Students brainstorm and discuss the different types of materials used to build houses in various climates. They build small models of houses and test them in different climates.

Focuses on how the housing and human service systems interact: how networks and social capital can build between elements of the two systems. Explores ways in which the differing world views, professional perspectives, and institutional needs of the two systems play out operationally. Part I establishes the nature of the action frames of these two systems. Part II applies these insights to particular vulnerable groups: "at risk" households in transitional housing, the chronically mentally ill, and the frail elderly.

In this lesson, students will learn about types of land use by humans and evaluate the ways land is used in their local community. They will also consider the environmental effects of the different types of land use. Students will assume the role of community planning engineers and will create a future plan for their community. (Note: Teachers will need to check out the following book from the local or school library: Durell, Ann, Craighead George, Jean, and Paterson, Katherine. The Big Book For Our Planet, New York: Dutton Children's Books, 1993).

Students design and build a mechanical arm that lifts and moves an empty 12-ounce soda can using hydraulics for power. Small design teams (1-2 students each) design and build a single axis for use in the completed mechanical arm. One team designs and builds the grasping hand, another team the lifting arm, and a third team the rotation base. The three groups must work to communicate effectively through written and verbal communication and sketches.

Kevin Lynch's landmark volume, The Image of the City (1960), emphasized the perceptual characteristics of the urban environment, stressing the ways that individuals mentally organize their own sensory experience of cities. Increasingly, however, city imaging is supplemented and constructed by exposure to visual media, rather than by direct sense experience of urban realms. City images are not static, but subject to constant revision and manipulation by a variety of media-savvy individuals and institutions. In recent years, urban designers (and others) have used the idea of city image proactively-- seeking innovative ways to alter perceptions of urban, suburban, and regional areas. City imaging, in this sense, is the process of constructing visually-based narratives about the potential of places.

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. While the design of materials is not new, the recent evolution of mutant materials and fabrication technologies has created a material culture pregnant with possibilities. Plastics can be endowed with the properties of glass, wood made to appear like fabric, and foams given the power of memory. Materials and their methods are multiplying while our inherited notions of material significance and signification are increasingly challenged. 'Truth' in materials or in their methods of construction is no longer (and arguably never was) an absolute concept. Highlighting the multiple states of materials (raw, finished, decomposed) and new methods for fabrication (CAD-CAM, CNC, rapid prototyping), this studio seeks to understand the processes that form, deform and ultimately dematerialize built matter. This studio will explore the limits of materiality and immateriality to engage a tectonics of temporal change, transformation, and succession. Materials will be treated, not merely as finishes, but as critical points of departure for investigating new spatial possibilities. Students will design and fabricate full scale material constructs in order to explore a material's inherent properties. Investigations of casting, stressing, weathering, eroding, corroding, etc. will be part of the design process. Students will translate these studies into critical architectural propositions for the Stearn's Quarry site in Chicago. Dating back 400 million years, the site was once a part of an ancient reef near the equator before the shift in the North American tectonic plate. Rich in calcium carbonate, the 23 acre Stearns quarry site was excavated from 1936 to 1970 to a depth of 350 feet. Located within Chicago's city grid, the quarry supplied the dolomite used to line the cities waterways and yielded an unprecedented amount of fossils from the Silurian Age. Since 1970 the quarry has been used as a dumping site for incinerator ash, and construction debris. Designated a 'Superfund Site' due to concerns over its toxicity, the city of Chicago is currently examining the reprogramming, reuse and reclamation of the site. Students will design a series of architectural interventions and public interfaces to enable, support and house the geological and ecological processes and artifacts of the site. The Stearns Quarry site presents a unique opportunity to engage temporal change, transformation, adaptation and succession at the scale of the building, the city and the landscape. By engaging the materials on the site in a process of excavation, recycling, and recovery, the studio addresses a prolonged understanding of architecture, one that acknowledges duration within the framework of architectural design. Engaged in the unpredictable interface of nature, history, construction and imagination, we will attempt to arrest, reverse, stretch, divert, adhere and accelerate the temporal qualities of architecture. The studio hopes to arrive at a strategy of reworking the landscape, rather than a finite architectural object- a shift from product to process. In doing so, it seeks to unleash urban scaled material effects within the deep surface of the landscape.

Students are presented with an engineering challenge: To design a sustainable guest village within the Saguaro National Park in Arizona. Through four lessons and six associated activities, they study ecological relationships with an emphasis on the Sonoran Desert. They examine species adaptations. They come to appreciate the complexity and balance that supports the exchange of energy and matter within food webs. Then students apply what they have learned about these natural relationships to the study of biomimicry and sustainable design. They study the flight patterns of birds and relate their functional design to aeronautical engineering. A computer simulation model is also incorporated into this unit and students use this program to examine perturbations within a simple ecosystem. The solution rests within the lessons and applications of this unit.

Subject applies cognitive science and technology to the industrial design process. Introduces prototyping techniques and approaches for objective evaluation as part of the design process. Students practice evaluating products with mechanical and electronic aspects. Evaluation process is applied to creating functioning smart product prototypes. Project oriented subject that draws upon engineering, aesthetic, and creative skills. Subject is geared towards students interested in creating physical products which encompass electronics and computers in order to include them in smart scenarios. Students present readings, learn prototyping skills, create a product prototype, and complete a publication style paper.

This seminar examines efforts in developing and advanced nations and regions to create, finance, and regulate infrastructure and energy technologies from a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives. It is conducted with intensive in-class discussions and debates.

This course is designed in the tightly controlled space between (national) security and (civil) liberty, student projects, guest presentations, readings and workshop discussions will attempt to develop positive answers to these questions. More specifically, the course will focus on the psychological, economical and political conditions of those who are marginalized and therefore deprived of parrhesia today: the silent victims and witnesses of any kind of social and cultural exclusions. "Parrhesia" was an Athenian right to frank and open speaking, the right that, like the First Amendment, demands a "fearless speaker" who must challenge political powers with criticism and unsolicited advice. Can designer and artist respond today to such a democratic call and demand? Is it possible to do so despite the (increasing) restrictions imposed on our liberties today? Can the designer or public artist operate as a proactive "parrhesiatic" agent and contribute to the protection, development and dissemination of "fearless speaking" in Public Space.

Explores the application of building technology to architecture through considerations of building construction -- materials and methods -- and systems -- structure, enclosure, climate and utility services, light, acoustics, fire safety, and accessibility. Includes lectures, laboratory exercises, site visits, problem sets, and a semester-long student investigation of a precedent building. Required of Course IV majors.

" This course will introduce students to architectural design and computation through the use of computer modeling, rendering and digital fabrication. The course focuses on teaching architectural design with CAD drawing, 3-D modeling, rendering and rapid prototyping. Students will be required to build computer models that will lead to a full package of architectural explorations with computers. Each semester we will explore the design process of a particular building type and building material. The course also investigates a few design processes of selected architects. The course is critical of design principles and building production methods. Student Assignments and Labs are graded based on the quality of design, representation and constructability. Great design input is always encouraged."

Explores, through exercises, lectures, and discussion, the nature and exercise of architectural intelligence; investigates design as processes located in individuals and in groups; seeks to understand design as argument, as claims for which reasons can be adduced, as logic in which there are explicit sets of elements and relations among them, and as experiment in which design and its results are themselves used to inform future designs or simply to inquire. Subject aims to open avenues for further research.

During this course, we will be exploring basic questions of architecture through several short design exercises. Working with many different media, students will discover the interrelationship of architecture and its related disciplines, such as structures, sustainability, architectural history and the visual arts. Each problem will focus on one of these disciplines and one exploration and presentation technique.

The planning process in developing countries. Interaction between planners and institutions at both national and local levels. Overview of theories of state, organizational arrangements, implementation mechanisms, and planning styles. Case studies of planning: decentralization, provision of low-cost housing, and new-town development. Analyzes various roles planners play in different institutional contexts. Professional ethics and values amidst conflicting demands. Restricted to first-year M.C.P. and SPURS students.

The I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis in August 2007, resulting in at least 13 deaths, illustrates the importance of structural integrity. This unit looks at the investigation that followed the collapse of the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River in 1967 which demonstrates how the study of safe design and the assessment of components and structures under load is of increasing importance in engineering design.

Introduction to usage and impacts of information technologies on urban planning and communities. Literature review, guest speakers, and web surfing provide examples and issues that are debated in class and homework exercises. Includes examination of metropolitan information infrastructures, urban modeling and visualization, e-government, collaborative planning, and cyber communities. This seminar is an introduction to the usage and impacts of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on urban planning, the urban environment and communities. Students will explore how social relationships, our sense of community, the urban infrastructure, and planning practice have been affected by technological change. Literature reviews, guest speakers, and web surfing will provide examples and issues that are debated in class and homework exercises. We will examine metropolitan information infrastructures, urban modeling and visualization, e-government, collaborative planning, and cyber communities. Students will attend a regular Tuesday seminar and occasional seminars of invited speakers during lunchtime on Fridays or Mondays. During the past two decades, ICTs have become so pervasive and disruptive that their impact on urban planning and social relationships has begun to reach far beyond their immediate use as efficient bookkeeping and automation tools. This seminar will examine ICT impacts on our sense of community, urban planning practice, the meaning of 'place', and the nature of metropolitan governance. In each of the four areas, we will utilize readings, class discussion, guest lectures, and homework exercises to identify and critique key trends, relevant theories, and promising directions for research and professional practice.

Introduction to video editing and interface devices. Explores video as an environmental, editorial and narrative form. Looks at issues of interpretation, meaning, expression and how they relate to historical, social, and cultural issues.

Being able to recognize a problem and design a potential solution is the first step in the development of new and useful products. In this activity, students create devices to get "that pesky itch in the center of your back." Once the idea is thought through, students produce design schematics (sketches). They are given a variety of everyday materials and recyclables, from which they prototype their back-scratching devices.

In the wake of Katrina the entire gulf coast is embroiled in a struggle over what constitutes "appropriate" rebuilding and redevelopment efforts. This practicum will engage students in a set of work groups designed to assist local community based institutions and people in shaping the policy and practices that will guide the redevelopment and rebuilding efforts in the city of New Orleans.