In an AI-enhanced future, humans will become better at everything. The machine targets real-world artificial intelligence challenges designed to help address issues related to climate change, and urbanization in cities. X Machine is an accelerator workshop designed to bring computer science and architecture together to create the most innovative and impactful technology solutions. The program's aim is to provide mentorship and technical support, with a focus on the problem statement and early-stage technology design ideation.

Undergraduates welcome.

The Professor has been steering a start-up housing group (DECOi) looking at automated composites via robotics. As part of this, they have developed design>build software to be able to generate complex detail quickly enough to keep pace with automated production. This has involved a highly skilled team of programmers and digital architects, mostly from MIT: Marc Downie (Media Lab PhD), Jorge Duro-Royo (Media Lab PhD), Kii Kang (SMArchS Computation), with framing and oversight offered by Professor Mark Burry, who pioneered parametric modeling for the Sagrada Famila in Barcelona over 30 years ago. As yet, this has focused on accelerating design>build capability, but all of the team members have a keen interest in how computation alters design imagination, and all have flirted with rule-based generative processes in their architectural work. All are intrigued by AI as it applies to design, yet there are as many versions of what AI "is", or might be.

The workshop aims to probe these differences, with students selecting what they feel are salient opportunities to develop some aspect of generative spatial/material aptitude, in the hope that it starts to offer clarity by being worked through into actual designs. The general premise is that the rule-based generative processes that emerged late C19th and steadily developed through the C20th are already taking hold in mainstream practice, and are destined to become the dominant mode of architectural production C21.

Students will be asked to step into speculative design protocols to gain insight into some aspect of auto-generated objects or buildings. The DECOi team is friendly, daring, and very team-oriented. There is no real expectation of computation as it's more adopting a creative mindset; but there is certainly a rare team of computational expertise to draw upon.

What we are finding is that once there is a high-speed and exact generative capability, so things like energy analysis, life-cycle analysis, techno-economic analysis can also take place "in seconds", offering technical feedback during the design process, which seems to be a real breakthrough. We also see opportunity for real-time co-design with clients, or even self-design in deploying the parameters offered by a cloud-based generative system. This seems to then offer potential for a vast expansion of architectural expertise, which currently involves itself in just 2% of global buildings! The expansion of architectural expertise and the liberation of design practice is then also an area that will merit our collective discussion, perhaps couched in terms of environmental benefit.

The Castaways Brick Fogon Fabrication Workshop is a direct extension of the spring 2024 Spoon Climate Studio & Workshop exploring the material properties and circularity of ‘waste’ brick. The Fall 2024 Fogon Workshop will be specifically focused on a selected, single brick stove design from the studio that was developed over the summer, and how it is fabricated in San Gregorio, a traditional farming community of chinampera farmers in Mexico City. The Workshop will continue to work with Cocina Collaboratorio, a local non-profit and will hold online reviews and discussions with local members of the San Gregorio community who will use the fogon.

The fogon, a traditional open hearth and wood cooking stove has its origins in Mesoamerican Nahuatl culture and family life. The development of the selected fogon design and its fabrication raise intriguing challenges: the fogon must mediate heat for cooking, hold cooking utensils, safely channel smoke in a chimney, be structurally stable and be scaled in size to provide a public gathering place for inter-generational cooks to prepare and share traditional food for community events.

The Workshop offers a hands-on opportunity to learn how an unconventional material—broken and irregular waste brick—can have new life in a functional prototype that can be replicated and adjusted as needs be on additional sites in San Gregorio. Students will produce detailed fabrication documents, brick jigs and layout tools and innovative instructions for building the fogon. The Nahuatl language has no word for ‘waste,’ which inspires a larger scale circularity project that represents how this ‘waste’ brick fogon could include local brick makers, undervalued forms of wood for fuel, and excess food harvested from local restaurants and chinampas. The Workshop will travel to Mexico City during a portion of the IAP period in January 2025 to build the fogon.

Techniques of Resistance aims to create an archive of communal construction practices located across the heterogeneous territory of South America through the research and documentation of paradigmatic indigenous, vernacular, and popular buildings. This research will form the basis for the design proposal of a contemporary radical project that will emerge from these ancestral techniques and the cases studied in the course.

Architecture, when built, mobilizes a huge—and often invisible—network of resources, knowledge, beliefs, and people involved in the construction of a building. Techniques of Resistance will focus on the study of buildings that are strongly rooted in the environment and ecologies where they are located, with a sensitive understanding of communal cooperation and material cyclability. From the Uros Islands in Lake Titicaca and the Putucos in the Peruvian plateau, to the Shabonos and Churuatas' large structures in the Amazon, the buildings that we will study offer a collection of construction techniques that serve as a resistance to the homogenization of architecture and the destruction of collective forms of construction.

The creation of an inventory of Techniques of Resistance presents the opportunity to broaden the definition of what a building could be in terms of its material technology and its role in a community, and will serve as the launching point for the development of a project that could redefine these techniques in a contemporary way through an understanding of material behavior, structural details, and geometry.

The course will consist of a combination of theoretical lectures, discussions, research, and design. During the first half of the semester, students will develop drawings and graphic essays as methods of research and documentation of the case studies. These deliverables will be compiled to create the archive of Techniques of Resistance, which will take the form of a publication.

In the second half of the semester, students will work on a conceptual design project for a communal building, structure, or infrastructure, proposing a critical revision of the cases and techniques previously documented. Considerable time will be given for the design process, working together to develop a conceptually and technologically strong project. Classes will take the form of workshop sessions, with design desk critiques and pin-ups. The projects will be communicated through large-scale, delicate, and well-developed drawings and, if possible, a small model.

The materials produced during the course—both the archive and the design projects—will be presented in an exhibition at the end of the fall semester. The course will value commitment, technical precision, detailed representation, and a radical and critical approach to design. Techniques of Resistance will also include contributions from guest speakers whose practices and built projects engage with the technologies and materials discussed during the semester.

Undergraduates welcome.

This workshop will offer a space for student-driven projects at the intersection of climate, community and careers as part of a series of courses that build on one another. Over the past year, students have been exploring the idea of a “climate corps” for MIT,  with partners of the MIT Civilian Climate Corps Initiative, on campus and in communities in Boston and Cambridge. We see an MIT climate corps as building student capacity to respond to needs identified by people and groups working on the front lines of addressing climate and equity issues, in the community and on campus, and to learn through collaborating on tangible projects. 

Students taking this workshop will advance and aim to complete a component of their climate corps projects while deepening their understanding of themes, their skills and practical experience. In order to hit the ground running, students should email the instructor with a description of what they would like to work on and why, what they would need to accomplish their goals (partner or mentor involvement, new partnership development, funding for materials, etc.) and whether they plan to work individually or as part of a team.  Students who have not been part of the previous courses or summer program, who wish to join a project led by another student who has, should write the instructor.

Undergraduates welcome.

Partners: Urban Risk Lab, SA+P, Eastie Farm Climate Corps, PowerCorpsBOS, the MIT Office of Sustainability, MIT Facilities, City of Cambridge.
 

Fencing is both the act of collective recognition and appropriation of a portion of land or physical space: it is the act of its delimitation and separation from the rest of the world-nature. It establishes the two topological, imaginary, geometric, technical regions of outside and inside. It formulates the problem of the mental or physical constitution of the limit, of the boundary and its violation. An act of architecture par excellence, the enclosure is what establishes a specific relationship with a specific place and at the same time the principle of settlement by which a human group proposes its relationship with nature-cosmos. But the enclosure is also the form of the thing, the way it presents itself to the outside world, through which it reveals itself.

In the opening editorial of Rassegna, published in 1979, Vittorio Gregotti proposes a theme that can be considered the manifesto of both a way of understanding the discipline and of questioning its boundaries. Architecture is primarily understood as the effort of a multitude. While evoking a primordial act of territorial conquer, the emphasis is on the collective and ritual nature of the gesture. Both act and form, the enclosure doesn't produce a solitary figure nor an abstract, generic principle. Its presence is always in relation to a particular place. It establishes a new order and generates a new equilibrium within a given territory. Further on, the editorial argues for the need to redefine the notion of enclosure at the highest possible level of abstraction, recognizing how its definition in terms of pure function (that of preventing the crossing of a body, a gaze, a law...) is what allows apparently disparate objects to be brought together under a single notion. The catalogue of examples that follows is actually rather heterogeneous and incomplete. Its limitation is also its generosity: we feel entitled to expand it and pick up Gregotti's discourse where he left off.

Enclosures is a studio focused on the architecture of the perimeter. It intends to stimulate an in-depth research into the possibilities generated by the fundamental act of delimitation. The project will be explored as a selective device, producing certain conditions of inclusion and exclusion, creating and erasing connections, sustaining acts of separation and suspension, enabling detachment and otherness. Opposing the dominant conception of architecture as production of singular — self centered — objects, the studio will stress the dialectic nature of the enclosure in relation to an underlying notion of context. The activity of the studio — ideally conceived as an appendix to Rassegna 1 — will be organized around three main tasks: a collective work of iconographic collection, the construction and manipulation of an organized taxonomy of case studies, and the development of site-specific proposals. 

Mandatory lottery process.

“Architecture is an art when one consciously or unconsciously creates aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere and when this environment produces well being.”

“I don’t divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one”

- Luis Barragan

Architecture of the Earth is a space where innovative thinking meets the environment, fostering a unique and harmonious design language. By immersing ourselves in this connection, we can learn, unlearn, and innovate, leading to a new understanding of the built environment. The studio explores the creative resources that are shaped by our surroundings, aiming to manipulate the existing ground with common forces and energies that generate spatial events. Through this approach, we can develop a new language of building that is adapted to the local context, taking into account the specific climate, culture, and geography. This will enable architects to design buildings that not only minimize environmental impact but also enhance the well-being of occupants. By developing observation and analytical skills, students can navigate the complexities of spatial design and create innovative solutions that transform the built environment.

Mandatory lottery process.