Classes

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.

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.

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.

Islands are examples of landscapes, ecologies and communities on the delicate and leading edge of sustainability and the imminent challenges brought about by climate change. The Galapagos are a prime example. Often challenged but sustained by consequences of tourism, they tread a fine line between economic and cultural viability on the one hand and the impacts of environmental and climatic vulnerability on the other. In such scenarios, island communities, such as Cuttyhunk, work hard to survive and become resilient- but with a concern around the policies they need to implement in the future to achieve a new form of ecological balance and real sustainability.  

The delicacy of this ecological balance is also subject to an understanding of the ‘flows’, in and out / to and fro, that sustain this native island and its culture - and perhaps provide a framework for understanding interactions over variable time scales that create strategies towards a more resilient future. As an example, many smaller-scaled islands such as Cuttyhunk, have flows and changing seasonal cycles of people, resources, goods, waste, climate variations, animals, vegetation and beaches to name a few of the most obvious. Also these flows and cycles can be traced and mapped through history to reveal a palimpsest of physical responses by earlier generations that have inhabited the island. Set against this scenario, the studio for the semester will work with the island of Cuttyhunk in southern Massachusetts, to consider how as architects we must engage with such issues in considering how to impact change on an island through design and architecture. 

While the nearby twelve-mile-long Elizabeth islands are unique as they are mostly uninhabited for the purposes of preservation, Cuttyhunk is the exception and grows from a population of only about twelve people in winter to several hundred with summer visitors, in addition to the regular day-trippers and significant numbers of visiting boaters from July to September. The island is about 1.5 x 0.75 miles and is accessed by a daily ferry from New Bedford. 

The southern half of the island is wild in nature and is still is farmed with oyster beds, while the northern end has a protected boat basin surrounded by mostly moderately-scaled summer homes and a network of roads. During three summer months the island is busy and active with flows of people, boats, resources, waste and fuel, but quietens down as it faces the winter months when essential repair and infrastructural work is completed and the people disappear. As mentioned, Cuttyhunk is in a balancing act as it questions whether it is a community that can exist outside of the short summer months for visitors - and if so it will need to figure out how to survive while preserving the island's culture and ecology, flora and fauna, and the future impacts of a changing climate. The thesis of the studio is that in times of climate change, sea level rise and a more-volatile climate, the island can retain positive outlook on its future as a year-round community, including being a laboratory for observing changes to the land, landscape and ocean and fishing, while also being a resource for learning and testing new ideas that enable it be exist sustainably. 

The studio will use Cuttyhunk as the context for making architecture as a strategic and physical act on the island. We will consider two projects: a short project that consider show to rethink the summit ‘destination’ and high point on the island (with 360 degree views) that is in need of new design thinking; and a longer project that is a modestly-scaled residential ecological education center that poses the possibility of new directions for public engagement on the island’s future. The idea is for the center to be a resource for visitors of different ages and backgrounds to spend time experiencing and researching the island and to express this through a non-invasive, resilient and adaptive form of architecture.  

‘Sites’ (as different landscape profiles, orientations and microclimates) will be determine from a larger consider of the island climate and ecology, together with the ability to support specific architectural concepts. Such concepts will look for a formal clarity as typologies together with a tectonic language of material and assembly appropriate for building on an island (including the notion of all timber prefabrication for transportation) with a variable climate that suggest different modes of openness and privacy. It is anticipated that design projects will have to be climatically resilient and self-sufficient in terms of energy and resources. The studio will aim to visit Cuttyhunk relatively early in the semester for experiencing the island and making specific studies to enhance and understanding of the inherent ‘ecological flows’. 
 

capitalist realism
There was a saying, I want to call it an “old saying” the way science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson did recently in his The Ministry of the Future, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. This notion, now part of Leftist folklore, attributed alternatively to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žizek, was also important for Mark Fisher’s framing of “capitalist realism”. Fisher was concerned with the “widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” What he calls “capitalist realism” is precisely the naturalization of this notion; that the politically mutable has become immutable. A few years after Fisher’s (2009) writing on the topic, many cataclysmic climate events later, and three years into the global pandemic that had brought us to a previously unimaginable hard stop globally, the cliché seems to have grown teeth and started biting. 

1989
Now consider the year 1989 beyond its common “capitalist realist” characterizations. This annus mirabilis of Eastern European peoples, was understood widely as the triumph of democracy, finally also, east of the Elbe. Philosopher Francis Fukuyama thought the events of 1989—also known as “the fall of the wall,” or “the fall of communism”— had marked the “end of history” itself. From then on, there would simply be nothing to motivate history’s forward movement, just perpetual present (global capitalism) and no alternatives to it. Another philosopher, Jürgen Habermas thought the historical events of 1989 had finally placed Eastern Europe on the right path, back on track to becoming proper liberal democracies. In his view, the events of 1989 were a form of “compensatory revolution.” He was not the only one, of course, his position represented the widespread colloquial understanding of the historical implications of efforts by Eastern European people to rid themselves of their oppressive regimes. 

More recently, Croatian philosopher Boris Buden, one of the most important commentators on the post-socialist transitions, proposed a different reading. Buden offered that this conception of Eastern European revolutions of 1989 as “revolutions in reverse” infantilized the subjects of post-socialism everywhere. It also decisively and swiftly sent all of the then “freed” countries straight into transitions towards global capitalism without any assessment of what their socialisms had achieved, or what might happen if the link between centralized planning and important and functioning public infrastructure was severed. Imagining 1989 to have been in the service of Eastern Europe’s catching up to the West also allowed the West not to question its own historical moment and trajectory.

architectural archives and retro-utopian work
This studio will begin by rethinking the archives of Yugoslavian socialism and architecture from the opposite posture, alongside Buden and with help from a number of local activists and historians. We will look to those archives—equipped with important historical hindsight and in light of dire future prospects—as a resource of tests and lessons of vital importance today. Our planned dive backward into the archive and forward into the future is constitutive of the logic of Retro-utopia as described by the curator Inke Arns and by Boris Buden, following her. Arns applied it optimistically to the 1990s art in the context of the Soviet Union and Slovenia. Buden extrapolates it to all cultural production in post-socialism. Mourning the loss of historical knowledge, Buden proposes that cultural knowledge, which appears in its wake, is an instrument of retro-utopia. Buden warns that retro-utopian products record not the truth of the past, but instead the truth of the retro-utopist’s relationship to that past and her belief in a specific future. We will self-consciously embrace this possible outcome precisely for what it can also tell us about our own imaginations, and with a hope that a radical and self-conscious, retro-utopian activity might also open up new horizons of possibility. 

The studio hypothesizes that by engaging in retelling the pertinent aspects of historical (architectural and political) heritage and by offering urban and architectural alternatives from the position that values socialist heritage in the context of Belgrade (ex-Yugoslavia’s capital), the fruits of its labor could have a critical function on both sides of the former Cold War divide. 

common good and forms of coauthorship
Similarly two its previous iterations, Collective Architecture Studio 3 will foreground and explore two key registers on which the concept of the common, collective good played out in Yugoslavian, and specifically Belgrade, architecture: first, the production and conception of urban and architectural space for the common good (with an emphasis on the material and architectural effects of Yugoslavia’s constitutional “right to housing”), and second, the conception of self-managed, group authorship and ownership that was implemented and performed through self-managed architectural enterprises. Important historical caveat: group authorship in such structures did not automatically mean no authorship. Collective Architecture Studio 3 will thus actively study and self-experiment with forms of coauthorship. Everything we make (including our building proposals) will also function as critical broadcasts, catalyzing discussion and/or revelation among our projected audiences. Every student will participate in the constitution of our studio’s own archives, work and broadcasts. We will read, plan, and play together. Commitment to the collective (in the studio organization and as a topic of investigation) and architectural follow-through are critical components of each individual student’s, as well as the Collective Architecture Studio’s, success. 

Travel:
We will travel to Belgrade over Spring Break at the end of March. There, we will interface with historians of architecture and urbanism, and contemporary actors engaged precisely in trying to revive and understand the links between their socialist heritage and contemporary forms of commoning. 
 

The design of urban environments. Strategies for change in large areas of cities, to be developed over time, involving different actors. Fitting forms into natural, man-made, historical, and cultural contexts; enabling desirable activity patterns; conceptualizing built form; providing infrastructure and service systems; guiding the sensory character of development. Involves architecture and planning students in joint work; requires individual designs or design and planning guidelines.

Note 1/30/23: Schedule change from TR 1-6 pm to TR 2-6 pm.

As the US population continues to relocate to sunbelt states, Phoenix has become one of the fastest growing metros in the country. This influx of new people during recent extreme droughts has pushed water resources and heat impacts to their limits; Phoenix is now the hottest city in the US. For those who still live in the urban core, the lack of shaded landscape and abundance of heat absorptive building materials has produced dangerous living conditions. Our studio is tasked with the challenge of designing “cooling” infrastructure, through architectural and landscape, while providing housing solutions for the inner loop neighborhoods of Phoenix. We will examine the inner loop of Phoenix to reimagine how new landscapes, infrastructures and housing typologies can be combined for “cooler,” safer, and healthier living.

This joint urban studio presents a new pedagogical model that brings together planners (DUSP students) and designers (ARCH) around a shared urban challenge. The studio will be offered as 2 study modules. The first module, which takes place over 6-7 weeks and includes a spring break trip, will focus on research -‘reading’ the metro landscape through analytical representation and mapping, and then further programming and writing a project brief which will inform design projects goals and parameters. The second module, which takes place over the following 6-7 weeks, will advance the learnings and briefs created in the first module to work on the design project in two groups. Working collectively, one group will develop a vision plan for the future of the inner city loop, and the other will be working on designing a ~60 unit housing cluster within an existing ‘loop’ neighborhood. As a whole the studio, through its research and design components, seeks to promote new approaches to urban living that address environmental, social, and economic challenges as presented by the Phoenix inner loop.

The design of urban environments. Strategies for change in large areas of cities, to be developed over time, involving different actors. Fitting forms into natural, man-made, historical, and cultural contexts; enabling desirable activity patterns; conceptualizing built form; providing infrastructure and service systems; guiding the sensory character of development. Involves architecture and planning students in joint work; requires individual designs or design and planning guidelines.

This joint urban studio will focus on one of the most urgent climate, environmental, and urban challenges we face today: heat and urban growth.  

Combining research and design, the studio presents a pedagogical model that brings together designers  - SMArchS Urbanism  (ARCH) and planners (DUSP students) to work together around a shared urban challenge where professional lines are blurred.  

The City of Phoenix, and its Office of Heat Response and Mitigation, have asked us to consider three wicked problems facing sunbelt cities as they continue to rapidly grow: affordable infill housing, heat island effects,  

and better access to multiple modes of transportation. Students will conduct group planning research as well as site analysis and urban design to comprehensively innovate around the nexus of urban heat--intergenerational housing--autonomous mobility  

and universal access design. The goal is to create a new set of block and streetscape typologies for cooler, intergenerational, autonomous living in Phoenix’s South Central neighborhoods. 

The urgency of the climate crisis has motivated a growing interest in material reuse at scale in architecture to support an alternative, circular approach to building construction.  The Odds & Mods pedagogy platform will offer a multi-year curriculum focused on these topics from a variety of perspectives.  In this IAP workshop, students and instructors will focus on technologies and workflows for digital circularity, encompassing a range of methods to acquire, characterize, design with, engineer, fabricate, and assemble reused and undervalued materials.  Students will specifically develop skills to engage in existing and emerging frameworks for reuse of unconventional and undercharacterized materials in creative architectural contexts.  The workshop will involve both technology-augmented, hands-on making and the use of computational design tools.

The term "megalith" simply refers to a 'big stone,' but behind this seemingly simple definition lies centuries of human ingenuity and cultural significance. In this course, we delve into the cultural act of bringing a stone to life, exploring the techniques and technologies used by ancient civilizations to transport and position these monumental structures.
Through a combination of theoretical learning and hands-on practical exercises, students will gain a comprehensive understanding of calculus-based curvature modeling and solver computation, necessary to drive the location of a megalith's center of mass. By mastering these concepts, participants will unlock the secrets of effortlessly moving massive objects and performing feats of spectacular prowess.
Students will embark on a journey of discovery, learning how to design, compute, and execute the precise movements required to transport megalithic stones. From principles of leverage and mechanical advantage to employing cutting-edge computational techniques, participants will explore a range of strategies for overcoming the logistical challenges inherent in moving objects of such monumental scale.

Moreover, this course goes beyond mere technical proficiency, encouraging students to consider the broader cultural and historical contexts surrounding megalithic engineering. Through engaging discussions and interactive activities, participants will explore the societal implications of megalithic construction, examining how these monumental structures have shaped human civilizations throughout history.

Merely to think about cities and get somewhere, one of the main things to know is what kind of problem cities pose, for all problems cannot be thought about in the same way.
– Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Chapter 22, “The kind of problem a city is.”

While we have begun to understand the interconnected properties of our cities, we still lack the tools and methodologies to engage cities as designers along the grain of these insights. This has consequences not just for the inclusion of physical factors at different scales, but also to the lack of influence of those most affected by climate change on design for resilience in their communities.

In this workshop we will explore digital tools and methodologies to conceive distributed, environmentally validated design proposals, connecting principles behind urban networks with systematic design and evaluation of a large number of distributed design interventions. We will introduce Local Software, a set of tools and workflows to imagine, evaluate, and implement networked urban designs by connecting GIS and parametric CAD software.

The course will provide a critical introduction to computational tools and approaches for urban design. Students will familiarize themselves with design workflows that integrate geospatial information, parametric modeling, and geospatial modeling to develop networked urban proposals. We will also discuss the conceptual, social, and political framework for such networked action in urban environments.

In the workshop, we will be engaging with Green City Force, an AmeriCorps program that engages young adults from New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) communities in environmental service. The workshop will begin to prototype a set of distributed interventions – ‘eco-hubs’— across NYCHA properties. NYCHA sites represent a distributed landscape throughout New York City whose population approaches that of Atlanta, and which are in areas of the city most vulnerable to the effect of climate change. Participating students will have the potential to apply to join this ongoing collaboration after the conclusion of the workshop as well.

Open to DUSP and Architecture students, others by instructor permission as well.

For more information email Carlos Emilio Sandoval Olascoaga.

As cities, industries, and manufacturing systems have formed over centuries, their waste streams are producing an ever-growing accumulation of matter, a material stockpile that can be mined. In the present time of climate crisis, when resourcefulness and critical, creative practices are becoming imperative, the agency of the designer shifts to appreciate scavenged, processed, & off-cut materials, and hone new ways of imagining what they can produce.

For the OFFCUT/CUTOFF IAP Workshop, we will immerse ourselves in the environment of metal parts manufacturing that underpins the Bahrain’s HVAC and air conditioning industries. We will study, analyze, and map the Awal Group’s operations, material sources and waste streams. Offcuts from the manufacturing of ducts and HVAC systems will form a palette of materials that we will upcycle through a series of fabrication exercises and design prototypes. Students will explore techniques including but not be limited to metal rolling, bending, casting, and punching. Digital algorithmic inventory matching tools, developed in the MIT ODDS & MODS material circularity curriculum, will help us design with the irregular archive of offcut materials and guide the fabrication process.

The results of the workshop will be showcased along the Pearling Path in Muharraq. During our time on the island, we will be engaging with local metal smelters and design studios, including Bahraini-Danish, Civil Architecture and Studio Anne Holtrop.

Note: This class has some travel in Summer 2025 but will meet as a class in the Fall 2025 term. Limited enrollment by application only.

The global imagination of the Amazon river basin, covering around seven million square kilometers, is dominated by the tropical forest. However, cities and towns within this basin represent some of the fastest growing urban settlements on earth. Over the past decade, nearly one hundred Amazonian cities and towns have seen population growth rates of over 20 percent–far above the under-two percent average across Latin America. Manaus represents one of the cities seeing the most rapid change. With roughly 2.5 million inhabitants, it is today the largest city in the Amazon, located at what is popularly referred to as the “Encontro das Águas” or meeting of the rivers, namely the Negro River (one of the main tributaries and start of the Amazon River) and its confluence with the Solimões River. The city’s fluvial character has long situated it as a central meeting point for ancestral peoples as well as for foreigners who arrived in different migratory cycles. Critically, the Negro River’s annual variation (typically up to 14 meters) has translated into a unique—but also typical for the Amazon—landscape of the built and natural environment. Stilt housing (palafitas), flooded swamp-like forests (igapós), and long river channels (igarapés) traditionally define this landscape and speak to the fluvial culture of Manaus, as well as other urban agglomerations for which the city is a major reference.

Today, however, accelerating unplanned and ill-equipped urban growth in Manaus represents a major challenge to its resilience. Continued deforestation and environmental degradation of surrounding towns and villages, coupled by varied water-related risks from draught, flooding, and contamination, have translated into the displacement of Indigenous populations from traditional lands in the Amazon and migration into cities like Manaus. Adequate, resilient housing and infrastructure systems have not been able to keep pace with the demands of this growth. Irregular or informal housing represents more than half the housing stock in Manaus. The city’s waterways, the defining feature of its urban landscape, have become neglected and abused, evidenced in its treatment as the de facto sanitation “solution” for both untreated wastewater dilution and the accumulation of solid waste in igarapés. The waste clogging igarapés in turn represent immense vulnerabilities for the built environment during the rainy season, as Manaus discovered during the unprecedented floods the city experienced in 2021. Further, efforts to “upgrade” housing, most recently with major international funding, resettled communities living in palafitas into social housing that physically and culturally repress the city’s canals instead of incorporating them into improvements in the physical and socio-economic life of the city—creating further problems with flooding and heat within ill-designed buildings. This class aims to provide an alternative vision of housing and sanitation in this fluvial landscape, recognizing and leveraging the central character of water in Manaus to envision a more resilient Amazonian fluvial city. The products of this practicum/studio will be featured in a a major exhibit hosted by our client, the Inter-American Development Bank’s Cities Lab, at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 30) in Belém, Brazil in November 2025. In addition, the class instructors will host a symposium, ideally with the support of the Charles Correa (1955) Lecture on Housing and Urbanization lecture, featuring a lecture by instructors and panels featuring presentations by student participants on the arc of the class’s pedagogical journey from Manaus to Belém, featuring the Amazonian Fluvial City of the future.

Where is North? This question is crucial to humankind’s ability to orient ourselves in time and place. It is not only important for navigation, but also fundamental to aligning our places of being. This course seeks to engage in one possible origin of architectural thought: Polar Alignment. There are a range of methods that align with north in the northern hemisphere. Some are terrestrial and magnetic while others are celestial and observant. Each method brings with it a set of biases, error tolerance, and cultural meaning. To address the various anomalies of each method, scale becomes essential to build accuracy, confirm observations, and build cultural significance. Orienting ourselves involves geometry (earth measure) as much as it does geography (earth drawing). 

Students will build upon methods developed in the Crop Circle Kit to impart cardinal direction. This will involve historic analysis, geometric experimentation, and computational development. The workshop will culminate in a colossal field drawing that inscribes the earth with knowledge about orientation. 

Clients, funding, consultants, contracts–architects are enmeshed in financial mechanisms that forever remind us of our direct reliance on local and global economies. Money talks and architecture follows: our work articulating the interests of those served while fluctuating with the rapidity of the market. And while this relationship may be fixed, perhaps we can find ways to resist its normative logics, which exacerbate social inequalities and consolidate power in the hands of the few and the privileged. This workshop will explore alternative economies and financial arrangements to find ways to re-code capitalism’s tendencies, desires, and outcomes. We’ll draw from a range of writing–from queer theory to post-colonial studies to literary criticism–to undo dominant financial orientations.

We will ask whether in addition to designing architecture, we can also design the market that demands architecture – to produce economic scenarios under which we might build. Each week we will pair readings in economic anthropology (studying how economies are shaped by behavior, cultural values, and social relationships), texts from other disciplines, and case-studies to invent atypical demand-chains, work against models of optimal performance, and instrumentalize culture to undercut efficiency. We will look at how we might produce clients, programs, and actor networks rather than responding to the whims of the market. We will consider how we might think of economic arrangements as tools for designers.

We will read, write, and compile a compendium of research for a publication on the topic. Students are encouraged to find broad reaching examples–from the domestication of post-war military technology to the proliferation of sharing economies to recent trends in reuse and the circulation of materials.

We will focus on buildings, materials, and products, largely drawn from North America in the 20th and 21st centuries, but may also look further afield. The course will focus on real examples of immaterial and material phenomena, inventing new languages and representational strategies along the way.

Clients, funding, consultants, contracts–architects are enmeshed in financial mechanisms that forever remind us of our direct reliance on local and global economies. Money talks and architecture follows: our work articulating the interests of those served while fluctuating with the rapidity of the market. And while this relationship may be fixed, perhaps we can find ways to resist its normative logics, which exacerbate social inequalities and consolidate power in the hands of the few and the privileged. This workshop will explore alternative economies and financial arrangements to find ways to re-code capitalism’s tendencies, desires, and outcomes. We’ll draw from a range of writing–from queer theory to post-colonial studies to literary criticism–to undo dominant financial orientations.

We will ask whether in addition to designing architecture, we can also design the market that demands architecture–to produce economic scenarios under which we might build. Each week we will pair readings in economic anthropology (studying how economies are shaped by behavior, cultural values, and social relationships), texts from other disciplines, and case-studies to invent atypical demand-chains, work against models of optimal performance, and instrumentalize culture to undercut efficiency. We will look at how we might produce clients, programs, and actor networks rather than responding to the whims of the market. We will consider how we might think of economic arrangements as tools for designers.

Each week, students are asked to produce a written response to the reading and to help guide discussion, researching and exploring examples and references to ground our work. The task is to produce a collective and cumulative body of knowledge. Together, we will read, write, and compile a compendium of research for a publication on the topic. Students are encouraged to find broad reaching examples–from the domestication of post-war military technology to the proliferation of sharing economies to recent trends in reuse and the circulation of materials and everything in between. We will focus on buildings, materials, and products, largely drawn from North America in the 20th and 21st centuries but may also look further afield. The course will focus on real examples of immaterial and material phenomena, inventing new languages and representational strategies along the way.

Undergraduates welcome.

The Deep Time Project aims to expand architecture timescales of perception seeking to re-position architecture as a more sensitive response to its environment. The course is structured around an interdisciplinary series of guest lectures, screenings, readings and precedent analysis on time literacy with particular focus on art and philosophy. Looking at the multiple repertoires of subjectivities and agents involved in the architectural process each student will develop design experiments on time aiming to explore a different constellation of temporalities that architecture must account for.

Undergraduate students welcome!

Units: UG: register for 3-0-6 (9 units)
Units Grad: register for 3-0-9 (12 units)

Augmented Historical Pedagogies: Tiergarten’s Hidden Urban Narratives is a collaborative workshop bringing together three institutions: the MIT Department of Architecture, the Institute for Architecture at TU  Berlin, and The Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. The collaboration will foster a VR- and AR-based, interdisciplinary study of the Tiergarten, Berlin’s largest park and a site which has undergone unique historical transformations. Because of its complex history, not just in field of architecture and urban planning, but also within the history of film, literature, politics, zoology, hydrology, and botanics, Tiergarten is an exemplary location for a critical exploration of the ways through which urban history is written and produced.

In addition to engaging with the site’s history through readings and archival research, students will use advanced simulation techniques–such as environmental sensing, laser scanning, and photogrammetry–as well as game engines, and produce immersive representations of Tiergarten. These projects, virtual- and augmented-reality installations, will be conceived as digital spaces that present the multiplicity of the park’s historical narratives through a variety of mediums, techniques and materials. The aim is not to make a passive reconstruction, but to use these digital spaces as the sites for insightful historical investigations. The final results, a collection of virtual tours and ‘incisions’ through the layers of knowledge and representation, aim to provoke discussion not just about Tiergarten’s past, but also about a re-envisioned future.

Cities, industries, & systems are material mines that have formed over centuries. As these artificial mines are built, voids they form, out of sight, grow. In a time when resourcefulness is the new imperative, the realm of design beckons a shift from a boundless creative aspiration towards an appreciation of scavenged, processed, & off-cut materials, allowing them to shape imaginative pursuits.

For OFFCUT/CUTOFF, we will travel to Bahrain and immerse ourselves in an environment of industrial production. We will study, analyze, and map Awal Group’s operations, material sources and waste streams. Offcuts from the manufacturing of ducts and HVAC systems will form a palette of materials that we will upcycle through a series of fabricated design solutions. Techniques used will include but not be limited to rolling, bending, casting, punching, and inflating. The resulting work will be showcased at the House of Heritage along the Pearling Path in Muharraq. 

During our time on the island, we will be engaging with local metal smelters and design studios, including bahraini-danish, Civil Architecture and Studio Anne Holtrop.

Limited Seats, please submit an application by midnight Dec 10 here: https://tinyurl.com/offcutbh 

*open to graduate students only, cross-registration available.

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.
 

(pre-approved for MArch Urbanism elective Fall 2023)

he last decades have seen the relentless acceleration of planetary-scale environmental and social challenges. Phenomena as widespread urbanization, human-induced climate change, or the operationalization of natural landscapes interrogate both the agency and the limits of architectural practices. The goal of this workshop is to explore how our architectural responses to the local impact of those planetary phenomena can trigger new forms of spatial and political organization — a possibility we will refer to as cosmopolitical design. 

We will study the idea of cosmopolitical design by investigating the relations between seven main areas of action: 1) Geovisualization, geoknowledge and geoimagination; 2) Architecture After Planetary Urbanization; 3)Territorial Design Across Scales; 4)Ecology as Planetary Praxis; 5)Climate Cosmotechnics; 6)Autonomy and Cosmopolitics; and 7)Decolonization and Cosmopolitics. Together, these seven areas aim to situate the local interventions that constitute the core of architectural practice as catalysts of broader processes of spatial and political structuring.  

The workshop is conceived as a collective design-research exercise, combining lectures, discussions and workshop sessions. In the lectures we will see how each of the seven aforementioned topics acted as a trigger of planetary-oriented architectural practices during modernity, and we will start reflecting upon and questioning the resulting modes of spatial production. Our discussions will build upon the lectures and upon a highly plural body of literature including thinkers from across the planet. We will read texts exploring the ideas of critical cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitics, cosmotechnics, pluriversality, world-ecology and decolonization.  

At the beginning of the course, each student will select a topic of design-research, conducing to the final production of a small individual book. Our emphasis will be on the production of strong and consistent visual narratives. Together, we will explore the synergies and convergences between your research topics, and conclude the term gathering the exercises in a collective volume. 

1/23/25 - Schedule change to T 10-1

Weekly class attendance and site visits are mandatory for this course. Weekend volunteer days with the Common Good Co-Operatives will provide hands-on opportunities for engaging the values of commoning, placemaking and placekeeping, and co-design and community participation.

This class represents the beginning of joint commitment with a community partner to develop a feasible plan for transforming a real-world site. Common Good Co-Operatives currently occupies seven parcels of land (0.5 acres) in the heart of Dorchester. Five of the seven land parcels that constitute the site of the Farm are owned by the City of Boston and are currently in agreement with Common Good Co-Operatives to be used as an agricultural site. In order to combat increasing development pressures, Common Good Co-Operatives want to solidify and increase its infrastructural capacity to facilitate community-based programming and economic development for the neighborhood. Working with Common Good Co-Operatives, this course will engage Architecture and Planning students to envision and plan expansive possibilities for the farm as a comprehensive farming system that can support, among others, essential workforce development and readiness programs, small-business incubation, co-op services, and community empowerment.

At the end of the first semester of work, students will produce a comprehensive document (diagrams of processes, design principles, historical analysis, architectural drawings and diagrams) that outlines the possibilities and opportunities on this site. Non-design students will produce as a final assignment a guide for non-profits on the history of zoning in Boston and how to navigate a zoning change for common use. Students will present to the City of Boston a plan for rezoning, establishing land tenure, and possibilities for Common Good.

Undergraduates welcome.