This one-week IAP workshop invites a small, dedicated cohort of MIT students to advance the design of a root cellar for Hannan Healthy Foods (HHF) farm in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Conceived as a community-oriented food preservation resource, the project supports capacity building on the farm while engaging broader questions of equitable food access, agricultural resilience, and sustainable land stewardship. The workshop includes a site visit and direct conversations with the farmer, local community members, and experts in natural building. 

Participants will iterate design concepts, test material and structural strategies, and explore natural building systems specific to the climatic and geological conditions of the Greater Boston region. Hands-on exploration with natural materials will be part of the week; however, given the short timeframe, the primary focus will be on research-driven investigation and small-scale testing rather than full prototyping. Students will also visit potential sourcing sites, including those offering surplus or reclaimed resources. A detailed program of requirements for the root cellar, including size, capacity, food storage types, ventilation needs, and environmental performance criteria, will be a key deliverable. 

Throughout the week, the cohort will play an active role in shaping the workshop’s direction. Together, participants will develop a robust design proposal that advances the performance and spatial intent of the root cellar while strengthening its role as a long-lasting shared asset for the farm and surrounding community. This proposal will lay essential groundwork for continued development leading toward construction in summer 2026. 

Interested students should email Aleks Banas (aleksb@mit.edu) and Zachary Rapaport (zrap@mit.edu) with a short (2-4 sentence) summary of their interests by December 20.

Also open to undergraduates.

This design studio and seminar explores translation as both a prompt and a method for publishing. Through readings, guest lectures, and site visits, students will examine the histories of typographic printing and the technological precedents for fixing forms of language. Students will work with and expand on various “translation” machines, starting with the printing press, to consider what tools can copy, transform, and reproduce texts and images. Students can expect to test these methods, build their own fonts, and learn how to bind their own books. By the end of the term, each student will have developed a printed and bound publication, grounded in a specific translation topic of their choosing.

Skill-building workshops and site visits will be arranged outside of the class time listed, in consultation with the group.

This workshop will be open to both undergraduate and graduate students who have design work that is documented or documentable, from all design-related classes or activities. Collected and documented design work will be utilized in the process of conceptualizing and assembling a design portfolio.

Week one will introduce skills for developing a complex graphic design project while prompting critical questions about how pages function as sites of organization and meaning. Students will examine principles of structure and composition as they begin shaping a framework to support the presentation of their design work. Alongside this, we will consider broader inquiries such as: What can a page be? How do designers construct relationships between text and image?

Week Two extends these inquiries to the scale of the portfolio. Students will explore what a portfolio can be while working on sequencing projects and combining text and image to communicate ideas.
Students have the choice to participate in Week 1, Week 2, or both weeks.

Software: Indesign
Students should bring laptops to all sessions.
Contact:  paulpett@mit.edu or jlobdell@mit.edu

This Option Studio operates within The Deep Time Project, an ongoing research framework that examines architecture as a polytemporal assemblage: the convergence of multiple time trajectories across vastly different temporal scales: from geological and planetary time to human, cultural, and political time as well as event-time and duration-time.

Deep Time Architecture examines architecture as a planetary process, asking how architectural cycles operate alongside—and within—Earth’s cycles. Particular attention is given to the temporal implications of material choice, construction techniques, and environmental context, situating architectural design within broader ecological and geological systems.

Building as Material Event challenges the conventional understanding of buildings as static objects, proposing instead that architecture be understood as a material event shaped by a multitude of agentic forces, human and more-than-human.

Deep Time Architecture positions architecture not only as a cultural practice, but as a mode of planetary engagement, one that demands expanded time-literacy and a renewed ethical responsibility toward the future.

Simply printing drawing from rhino may prompt a journey across three software platforms, two licensing pools, a handful of file formats, a user authentication, a deposit of $1.50, and a toolpath actuation which transcribes the data onto a sheet of paper as six hundred discrete droplets of ink per square inch. 

A large network of operations stretch across this relatively mundane action of labor, greased by the accommodations of our many software infrastructures. While many design softwares are envisaged as open “sandbox” environments, their being a conduit to labor often has users using software as a means to an end, while common use-cases ultimately direct the attention of future developments. The well-worn cartography gets vertically integrated with telescopic functionalities, while vast territories of potential intersection remain unrepresented and illegible. 

This course views the experimental technique and unsuspected intersection as a site for new artistic and political potentials. Rather than reverse engineering a desired outcome to a sequence of software protocols, we are proposing to consider new software protocols first and to discover what they produce. This approach is designed to complicate standard user-profiling while expanding our notions of what software-mediated design can look like. 

In an effort to deprioritize content and prioritize process, we will be centering the class around an archive of flower photographs. The method is as follows: Every participant will choose an image of a flower from the archive. Each image will be subject to a digital transformation of one’s choosing. The network cartography of each technique will be diagrammed. We will meet to see everybody’s flowers and discuss their techniques. The manipulated flower will then be exchanged for another’s, where 2,3, & 4 will be repeated. 

This class will be held as a joint project between the GSD J-Term and MIT IEP, facilitated by Zachary Slonsky (GSD MArch) and Aisha Cheema (MIT MArch). In the first meeting, we will walk through an example of this process being carried out between us two. Each image and diagram pair will be formatted to the page of a recipe book. At the end, these pages will be compiled, printed, and bound. The collective result will form an archive of deviant network practices, experimental techniques, and pretty flowers. Each participant will receive a physical copy. We hope to see you there!

This Site Planning practicum coincides with the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina—a pivotal moment for New Orleans and for MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP). Over the past two decades, DUSP faculty, students, and alumni have supported the city’s recovery and resilience efforts through long-term partnerships and planning initiatives.

The studio will re-engage with New Orleans through the lens of corridor-scale resilience, focusing on how underrecognized neighborhood/commercial corridors can adapt to climate and social challenges such as heat, flooding, and energy vulnerability. Students will develop Corridor Resilience Action Plans for three areas, building on the 2016 New Orleans Main Street Resilience Plan, while exploring neighborhood connectivity and how urban design, equity, and identity intersect. 

Focuses on the synthesis of urban, mixed-use real estate projects, including the integration of physical design and programming with finance and marketing. Interdisciplinary student teams analyze how to maximize value across multiple dimensions in the process of preparing professional development proposals for sites in US cities and internationally. Reviews emerging real estate products and innovative developments to provide a foundation for studio work. Two major projects are interspersed with lectures and field trips. Integrates skills and knowledge in the MSRED program; also open to other students interested in real estate development by permission of the instructors.

Examines ways that urban design contributes to distribution of political power and resources in cities. Investigates the nature of relations between built form and political purposes through close study of public and private sector design commissions and planning processes that have been clearly motivated by political pressures, as well as more tacit examples. Lectures and discussions focus on cases from both developed and developing countries.

Students continue to work in their venture teams to advance innovative ideas, products, and services oriented to design, planning, and the human environment. Presented in a workshop format with supplementary lectures. Teams are matched with external mentors for additional support in business and product development. At the end of the term, teams pitch their ventures to an audience from across the school and MIT, investors, industry, and cities. Registration limited to students accepted to the MITdesignX accelerator in the fall.

Examines innovations in urban design practice occurring through the work of leading practitioners in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning. Features lectures by major national and global practitioners in urban design. Projects and topics vary based on term and speakers but may cover architectural urbanism, landscape and ecology, arts and culture, urban design regulation and planning agencies, and citywide and regional design. Focuses on analysis and synthesis of themes discussed in presentations and discussions.