This interdisciplinary studio brings together students from MIT Architecture and Atelier LUMA to imagine, design, and realize new approaches to building in extreme environments on Earth, landscapes that are increasingly shaped by climate change. Building on the Space Architecture studios of the past two years, which focused on lunar and orbital habitats, this course shifts its lens to terrestrial extremes through three guiding principles: In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) adapted from space exploration, bioregional and natural material design rooted in Atelier LUMA’s practice, and the ethos of Building with Nature informed by the Self-Assembly Lab’s work in the Maldives and Iceland. In this studio, students will design, fabricate, test, and deploy high-performance, packable shelters, habitats, or field stations made exclusively from natural materials and tailored to conditions such as wind, rain, temperature, snow, and sun. Through a sequence of concept research, intensive prototyping and testing, and full-scale field deployment, both at Atelier LUMA and in New England ecosystems, the studio challenges students to harness local materials, environmental forces, and emerging fabrication techniques to create adaptive, resilient architectures for extreme conditions.

WASTE +1: UNWANTED WOOD is the third curriculum of the ODDS & MODS research and design initiative on material circularity in architecture. This Spring, we explore what is termed UNWANTED WOOD. This encompasses the enormous scale of wood construction waste and “low value” timber such as small diameter hardwoods, invasive species and “unmerchantable” trees that, if removed from forests, would improve forest health and resiliency. Students will engage the field of Discard Studies to question what wood “waste” might mean and stake out positions that redefine structural and spatial material value in larger cultural, economic and disciplinary contexts. Departing from Odds & Mods mono-material research, we invite students in WASTE +1 to bring a guest material, a plus one to their design work with unwanted wood.

Working first in the deciduous forests of New England, students will learn from precedents, explore unwanted wood hands-on, and fabricate experimental building components for a multi-use Forest Made cabin. The Studio will leverage MIT’s Circularity Toolkit and computational design to explore a fuzzy architectural form making that can accommodate varying inventories of waste wood. Our approach moves away from architecture made with physically continuous, uniformly milled wood. Instead, we will explore relationships of part to whole, density and distribution, in a transformative ‘alchemy’ where many small pieces of unwanted wood operate together by design. In the second half of the semester, students will fabricate prototypes and apply their findings to design a 15-meter clear-span pavilion of unwanted wood, scaled for collective programs of use that support bioregionalism in the Mediterranean Alpilles Forests of France.

12/17/25 note: Room has changed to 5-216

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.

Research and project activities, which cover the range represented by the various research interests and projects in the department. Students who wish a letter grade option for their work must register for 4.URG.

Research and project activities, which cover the range represented by the various research interests and projects in the Department.

12/16/25 Note - subject is now H3 half term and schedule change to R 9:30-12:30

Place is location, but it’s also people, relationships, and memories, the site of things forgotten, suppressed or unrecorded, terrible and ordinary ways of being. The experience of people and peoples who have migrated, been displaced or exiled add further complexity to place: perhaps, an unshakeable orientation to elsewhere or a sense of in-betweenness; or a simultaneous yet imperfect belonging to both here and there, to neither here nor there; an intermittent or constant feeling of being entirely out of place. What is a diasporic sense of place, how do we image or describe it, and how might it reimage space and place to define a territory for spatial practice?

Note for MArch students: Serves as a HTC Non-Restricted OR Restricted Elective; also serves as an Urbanism elective

1/28/26 note: class schedule change from M 9-12 to R 9-12

This course is an exploration of the later stages of architectural design that occurs in architectural detailing and construction mock-ups. To initiate this course, students will select a building threshold from a project that they have previously designed and use it as a basis to produce 5-10 new threshold variations. The threshold variations will be a detailed response and study of select architectural precedents. For the final project, students will select one threshold design to build a physical model at full (or half) scale.

Students will explore the design potential of building thresholds, passages, and openings. Every threshold is on the verge of–. Choosing and isolating a threshold allows for an in-depth study of the passage between interiors, and exteriors, and of the in between space itself. For example, in Marcel Duchamp’s door 11 rue Larrey from 1927, the threshold is an opening to, a closure of, and as such it holds the space between both conditions.

In their threshold (re)designs, students will explore multiple threshold design options–each approached through a different tectonic lens. The variations will be supported by two studies: 1. an exploration of a range of cross-cultural threshold precedents drawn from editions of GA Detail, Global Architecture, El Croquis, and when possible, detailed vernacular and classical examples to establish the tectonic lenses; 2. An exploration of material, spatial, and atmospheric properties and qualities, and the bodily performances required of the passage.

The approach to tectonic studies is informed by a range of precedents from literature, mathematics, art, music and architecture. In art and music, instructional compositions are informed by repetition, variation, and singularity (uniqueness). Examples are the chance compositions of John Cage and the wall drawings of Sol Le Witt. Other models for this exploration include Elements of Style by Raymond Queneau and 99 Variations on a Proof by Philip Ording, two works that begin with a simple premise that is reinvented one hundredfold by a new set of principles, techniques, contexts, and histories.

Queneau the cofounder of OuLiPo (workshop of potential literature) begins with a narrative, while Ording begins with a theorem, yet each uses the same method to generate new perspectives of the original through an exploration of style. The class will draw from these examples to devise constraints and rules to conceive of and structure thresholds.

Since the threshold selected by student is from an original design that was given much consideration previously, each new speculation suggests alternative design approaches and potentials for the original building design, and, for their future approach to design in general.

 In 1997, the Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Pritzker Prize in 2006, was invited to take part in an art exhibition called Sao Paulo Arte Cidade, curated by Nelson Brissac. The location of his work was a former industrial zone alongside an old railway crossing the downtown area of the city. Mendes da Rocha´s proposal was just to install a construction hoist in front of the framework of the abandoned factory as a way to highlight the mechanical dimension of the city (at the time: 50km of subway, 250km of trains and 2,500 km of lifts). That intervention, which went almost unnoticed during the event, was but a brief comment informed by the architect’s keen critical vision over the city. That vision, indeed, was forged by the dialogue between his architectural work and his experience of the city, beyond its mechanical dimension it means the intense experience of the urban everyday life. A way to think in architecture more informed by culture than by erudition. Two notions, culture and erudition, that the architect used to oppose. 

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 prior to registration for 4.THG.

This edition of the class will be structured around four key debates: 1) the city and the urban, 2) spatial forms of the political, 3) world systems and urban economies, and 4) environmentalism. We will analyze these topics both cross-historically and cross-geographically, consistently moving between historical and contemporary urban formations.

The class will explore these four questions by examining the various artifacts and mechanisms that make up the urban environment (infrastructures, buildings, plans) and the spatial structures they generate. Throughout, we will consider cities as part of broader processes of territorial structuring, investigating how cities depend on these processes for their functioning while also contributing to their shaping.

The class debates will be complemented by an individual, semester-long design-research project, which will be discussed through presentations and dedicated workshops.

Note for MArch students: Serves as a HTC Non-Restricted OR Restricted Elective

MIT Certificate Protected Syllabus