Classes

How do we design places that reflect and elicit joy? How about places that allow us to acknowledge or express grief? We will examine the role of care in architecture and design and how it finds expression through joy and grief as expressed by interventions in public space. We will look at memorials, playgrounds, parks, promenades, and a variety of places of gathering and solitude. Students will be invited to engage with essayists, poets, artists, psychologists, and musicians—some of whom will be guests—along with urban planners and architects; expect to read Zadie Smith, Carolina Miranda, Alexandra Lange, Layli Long Soldier, Edwidge Danticat, and Rita Dove, and to look at the work of Roy DeCarava, Tyler Mitchell, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Felandus Thames, David Adjaye, Rachel Whiterhead, Tadao Ando, Kara Walker, and others. Students will be invited to design a public space that invites joy and (or?) another that wrestles with grief. (No prior design experience necessary).

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.

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.

Introduces the tools, techniques and technologies of design across a range of projects in a studio environment. Explores concepts related to form, function, materials, tools, and physical environments through project-based exercises. Develops familiarity with design process, critical observation, and the translation of design concepts into digital and physical reality. Utilizing traditional and contemporary techniques and tools, faculty across various design disciplines expose students to a unique cross-section of inquiry.

Introduces the tools, techniques and technologies of design across a range of projects in a studio environment. Explores concepts related to form, function, materials, tools, and physical environments through project-based exercises. Develops familiarity with design process, critical observation, and the translation of design concepts into digital and physical reality. Utilizing traditional and contemporary techniques and tools, faculty across various design disciplines expose students to a unique cross-section of inquiry.

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.

“That ‘night design’ exists today as a set of operations that work to prolong the day is thus not surprising. For darkness, in its sinful form, casts a shadow on a variety of practices, disciplines, and beliefs. In building a new alliance between light and darkness, this studio will operate outside Eurocentric constructions of value that have, through the so-called rationality of the enlightenment, forged a seemingly unyielding relationship between eyesight and insight, and between vision and morality. In doing so, it will ask: how can we move towards a discussion of architecture that understands the night not as a narrow period of negation, but as an amorphous space capable of embodying both the mundane and the spectacular? The studio will thus reject dualistic perspectives of night vs. day, sleep vs. wakefulness, cosmos vs. body, and foreground instead the temporary and eternal laws that govern their relationships. Rather than a backdrop against which traditional modes of practice might be celebrated, the darkening sky in this studio will emerge as an analytical tool that examines the agency of darkness and the complexity of its social and territorial transformations. Mediating between extensions to the body and extensions to the city, students will build on foundational tools—namely, drawing and making—and on architectural theory and building technology to design equity across both space and time.”

Provides instruction in more advanced architectural design projects. Students develop integrated design skills as they negotiate the complex issues of program, site, and form in a specific cultural context. Focuses on how architectural concepts and ideas translate into built environments that transform the public sphere. Studio designed to prepare students for graduate studies in the field. 

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 an introduction to working with information, data and visualization in a hands-on studio learning environment. Studies the history and theory of information, followed by a series of projects in which students apply the ideas directly. Progresses though basic data analysis, visual design and presentation, and more sophisticated interaction techniques. Topics include storytelling and narrative, choosing representations, understanding audiences, and the role of designers working with data. 

Graduate students are expected to complete additional assignments.

Focuses on producing a small series of manufactured products. Students develop products that address specific user needs, propose novel design concepts, iteratively prototype, test functionality, and ultimately exhibit their work in a retail context. Stemming from new research and technological developments around MIT, students try to imagine the future products that emerge from new materials and machine intelligence. Provides an in-depth exploration of the design and manufacturing of products, through narrative, form, function, fabrication, and their relationship to customers. 

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

Intensive introduction to architectural design tools and process, taught through a series of short exercises. Covers a broad range of topics relating to the discourse of geometry as the basis of architectural design process. Focuses on projective drawings, explicit 3D modeling, and the reciprocity between representation and materialization. Lectures, workshops, and pin-ups address the architectural arguments intrinsic to geometry and its representation. 

Inspired by Charles and Ray Eames' canonical Powers of Ten, explores the relationship between science and engineering through the lens of design. Examines how transformations in science and technology have influenced design thinking and vice versa. Provides interdisciplinary skills and methods to represent, model, design and fabricate objects, machines, and systems using new computational and fabrication tools. Aims to develop methodologies for design research of interdisciplinary problems.

Dedicated to bridging the gap between the virtual and physical world, the subject embraces modes of computation that hold resonance with materials and methods that beg to be computed. Students engage in bi-weekly exercises to solve complex design problems. Each exercise is dedicated to a different computation approach (recursion, parametric, genetic algorithms, particle-spring systems, etc.) that is married to a physical challenge, thereby learning the advantages and disadvantages to each approach while verifying the results in physical and digitally fabricated prototypes. Through the tools of computation and fabrication, it empowers students to design as architects, engineers and craftspeople.

Additional work required of students taking for graduate credit.

Provides instruction in designing and building a functional piece of furniture from an original design. Develops woodworking techniques from use of traditional hand tools to digital fabrication. Gives students the opportunity to practice design without using a building program or code. Surveys the history of furniture making. 

Additional work required of students taking for graduate credit. 

Fosters a holistic understanding of the architectural-building cycle, enabling students to build upon the history of design and construction to make informed decisions towards developing innovative building systems. Includes an overview of materials, processing methods, and their formation into building systems across cultures. Looks at developing innovative architectural systems focusing on the building envelope. Seeks to adapt processes from the aerospace and automotive industries to investigate buildings as prefabricated design and engineering assemblies. Synthesizes knowledge in building design and construction systems, environmental and structural design, and geometric and computational approaches.

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.

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.

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.

Builds on Core I skills and expands the constraints of the architectural problem to include issues of urban site logistics, cultural and programmatic material (inhabitation and human factors), and long span structures. Two related projects introduce a range of disciplinary issues, such as working with precedents, site, sectional and spatial proposition of the building, and the performance of the outer envelope. Emphasizes the clarity of intentions and the development of appropriate architectural and representational solutions.

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.

On Vessels is a studio concerned with architecture as an act of subtraction and the articulation of voids, rather than a process of addition and the making of objects. Space-making will be conceptualized as acts of removal, displacement, carving, sculpting, excavation, and erosion of material in contrast to the more typical methodologies associated with building; those oriented toward the assembly and orchestrations of parts, products, and constructions systems. The studio will find inspiration outside of the western cannon of architectural precedents in order to ground the studio’s research in, for example, industrial designed objects, works of land-art, and subterranean spaces not typically deemed “architectural.” At the outset of the studio, we will explore the “vessel” as a conceptual model for the containment of space, that will expand the way we imagine the shaping of space at an architectural scale.

The emphasis on the designing of voids is, in significant part, a pedagogical apparatus to draw focus to, and bring new modes of formal/figural rigor to, a relatively yet-undisciplined (this term to be unpacked and debated throughout the semester) realm of form-making in subterranean architecture. Historically, underground space-making has been informed by industrial, utilitarian, militaristic, apocalyptic, and sacred motivations. The studio will eschew programs that are deterministic and/or singular in their means to generate underground space, and instead identify programs that are more more pliable, ambiguous, and enigmatic in order to prompt students to develop new forms of discipline/guiding principles for the designing of voids.

Another important aspect to the pedagogical apparatus of the studio is the aim to distill the architectural problem to fewer, yet-more-fundamental, layers of consideration within architecture studio pedagogy. On Vessels is a studio intended to focus students’ attention and effort on the conjuring of form, light, experience, atmosphere, and the engagement with myriad modes of representation that will aid in bringing students’ imaginations to life. Although this studio is one which is ultimately concerned with voids, the studio will be heavily invested in the modeling of objects as a way to depict the voids students are conceptualizing, designing, and developing. The reciprocal relationship between the making of casts and the making of molds/formwork will provide a conceptual space within which students will revel during the testing of, the rehearsal of, and the refining of underground worlds.

“The birth of the body in the 17th century also marked its end, as the concept of the body would cease to define a specific organic reality, and become instead a political signifier of class relations, and of the shifting, continuously redrawn boundaries which these relations produce in the map of human exploitation.”

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch

Half a century ago the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose to have an abortion, a landmark decision known as Roe v. Wade. Throughout the past 50 years the decision has been challenged continuously, a tug o' war between different actors, instead of being firmly cemented as a human right and health care issue, culminating in the last decade in a particularly effective political tool. Today Texas, the second largest state and home to 30 million people (a size equaling half the population of Italy), succeeded in banning abortion. There are six additional bans that have been signed into law but are not currently in effect in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio. Yet According to the WHO (World Health Organization) restricting legal access to abortion does not decrease the need, but increases the number of womxn seeking illegal and unsafe abortion. Nearly a fourth of womxn in America will have an abortion by age 45, yet 6 states have only one abortion-care provider, an emergency situation which falls especially hard on people with low incomes. 

What does Space have to do with it?

Given Roe v. Wade, politicians have been seeking round-about ways of banning abortion, as they were unable to do so directly. Space became a primary weapon in the Texas Omnibus Abortion Bill, known as HB 2, signed into law in 2013, which required all abortions to be done in ambulatory surgical centers. Essentially mini-hospitals, these spaces have very specific code requirements regarding width and size of spaces, mechanical equipment and others. This automatically disqualified most if not all Planned Parenthood and other clinics. The entire established medical profession, both in Texas and nationally, disagreed that such provisions were necessary. The law faced immediate legal scrutiny, and in July 2016, the United States Supreme Court held some parts of the law to be unconstitutional in its decision on Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt. 

“When a State severely limits access to safe and legal procedures, women in desperate circumstances may resort to unlicensed rogue practitioners. ... Laws like H. B. 2 that 'do little or nothing for health, but rather strew impediments to abortion' cannot survive judicial inspection.” 

Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt

In addition to codes, the clinics have become a quite literal battle ground and both people seeking healthcare services, as well as healthcare providers are harassed and attacked by protesters who disagree with one’s choice over their own body. What should be a routine gesture in any developed country, let alone the richest in the world, that of seeking medical care, is more dangerous before one makes it to the door of the clinic, then anything happening inside. Nobody should be persecuted for seeking medical care, and nobody providing care, either. This results in added costs, stress or outright inability to access medicare care to those most in need and with the least resources, as well as severely limiting the day-to-day activities of abortion clinics and in time require them to shut down.

The studio will be working in partnership with sexual health care clinics in the US that struggle to exist within the restrictions in order to examine how law and space interact, understanding the ways in which space is being weaponized against the body.

This past century we have seen skyscrapers proliferate throughout cities worldwide. The realities of climate change, the global pandemic, the drive for renewable energy and their corollary in high-performance, energy efficient electrified buildings has precipitated a massive unprecedented movement towards the comprehensive repositioning of skyscrapers. Whether necessitated by obsolete and failing mechanical systems and building envelopes, by structures that require remediation and augmentation, by spaces and environments that are outdated and fail to meet contemporary market expectations — there are now powerful cultural, technical and economic forces that have catalyzed the need and desire for the radical transformation of existing tall and large-scale buildings. A global design and construction industry has emerged around the world to meet these fascinating opportunities.