Coming soon.
The MIT-LUMA Lab proseminar questions the role architecture and urbanism play in the use and transformation of material and energetic resources, investigating the potential for non-extractive territorial and construction systems. Grounded in literature spanning political ecology, territorial theory, cosmopolitics, geography, and architecture, the class provides students a framework to explore the interplay between geographical and ecological conditions, modes of production, labor relations, and architecture. The course is structured along a scalar continuum, simultaneously studying the processes and spaces of extraction, circulation, and transformation. By analyzing these dynamics, the proseminar examines how build new equilibria between architecture and territory that produce alternatives to the dominant processes of planetary urbanization. Through guest lectures, reading discussions, and a semester-long design research project, students will investigate how to conceptualize and produce new, equitable territorial and construction systems.
Undergraduates welcome.
The site called Dique Vila Gilda, located over the mangrove along the Bugres River at the border of municipalities of Santos and Sao Vicente. It is the largest 'favela' built on stilts in Brazil.
Housing and infrastructure systems in unplanned urbanizing fluvial neighborhoods and in wealthier gated communities alike are increasingly inadequate, under-funded, and uninspected by misaligned regulatory bodies for the level of population growth being experienced and for the nature of living with water in this context. Much is to be learned, nonetheless, from communities therein, for communities therein and for those in other geographies increasingly defined by the nature of living with water. Our research is centered on this task: how can communities sustainably and resiliently live with water in contexts where the very challenge is, in major part, water variability and water vulnerabilities: too much, too little, too polluted, too hot, too salinized, all in short and shifting timespans. Dique Vila Gilda is one in a sequence of case studies on the planning and design of housing and sanitation-related infrastructures to both leverage traditional regional knowledge and introduce novel proposals for how to live with water.
Undergraduates welcome.
As we come increasingly under the spell of AI, which raises questions as to whether it offers genuine creativity or legitimate artwork, we might gain insight in surveying some of the pioneering cultural figures in C19th + C20th whose methods offered incisive and influential new aptitude. I use the term autopoiesis to name the emerging man-machine symbiosis that conjured vivid textual, graphic, plastic, sonic, kinetic artworks, asking whether their creative and receptive cadence might nurture fertile new generative practices at this new threshold of technical capability.
The light-hearted course will introduce figures that have fascinated me in witnessing daring and often fanatical creative methods, and ask students to each explore the works' lucid delinquency, to both illuminate it for the class, but also to engage it using any contemporary methods that seem effective. My sense is that they have already rehearsed fertile generative methods, and offer psychological clarity as to their aspiration (which is not to say that they weren't a little mad)!
Mark Goulthorpe and Marc Downie have interest in these precedents as we are trying to devise an architectural design methodology that is AI-nascent.
Raymond Roussel, Alban Berg, Antoni Gaudi, Kurt Schwitters, James Joyce, Thom Mayne, Paul Steenhuisen, Marc Downie.
Undergraduates welcome.
Buildings are made up of materials, assemblies, and parts that carry stories. Deconstruction Party! is a one-week IAP course that frames taking things apart as a collective and celebratory act: a gathering around materials to uncover their pasts and discover the future possibilities they afford. The course serves as a prelude to the Spring Architectural Workshop, House( )ing: Messy Models, where the deconstructed materials will take on new lives.
Through conversations with industry experts and creative practitioners, students will rethink deconstruction as an integral part of the design process. Starting with existing architectural models, we will carefully take them apart and develop creative methods for documenting, sorting, and repairing their parts, asking how these acts might add new layers of history, meaning, and possibility to the materials.
Rather than making something new, students will focus on the process of deconstruction itself. This process will culminate in a short narrative project using time-based media, such as stop-motion animation or videos, in which the physical models and their materials become protagonists of the story.
Undergraduates welcome.
Buildings are messy—they weather, age, and accumulate traces of inhabitation over time. They require maintenance and adaptation as materials fall apart, technologies become obsolete, and ways of living change. This workshop embraces messiness as a methodology: not as disorder, but as an accumulation of change and layered temporalities—an incomplete condition that invites improvisation, making-do, and continuous editing of what already exists.
Imagining a not-so-distant future shaped by energy and resource crises, each student will depart from a contemporary domestic system or appliance—cooling, heating, plumbing, refrigeration, leisure, or storage—and speculate on its failure or obsolescence. What happens when these mechanical systems disappear, and architecture must absorb and reclaim their functions? Beginning with fragment models of an ordinary existing home, students will alter, edit, and add to them throughout the semester. As story- and time-telling devices, these models will accumulate infills, extensions, appendages, and prosthetics that support existing domestic rituals while making room for new ones.
Undergraduates welcome.
Introduces fundamental design principles as a way to demystify design and provide a basic introduction to all aspects of the process. Stimulates creativity, abstract thinking, representation, iteration, and design development. Equips students with skills to have more effective communication with designers, and develops their ability to apply the foundations of design to any discipline.
Note: this is an H1 Half Term subject
This Workshop accompanies Building Situations: Studio by studying situations and their histories across time and space. Over the longue durée, modernity’s peculiar predilection for novelty emerges as something of an aberration. It was normal, in the preindustrial age, to continuously refit buildings to the fugitive imperatives of time. By studying spoliation, renovation, preservation, adaptive reuse, and similar such practices, we will discover how people in various historical circumstances confronted the challenge of inhabiting the already-built. Rather than merely recovering these approaches as models, our ambition is to develop a grammar of responses adequate to the situations in which we find ourselves, and to develop alternatives to the largely calcified orthodoxies imposed by market logics and regulatory regimes.
This is a seminar about the material making of architectural discourse, specifically in the form of print publication. We will begin from a familiar argument—that the media through which discourse takes place inflect the architecture that emerges. We will consider this problem historically, with visits to friends in various rare books rooms, where we will see a range of books, pamphlets, posters, prints, newspapers, zines, and building graphics that help us understand the changing technologies of the architectural book and changing political economies of print circulation. We will read a substantial amount of media theory and book history, and we will analyze many precedents. Our aim is to take stock of the landscape of architectural publication today, print and digital, conceptually and materially, and to experiment with how we might intervene in it at a range of scales. We will take some printing workshops together (which may or may not work their way into your projects); we will host editors, designers, and scholars with distinct perspectives on publication; and we will put a lot of things on the table. You’ll make a small (or not-small) book.
