Online courses directory (19947)

This class investigates theory and practice of digital or new media poetry with emphasis on workshop review of digital poetry created by students. Each week students examine published examples of digital poetry in a variety of forms including but not limited to soundscapes, hypertext poetry, animation, code poems, interactive games, location-based poems using handheld devices, digital video and wikis.

This course focuses on traditional nature writing and the environmentalist essay. Students will keep a Web log as a journal. Writings are drawn from the tradition of nature writing and from contemporary forms of the environmentalist essay.

This course is intended to provide students with the fundamentals of fencing, including footwork, bladework, bouting and refereeing. It will allow students to develop the ability to analyze a fencing bout, and promotes creativity in applying acquired skills in a fencing bout.

This studio explores the notion of in-between by engaging several relationships; the relationship between intervention and perception, between representation and notation and between the fixed and the temporal. In the Exactitude in Science, Jorge Luis Borges tells the perverse tale of the one to one scale map, where the desire for precision and power leads to the escalating production of larger and more accurate maps of the territory. For Jean Baudrillard, "The territory no longer precedes the map nor survives it. …it is the map that precedes the territory... and thus, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map." The map or the territory, left to ruin-shredding across the 'other', beautifully captures the tension between reality and representation. Mediating between collective desire and territorial surface, maps filter, create, frame, scale, orient, and project. A map has agency. It is not merely representational but operational, the experience and discursive potential of this process lies in the reciprocity between the representation and the real. It is in-between these specific sets of relationships that this studio positions itself.

The theme that unites the Level II studios in the fall semester is a focus upon the 'making of architecture and built form' as a tectonic, technical and materially driven endeavor. It is a design investigation that is rooted in a larger culture of materiality and the associated phenomena, but a study of the language and production of built form as an integrated response to the conceptual proposition of the project. The studio will look to works of architecture where the material tectonic and its resultant technology or fabrication become instrumental to the realization of the ideas, in whatever form they may take. This becomes the 'art of technology' -- suggesting a level of innovation and creative manipulation as part of the design process to transform material into a composition of beauty and poetry as well as environmental control. In this regard the studio will look to the works and design processes of a number of architects including Shigeru Ban, Peter Zumthor, Herzog and deMeuron, Kazuyo Sejima, Richard Horden, Rick Joy and Glenn Murcutt among others.

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 studio proposes to engage tectonics as a material process. By exploring transformation, indeterminacy and mutability inherent in material and landscape processes, students will be challenged to engage notions of duration as a design strategy for architecture and urbanism. While the second law of thermodynamics states that the material universe tends toward a state of increasing disorder, architects build and construct in opposition to these forces. Attempting to delay the processes of disorder, decay and collapse, tectonics is often seen as the embodied expression of an arrested moment the finite resolution of the building process. Yet the processes that enable and disable architecture extend beyond any arrested moment.

A more detailed description can be found in the syllabus section.

This course examines the neural bases of sensory perception. The focus is on physiological and anatomical studies of the mammalian nervous system as well as behavioral studies of animals and humans. Topics include visual pattern, color and depth perception, auditory responses and sound localization, and somatosensory perception.

This graduate-level course is a continuation of Mathematical Methods for Engineers I (18.085). Topics include numerical methods; initial-value problems; network flows; and optimization.

This course examines relationships among technology, culture, and politics in a variety of social and historical settings ranging from 19th century factories to 21st century techno dance floors, from colonial Melanesia to capitalist Massachusetts. We will be interested in whether technology has produced a better world, and for whom.

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.