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For the month of March, Archinect is focusing its Spotlight on Boston, the largest city in Massachusetts and the northernmost node of America's Northeast megalopolis. The focus on Boston follows our recent Spotlight on Miami theme from the month of February. Boston, of course, has a... View full entry
Architect and educator Nicholas de Monchaux has been selected to lead the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) School of Architecture and Planning. de Monchaux is known globally as a scholar of the intersections between technology, data, and... View full entry
MIT will create a new college that combines AI, machine learning, and data science with other academic disciplines. It is the largest financial investment in AI by any US academic institution to date. — MIT Technology Review
MIT’s new artificial intelligence-focused Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing will "create 50 new faculty positions and numerous fellowships for graduate students," according to the MIT Technology Review. The school is set to debut in September 2020, first in existing buildings... View full entry
It’s well known that the production of cement—the world’s leading construction material—is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for about 8 percent of all such releases...A team of researchers at MIT has come up with a new way of manufacturing the material that could eliminate these emissions altogether, and could even make some other useful products in the process. — MIT News
The research team is exploring the "idea of using an electrochemical process to replace the current fossil-fuel-dependent system" that relies on coal-fired ovens to convert limestone, clay, and sand to Portland cement. Through the new process, the need to burn coal will be avoided and the emitted... View full entry
Mr. Ito stepped down less than a day after an article in The New Yorker described the measures officials at the lab took to conceal the relationship with Mr. Epstein, who killed himself in jail last month while facing federal sex trafficking charges. Mr. Ito sent a copy of the resignation email to The New York Times after repeated requests for comment. — The New York Times
“After giving the matter a great deal of thought over the past several days and weeks, I think that it is best that I resign as director of the media lab and as a professor and employee of the Institute, effective immediately,” Ito wrote in an email to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology... View full entry
MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito has faced pressure to resign after revealing that he took research funding from financier and alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. But today Nicholas Negroponte, who cofounded the Media Lab in 1985 and was its director for 20 years, said he had recommended that Ito take Epstein’s money. “If you wind back the clock,” he added, “I would still say, ‘Take it.’” And he repeated, more emphatically, “‘Take it.’”
Both Joichi Ito, MIT Media Lab director, and Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the MIT Media Lab, have come under scrutiny in recent days as news that a portion of the lab's funding was donated by convicted sex trafficking billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, MIT Technology Review... View full entry
The Moscow-based Strelka Institute has announced a new research program geared toward exploring the issues of planetary urbanism, global energy infrastructure, “geotechnology,” and speculative design, among other topics. Directed by professor and theorist Benjamin Bratton, the three-year... View full entry
MIT’s Self Assembly Lab and Maldives-based Invena have unveiled Growing Islands, a provocative underwater structural system that redirects wave energy and sand accumulation flows to build new islands and help rebuild existing beaches ravaged by rising sea levels. Diagram showcasing the... View full entry
Since the first known use the term 'nuclear family' in 1941 (defined by George Murdock as "a social group characterized by common residence, economic cooperation and reproduction[,] contain[ing] adults of both sexes, at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship, and one or... View full entry
I.M Pei's work has influenced many. However, there are several individuals and places that have influenced Pei into becoming one of the most recognized architects in the profession. Growing up in Hong Kong and Shanghai, Pei drew much inspiration from his childhood surroundings, but do you know... View full entry
A lecture at MIT that was to be given by the Japanese architect Junya Ishigami has been cancelled following revelations that Ishigami's Tokyo-based studio was relying on unpaid interns—a controversy that has prompted wide discussion and raised questions over the value of labor in architecture. ... View full entry
In light of a recent breakthrough within the topic of space, the architecture design firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM) shares their partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in designing the first "full-time human habitat on the... View full entry
Researchers at MIT have developed a way to shrink objects to nanoscale. Using a technology called implosion fabrication, the method allows objects to be 3D printed at a scale smaller than what one can see with a microscope. "It’s a way of putting nearly any kind of material into a 3-D pattern... View full entry
“A project of this scale and complexity, which demands a design sensibility informed by both art and technology — along with a deep understanding of architecture education as well as the role of public space — is made for a firm like DS+R,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. — MIT News
The MIT school of architecture, which has long been dispersed across the campus, will soon have a central base in a large brick warehouse across the street on Massachusetts Avenue. Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the New York-based architecture firm responsible for Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art... View full entry
MIT's Mediated Matter Group has developed a construction robot that winds fiberglass filament into large structures. The research studio, led by Neri Oxman, has dubbed the little machines, Fiberbots, and hopes they can one-day be used to build complicated, large-scale structures. Credit: The... View full entry
