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

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

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.

Architects often craft images that show only the most polished views and idealized spaces to define a building’s identity and spatial experience.

This workshop proposes an alternative approach to image-making, one that focuses on small, fragmented views of a space in order to capture architecture’s overlooked moments. By illustrating architectural spaces at the size of 1’x1’x1’ fragments, we will get impressions of spaces that traditional architectural images would otherwise neglect—such as corners, undersides, sills, material details, traces of occupation and maintenance. In foregrounding these minor moments, the workshop invites a political reconsideration of which spaces and narratives are valued, challenging the hierarchy of architectural representation.

Dust bunnies—the small clumps of debris that form in the corners—will guide the process of identifying these fragments. Upon closer inspection, dust bunnies reveal a microcosm of their environment, as they indiscriminately collect tiny fragments from their surroundings. We will speculate on the origins of the particles within dust bunnies and depict the architectural fragments they might have once belonged to. Throughout the workshop, dust bunnies will be our guides into illustrating overlooked rhythms and spaces of occupation and maintenance.

Undergraduates welcome.

The sequence of weekly meetings intends to scrutinize typical atmospheres that tend to surround designers along with the design process. In other words, it is the world affecting architects and pushing them to react by producing architectural propositions. Following a series of proposed 14 topics (as listed below), the discussion will be guided with the purpose of checking their pertinence and validity. Exactly how it happens in a design process, those topics are presented as a first outline, to gain a sharper contour throughout the sequence of discussions. The focus will be on the design process, specifically on the successive moods it inescapably implies.

For over thirty years my academic and professional activities have been closely related to this research. The book: Sao Paulo, reasons for architecture, resulting from my PhD, focuses on how experiencing a city impacts in one’s way to imagine architecture, but it was informed directly and reflects continuously in everyday practice of designing.

Topics (on process)

1. about design process
   (a supposedly infallible method that, by definition, can never be completed)
   (on source, design as a tool to apprehend the world)
2. design as reading (the language of the physical world, given or constructed)
3. design as walking (promenade is an architectural experience)
4. design as talking (a sequence of dialogues and its specific way to record it)
   (design and abstract thinking)
5. design and concept (the strength and permanence of an idea before becoming a thing)
6. design and precision (geometry and aesthetic rigor, lineaments)
7. design and imagination triggers (genealogy of imagination; abstract thinking)
   (on concepts)
8. design and purpose (know why and know what)
9. design and synthesis (an increasingly demanding filter)
10. design and tolerance (cultural and industrial meaning)
11. design and dissolution (as dissemination of meanings)
12. design opposes to alienation (purpose, pleasure, engagement, fulfilment are require
    (on the nature of architecture)
13. architecture is an open source (vulnerability and strength)
    (on architecture and humanism)
14. architecture to refrain human madness 
    (For Alberti, architecture takes one single task of refraining the madness that dominate mankind; M. Tafuri)

Structure

The dynamic of the classes would be:

• each topic will be introduced in the previous session to allow a week to students for preparing evidences or references (texts, drawings or images) for the discussion in the following week.
• each session will start with students’ presentations followed by discussions; at the end of each session, a short lecture will introduce the topic for next session;

Pedagogical Objectives

The attempt of naming typical moods, strategies and dilemmas potentially experienced along with a design process, has two clear goals:

• to make students more familiar about crossing different moods in the process.
• to made students more comfortable dealing with uncertainties, unknowns, fallibilities, errors; in short, all that one has been trained to avoid.

If the architectural drawing moves something unknown to something known (from vision to building), the reverse could be said of the architectural survey. The potential of the architectural survey lies in its mobilizing of something known into unforeseeable future uses (from building to visions). This course centers on recasting the architectural survey from conveyor of building facts to instrument for building stories. Operating somewhere between the limits of absolute truth and virtual truth, our research will aim to uncover new ways of engaging architecture’s relationship to vision, documentation, and the art of renewal (or preservation) against the backdrop of racial, economic, and material conditions in the turn-of-the century South. More specifically, the site of the course will be Tuskegee University and the legacy of Robert R. Taylor, the first accredited Black architect, MIT graduate, and designer and builder of a significant portion of the campus’s brick buildings. Students will consider Taylor’s work both in the present context and its inception under Booker T. Washington’s leadership.

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.

Practical experience through summer and January IAP internships secured by the student in the field of architecture, urbanism, digital design, art, or building technology. Before registering for this subject, students must have an offer from the organization and complete the Department of Architecture application with their advisor's signature. Upon completion of the internship, students must submit an evaluation form available from the departmental academic office. Students are limited to a total of three approved experiences.

Provides the material system knowledge and fabrication process skills to successfully engage with all areas of the shop, from precision handwork to multi-axis computer numerically controlled (CNC) machining. Progresses through a series of basic exercises that introduce the material and workflow, concluding with more complex problems that explore opportunities and issues specific to architecture.