Utopias, Camps, and the Architecture of War, is proposed as a research- design workshop that examines the layered histories of Terezín as a way to think critically about how architecture participates in the making of trauma, memory, and recovery. Conceived as a fortified utopian city and later transformed into a Nazi transport camp, Terezín embodies the shifting functions of urban space and architecture as both agent and witness. Its bastions, mounds, and urban fabric are not merely remnants but active carriers of political and historical meaning. By tracing the trajectory from fortification to camp, from architecture of war to the ongoing dilemmas of inhabitation, memorialization, restoration and reconstruction, this workshop foregrounds the ethical and epistemological challenges of engaging with sites where architecture itself was complicit in violence.

This workshop class is offered as collaborative project together with: Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic (lead by Veronika Sindlerova); TU Liberec, Czech Republic (lead by Radek Kolarik,  Iva Dvorakova) TU Dresden, Germany (lead by Angela Mensing-de Jong); Technion -Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel (lead by Eliyahu Keller, Aaron Sprecher).

The class will sponsor (flights & accommodation) a trip to the Czech Republic to take place between October 7/8 – 14, 2026 (exact dates tbc), including participation in a conference and exhibition in Terezin during Oct. 12-13,  of ongoing studies undertaken on this subject by our collaborating universities. During this trip the MIT class will interact with students from all the collaborating schools mentioned above and work together with the students & researchers from the Technion in conducting field research, developing narratives, and learning first-hand the physical and historical conditions that have shaped the town of Terezin. 

6/29/26 note: schedule change to M 2-5

Detail is tricky. Despite its ubiquity, it remains underappreciated as a site of political, historical, and aesthetic meaning. It is elusive, often strange, and strung between opposites. It can be necessary or excessive, graphic or tectonic, honest or dishonest —often both. This course investigates various lineages of architectural detail, encouraging students to appreciate the 1:1 as an important scale of intention and invention in our discipline. Lectures and assignments will equip students in noticing the attitudes and sensibilities which emanate from the steps, sills, corners and eaves around them, and developing their own. Drawing on this cultivated awareness, the final project will allow students to experiment with a way of designing buildings that begins at the scale of the hand.

Undergraduates welcome.

Description posted here close to start of term.

Mandatory lottery process.

This seminar introduces students to environmental challenges in the US and across the globe. We will do this by meeting and talking with amazing professors and researchers across MIT who are working on the science, technology, design, and policy related to many of the major issues of the planet. In visiting these professors and researchers in their labs and workplaces we will discuss the principles of sustainability and explore diverse topics including the science and policy of climate change, material and energy needs of the modern world, the prospects for meaningful circular economies, biodiversity and the bioeconomy and more. Prof. Fernandez, as co-founder of MIT Environmental Research + Action, will guide the seminar through various departments, research groups, and labs to engage MIT faculty and researchers on the pressing environmental questions of our time. The goal of this seminar is to introduce first year students to the rich mosaic of work at MIT oriented toward the environment and the prospect of improving human life and all life on Earth. The sessions will also be an ideal way in which to learn more about the many opportunities for exploring the range of expertise at MIT and directing your studies as an undergraduate toward improving the state of the planet.

John E. Fernandez is professor of architecture, urbanism, and building technology in the Department of Architecture. His research and teaching centers on sustainability, climate change, and biodiversity as co-founder of MIT Environmental Research +Action (ERA), a new model for environmental research and action at MIT uniting cities, the biosphere, and artificial intelligence asco-evolving systems. Fernandez also serves as Head of House at Baker House, supports student-athletes, mentors UROPs, and is a member of the MIT class of 1985.

Mandatory lottery process.

Part studio, part seminar, part field-trip, we will visit the sublime landscapes of the arid Bighorn Basin in Wyoming. We will travel through geological landscapes, sacred landscapes, extractive landscapes, infrastructural landscapes, remediated landscapes, preserved landscapes – almost all in some way contested landscapes, set within the current geo-political landscape.

Wyoming is perhaps the wilderness most haunted by invisible yet powerful Anthropocenic forces, exporting the largest tonnage of materials of any state. Native peoples thrived in these now deserted upland regions, adapting to the seasonal migrations of abundant fauna with a brilliant nomadic architecture, evolving respectful patterns of co-existence with nature, a pact of seven-generation mindfulness. You will need to balance between contradictory notions of well-being writ large in the anticline catchment basins and societal histories that have offered-up such material wealth.

The studio will explore critical materiality, but in the current global context of civilizational-scale dwelling, at precisely the moment rare-earth minerals have been discovered here in high concentrations, vital to emerging electronic performance. This will be counterpointed with notions such as "honorable harvest”, the deep respect native peoples’ show for the earth and all its systems: yet the Arapaho now mine coal.  .

Through 3 creative studies, you will be asked to use material imagination (Bachelard’s counterpoint to formal imagination) to elicit an ethical new C21st materiality; to capture a perceived pathos in a landscape artwork; and to design a material research center + visitor housing as a nascent and elegant new architecture.

Explores photography as a disciplined way of seeing, and as a medium of inquiry and of expressing ideas. Readings, observations, and photographs form the basis of discussions on landscape, light, significant detail, place, poetics, narrative, and how photography can inform research, design and planning, among other issues. Recommended for students who want to employ visual methods in their theses. 

Introduces methods for observing, interpreting, and representing the urban environment. Students draw on their senses and develop their ability to deduce, question, and test conclusions about how the built environment is designed, used, and valued. The interrelationship of built form, circulation networks, open space, and natural systems are a key focus. Supplements existing classes that cover theory and history of city design and urban planning and prepares students without design backgrounds with the fundamentals of physical planning. Intended as a foundation for 11.329.