Note: the Architecture Design section will meet with subject 4.130 for the Fall 2026 term

• Architecture design section taught by Brandon Clifford
• Urbanism section taught by Miho Mazereeuw

Students select thesis topic, define method of approach, and prepare thesis proposal for SMArchS degree. Faculty supervision on an individual or group basis. Intended for SMArchS program students (Computation students register for 4.588 instead)  prior to registration for 4.THG.

8/21/26 - schedule change from W 2-5 to W 2-5:30; new room: W41-1101

Critical introduction to key contemporary positions in urbanism to the ends of researching, representing, and designing territories that respond to the challenges of the 21st century. Provides an overview of contemporary urban issues, situates them in relation to a genealogy of urban precedents, and constructs a theoretical framework that engages the allied fields of architecture, landscape architecture, political ecology, geography, territorial planning, and environmental humanities. Comprised of three sections, first section articulates a framework on the urban as both process and form, shifting the emphasis from city to territory. Second section engages a series of related urban debates, such as density/sprawl, growth/shrinkage, and codes/exception. Third section calls upon urban agency in the age of environment through the object of infrastructures of trash, water, oil, and food.

MIT Certificate-Protected Syllabus

Gives a critical orientation towards a career in architectural practice. Uses historical and current examples to illustrate the legal, ethical and management concepts underlying the practice of architecture. Emphasis on facilitating design excellence and strengthening connections between the profession and academia. 

9/4/26: Room change to W41-3511

Aims to create a discourse across the various SMArchS discipline groups that reflects current Institute-wide initiatives; introduce SMarchS students to the distinct perspective of the different SMarchS discipline groups; and provide a forum for debate and discussion in which the SMarchS cohort can explore, develop and share ideas. Engages with interdisciplinary thinking, research, and innovation that is characteristic of MIT's culture and can form a basis for their future work. 

Note: 3/13/26 - schedule change to M 2-5

Through formal analysis and discussion of historical and theoretical texts, seminar produces a map of contemporary architectural practice. Examines six pairs of themes in terms of their recent history: city and global economy, urban plan and map of operations, program and performance, drawing and scripting, image and surface, and utopia and projection.

Preparatory research development leading to a well-conceived proposition for the MArch design thesis. Students formulate a cohesive thesis argument and critical project using supportive research and case studies through a variety of representational media, critical traditions, and architectural/artistic conventions. Group study in seminar and studio format, with periodic reviews supplemented by conference with faculty and a designated committee member for each individual thesis.

Fall 2026: A limited number of spots available to Course 11 students (register for 11.332)

A Tale of Two Ports. Building Solidarities, integrates research and design to investigate contemporary urban transformations at the territorial scale. Moving beyond urban design’s dominant focus on the space and scale of the city, the studio examines the broader relationship between settlements and their supporting territories. Today, urbanization systematically creates spatial asymmetries, unevenly distributing land uses, rent, social services, and infrastructure across a given region. Central to this process is the externalization of productive, energetic, and metabolic functions, which are displaced from the city core to areas of lower capital value.

The studio interrogates these dynamics through research and design interventions for the historic port and the outport of A Coruña, Spain. These two infrastructures function as reciprocal landscapes defined by opposing values: the visible and the invisible, the accessible and the hidden, the architecturally designed and the engineered. They act as agents of territorial differentiation between areas prized for their cultural and economic value and those treated as necessary logistical support. This logic of separation directly shapes the disparate living conditions in the two municipalities where the ports reside. By developing proposals for both sites, the studio aims to challenge territorial hierarchies, exploring design strategies of metabolic, ecologic, and social solidarity that counter the current system of oppositions.

9/10/26 - room changed to studio W41-4419

Somewhere between volatile markets and volatile governance, between prediction betting and networks of desire that proliferate at the speed of fiber optics, money seems to flow ever faster. Architecture attempts to keep up. Think of the light-frame building, the big box store, apartments that constantly change hands, restaurants and commercial districts that are in a state of perpetual flux. These buildings combine structural frameworks with articulated and customized surfaces, furnishings, layouts and organizations–blending the specific and the generic into new interwoven configurations that prioritize transformability over permanence.

And sometimes our tools fail us and the speed of building crashes into the speed of economy, or maybe vice versa. In 2020, work stopped on 1 Seaport, a 670-foot tall residential condominium building in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport neighborhood. Owing to a faulty foundation strategy chosen to save money, the building was leaning. Enough that slabs were misaligned by nearly a foot in some areas and enough to trigger a stop work order. The building has been left a (now-stable) partly-built shell with an exposed concrete core, clad with patchy swaths of glass that situate it between construction and completion.

This studio will use this concrete shell as a site to explore intersections between market narratives and adaptive reuse: as a Tour Dom-Ino to test how to inhabit a structural frame, as a capital stack to balance a patchwork ownership model, and as an experiment to account for multiple scales of time and use. Students will work on a large hybrid model/drawing throughout the semester that they will build, rebuild, elaborate, and append as a primary design tool. We will look at how to operate on an existing building to make it perform differently: to use design to register broader socio-economic conditions at the scale of a material or a detail. If money and time have conspired to demand new kinds of architecture, this studio intends to supply corresponding designs from lobby to roof, from core to shell. 

Mandatory lottery process.

Interdisciplinary approach to design through studio design problems that engage the domains of building technology, computation, and the cultural/historical geographies of energy. Uses different modalities of thought to examine architectural agendas for 'sustainability'; students position their work with respect to a broader understanding of the environment and its relationship to society and technology. Students develop a project with a comprehensive approach to programmatic organization, energy load considerations, building material assemblies, exterior envelope and structure systems.

Explores the foundations of design through a series of bracketed methods of production. These methods exercise topics such as form, space, organization, structure, circulation, use, tectonics, temporality, and experience. Students develop methods of representation that span from manual to virtual and from canonical to experimental. Each method is evaluated for what it offers and privileges, supplying a survey of approaches for design exercises to follow. First in a sequence of design subjects, which must be taken in order.