Provides instruction in architectural design and project development within design constraints including architectural program and site. Students engage the design process through various 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional media. Working directly with representational and model making techniques, students gain experience in the conceptual, formal, spatial and material aspects of architecture. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication provided.

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.

This workshop engages students in hands-on stone sculpting and working with stone by hand. Given the limited infrastructure at MIT for stone-based work, the course aims to support students in developing a deeper material understanding through direct making. The workshop also expands students’ knowledge of stone as a building material, situating it within broader historical, architectural, and artistic contexts.

Introduces critical theories and contemporary practices in the field of urbanism that challenge its paradigms and advance its future. Includes theoretical linkages between ideas about the cultures of urbanization, social and political processes of development, environmental tradeoffs of city making, and the potential of design disciplines to intervene to change the future of built forms. Events and lecture series co-organized by faculty and doctoral students further engage and inform research.

Goal: Understanding the Conceptual Elegance Carbon might offer Architecture

A broad range of carbo/composite specialists that contributed to DOE and ARPA-e CarbonHouse research will offer insight into the properties and usage of Carbon:

Prof Dag Olav Hessen (carbon cycle geo-biologist), Prof Matteo Pasquali (CNT chemist), Dr Nicola Ferralis (carbon material scientist), Dr Dave Gailus (carbon nanotube scientist), Dirk Kramers (America’s Cup composite structural Engineering), Dr Roger Avakian (polymer compounding), Jeff Kent @ Moore Bros, RI (composite fabrication), Stephan Vaast (CNC milling / composite production), Dr Gus Bosse (carbon research chemist), Doron Levin (carbon research chemist), Dr Steve Nolet (wind-turbine production manager).

Part 1  The History and Potential of Carbon 

Part 1 will engage Dag Olav Hessen’s rueful, The Many Lives of Carbon, that explains the carbon cycle through eons of planetary history with a degree of foreboding. But we will diagram the majestic waltz of bio-systems in their temporal balancing of earth-/ocean-/atmospheric-carbon, with architectural sensibility, looking to capture the discordant breakdown of established biorhythms and its ominous portent with a speculative clarity that science seems to have failed to do.  

Part 2: Towards a Carbon Architecture

Part 2 will turn to use of Carbon as a polyfunctional material, already well-established in most other high-performance structural applications such as boats, planes, trains, wind turbine blades, etc via  fiber-based composites. The development of such materials and methods over the past 50 years has occurred hand-in-glove with emerging digital engineering and fabrication capability, with finite element will turn to use of Carbon as a polyfunctional material structural analysis essential to computing load-path in a zillion layered fibers. But it has equally been enabled by remarkable development of all manner of specialist materials such as cores, resins, adhesives, that testify to the polyvalence of Carbon, allowing order-of-magnitude advantage over mineral/metal structures – more akin to wood in its fibrous base-carbon morphology. The ability to orient fibers along non-isotropic stress-lines is more akin to biological systems than mechanical ones, as perhaps are the use of heat and atmospheric pressure to bind multi-material continuities.  

With leading engineers and fabricators based in Bristol, RI – a pioneering center of composite fabrication – we will consider how the widespread adoption of carbon composites might now be brought to bear on buildings, just as le Corbusier, say, brought forward steel and reinforced concrete by considering the boats and planes of the early 20th century (in Vers Une Architecture).  

Having absorbed the material, engineering, fabrication and environmental potentials this remarkable class of materials offers, students will be asked to envisage a small pavilion or a building component that conveys the tectonic (or anti-tectonic!) principles of such a Carbon  Architecture, looking to capture the brilliant formal and aesthetic qualities of a potentially electrothermal-structural new materiality. While this may speculate on emerging morphologies such as carbon nanotube or carbon foam (that hold promise of hydrogen as a corollary clean fuel, say) at issue will be to demonstrate realism in prescribing manufacturing methods with technical acuity. 

The IAP winter workshop is an architectural investigation focused on developing unconventional tectonic forms and fresh professional approaches. The main goal is to create a full-scale prototype of “Rare-Earth” Composites by synthesizing natural earth materials. Building on the #mattertodata Fall Studio, the program now focuses on a hands-on methodology using physical testing and spatial models to explore materials and structural knowledge. The experience promotes collaboration, speculation, and learning from mistakes to achieve breakthroughs.

You can take a look at a class outline at this link.

Please send your applications to ensamble@mit.edu

Design+ is a first-year undergraduate advising seminar made up of approximately 30 first-year undergraduate students, 4 faculty advisors, and 4 or more undergraduate associate advisors.

The academic program is flexible to account for diverse student interests within the field of design, and students work with advisors to select a mix of academic and experiential opportunities.

Design+ assists incoming first-year students in their exploration of possibilities in design across MIT. 

Design+ includes a dedicated study space, kitchen, lounge, and a variety of maker spaces which offer Design+ students a second campus home for making and braking.

Design+ introduces first year undergraduate students to opportunities 
Design+ around design such as internships, international travel, and 
Design+ UROPs with some of the most exciting design labs at MIT

For registration and other administrative questions contact The Office of the First Year.

Design+ is a first-year undergraduate advising seminar made up of approximately 30 first-year undergraduate students, 4 faculty advisors, and 4 or more undergraduate associate advisors.

The academic program is flexible to account for diverse student interests within the field of design, and students work with advisors to select a mix of academic and experiential opportunities.

Design+ assists incoming first-year students in their exploration of possibilities in design across MIT. 

Design+ includes a dedicated study space, kitchen, lounge, and a variety of maker spaces which offer Design+ students a second campus home for making and braking.

Design+ introduces first year undergraduate students to opportunities 
Design+ around design such as internships, international travel, and 
Design+ UROPs with some of the most exciting design labs at MIT

For registration and other administrative questions contact The Office of the First Year.

This course is aimed for architecture and urban planning students. It will introduce the synthesis of data-driven research and urban / architectural design. The workshop will walk participants through their own data collections using gaze tracking glasses and heart rate monitors on campus.

Contact Isabel Waitz to sign up by January 1, 2026.

We all feel it - fear of the climate crisis is pervasive, and it’s hard to imagine the future without fatalism and dread. Worldwide, surveys show that a majority of people believe ‘the future is frightening’ and that ‘humanity is doomed.’ 

Yet, despite the dangers we face today, the world isn’t actually any scarier than it has been in the past. It’s our present outlook on the future, devoid of direction, possibility, and hope, which is far more terrifying. It doesn’t have to be this way. Past social movements have shown that humans are capable of radically steering the direction of the future through collective action.

Waking up to our destiny is a deliberate practice - a collective effort of forward-thinking to escape the sense of doom that pervades our generation. In the wave of cynicism that surrounds us, imagining a hopeful climate future isn’t naive - it’s radical.

This workshop invites participants to engage in a radical imagining of a climate-positive future, beginning at the scale of their own personal community. Through design exercises, games, and interactions with guest speakers, participants will find ways to inhabit these future ecologies today - to move from “What If?” to “What’s Next?” 

The final outcome of this workshop will be an exhibition celebrating our collective time travel into a hopeful climate future, which will be expressed through a series of “dress rehearsals:” speculative glimpses into optimistic new worlds and how we can practice inhabiting them today. The results of this collective worldmaking will be exhibited in the Wiesner Gallery at the end of January - details TBD.

Contact Sam Owen by 1/16/26 if interested.