4.310
4.311

Introduction to Screen Printing

UG: 4.310, G: 4.311

This hands on studio class will expose students to the technical skills needed for successful screen printing. Students will produce single and multicolor prints on paper and fabric using a variety of methods. Classes will cover an introduction to preparing and reclaiming screens, creating handmade and digital cut stencils, use of screen positives and photo emulsion, mono prints and editions, registration, and more.  Lab fee required.

Spring
2025
0-3-3
U
0-3-6
G
Schedule
W 2-5
Location
E14-151
Enrollment
Limited to 10 (total for 4.310 and 4.311)
Lab Fee
Per-term $75 fee after Add Date; SMACT students are exempt
Can Be Repeated for Credit
No
4.302

Foundations in Art, Design and Spatial Practices

Develops an introductory foundation in artistic practice and its critical analysis, and develops artistic approaches and methods by drawing analogies to architectural thinking, urbanism, and design practice. Covers how to communicate ideas and experiences on different scales and through two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and time-based media in new genres. Uses artistic methods that engage the public realm through spatial, sculptural, performative, and process-oriented practices. Instruction components include video screenings, guest lectures, visiting artist presentations, and field trips. Instruction and practice in written and oral communication provided.

Spring
2025
3-3-6
U
Schedule
TR 9:30-12:30
Location
E15-207
Prerequisites
4.021 or 4.02A
Required Of
BSA, BSAD, D Minor; restricted elective for A Minor
Enrollment
Limited to 20
Preference Given To
Course 4 majors and minors
Lab Fee
Per-term $75 fee after Add Date; SMACT students are exempt
Can Be Repeated for Credit
No
4.322
4.323

Introduction to Three-Dimensional Art Work

4.322 UG | 4.323 G

Explores three-dimensional artwork, including sculpture, installation, and fashion from concept to finished piece. Addresses design, fabrication, process, context, and relationships between objects, the body, and material culture. Lectures, screenings, field trips, readings, and class discussions supplement studio practice. Additional work required of students taking the graduate version.

Spring
2025
3-3-6
U/G
3-3-3
G
Schedule
TW 2-5
Location
Tu: E15-001
W: E15-235
Enrollment
Limited to 20
Lab Fee
Per-term $75 fee after Add Date; SMACT students are exempt.
Can Be Repeated for Credit
No
4.361
4.362

Performance Art Workshop

4.361: UG | 4.632 G

Explores performance centered on the body as a space of resistance/action, the collective body and its powers, and performative acts that blur boundaries between art and everyday life. By acknowledging embodied experience as a container -and generator- of knowledge, students trace gestures of care and reciprocity by enacting scores and poetry, conceptually altering screens/walls that divide and separate us, reclaiming time, and undoing categories that alienate our bodies from life itself. Activities include improvisation, movement vocabulary, theater strategies, walking, reading, writing, listening, observation, screening, and discussing theoretical, historical, and contemporary examples of performance art, social art practice, procession, and artistic collaborations. Several small performance-based projects, both collective and individual, assigned throughout the semester. Additional work required of students taking graduate version.

Spring
2025
3-3-6
U/G
3-3-3
G
Schedule
TW 9:30-12:30
Location
E15-235
Enrollment
Limited to 20
Lab Fee
Per-term $75 fee after Add Date; SMACT students are exempt.
Can Be Repeated for Credit
No
4.154
16.s898, MAS.s66

Architecture Design Option Studio — Space Architecture (Tibbits)

This studio will bring together students and faculty from Architecture, Aeronautics & Astronautics and the Media Lab to imagine, design and create the future of habitats beyond the Earth - starting this semester with a prototype for Low Earth Orbit. This studio will be taught as a collaboration between three groups including shared lectures, assignments, group projects and presentations. The aim of the collaboration is to bring together students across the institute as well as faculty, and invited guest experts, to help conceptualize and materialize a future of human experience, architecture and construction. This semester’s collaborative studio will prompt students to imagine, design, model, prototype and test their unique proposals. Projects may focus on novel approaches to: construction/assembly, deployability, transportation/logistics, human experience, In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), material performance, or the many components of living and exploring in space.

Spring
2025
0-10-11
G
Schedule
TR 1-4
Location
Studio 3-415
Prerequisites
4.153
Required Of
MArch
Enrollment
mandatory lottery process
Can Be Repeated for Credit
No
Document Uploads
4.154

Architecture Design Option Studio — What Would Wood (Kennedy/Mueller)

WHAT WOULD WOOD is the second installment of the multiyear ODDS & MODS research and design initiative at MIT on material circularity in architecture. The WHAT WOULD WOOD option studio and adjacent fabrication workshop will explore experimental and innovative approaches to the use of wood in the design of collective worker housing for US Forest Service firefighters and community service providers. Our partners in this venture will be representatives of the US Forest Service and Washoe first nation sawmill start-ups and stewards of the Palisades Tahoe Forest region of what is now called California.

Studio and Workshop will explore experimental wood construction with two unconventional and seemingly opposite typologies of wood. Messy Mass Timber (MMT) is our term for irregular pieces of dimensional lumber and CLT offs cuts harvested from factory waste streams. Extracted as commercial crop in industrially cultivated soft wood forests, mainstream CLT production is based on a modern era system of standardization and wood waste. The abundant by-product supply of ‘waste’ wood cut-offs can be stacked and assembled, inspired by design imagination to create new forms of un-wholly wood – thick beams and floor slabs that can resist large forces in compression.

At the other end of the industrial-forest spectrum, Wild Wood is our term for minimally processed, small diameter logs with varying branch geometries that retain wood’s unique mechanical properties as an orthotropic material. Wild Wood encompasses small-diameter hard wood tree species and tree forks of varying branch geometries that can be harvested to support forest regeneration. In natural varying forms, the junction of forking branches conserves much more strength in tension than if it were cut and sliced. Messy Mass Timber and Wild Wood can be utilized independently or together to create regenerative wood building systems that respond to forces in tension and compression.

Students will travel to local forest land in New Hampshire or Maine where we will immerse ourselves immediately in all things forest to discover and represent its many spatial qualities and diverse aesthetics. Our departure point will be the design of a bird blind—a small, stealthy structure that can disappear into the landscape of woods. Working with digital design toolkits, students will draw inspiration from a design inventory of specific wood pieces that they choose to work with. With intelligent design visualization and assembly protocols, the studio will explore a fundamentally new relationship of part to whole in architecture. Our approach moves away from the traditional value accorded to physically continuous, uniform wood in favor of a transformative ‘alchemy’ where diverse sets of small wood pieces, considered in the mainstream as ‘waste’, can be aggregated and designed to take on high value spatial properties and structural capacities.

Over Spring Break we’ll travel to Washoe first nation forest lands to visit and document collective housing sites and sawmills. There, we’ll converse and share design ideas with artisanal wood knowledge keepers, forest fire fighters, community leaders and industrial wood manufacturers. At MIT and at the legendary UC Berkeley Wood Lab, students will fabricate models and large-scale wood components of their design proposals for collective worker housing.

Against the visible context of ongoing forest fires and climate crisis, students will study the different histories and ways of thinking about the forest to stake out a range of design positions on the utilization of wood in architecture.  Messy Mass Timber and Wild Wood are undervalued, provocative and increasingly combustible parts of a fragile, and fast disappearing ecological commons. WHAT WOULD WOOD asks a fundamental question: how could building with wood – and the architectural discourse around design with wood— be redefined and reimagined to enable wood circular materiality and envision possible futures for wood in architecture.

 Mandatory lottery process.

Spring
2025
0-10-11
G
Schedule
TR 1-5
Location
Studio 3-415
Prerequisites
4.153
Required Of
MArch
Enrollment
mandatory lottery process
Can Be Repeated for Credit
No
Document Uploads
4.154

Architecture Design Option Studio — Collective Architecture Studio (Miljacki)

The fourth edition of the Collective Architecture Studio 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. S25 Collective Architecture Studio will thus actively study and self-experiment with forms of coauthorship. We will focus on the architectural repair of existing, as well as the invention of new modes of cooperative housing in this context. Everything we make (including our building proposals) will also function as critical broadcasts, catalyzing discussion and/or revelation among our projected audiences.

Spring
2025
0-10-11
G
Schedule
TR 1-5
Location
Studio 3-415
Prerequisites
4.153
Required Of
MArch
Enrollment
mandatory lottery process
Can Be Repeated for Credit
No
4.URG

Undergraduate Research in Design (UROP)

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.

consult S. Tibbits
Spring
2025
TBA
U
Schedule
consult S. Tibbits
Prerequisites
permission of instructor
Can Be Repeated for Credit
Yes
4.UR

Undergraduate Research in Design (UROP)

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

consult S. Tibbits
Spring
2025
TBA
U
Schedule
consult S. Tibbits
Prerequisites
permission of instructor
Can Be Repeated for Credit
Yes
4.THU

Undergraduate Thesis

Class meets in-person every spring term.

Program of thesis research leading to the writing of an SB thesis. Intended for seniors. Twelve units recommended.

Spring
2025
0-1-11
U
Schedule
T 12:30-1:30
Location
3-329
Prerequisites
4.THT
Required Of
BSA, BSAD
Can Be Repeated for Credit
Yes