Spring 2025

This studio will expand on MUD students' understanding of neighborhood-scaled urban design through the examination of urban systems and systemic processes, focusing on the infrastructures of toxicity and modes of local action against them. The studio is anchored in an ongoing collaboration with North Braddock Residents For Our Future, a grassroots organization which has led the opposition to unconventional gas drilling and environmental injustice in Braddock and North Braddock and surrounding communities.

Commoning the City is a yearlong research-based-design thesis studio focused on social justice and community-led urban transformations, positioning design as an agent of change that can support citizens claiming their Right to the City. 

This seminar investigates the future of cities by focusing on three existential challenges: the escalating environmental crisis, growing social inequity, and technological dislocation. In the face of these wicked problems, we address the role and agency of designers and planners, decision makers and citizens in tackling what Jeremy Rifkin describes as the Third Industrial Revolution and how to lay the foundational infrastructure for an emerging collaborative age.

This course examines the shifting regimes of urban ecology and equips students with skills and core concepts that enable them to lead or contribute to transition through design. The course discusses the systems and the logics that create the patterns and explores how our design process may be different when dealing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of systems design.

The course will introduce students to collecting and processing data acquired from building systems and evaluating their performance. It will discuss the basics about control systems, including both traditional control logics, like rule-based control and model predictive control, and advanced control logics like reinforcement learning based control. Proficiency in Python and maturity in mathematics is required. Knowledge of website design and reinforcement learning is recommended.

This graduate-level course examines the emergence of computation as a pivotal concept in contemporary architecture and design through a selection of design theories and practices responding to the so-called "computer revolution".