Practical experience through summer and January IAP internships secured by the student in the field of architecture, urbanism, digital design, art, or building technology. Before registering for this subject, students must have an offer from a company or organization and complete the Department of Architecture application signed by the advisor. Upon completion of the internship, students must submit an evaluation form available from the departmental academic office. Students are limited to a total of three approved experiences. 

Note: More detailed description will be posted here closer to the start of the Spring 2027 term.

Offers a broad range of advanced-level investigations in architectural design in various contexts, including international sites. Integrates theoretical and technological discourses into specific topics. Studio problems may include urbanism and city scale strategies, habitation and urban housing systems, architecture in landscapes, material investigations and new production technologies, programmatic and spatial complex building typologies, and research centered studies. Mandatory lottery process.

Note: More detailed description will be posted here closer to the start of the Spring 2027 term.

Offers a broad range of advanced-level investigations in architectural design in various contexts, including international sites. Integrates theoretical and technological discourses into specific topics. Studio problems may include urbanism and city scale strategies, habitation and urban housing systems, architecture in landscapes, material investigations and new production technologies, programmatic and spatial complex building typologies, and research centered studies. Mandatory lottery process.

Note: More detailed description will be posted here closer to the start of the Spring 2027 term.

Offers a broad range of advanced-level investigations in architectural design in various contexts, including international sites. Integrates theoretical and technological discourses into specific topics. Studio problems may include urbanism and city scale strategies, habitation and urban housing systems, architecture in landscapes, material investigations and new production technologies, programmatic and spatial complex building typologies, and research centered studies. Mandatory lottery process.

Description 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.