This class investigates the theory, method, and form of collage. It studies not only the historical precedents for collage and their physical attributes, but the psychology and process that plays a part in the making of them. The class was broken into three parts, changing scales and methods each time, to introduce and study the rigor by which decisions were made in relation to the collage. The class was less about the making of art than the study of the processes by which art is made.

An intensive nine day remote collaborative workshop involving MIT and Miyagi University in Japan. The objective is to develop a small housing project using shape computation as a design methodology. Students will use and test new interactive software for designing, sharing applications with overseas partners, presenting projects on an Internet workspace, and critiquing design proposals through the web and other advanced digital technologies. Students will be expected to do most of their work in class.

This is the second undergraduate architecture design studio, which introduces design logic and skills that enable design thinking, representation, and development. Through the lens of nano-scale machines, technologies, and phenomena, students are asked to explore techniques for describing form, space, and architecture. Exercises encourage various connotations of the “machine” and challenge students to translate conceptual strategies into more integrated design propositions through both digital and analog means.

This architectural studio will have one main project for the semester: to explore the issues surrounding the redesign of an area in Havana, Cuba. It is a typical area about the size of a Law of Indies block that presently has a mix of housing, work, and shopping, in buildings that need to be replaced and others that need to be rehabilitated. There is also vacant land, and buildings that are unused. Part of the blocks front on the Malecon, the street next to the water. The other edge fronts onto a typical neighborhood. The intention is to study the culture through an understanding of one area of Havana and then design an “echo” in architectural form. The design will include public space as well as a mix of buildings: some new, some rehabilitated.

This subject introduces skills needed to build within a landscape establishing continuities between the built and natural world. Students learn to build appropriately through analysis of landscape and climate for a chosen site, and to conceptualize design decisions through drawings and models.
This class was taught concurrently with course 4.125A. Some of the assignments are the same, some are different, and the sites for the final project are different. But since they were taught in tandem, it would be useful to look at both together.

4.125 is the third undergraduate design studio. This subject introduces skills needed to build within a landscape establishing continuities between the built and natural world. Students learn to build appropriately through analysis of landscape and climate for a chosen site, and to conceptualize design decisions through drawings and models.

This subject introduces skills needed to build within a landscape establishing continuities between the built and natural world. Students learn to build appropriately through analysis of landscape and climate for a chosen site, and to conceptualize design decisions through drawings and models.
This class was taught concurrently with 4.125B. Some of the assignments are the same, some are different, and the sites for the final project are different. But since they were taught in tandem, it would be useful to look at both together.

This is the second undergraduate design studio. It introduces a full range of architectural ideas and issues through drawing exercises, analyses of precedents, and explored design methods. Students will develop design skills by conceptualizing and representing architectural ideas and making aesthetic judgments about building design. Discussions regarding architecture’s role in mediating culture, nature and technology will help develop the students’ architectural vocabulary.

While no businesses succeed based on their architecture or space design, many fail as a result of inattention to the power of spatial relationships. This course demonstrates through live case studies with managers and architects the value of strategic space planning and decision making in relation to business needs. The course presents conceptual frameworks for thinking about architecture, communication and organizations.
This course is offered during the Sloan Innovation Period (SIP), which is a one-week period at the MIT Sloan School of Management that occurs midway through each semester.

Cairo is the quintessential Islamic city. Founded in 634 at the strategic head of the Nile Delta, the city evolved from an Islamic military outpost to the seat of the ambitious Fatimid caliphate which flourished between the 10th and 12th century. Its most spectacular age, however, was the Mamluk period (1250-1517), when it became the uncontested center of a resurgent Islam and acquired an architectural character that symbolized the image of the Islamic city for centuries to come.
Cairo today still shines as a cultural and political center in its three spheres of influence: the Arab world, Africa, and the Islamic world. Moreover, many of its monuments (456 registered by the 1951 Survey of the Islamic Monuments of Cairo) still stand, although they remain largely unknown to the world’s architectural community and their numbers are dwindling at an exceedingly alarming pace.

This Communication and Argumentation seminar is an intensive writing workshop that focuses on argumentation and communication. Students learn to write and present their ideas in cogent, persuasive arguments and other analytical frameworks. Reading and writing assignments and other exercises stress the connections between clear thinking, critical reading, and effective writing.

This course examines how people learn, practice, and evaluate traditional and contemporary craft techniques. Social science theories of design, embodiment, apprenticeship learning, skill, labor, expertise, and tacit knowledge are used to explore distinctions and connections among art, craft, and science. We will also discuss the commoditization of craft into market goods, collectible art, and tourism industries. Ethnographic and historical case studies include textiles, glassblowing, quilting, cheese making, industrial design, home cooking, factory and laboratory work, CAD-CAM. In-class demonstrations and hands-on craft projects will be included.

Art museums are powerful and contested institutions. They are also innovative sites of architectural and artistic practice. From the exhibitionary complex of the nineteenth century to the experiential complex of today, this course investigates the art museum from historical and contemporary perspectives, striking a balance between theoretical investigation and case studies of recent exhibitions and museum buildings. Where and why did the concept of the public art museum emerge, and how have its functions changed over time? How do art museums continue to shape our definitions of what art is? How have they responded to recent critiques of the self-described ‘universal’ museum and to claims for the ethical display of ill-gotten artifacts or the restitution of such objects as Greek vases and bronzes looted from Benin? And why is the Euro-American art museum so compelling a model that it has spread around the globe?
To address these and other questions, we will also go behind the scenes. Visits to local museums and discussions with curators are an essential component of the course.

This subject focuses on the objects, history, context, and critical discussion surrounding art since World War II. Because of the burgeoning increase in art production, the course is necessarily selective. We will trace major developments and movements in art up to the present, primarily from the US; but we will also be looking at art from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, as well as art “on the margins” — art that has been overlooked by the mainstream critical press, but may have a broad cultural base in its own community. We will ask what function art serves in its various cultures of origin, and why art has been such a lightning rod for political issues around the world.

This seminar looks at current theories on happiness and positive psychology as well as practical implications of those theories for our own lives. It explores the concept of happiness, different cultural definitions of happiness, and the connection between happiness, optimism, and meaning. Also explored are practical strategies for creating more opportunities for happiness in our lives and for learning how to deal more effectively with sources of unhappiness.
This seminar is part of the Experimental Study Group at MIT.

This course provides an introduction to bargaining and negotiation in public, business, and legal settings. It combines a “hands-on” skill-building orientation with a look at pertinent social theory. Strategy, communications, ethics, and institutional influences are examined as they influence the ability of actors to analyze problems, negotiate agreements, and resolve disputes in social, organizational, and political circumstances characterized by interdependent interests.

The course examines the earliest emergence of stories about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in the context of the first wave of British Imperialism and the expanded powers of the Catholic Church during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The morphology of Arthurian romance will be set off against original historical documents and chronicle sources for the English conquests in Brittany, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland to understand the ways in which these new attitudes towards Empire were being mythologized. Authors will include Bede, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, Gerald of Wales, together with some lesser known works like the Perilous Graveyard, the Knight with the Sword, and Perlesvaus, or the High History of the Holy Graal. Special attention will be paid to how the narrative material of the story gets transformed according to the particular religious and political agendas of each new author.

This course introduces representations, techniques, and architectures used to build applied systems and to account for intelligence from a computational point of view. This course also explores applications of rule chaining, heuristic search, logic, constraint propagation, constrained search, and other problem-solving paradigms. In addition, it covers applications of decision trees, neural nets, SVMs and other learning paradigms.

This course introduces students to the basic knowledge representation, problem solving, and learning methods of artificial intelligence. Upon completion of 6.034, students should be able to develop intelligent systems by assembling solutions to concrete computational problems; understand the role of knowledge representation, problem solving, and learning in intelligent-system engineering; and appreciate the role of problem solving, vision, and language in understanding human intelligence from a computational perspective.

This course teaches simple reasoning techniques for complex phenomena: divide and conquer, dimensional analysis, extreme cases, continuity, scaling, successive approximation, balancing, cheap calculus, and symmetry. Applications are drawn from the physical and biological sciences, mathematics, and engineering. Examples include bird and machine flight, neuron biophysics, weather, prime numbers, and animal locomotion. Emphasis is on low-cost experiments to test ideas and on fostering curiosity about phenomena in the world.