MIT Department of Architecture

09/04/2026

The Ahmad Tehrani Symposium: Thursday, September 10 @ 6–8pm ET
Featuring Sara Zewde + Najha Zigbi-Johnson
Inaugural event of the MIT Fall 2026 Architecture Lecture Series, held in person in the Sidara Auditorium at the MET Warehouse (W41-1216) and streamed online via YouTube and LinkedIn. Registration is available below.

The Practice of Possibility
Beginning with her master’s work at MIT nearly two decades ago, Sara Zewde has explored how culture, memory, and ways of knowing can shape contemporary design practice. Through the presentation of select recent projects of Studio Zewde, she and Najha Zigbi-Johnson will reflect together on the reciprocal movement between theory and making, and how dialogue across forms of knowledge can push the boundaries of what design can imagine and make possible.

Sara Zewde is Associate Professor of Practice at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and founding principal of Studio Zewde, a design firm practicing landscape architecture, urbanism, and public art. Her work is celebrated for design methods that sync culture, ecology, and craft.

Najha Zigbi-Johnson is a writer, educator, and cultural organizer. Her Harlem-based practice explores the intersections of contemporary Black art, the built environment, and social movements. She currently teaches at The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York.

Learn more and register: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/mitarchitecture/2370205

08/21/2026

The Department of Architecture’s Applicant Mentorship Program (AMP) is open to prospective students! The deadline to apply for the 2026–2027 academic year is September 21.

AMP pairs prospective graduate and doctoral applicants with current students who can offer guidance and answer questions throughout the application process. All are welcome and eligible to sign up for the program.

If you are a prospective applicant and would like to participate in AMP, please complete the AMP Mentee Interest Form via the website below by Monday, September 21, 2026.

Learn more: https://architecture.mit.edu/applicant-mentorship-program-amp

Image credit: Courtesy of Nandini Choudhury | MIT Architecture

08/18/2026

08/12/2026

In a feat of adaptive reuse, the century-old Met Warehouse has become a new home for MIT School of Architecture + Planning. “It’s almost inconceivable that this brick box, which was not designed for human habitation but to store objects, has been opened up,” says John Ochsendorf, director of MIT Morningside Academy for Design. https://news.mit.edu/2026/met-warehouse-opens-new-home-mit-school-architecture-planning-0812

Image: Iwan Baan, courtesy of MIT

05/13/2026

Shape Computation: Fifty Years, 1927-2022 is available now as open access. Edited by Dr. Sotirios D. Kotsopoulos SM '00, PhD '05, it gives a panorama of Shape Computation, exploring its diverse design practices and interdisciplinary applications. Originating in the seminal 1972 article by George Stiny and James Gips that introduced shape grammars as a new computational paradigm, Shape Computation challenges traditional notions of visual and symbolic calculation, particularly in art and design.

Available on Springer Nature (no login required):
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-81623-9

04/27/2026

David Chipperfield
The 31st Pietro Belluschi Lecture
Part of the Spring 2026 MIT Architecture Lecture Series.

Register to attend: https://buytickets.at/mitarchitecture/2187610

David Chipperfield studied architecture at the Kingston School of Art and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. He worked for Douglas Stephen, Richard Rogers and Norman Foster before founding his own practice in 1985 and establishing a design methodology that is now used across five offices in London, Berlin, Milan, Shanghai and Santiago de Compostela.

David Chipperfield is a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects and an honorary fellow of both the American Institute of Architects and the Bund Deutscher Architekten. Among the accolades he has received are the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, awarded in 2009, and a knighthood for services to architecture in the UK and Germany, awarded in 2010. He has received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for Architecture (2011) and the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association (2013), both given in recognition of a lifetime’s work. David Chipperfield was appointed a member of the Order of the UK's Companions of Honour in 2021, Commander of Spain's Orden de Isabel la Católica and member of Germany's Orden Pour le Mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste in 2022 for his services to architecture internationally. In 2023 he was selected Laureate for the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

In addition to design work, David Chipperfield has taught and lectured at schools of architecture worldwide. In 2012 he curated the 13th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale under the title 'Common Ground. He served as the mentor for architecture from 2016–17 for the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. In 2017 he founded Fundación RIA, a private, non-profit entity that works towards meaningful economic, environmental and cultural development in Galicia, Spain.

David Chipperfield has published numerous books and articles, including 'On Planning – A Thought Experiment' (2018), a publication that explores and theorises the urban qualities of contemporary urban developments. He was the 2020 guest editor of Italian design magazine Domus.

04/23/2026

TONIGHT, Thursday April 23, 6pm | Long Lounge (7-429) and on YouTube:
Curry J. Hackett
"Other Channels: Imaging Black Life, Land, and Knowledge"
The MIT NOMAS Lecture
Part of the Spring 2026 MIT Architecture Lecture Series.

This talk asks how pedagogy, speculative fiction, and multimedia art can render what Katherine McKittrick calls a “Black sense of place.” Drawing on his transdisciplinary work and research, Curry J. Hackett reflects on how image-making, sound, archives, and AI might act as channels for narrating and re-presenting Black relationships to territory, history, and possibility.

Curry J. Hackett is a transdisciplinary designer, visual artist, and educator exploring Black relationships to land, media, and memory. A Farmville, Virginia native, his work works across scales and mediums to speculate on the aesthetics and ecologies of the American South.
Hackett’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and Metropolis, among others. He has exhibited at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, the Architectural Association School of Architecture, and the “Making Home”—Smithsonian Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.Curry holds architecture degrees from Howard University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and currently serves as Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

04/01/2026

Thursday, April 2, 2026 | 6:00pm EST

Forrest Meggers
THERManifesto: Wordplay, Techplay, and Systemic Change in Architecture�
Part of the Spring 2026 MIT Architecture Lecture Series.
Presented with the Building Technology Group.

Does architecture really require a strict divide between inside and outside? This lecture questions the long-held belief that buildings must create sealed, mechanically controlled “comfortable” interiors. For over a century, architects and engineers have relied on thermal systems—especially air conditioning—that quietly shaped our buildings, aesthetics, and expectations of comfort. Yet the standards and metrics guiding these systems may be flawed, contributing to high energy use, health concerns, and limited design imagination. Drawing on research and built experiments, I explore alternatives based on radiant heat and other strategies that blur indoor and outdoor boundaries. Rethinking comfort can help us design healthier, lower-carbon, and more equitable places—not just enclosed shelters.

Forrest Meggers is an associate professor of architecture and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University. His fields of knowledge include building systems design and integration, radiant systems, desiccants, heat pumps; exergy analysis; geothermal energy; thermal storage; building materials; thermodynamics and heat transfer. Meggers founded and directs CHAOS (Cooling and Heating for Architecturally Optimized Systems) Lab, where he and his research team investigate alternative thermal paradigms to challenge the status quo in thermal system design, comfort metrics, and user-centric architecture. Meggers has several patents and founded Clearly-cool.com and CHAOSense.com to bring radiant and sensor technology to market while working closely with industry and standards organizations to accelerate critical opportunities for innovation adoption.

This lecture will be held in person in Long Lounge, 7-429 and will be streamed on YouTube. Learn more: https://architecture.mit.edu/events/forrest-meggers

03/10/2026

Thursday, March 12, 2026 - 6:00pm | Long Lounge (7-429) and Live on YouTube

MIT Architecture will host Jeanne Gang, FAIA, of Studio Gang, as part of the Spring 2026 MIT Architecture Lecture Series. Presented with the Architecture and Urbanism Group in collaboration with the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU).

Architect Jeanne Gang is the founding partner of international architecture and urban design practice Studio Gang. Known for a distinctive design approach that expands beyond architecture’s conventional boundaries, she creates striking places that strengthen connections between people, their communities, and nature. Her diverse portfolio across the Americas and Europe includes the Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History; a new United States Embassy in Brazil; and an expansion of the Clinton Presidential Center. A MacArthur Fellow and the Kajima Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Jeanne has been named one of TIME Magazine’s most influential people in the world.

Photo credits:
Jeanne Gang, by John David Pittman
Richard Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History, photo by Iwan Baan.

11/20/2025

Seeing the Forest for the Trees:
Presentations and discussion on sustainable forestry and wood innovation, hosted by the MIT Department of Architecture and industry partner WholeTrees Structures.

Friday, November 21, 2025 — 3:00 to 5:00 PM GMT+1 / 9:00 to 11:00 AM EST

Registration: https://mit.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ADzPetxVTpKfSDfyK6xRlw #/registration

Speakers include Dr. Caitlin Mueller (MIT), Sheila Kennedy (MIT), Amelia Baxter (WholeTrees Structures), Dr. Nate Helbach (Neutral), Amy Berry (Tahoe Fund), Aurimas Bukauskas (RMI), Prof. Dr. Christopher Robeller (Augsburg Technical University of Applied Sciences THA), Dr. Barbara Cueto (LAS Art Foundation), Rachel Blowes (MIT), Kate Davies (Hooke Park), Dr. Dario Parigi (Aalborg University), Dr. Paul Mayencourt (UC Berkley) and Dr. Fiona O'Donnell (Swarthmore College).