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.

9/10/26 - room changed to studio W41-4419

“if architects only work with what is existing, then we/they will never create anything new”

This studio aims to prove the opposite is true; showcasing that while in the past, creativity was defined as the spark that ignites something entirely new, we are at an inflection point. Our planet is suffering under our continued need for “newness”. If newness provides the only definition of creative spark, we will continue to extract, ravage and exploit our planet for resources. We will continue to throw things away. Our linear lifestyle will remain, by default, the definition of the creative mind.

What if, instead, we start with all that we already have? What if creativity is defined and celebrated by the ability to make the ugly beautiful, the useless useful and the abandoned loved?

In a climate changed and changing world, architects must learn to more deeply engage with existing material, deconstruction techniques and logistics, design for disassembly and re-configuration, and the planning for a building’s maintenance. Moving architecture away from the stylistic value of a finished object, and toward an ongoing, process oriented endeavor, it must immerse itself with both the lineage of our material past and the future of its continued value.

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.

9/10/26 - room changed to studio W41-4419

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.