Online courses directory (215)

The goal of this course is to investigate with students backgrounds on some of the pivotal events that have shaped our understanding and approach to architecture. Emphasis of discussion will be primarily on buildings and works of individual architects. Canonical architects, buildings and movements that have exerted significant influences on the development of architecture will be studied in detail. We will visit some of these buildings for a first-hand look and to evaluate for ourselves their significance or lack thereof. As a final project, each student will analyze a building through drawings, text, bibliography and a physical model in a format ready for documentation and exhibition.

Tradition and innovation in representative fiction of the early modern period. Recurring themes include the role of the artist in the modern period; the representation of psychological and sexual experience; and the virtues (and defects) of the aggressively experimental character. Works by Conrad, Kipling, Babel, Kafka, James, Lawrence, Mann, Ford Madox Ford, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Nabokov.

This course uses scale models to design environments that orchestrate contrasting material properties and conventional constructional systems to create places that foster specific ways of inhabiting space. It also demonstrates how architecture differs from other forms of design. Intended for students to test aptitude for architectural design and to experience an unfamiliar mode of thought, it's conducted in a studio format, with lectures on architectural theory and history, and structured for students with no previous experience in design.

Required of Architecture majors.

How do we define Public Art? This course focuses on the production of projects for public places. Public Art is a concept that is in constant discussion and revision, as much as the evolution and transformation of public spaces and cities are. Monuments are repositories of memory and historical presences with the expectation of being permanent. Public interventions are created not to impose and be temporary, but as forms intended to activate discourse and discussion. Considering the concept of a museum as a public device and how they are searching for new ways of avoiding generic identities, we will deal with the concept of the personal imaginary museum. It should be considered as a point of departure to propose a personal individual construction based on the concept of defining a personal imaginary museum - concept, program, collection, events, architecture, public diffusion, etc.

This class will introduce students to a variety of contemporary art practices and ideas. The class will begin with a brief overview of 'visual language' by looking at a variety of artworks and discussing basic concepts revolving around artistic practice. The rest of the class will focus on notions of the real/unreal as explored with various mediums and practices. The class will work in video, sculpture and in public space.

This class introduces design as a computational enterprise in which rules are developed to compose and describe architectural and other designs. The class covers topics such as shapes, shape arithmetic, symmetry, spatial relations, shape computations, and shape grammars. It focuses on the application of shape grammars in creative design, and teaches shape grammar fundamentals through in-class, hands-on exercises with abstract shape grammars. The class discusses issues related to practical applications of shape grammars.

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 course covers theories about the form that settlements should take and attempts a distinction between descriptive and normative theory by examining examples of various theories of city form over time. Case studies will highlight the origins of the modern city and theories about its emerging form, including the transformation of the nineteenth-century city and its organization. Through examples and historical context, current issues of city form in relation to city-making, social structure, and physical design will also be discussed and analyzed.

This course is an exploration of visual art forms and their cultural connections for the student with little experience in the visual arts. The course includes a brief study of art history and in depth studies of the elements, media, and methods used in creative process and thought. This course will teach students to develop a five-step system for understanding visual art in all forms based on description, analysis, meaning, context, and judgement. The Open Course Library (OCL) is a project to create 81 openly-licensed high-enrollment general education college courses & lower textbook costs for students. The Art Appreciation course was developed by Christopher Gildow (Cascadia Community College), published originally with OCL, and is showcased here with his permission.

Ecologies of Construction examines the resource requirements for the making and maintenance of the contemporary built environment. This course introduces the field of industrial ecology as a primary source of concepts and methods in the mapping of material and energy expenditures dedicated to construction activities.

This semester students are asked to transform the Hereshoff Museum in Bristol, Rhode Island, through processes of erasure and addition. Hereshoff Manufacturing was recognized as one of the premier builders of America's Cup racing boats between 1890's and 1930's. The studio, however, is about more than the program. It is about land, water, and wind and the search for expressing materially and tectonically the relationships between these principle conditions. That is, where the land is primarily about stasis (docking, anchoring and referencing our locus), water's fluidity holds the latent promise of movement and freedom. Movement is activated by wind, allowing for negotiating the relationship between water and land.

This subject explores the varied nature and practice of computation in design. We will view computation and design broadly. Computation will include both work done on the computer (digital computing) and by-hand. Design will include both the process of making designs and artifacts, as well as the designs and artifacts themselves. The aim of the course is to develop a view of computation and design beyond the specifics of techniques and tools, and a critical, self-awareness of our own approaches and metaphors for computation and design.

This course will focus on Western classical music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it is designed for people who are passionate about classical music but who have not necessarily had any advanced training or taken any college-level music courses. The only prerequisite is a basic knowledge of how to read musical notation.

This is a project to assist in the design, drawing, modeling and hopefully constructing of a small Community Children's Center near Guayaquil, Ecuador. For the last year, Nicki Lehrer, from MIT's Aero/Astro Department, has been organizing efforts to build the project. The goal of the workshop is to provide her with a full fleshed out design for the community center so it can be built in the summer of 2007.

The television landscape has changed drastically in the past few years; nowhere is this more prevalent than in the American daytime serial drama, one of the oldest forms of television content. This class examines the history of these "soap operas" and their audiences by focusing on the production, consumption, and media texts of soaps. The class will include discussions of what makes soap operas a unique form, the history of the genre, current experimentation with transmedia storytelling, the online fan community, and comparisons between daytime dramas and primetime serials from 24 to Friday Night Lights, through a study of Procter & Gamble's As the World Turns.

The project for this studio is to design a demonstration project for a site near the French Quarter in New Orleans. The objectives of the project are the following:

1. To design more intense housing, community, educational and commercial facilities in four to six story buildings.
2. To explore the "space between" buildings as a way of designing and shaping objects.
3. To design at three scales - dwelling, cluster and overall.
4. To design dwellings where the owners may be able to help build and gain a skill for employment.
5. To provide/design facilities that can help the residents to gain education and skills.