MIT School of Architecture + Planning

MIT School of Architecture + Planning The School of Architecture + Planning is one of five schools at the Massachusetts Institute of Techn

The School of Architecture + Planning is one of five schools at MIT. The school comprises five main divisions:

The Department of Architecture
The Department of Urban Studies + Planning
The Media Lab
The Center for Real Estate
The Program in Art, Culture and Technology

The school is also host to the Levanthal Center for Advanced Urbanism and the Center for Bits and Atoms.

Few architects have made a more compelling argument for the social agency of the discipline than Alejandro Aravena.Arave...
05/27/2026

Few architects have made a more compelling argument for the social agency of the discipline than Alejandro Aravena.

Aravena, founder and executive director of ELEMENTAL, will deliver the commencement address at the SA+P Advanced Degree Ceremony on May 28. His practice, which he describes as a "Do Tank," has centered social housing, public space, and urban infrastructure, developing novel approaches to community engagement that have shaped how architects and policymakers think about the built environment. Projects range from community-engaged housing in Quinta Monroy to post-earthquake reconstruction in Constitución following Chile's 2010 disaster, to institutional work across the United States, Europe, and the Middle East.

Aravena received the Pritzker Prize in Architecture in 2016, the same year he curated the Venice Architecture Biennale under the title "Reporting from the Front," an exhibition that asked what architecture could contribute to the most pressing challenges facing humanity. He was also the first architect to receive the Gothenburg Prize for Sustainable Development, and currently serves as Chair of the Pritzker Architecture Prize Jury.

📍 Kresge Auditorium, MIT
🗓 May 28, 2026
🔗 Advanced Degree Ceremony info: https://sap.mit.edu/news/advanced-degree-ceremony-0
🔗 More about Alejandro Aravena: https://www.pritzkerprize.com/biography-ale-jan-dro-ara-ve-na

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | MIT School of Architecture + Planning | MIT Department of Architecture

Tod Machover, Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media and Faculty Director of the MIT Media Lab, will receive the ...
05/26/2026

Tod Machover, Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media and Faculty Director of the MIT Media Lab, will receive the George Peabody Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Music and Dance in America, the highest honor bestowed by the Peabody Conservatory.

Machover joins a roster of previous recipients that includes Stevie Wonder, Yo-Yo Ma, Herbie Hancock, Ella Fitzgerald, and Leonard Bernstein.

"Tod Machover's genuinely groundbreaking and prescient work at the intersection of music and technology, along with an overall and broad impact on the American music scene, make him an ideal recipient for the Peabody Medal," said Peabody Institute Dean Fred Bronstein.

Machover is recognized for creating music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries and for developing technologies that expand music's possibilities for everyone. His current projects include The Overstory, an opera based on Richard Powers' Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, set to premiere in spring 2028, and a new work for orchestra and live AI that will be premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in fall 2026.

Machover will also deliver the commencement addresses at the Peabody Conservatory's 2026 Graduation ceremonies on May 20 in Baltimore.

🔗 Read more: https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/tod-machover-to-receive-george-peabody-medal-for-outstanding-contributions-to-music-and-dance-in-america/
📸 Image credit: Natalia Tsarkova

A third of our lives happens in sleep, a state most technology ignores entirely. Adam Haar Horowitz, researcher in the F...
05/23/2026

A third of our lives happens in sleep, a state most technology ignores entirely. Adam Haar Horowitz, researcher in the Fluid Interfaces group at the MIT Media Lab, has spent years building tools to work with that space rather than around it.

His practice centers on hypnagogia, the threshold between wakefulness and sleep, where thought becomes associative, fluid, and untethered from logic. Using biosensor-equipped devices, audio cues, and engineered sleep environments, Horowitz and his collaborators have developed ways to detect that state and guide it, transforming sleep into a medium for creativity, research, and artistic exploration.

One of those works, Hotel Room #2: Communal Dreams, is currently on view at the MIT Museum as part of Lighten Up! On Biology and Time, on exhibit through August 2026. Three participants at a time enter a sculptural environment filled with pulses of light, sound, and motion and fall asleep together, turning shared sleep into a form of collective experience where the audience becomes the installation.

The same logic runs through his broader practice: Dormio, a biosensor glove that detects sleep onset and delivers targeted audio cues to shape dream content; Boreal Dreams, a film installation that continues into the viewer's bedroom overnight; and DUST, an app that brings these tools out of the lab and into everyday life.

"Dreams are not noise," Horowitz argues. They are a system that generates thought, processes experience, and produces material the waking mind can use.

📍 Hotel Room #2: Communal Dreams, MIT Museum, through August 2026, as part of Lighten Up! On Biology and Time.

🔗 Learn more: https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/exhibitions/lighten-up-on-biology-and-time

📸 Image credit: Judith Amores, Oscar Rosello, Adam Haar Horowitz, Anna Olivella for the MIT Museum, and Oscar Rosello

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | MIT School of Architecture + Planning

Later this week, MIT hosts a symposium honoring the scholarly legacy of Nasser Rabbat, the Aga Khan Professor and Direct...
05/21/2026

Later this week, MIT hosts a symposium honoring the scholarly legacy of Nasser Rabbat, the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. Over more than 35 years, his work has critically challenged methodologies inherited from the study of Western art and architecture.

Critical Historiography as Method brings together contributors to a Festschrift being organized in Rabbat's honor. The day-long program gathers students, mentees, and close colleagues whose own research reflects the critical and historiographical orientation he has modeled throughout his career, presenting papers organized around four themes: self-reflexivity and the field's future, the city as a scale of inquiry, the reception of art, and new frontiers for a new world.

Contributors include Nancy Demerdash, Talinn Grigor, Heghnar Watenpaugh, Pamela Karimi, and many others. Registration is required. A recording will be made available online in the days following the event.

📍 Dreyfoos Lecture Hall (E14-633), MIT Media Lab
🗓 Saturday, May 23, 2026, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
🔗 Register now: https://sites.mit.edu/festschrift/register/

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | MIT School of Architecture + Planning

When Indian policymakers decided which foreign companies could operate in their country, they were not just running econ...
05/20/2026

When Indian policymakers decided which foreign companies could operate in their country, they were not just running economic calculations. They were making moral judgments.

That is the central argument of a new book by Jason Jackson, associate professor of political economy and urban planning in MIT DUSP. In "Traders, Specculators, and Captains of Industry: How Capitalist Legitimacy Shaped Foreign Investment Policy in India," published by Harvard University Press, Jackson traces how Indian policymakers evaluated firms, both foreign and domestic, through what he calls "moral categories of capitalist legitimacy." Would a company invest in local technology? Provide good jobs? Or would it extract resources and leave little behind?

The book draws on archival research and fieldwork to show how these moral frameworks, rooted in the legacy of colonial-era exploitation, shaped some of India's most consequential economic policy decisions, including the expulsion of Coca-Cola and IBM in the 1970s for failing to comply with technology transfer requirements.

"India is an exemplary case of ways in which moral beliefs shape economic policy decisions," Jackson says. "But at the same time, I think it's representative of a general feature of capitalism."

The book contributes to ongoing debates about economic nationalism, industrial policy, and globalization, and arrives at a moment when governments around the world are once again weighing the costs and benefits of foreign investment.

🔗 More about the book: https://news.mit.edu/2026/how-morality-ethics-shaped-indias-economic-development-0421

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | MIT School of Architecture + Planning

New research from MIT Center for Constructive Communication, based at the MIT Media Lab, finds that leading AI chatbots ...
05/17/2026

New research from MIT Center for Constructive Communication, based at the MIT Media Lab, finds that leading AI chatbots may perform worse for the very users who stand to benefit from them most.

The study tested how state-of-the-art models responded to questions from users described as having lower English proficiency, less formal education, or origins outside the United States. Across all models and datasets, researchers found significant drops in accuracy for these users. The effects were most pronounced at the intersection of these traits, with users who were both non-native English speakers and less formally educated seeing the largest declines in response quality.

Models also refused to answer questions at higher rates for vulnerable users, and in some cases responded with condescending or patronizing language, or withheld correct answers that were provided to other users.

"The people who may rely on these tools the most could receive subpar, false, or even harmful information," says lead author Elinor Poole-Dayan SM '25.

The findings mirror documented patterns of human sociocognitive bias, and carry particular implications as AI personalization features become more widespread. As CCC Director and Professor of Media Arts and Sciences Deb Roy notes, the study is a reminder of how important it is to continually assess systematic biases that can quietly slip into these systems.

🔗 Read more: https://news.mit.edu/2026/study-ai-chatbots-provide-less-accurate-information-vulnerable-users-0219

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | MIT School of Architecture + Planning

Louise Yeung, MIT DUSP alumna, is New York City's new climate chief, appointed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani in January to lea...
05/15/2026

Louise Yeung, MIT DUSP alumna, is New York City's new climate chief, appointed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani in January to lead the Mayor's Office of Climate and Environmental Justice.

For Yeung, the climate crisis and the affordability crisis are inseparable. Flooded basements, soaring energy bills, heat-related hospital visits: "The climate crisis is inextricably linked to the affordability crisis," she told The New York Times.

Her agenda spans immediate needs and long-term planning, from protecting rent-regulated apartments already at risk from flooding, to making utility rate cases more transparent and accessible for working New Yorkers, to neighborhood planning workshops that invite communities to shape a shared vision for the city's future.

Yeung's first job in New York, in 2016, was managing a multibillion-dollar project to protect Lower Manhattan from coastal flooding. Three mayoral administrations later, it is still years from completion.

"Working in climate change always has this tension of urgency and time scale," she says.

📰 Read the full profile in The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/nyregion/mamdani-climate-czar-nyc.html
📷 Vincent Alban / The New York Times

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | MIT School of Architecture + Planning | MIT DUSP | MIT Alumni Association

Beneath the streets of Querétaro, a 16th-century water system has been buried and forgotten for centuries. Invisible Inf...
05/13/2026

Beneath the streets of Querétaro, a 16th-century water system has been buried and forgotten for centuries. Invisible Infrastructures, on view at the Regional Museum of Querétaro through May 2026, brings it back to the surface.

The exhibition is the work of Chucho Ocampo (SMACT '21), whose interdisciplinary research project used Ground Penetrating Radar to map the Acequia Madre, a hydraulic infrastructure that supplied the city with drinking water for hundreds of years before being abandoned and buried beneath the historic city center.

Working with dérive lab, the Geosystems Mechanics Laboratory and Rock Physics Laboratory of UNAM's Institute of Geosciences, and the Regional Museum of Querétaro, Ocampo combines geophysical fieldwork, archival research, and sculptural interfaces inspired by ancient measuring instruments to examine what lies beneath our cities and what it tells us about how we manage water today.

The ground we walk on is composed of layers of history. This project asks what happens when we look.

📸 Image credit: Chucho Ocampo, Invisible Infrastructures, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
🔗 Digital interface accessible at: https://act.mit.edu/2026/02/chucho-ocampo-invisible-infrastructures/

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | MIT School of Architecture + Planning | Art, Culture, and Technology program at MIT

Six technology sectors. One urgent question: Where does the U.S. need to invest to remain competitive, secure, and prosp...
05/11/2026

Six technology sectors. One urgent question: Where does the U.S. need to invest to remain competitive, secure, and prosperous?

"Priority Technologies: Ensuring U.S. Security and Shared Prosperity" brings together MIT faculty to examine semiconductors, biotechnology, critical minerals, drones, quantum computing, and advanced manufacturing. The book, edited by Elisabeth Reynolds, Professor of the Practice at MIT DUSP, grew out of a seminar she has taught with economist and Nobel laureate Simon Johnson, who wrote the foreword.

Contributors include Elsa Olivetti on critical minerals, J. Christopher Love on biomanufacturing, Fiona Murray on drones, and Jesús A. del Alamo on semiconductors, alongside Reynolds on advanced manufacturing and William D. Oliver and Jonathan Ruane on quantum computing.

Across each sector, a shared set of challenges emerges: Supply chain vulnerabilities, gaps between U.S. research leadership and domestic manufacturing capacity, and the need for sustained federal investment in the university research ecosystem that has long driven American innovation.

"In each of these areas, there are breakthroughs to be had, where the U.S. can leapfrog competitors and gain an advantage," Reynolds says. "These areas are front and center for U.S. national economic and security policy."

Published recently by The MIT Press.

🔗 Read more: https://news.mit.edu/2026/how-to-expand-us-economy-priority-technologies-book-0421

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | MIT School of Architecture + Planning

Robots that can see through walls. Researchers at MIT Media Lab have developed a new system that uses generative AI to r...
05/07/2026

Robots that can see through walls. Researchers at MIT Media Lab have developed a new system that uses generative AI to reconstruct hidden 3D objects and entire indoor scenes from reflected wireless signals — the same type used in Wi-Fi.

The work, led by Fadel Adib, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Signal Kinetics group in the MIT Media Lab, addresses a longstanding limitation in wireless vision: because signals tend to reflect in a single direction, large portions of a hidden object's surface are effectively invisible to sensors. The new system, called Wave-Former, builds a partial reconstruction from those reflections and uses a specially trained generative AI model to fill in the rest, boosting accuracy by nearly 20 percent over existing approaches.

The team also developed an expanded system, called RISE, that reconstructs entire indoor scenes using reflections off humans moving through a room. A single stationary radar captures the signals, with no need for a mobile robot to scan the space, and without the privacy concerns associated with camera-based methods.

The applications are wide-ranging: from warehouse robots verifying packed items before shipping, to smart home systems that can locate someone in a room to improve safety and efficiency in human-robot interaction.

🔗 For more, visit: https://news.mit.edu/2026/generative-ai-improves-wireless-vision-system-sees-through-obstructions-0319

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | MIT School of Architecture + Planning

Congratulations to Katerina Cizek on her appointment to Canada’s National Advisory Group on the modernization of the cou...
05/05/2026

Congratulations to Katerina Cizek on her appointment to Canada’s National Advisory Group on the modernization of the country’s audiovisual sector.

At MIT, Cizek is artistic director, research scientist, and co-founder of the Co-Creation Studio at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, where her work explores new forms of documentary storytelling grounded in collaboration with communities. Her practice spans photography, film, and digital media, and focuses on the relationship between media, place, and lived experience.

She is currently directing a short social history film on the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse (the “MET”), to be released in February 2027 following the School of Architecture and Planning’s move to the building.

“I am honoured by this invitation to consider Future Media in Canada… We do this work at a critical moment globally for media, place and culture in the public interest.”

Read more on Cizek's work: https://opendoclab.mit.edu/the-new-digital-storytelling-series-katerina-cizek/

Image: Jamie Hogge

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | MIT School of Architecture + Planning | MIT DUSP

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