12/11/24 note: Class will now meet in studio 7-434

Building the Page and Portfolio is a communication design course that teaches the students how to design a book such as a portfolio or other publication using InDesign, high res images, writing, typography, and typesetting.

Undergraduates welcome!

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 workshop is part of Self and Work, a series that began in 2018 as part of Experiments in Pedagogy at MIT Architecture. Self and Work centers the personal, the body, and lived experience as site of knowledge.

We will study work by authors and artists whose lives and works are profoundly influenced by their own relation to place. Forms that give direction to the semester project are: cartography, annotation, oral history, installation, film. An experimental approach to critique is central to the workshop and will be discussed and shaped as part of the process. Collaborative work will be encouraged.

Territory as Interior — Economies and Ecologies in the Barbanza Peninsula aims to link architectural and territorial design. We have a dual objective: to propose economic and productive activities which contribute to revitalize the Barbanza peninsula in Galicia (Spain), and to investigate technologies of construction that use local material resources. Students will initially research and map the area's key economic sectors and resources and then they will propose a building that combines the productive activity they find most crucial with the use of critical local materials.

This studio will bring together students and faculty from Architecture, Aeronautics & Astronautics and the Media Lab to imagine, design and create the future of habitats beyond the Earth - starting this semester with a prototype for Low Earth Orbit. This studio will be taught as a collaboration between three groups including shared lectures, assignments, group projects and presentations. The aim of the collaboration is to bring together students across the institute as well as faculty, and invited guest experts, to help conceptualize and materialize a future of human experience, architecture and construction. This semester’s collaborative studio will prompt students to imagine, design, model, prototype and test their unique proposals. Projects may focus on novel approaches to: construction/assembly, deployability, transportation/logistics, human experience, In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), material performance, or the many components of living and exploring in space.

WHAT WOULD WOOD is the second installment of the multiyear ODDS & MODS research and design initiative at MIT on material circularity in architecture. The WHAT WOULD WOOD option studio and adjacent fabrication workshop will explore experimental and innovative approaches to the use of wood in the design of collective worker housing for US Forest Service firefighters and community service providers. Our partners in this venture will be representatives of the US Forest Service and Washoe first nation sawmill start-ups and stewards of the Palisades Tahoe Forest region of what is now called California.

Studio and Workshop will explore experimental wood construction with two unconventional and seemingly opposite typologies of wood. Messy Mass Timber (MMT) is our term for irregular pieces of dimensional lumber and CLT offs cuts harvested from factory waste streams. Extracted as commercial crop in industrially cultivated soft wood forests, mainstream CLT production is based on a modern era system of standardization and wood waste. The abundant by-product supply of ‘waste’ wood cut-offs can be stacked and assembled, inspired by design imagination to create new forms of un-wholly wood – thick beams and floor slabs that can resist large forces in compression.

At the other end of the industrial-forest spectrum, Wild Wood is our term for minimally processed, small diameter logs with varying branch geometries that retain wood’s unique mechanical properties as an orthotropic material. Wild Wood encompasses small-diameter hard wood tree species and tree forks of varying branch geometries that can be harvested to support forest regeneration. In natural varying forms, the junction of forking branches conserves much more strength in tension than if it were cut and sliced. Messy Mass Timber and Wild Wood can be utilized independently or together to create regenerative wood building systems that respond to forces in tension and compression.

Students will travel to local forest land in New Hampshire or Maine where we will immerse ourselves immediately in all things forest to discover and represent its many spatial qualities and diverse aesthetics. Our departure point will be the design of a bird blind—a small, stealthy structure that can disappear into the landscape of woods. Working with digital design toolkits, students will draw inspiration from a design inventory of specific wood pieces that they choose to work with. With intelligent design visualization and assembly protocols, the studio will explore a fundamentally new relationship of part to whole in architecture. Our approach moves away from the traditional value accorded to physically continuous, uniform wood in favor of a transformative ‘alchemy’ where diverse sets of small wood pieces, considered in the mainstream as ‘waste’, can be aggregated and designed to take on high value spatial properties and structural capacities.

Over Spring Break we’ll travel to Washoe first nation forest lands to visit and document collective housing sites and sawmills. There, we’ll converse and share design ideas with artisanal wood knowledge keepers, forest fire fighters, community leaders and industrial wood manufacturers. At MIT and at the legendary UC Berkeley Wood Lab, students will fabricate models and large-scale wood components of their design proposals for collective worker housing.

Against the visible context of ongoing forest fires and climate crisis, students will study the different histories and ways of thinking about the forest to stake out a range of design positions on the utilization of wood in architecture.  Messy Mass Timber and Wild Wood are undervalued, provocative and increasingly combustible parts of a fragile, and fast disappearing ecological commons. WHAT WOULD WOOD asks a fundamental question: how could building with wood – and the architectural discourse around design with wood— be redefined and reimagined to enable wood circular materiality and envision possible futures for wood in architecture.

 Mandatory lottery process.

The fourth edition of the Collective Architecture Studio will foreground and explore two key registers on which the concept of the common, collective good played out in Yugoslavian, and specifically Belgrade, architecture: first, the production and conception of urban and architectural space for the common good (with an emphasis on the material and architectural effects of Yugoslavia’s constitutional “right to housing”), and second, the conception of self-managed, group authorship and ownership that was implemented and performed through self-managed architectural enterprises. Important historical caveat: group authorship in such structures did not automatically mean no authorship. S25 Collective Architecture Studio will thus actively study and self-experiment with forms of coauthorship. We will focus on the architectural repair of existing, as well as the invention of new modes of cooperative housing in this context. Everything we make (including our building proposals) will also function as critical broadcasts, catalyzing discussion and/or revelation among our projected audiences.

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.

Are you aspiring to thrive as an independent creative professional or to launch your creative practice?

This half-semester course offers students in art, cultural, and creative disciplines fundamental tools and strategies for building their careers as independent professionals.

Students will: A) Develop an understanding of the international framework of institutions, relations, and policies that serve as a foundation for professionals seeking to make an impact through their creative practice and how this knowledge can translate into offerings that stand out and create a competitive advantage.
B) Learn concepts and mechanisms commonly found in the economics of art and culture and understand how critical issues can be transformed into opportunities.
C) Explore the diverse values generated by cultural production and learn how to combine these into distinctive offerings. Students will also examine relevant business models within the creative industries and develop the skills to adapt and thrive in dynamic market landscapes.
D) Acquire practical skills in branding, legal business structures, and intellectual property, enabling students to protect and leverage their creative work while building a sustainable professional practice.