Provides a practical hands-on introduction to digital fabrication, including CAD/CAM/CAE, NC machining, 3-D printing and scanning, molding and casting, composites, laser and waterjet cutting, PCB design and fabrication; sensors and actuators; mixed-signal instrumentation, embedded processing, and wired and wireless communications. Develops an understanding of these capabilities through projects using them individually and jointly to create functional systems.

Schedule & Information

Note: class meets with Architecture Design section of 4.288 for the Fall 2026 term

Studies design as an interrogative technique to examine material sciences, media arts and technology, cultural studies, computation and emerging fabrication protocols. Provides in-depth, theoretical grounding to the notion of 'design' in architecture, and to the consideration of contemporary design methodologies, while encouraging speculation on emerging design thinking. Topical focus varies with instructor. May be repeated for credit with permission of department.

Note: class meets with 4.500/4.505 for the Fall 2026 term.

Introduction to cultures of form in architectural design, representation, and production, including material cultures, geometric discourse and analysis, Western and non-Western modes of perception and representation. Through a series of acts of forming and making, provides a primer and venue to rehearse skills such as 3D modeling and the reciprocity between representation and materialization. Exercises accompanied by lectures from practitioners, who each represent a highly articulated relationship between form and material in a body of design research or built work.

Provides an introduction to visual communication, emphasizing the development of a visual and verbal vocabulary through the lens of typography. Presents the fundamentals of shape, composition, visual hierarchy, word/image relationships, and type systems as building blocks for communicating with clarity, emotion, and meaning. Students develop their ability to analyze, discuss, and critique both their work and the work of the designed world, with an emphasis on type as a visual and conceptual medium.

Overview of design as the giving of form, order, and interactivity to the objects that define our daily life. Follows the path from project to interactive product. Covers the overall design process, preparing students for work in a hands-on studio learning environment. Emphasizes design development and constraints. Topics include the analysis of objects; interaction design and user experience; design methodologies, current dialogues in design; economies of scale vs. means; and the role of technology in design. Provides a foundation in prototyping skills such as carpentry, casting, digital fabrication, electronics, and coding.

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.