Courses

Discourse and Methods II

Antoine Picon

The objective of the seminar is to examine and discuss in depth some of the main methodological issues that students enrolled in the PhD program…

MDes Open Project 9701

Malkit Shoshan

MDes Open Project is an 8-unit, project-based, design-research collaboration supporting individual projects and peer review. The class is required of, and only open to, all…

MDes Open Project 9702

MDes Open Project is an 8-unit, project-based, design-research collaboration supporting individual projects and peer review. The class is required of, and only open to, all…

MDes Open Project 9703

Allen Sayegh

MDes Open Project is an 8-unit, project-based, design-research collaboration supporting individual projects and peer review. The class is required of, and only open to, all…

MDes Open Project 9704

Abby Spinak

MDes Open Project is an 8-unit, project-based, design-research collaboration supporting individual projects and peer review. The class is required of, and only open to, all…

MDes Open Project 9705

Alex Wall

MDes Open Project is an 8-unit, project-based, design-research collaboration supporting individual projects and peer review. The class is required of, and only open to, all…

MDes Open Project 9706

Elisa Silva

MDes Open Project is an 8-unit, project-based, design-research collaboration supporting individual projects and peer review. The class is required of, and only open to, all…

MDes Open Project 9707

Charles Waldheim

MDes Open Project is an 8-unit, project-based, design-research collaboration supporting individual projects and peer review. The class is required of, and only open to, all…

First Semester Architecture Core: PROJECT

Sean Canty, Carl D’Apolito-Dworkin, Andrew Holder, Hyojin Kwon, Ian Miley, Lexi Tsien, Emmett Zeifman

PROJECT is the first core studio of the four-semester sequence of the MArch I program. With a multiplicity of references, PROJECT may refer to fundamental…

Third Semester Architecture Core: INTEGRATE

Eric Howeler, Alex Anmahian, Elle Gerdeman, Andrew Heid, Jon Lott, Angela Pang

Integration is the agenda for the third-semester architecture design studio. Architecture is fundamentally a part-to-whole problem, involving the complex integration of building components, systems, and…

Collaborative Design Engineering Studio I (with SEAS)

Elizabeth Christoforetti, Alexandros Haridis, Andrew Witt, Siqi Zhu

The first semester studio is a project-based introduction to a range of ideas, methods, and techniques essential for the design engineer. In the studio, students…

New York New York

Kersten Geers, David Van Severen

There is a famed anecdotal evidence that designing a tower is easier than designing a chair. The boastful comparison was rather meant to aggrandize architects’…

Baizo House – Perception Description Representation

Eric Lapierre

On October 8, 1980, New York band Talking Heads released Remain in Light, their fourth album. The album's final track, "The Overload", was written in…

Percent for Art: A New Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw

Fredi Fischli, Niels Olsen

In the option studio, we design a new building for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw by re-using the structure of a large-scale shopping…

Nexus of Ecology, Education, and Design – A new School of Design on an Island at Yangtze Estuary

Hu Li, Wenjing Huang

This studio project touches upon two important areas relevant to our collective future— ecology and education. This is a future in which we must change…

Parisian Knees

Ron Witte

There is little doubt that density is reshaping our cities, at a furious pace and with vast implications for urban life. As far-reaching as these…

Earth Curvature: Context as Material / How to Read Place

Wendell Burnette

Students will craft their own architectural language, guided by personal ethics and an original vision towards a sustainable architecture that also strives to timelessly resonate…

Forgotten Fort Kongestein

Olayinka Dosekun-Adjei

This studio will explore potential new attitudes toward historical preservation, transformation, and adaptive reuse. The location is Fort Kongestein on the Eastern Coast of Ghana,…

Housing as a Sustainable Common

Farshid Moussavi

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, architects were the driving force of progress in developing housing typologies that would enable people to live more socially…

From Within to Without [M1]

Victor Jones, Clover Lee

This studio will explore the notion of interiority in the public realm by reimagining an existing mid-sized commercial building. As e-commerce, shifting consumer habits, and…

Second Opportunities in Architecture [M1]

Iñaki Abalos, Renata Sentkiewicz

In its historical context, architecture has demonstrated an extensive capacity for the adaptation of typologies or forms to different sites, programs, and circumstances. In opposition…

Do-It-Anyway: Place, Tectonics, and Time [M1]

Hiroto Kobayashi

In this studio, students will design and fabricate a sleeping space at one-to-one scale in the period of seven weeks. Why? We are living…

Transforming the Urban Villa with Private Garden into a Contemporary Typology [M1]

Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani

The studio will deal with the strategies for the transformation of a coveted but obsolete architectural type, the urban villa in the park, keeping its…

Revisiting Utopia: Bio-Based Megastructures in the Texas Desert [M2]

Regine Leibinger, Stefan Sauter, Karen Stein

The social and political tumult of the 1960s prompted a resurgence of utopian architecture. Rising fuel prices, a growing dependence on technology and, in particular,…

Exploring Collective Bonds: Creating Spaces of Solidarity [M2]

Cory Henry

In what way can design serve as a conduit, spanning the gap between heterogeneous groups and binding them through their shared collective endeavors? How do…

Necessary Architecture [M2]

Diego Grass, Shingo Masuda

Our cities are filled with buildings–why more? With our discipline about to split into activists and professionals, we need to find purpose for architecture. We…

Monumental Affairs [M2]

Germane Barnes

As architecture and urbanism continues to grapple with exposure from atypical authors the need for constructive examination becomes more pressing. Global terror and dissent typically…

Architectural Representation I [Module 1]

Elle Gerdeman

Architectural Representation I: Origins + Originality Architectural representation as a medium blends theorizing, historization, and a unique capacity to induce a physical entity, either fictional…

Architectural Representation II [Module 2]

Carl D’Apolito-Dworkin

Architectural Representation II: Geometries in Interaction There has never been just one geometry.  In mathematics, the Euclidean, projective, algebraic, and transformational approaches to geometry each…

Digital Media: Errors and Omissions

Ian Miley

errare — to move without clear direction, departing from truth, norm, or some other analog of unity omittere — fail to use or do, neglect…

Digital Media: Power Tools

Lexi Tsien

This course aims to leverage collective and DIY-knowledge-building as a representational technique and a tool of power. It begins with the premise that a site…

Interior Residential Planning, Furnishings, and Materials

Benjamin Pardo

Buildings are inseparable from Interior Planning. The objective of this course is to design interior space in existing freestanding residential buildings and urban apartments. Projects…

Exhibiting Architecture

Fredi Fischli, Niels Olsen

In this seminar students will engage with curatorial studies and the specific domain of “exhibiting architecture.” Not only the “art of display,” from exhibition design…

Paper or Plastic: Reinventing Shelf Life in the Supermarket Landscape

Teman Evans, Teran Evans

We tend to assume that supermarkets are static, neutral spaces where little of significance ever happens. The supermarket shelf is actually a highly volatile, hyper-competitive…

Drawing for Designers: Techniques of Expression, Articulation, and Representation

Ewa Harabasz

The course is intended as a creative drawing laboratory for designers, an expressive, playful supplement to computer-based labor. This course will master techniques in hand…

Faux: Design, Performance, and Perception of Fake Materials

Martin Bechthold, Marina Sartori

Materials are everywhere. They remain central to our lives and to contemporary design, despite the omnipresence of digital information. Yet, the fact that many materials…

Architecture on Screen

Mark Lamster

From the dystopian visions of Fritz Lang to the midcentury world of Jacques Tati and the stylized universe of Wes Anderson, this courseexamines the…

The Fifth Plan

Ron Witte

In this seminar, we will consider the evolution of the floor plan across five iterations: proto-modern, modern, post-modern, plan-non-chalant, and, most importantly, the present. We…

Proximities / or Readings and Methods within Reflexive Formalism

Jon Lott

“Making comparisons is the only good method in a world in which things take on consistency in relation to others. A comparison may be implicit…

Philosophy of Technology: From Marx and Heidegger to AI, Genome Editing, and Geoengineering (HKS)

Mathias Risse

Technology shapes how power is exercised in society, and thereby also shapes how the present changes into the future. Technological innovation is all around us,…

Housing Matters

Farshid Moussavi

This seminar investigates the politics of housing by focusing on the relationships between spatial, material, and typological decisions architects make when designing housing and the…

Rational Form Making

Angela Pang

Optimization precedes superfluous forms. In search for freedom in aesthetics, the disciplines of architecture and structural design have always worked hand in hand in expanding…

Building, Texts, and Contexts: Architecture’s Multiple Modernisms

K. Michael Hays, Ana Maria Leon Crespo

Modernism is aligned with the emergence of new kinds of objects and events, new conceptualizations of their appearance, and changing event structures and temporalities. At…

Michelangelo Architect: Precedents, Innovation, Influence

Christine Smith

An exploration of Italian Renaissance architecture and urbanism through the persona of Michelangelo as witness, agent, and inspiration. We look at architecture and urbanism in…

Structuring Urban Experience: From the Athenian Acropolis to the Boston Common

Christine Smith

This lecture course examines selected cities between the fifth century B.C. and the seventeenth century A.D., beginning with ancient Athens and ending with the rebuilding…

Building and Urban Conservation and Renewal – Assessment, Analysis, Design

David Fixler

What are the values inherent in a property, site or district that must be understood to craft conservation policy and interventions that will reveal, complement,…

Architecture and Construction: From the Vitruvian Tradition to the Digital

Antoine Picon

The course aims to contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between architecture and construction through the study of key historical episodes such as…

Atmospheric Projections: Media as Environments (at AFVS)

Giuliana Bruno

What is the ecology of the arts in our visual age of changing media? Can media be understood as environments? This seminar investigates a “material…

The Project and the Territory: Japan Story

Mohsen Mostafavi

What is the future of urbanization?What role can design play in shaping that future? What will happen to the conflicting tensions between urban and…

Histories of Architecture Against

Ana Maria Leon Crespo

This course focuses on the challenges of writing histories of architecture against—against capital, against the state, or other types of power. In the first half…