculative design approaches about the cultural impacts of this emerging technology.

The workshop participants should bring their laptops as we will be conducting hands-on exercises that require a computer.

Undergraduates welcome.

Please email Matej Vakula at matej@mit.edu for more information or to sign up.

Note: room is now E15-341

This two-day IAP workshop will explore the aesthetic dimensions of microfluidics and biotechnology. It will focus on creating interactive artworks highlighting the intersection of science and art through microfluidic technologies, including various lab-on-a-chip devices. Participants will prototype works that explore the cultural and visual implications of lab automation and biotechnological advancements, highlighting their aesthetic significance.

ACT lecturer Matej Vakula and Dr. Mehdi Salek, the lead instructor for MIT’s New Engineering Education Transformation Program, will lead the workshop.

Undergraduates welcome.

Please email Matej Vakula at matej@mit.edu for more information or to sign up.

Architects often craft images that show only the most polished views and idealized spaces to define a building’s identity and spatial experience.

This workshop proposes an alternative approach to image-making, one that focuses on small, fragmented views of a space in order to capture architecture’s overlooked moments. By illustrating architectural spaces at the size of 1’x1’x1’ fragments, we will get impressions of spaces that traditional architectural images would otherwise neglect—such as corners, undersides, sills, material details, traces of occupation and maintenance. In foregrounding these minor moments, the workshop invites a political reconsideration of which spaces and narratives are valued, challenging the hierarchy of architectural representation.

Dust bunnies—the small clumps of debris that form in the corners—will guide the process of identifying these fragments. Upon closer inspection, dust bunnies reveal a microcosm of their environment, as they indiscriminately collect tiny fragments from their surroundings. We will speculate on the origins of the particles within dust bunnies and depict the architectural fragments they might have once belonged to. Throughout the workshop, dust bunnies will be our guides into illustrating overlooked rhythms and spaces of occupation and maintenance.

Undergraduates welcome.

Research and project activities, which cover the range represented by the various research interests and projects in the department. Students who wish a letter grade option for their work must register for 4.URG.