Archinect - Features

The People’s Place in the City of Bits and Atoms

2024-03-06T07:34:00-05:00

The city of the 21st century represents a confluence of bits and atoms; an organism in its own right that relentlessly spawns information and data about itself, its people, and the invisible flows that support them. What is the relationship between humans and the city in this new condition? What is its future? To explore these questions, we speak with architect, TED founder, and father of information architecture Richard Saul Wurman, 2025 Venice Biennale curator Carlo Ratti, and MIT Media Lab researchers Naroa Coretti and Ainhoa Genua.

This article is part of the Archinect In-Depth: Artificial Intelligence series.

Bridging Research and Real Estate: MIT's Center for Real Estate Offers a Master's Program That Balances Theory and Practice

2021-10-11T13:05:00-04:00

Pursuing a Master's program is no simple feat. Besides finding the right program and weighing its financial costs, choosing a graduate program also requires time. With plenty of traditional Master of Architecture programs, MIT and its Center for Real Estate offer a unique one-year Master of Science program in Real Estate Development (MSRED).

This intensive graduate program provides a comprehensive approach to traditional real estate and MBA programs. The Center prides itself in preparing its students to "compete in the global market with superior qualifications — providing the research-based expertise necessary to solve complex problems in contemporary real estate." Its 33-year history not only investigates real estate as a practice but also brings a multidisciplinary approach to the field from "design and development to construction, management, finance, and law."

To provide more insight into the program, we connected with MIT's Center for Real Estate to learn more.

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MIT M.Arch Graduate Angeline Jacques Designs a New Conceptual Framework for Glacier National Park

2020-08-13T12:40:00-04:00

Recent MIT M.Arch graduate Angeline Jacques focuses her thesis project, Mission 2066, on the state of National Parks, specifically Glacier National Park in Montana, and how our perceptions and interventions within these parks might change for the future.

According to Jacques, her thesis seeks to, "adapt and deploy a series of interventions that augment and artificialize melting glaciers. These interventions not only assist in easing the speed of change to ecologies and economies reliant on the glaciers but also provide new inhabitations of the park." Archinect connected with Jacques to discuss her thesis project as well as her experiences entering the workforce during a pandemic. As one of the lucky students able to secure a job post-graduation, she shares with us her experiences as a young designer learning how to start her professional career remotely.

Archinect's Spotlight on 2020 Thesis Projects: 2020 has been an extraordinarily challenging year for architecture graduates. Stud...

MIT M.Arch Graduates Alexandre Beaudouin-Mackay & Sarah Wagner Inject "A New Way of Play" Into Architectural Pedagogy

2020-07-20T12:34:00-04:00

Graduates Alexandre Beaudouin-Mackay & Sarah Wagner take architectural pedagogy in a direction driven by play. According to the duo, "by understanding play as a powerful methodology, architects can engage others in creative processes with the ambition of implementing new, meaningful, and imaginative design strategies. Play is not aimless but productive..."

In their thesis project A New Way of Play: The Forms and Functions of Participatory Design and Critical Pedagogies, Beaudouin-Mackay and Wagner they push for architecture to reimagine play. As recent graduates from MIT's School of Architecture, they created a set of play spaces for children in order to understand how different forms of architectural authorship could be challenged.

Archinect's Spotlight on 2020 Thesis Projects: 2020 has been an extraordinarily challenging year for architecture graduates. Students were displaced as schools shut down, academic communities had to adapt to a new virtual format, end-of-year celebration...

MIT M.Arch Graduates Kevin Marblestone and Emily Whitbeck Investigate Architecture Pedagogy's Relationship to Time

2020-07-13T12:42:00-04:00

In their thesis project, graduate students Kevin Marblestone and Emily Whitbeck engage with architectural pedagogy by exploring time and it's relation to the design process. According to the duo, "Architecture needs a new generation of practitioners that can think differently about time."

Recent graduates from MIT's School of Architecture, Marblestone and Whitbeck make use of time-based media to work through their thesis project Pedagogy of the Fourth Wall. Archinect connected with the duo to learn more about their exploration and dissection of contemporary design pedagogy and their thoughts on the architecture industry as a whole.

Creating "an Architecture Out of Constraints, Ordering Systems, and Rules" with WOJR

2020-04-10T13:29:00-04:00

WOJR: Organization for Architecture is a six-person "organization of designers" based in Cambridge, Massachusetts led by William O'Brien, Jr. that works holistically across projects, research, and workflows to conceptualize the practice of architecture as "a form of cultural production." O'Brien, a tenured Associate Professor at the MIT Department of Architecture and one of the founding members of Collective–LOK, and his team work to imbue a growing set of conceptual and built projects with an immaculate sense of detail that fuses subtle formal gestures with elemental materiality to produce sumptuous spaces that toy with our expectations of what architecture should be.

For the latest Studio Snapshot, Archinect connected with O'Brien to discuss the intellectual and cultural concepts that drive the practice and its work.

Redlines: Thresholds

2018-05-29T09:00:00-04:00

Redlines is a collection of interviews with editors that make today's most provocative architectural publications come to life. While architecture is traditionally concerned with buildings, materials, and scale, their importance and historical impact are recorded through words, books, and images that are often organized, published, and disseminated. Redlines seeks to understand the pedagogical and design frameworks that shape this process.

In this session, we look at Thresholds, a publication housed within the History Theory Criticism group in the Department of Architecture at MIT.

Screen/Print #33: the alternative history of Edith Farnsworth and her architect, from MIT's "Thresholds"

2015-06-06T12:53:00-04:00

MIT’s Department of Architecture is the oldest in the US, and its journal is comparably formidable. Known as Thresholds, the peer-reviewed publication is issued annually, and not uncommonly features work by established leaders in architectural thought, associated with the school or not. It doesn’t strive towards a single theoretical or conceptual framework as a whole, but unpacks a particular idea with each issue – featured here is “Scandalous”.

MIT, Going FAST After 150 Years

2011-05-06T12:08:00-04:00

In 2011 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology celebrates the 150th anniversary of its founding, an occasion marked with 150 consecutive days of activities commemorating its long history of technology innovation. The most prominent of the exhibits, performances and symposia making up the celebration is the Festival of Art, Science and Technology (FAST), a series of events meant to highlight the institute’s often overlooked tradition in the arts. Organized as a six-part series of events spanning three months, FAST offers the public direct access to a body of work that transcends art as a means of representation to instead becomes an agent of social and technological exploration. On May 7th and 8th FAST culminates in the FAST Light festival, an open house showcasing a number of installation projects by both faculty and staff.

A New Village at MIT

2004-05-06T15:07:00-04:00