This seminar invites architects to step away from the design of buildings and toward the choreography of behaviors. Instead of treating game engines as tools to simulate physical architecture, we will explore them as spaces of agency, interaction, and emergent systems - approached through the lens of the Non-Playable Character (NPC).

Non-Player-Characters can be understood as supporting characters without agency in the design process - figures who move through, occupy, and animate spaces but do not participate in shaping them. In games like The Sims or Animal Crossing, their behaviors are bounded by pre-set logics: they water flowers where flowers exist, gather where furniture is placed, or follow circulation paths laid out by the player. This dynamic mirrors how some architectural users are often positioned: not as co-designers but as bodies that test, confirm, or reveal the affordances of constructed environments. Thinking of NPCs this way allows us to frame game engines and digital twins as laboratories where human and more-than-human presence is simulated, not negotiated, offering architects a way to study occupation and spatial legibility while questioning the confines of agency within design practice.

In the world of simulated environments, particularly in computer games, NPCs are not players that the world is actively designed around; they are zero-sum rules, behaviors, consequences. They react, they loop, and perhaps most importantly, they adapt. What happens when we begin to think of design not in terms of form, but in terms of relationships, reactions, and responses? This course frames the NPC as a design actor; a system-aware inhabitant of simulated space. Through the logic of NPCs, we’ll explore how spatial environments are less about static structures and more about the relationships, scripts, and feedback loops they host. We’ll treat NPCs as both products and producers of space, understanding them as narrative tools, systems-thinking proxies, and spatial collaborators.

Throughout the semester, we will be joined by guest speakers working in level design, game development, and interactive storytelling, who will share insights into the production of behavior-driven environments and the role of NPCs in shaping user experience. These conversations will give students a lens into game-design practices and help situate architectural thinking within broader world-building and digital design ecosystems.

Participants in the seminar will learn to prototype not walls, but worlds - not elevations, but behaviors - using the affordances of game engines to build interactive ecologies rather than inert environments. If architecture traditionally answers what stands still, dynamic environmental design methods ask: what moves, what interacts and why? The seminar introduces game engines, and their respective asset development pipelines, as design laboratories where spatial form, character logic, and environmental systems converge, enabling new ways to imagine architecture as dynamic, lived experience. We will investigate the different opportunities to explore complex relationships within constructed environments through the lens of changing and adaptive game environments, illustrate interactions, responses, and challenges within architectural space, and investigate the limits and possibilities within simulated space. Creating processes and pipelines that weave architectural observations and design strategies into the logics of game development, we explore the opportunities and limitations that derive from the conversion of 3D assets, material mapping, and digital environments into interactive and adaptive worlds.

Territory as Interior: Post-Carbon Landscapes of the Eume River explores the role of architecture as a mediator between ecologies and economies in the Eume River Basin, Galicia — a region once defined by coal production and now a hub for renewable energy. Treating the basin as a corridor of material, energy, and labor flows, the studio examines the social and ecological challenges of this transition and explores how architecture can shape a sustainable post-carbon future. Students will map territorial resources and economies to design projects that reactivate the region through new productive programs and constructions rooted in proximity resources. The goal is to define architectural interventions that reactivate the region’s economy and reveal how territorial conditions can be understood and experienced in a building’s interior space.

This Options Studio will bring together students and researchers from MIT and Atelier LUMA to imagine, design, and create new approaches to designing in extreme environments on Earth—regions increasingly shaped by the pressures of climate change. From arid deserts and flood-prone deltas to polar landscapes and rapidly changing oceans, these environments challenge us to rethink the relationship between material, environment, and construction.

Techniques of Resistance aims to create an archive of communal construction practices located across the heterogeneous territory of South America through the research and documentation of paradigmatic indigenous, vernacular, and popular buildings. This research will form the basis for the design proposal of a contemporary radical project that will emerge from these ancestral techniques and the cases studied in the course.

Architecture, when built, mobilizes a huge—and often invisible—network of resources, knowledge, beliefs, and people involved in the construction of a building. Techniques of Resistance will focus on the study of buildings that are strongly rooted in the environment and ecologies where they are located, with a sensitive understanding of communal cooperation and material cyclability. From the Uros Islands in Lake Titicaca and the Putucos in the Peruvian plateau, to the Shabonos and Churuatas’ large structures in the Amazon, the buildings that we will study offer a collection of construction techniques that serve as a resistance to the homogenization of architecture and the destruction of collective forms of construction.

The creation of an inventory of Techniques of Resistance presents the opportunity to broaden the definition of what a building could be in terms of its material technology and its role in a community, and will serve as the launching point for the development of a project that could redefine these techniques in a contemporary way through an understanding of material behavior, structural details, and geometry.

The course will consist of a combination of theoretical lectures, discussions, research, and design. During the first half of the semester, students will develop drawings and graphic essays as methods of research and documentation of the case studies. These deliverables will be compiled to create the archive of Techniques of Resistance, which will take the form of a publication.

In the second half of the semester, students will work on a conceptual design project for a communal building, structure, or infrastructure, proposing a critical revision of the cases and techniques previously documented. Considerable time will be given for the design process, working together to develop a conceptually and technologically strong project. Classes will take the form of workshop sessions, with design desk critiques and pin-ups. The projects will be communicated through large-scale, delicate, and well-developed drawings and, if possible, a small model.

The materials produced during the course—both the archive and the design projects—will be presented in an exhibition at the end of the fall semester. The course will value commitment, technical precision, detailed representation, and a radical and critical approach to design. Techniques of Resistance will also include contributions from guest speakers whose practices and built projects engage with the technologies and materials discussed during the semester.

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.

Research and project activities, which cover the range represented by the various research interests and projects in the Department.

Place is location, but it’s also people, relationships, and memories, the site of things forgotten, suppressed or unrecorded, terrible and ordinary ways of being. The experience of people and peoples who have migrated, been displaced or exiled add further complexity to place: perhaps, an unshakeable orientation to elsewhere or a sense of in-betweenness; or a simultaneous yet imperfect belonging to both here and there, to neither here nor there; an intermittent or constant feeling of being entirely out of place. What is a diasporic sense of place, how do we image or describe it, and how might it reimage space and place to define a territory for spatial practice?

This course is an exploration of the later stages of architectural design that occurs in architectural detailing and construction mock-ups. To initiate this course, students will select a building threshold from a project that they have previously designed and use it as a basis to produce 5-10 new threshold variations. The threshold variations will be a detailed response and study of select architectural precedents. For the final project, students will select one threshold design to build a physical model at full (or half) scale.

Students will explore the design potential of building thresholds, passages, and openings. Every threshold is on the verge of–. Choosing and isolating a threshold allows for an in-depth study of the passage between interiors, and exteriors, and of the in between space itself. For example, in Marcel Duchamp’s door 11 rue Larrey from 1927, the threshold is an opening to, a closure of, and as such it holds the space between both conditions.

In their threshold (re)designs, students will explore multiple threshold design options–each approached through a different tectonic lens. The variations will be supported by two studies: 1. an exploration of a range of cross-cultural threshold precedents drawn from editions of GA Detail, Global Architecture, El Croquis, and when possible, detailed vernacular and classical examples to establish the tectonic lenses; 2. An exploration of material, spatial, and atmospheric properties and qualities, and the bodily performances required of the passage.

The approach to tectonic studies is informed by a range of precedents from literature, mathematics, art, music and architecture. In art and music, instructional compositions are informed by repetition, variation, and singularity (uniqueness). Examples are the chance compositions of John Cage and the wall drawings of Sol Le Witt. Other models for this exploration include Elements of Style by Raymond Queneau and 99 Variations on a Proof by Philip Ording, two works that begin with a simple premise that is reinvented one hundredfold by a new set of principles, techniques, contexts, and histories.

Queneau the cofounder of OuLiPo (workshop of potential literature) begins with a narrative, while Ording begins with a theorem, yet each uses the same method to generate new perspectives of the original through an exploration of style. The class will draw from these examples to devise constraints and rules to conceive of and structure thresholds.

Since the threshold selected by student is from an original design that was given much consideration previously, each new speculation suggests alternative design approaches and potentials for the original building design, and, for their future approach to design in general.