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MIT SMArchS Urbanism

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Master of Science in Architecture Studies (SMArchS) in Urbanism at @mitarchitecture @mitsap

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“Geo–Matters” is the Spring 2026 SMArchS Urbanism Lecture Series, organized in collaboration with LCAU.

GEO–MATTERS asks how designers might respond to the earth’s matter, forces and signals? The lecture series attends to matter and material ecologies, including the unruly disturbances intensified by the climate crisis. Here, design works with earth systems, tracking material flows—greenhouse gases, heat, sediment, water, biomass, waste—across the extended territories, from quarries and farms to Arctic coastlines. Media also matters for geo‑design because the globe is already an image, produced through systems that sense, record, and visualize the Earth—satellite tiles, climate‑model outputs, air‑quality dashboards, LiDAR point clouds, GIS layers, and more. Geo–Matters attends thus to geographic situatedness, material ecologies, and imaging systems through which Earth is assembled and geo–design is practiced.

We are pleased to host:
John May (Harvard GSD / Millions) @harvardgsd @millionsarchitecture
Mason White (University of Toronto Daniels / Lateral Office) @uoftdaniels @lateraloffice
Roi Salgueiro (MIT SA+P) @mitdesignacademy
Mae-Ling Lokko (Yale Architecture) @maelokko @yalearchitecture
Jane Hutton (Waterloo Architecture) @waterloo_architecture @janemahhutton

All talks are at noon – 1:00 pm in MIT Architecture Long Lounge (7-429).

Poster: @gabycarucci

@mitarchitecture
@mit_lcau
@mitsap taken in MIT School of Architecture and Planning by @mit_urbanism

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8 months ago

SMArchS Urbanism presents the Spring 2025 Lecture Series, titled “Unworlding Energy,” with the support of the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.

“Unworlding Energy” engages the aspirational “transition” by situating “energy” within the social and environmental systems that have underpinned growth and destruction, to imagine through that other possible values, lives and worlds.

The lectures are held on Mondays and Wednesdays at noon in 7.429 (Long Lounge).
Tickets + Series Info link in bio.
Join us, will you?

Poster: @gabycarucci

@Leighnew #caradaggett #marinaoteroversier @rvtrarchitecture @kathyvelikov @geoffreythun67 @nickpevzner #abbyspinak @cave_bureau @kabage_karanja
@mitsap
@mitarchitecture taken in MIT School of Architecture and Planning by @mit_urbanism

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2 years ago

In the AKPIA Lecture Series, SMArchS Urbanism hosts Civil Architecture for a book talk on Two Thousand Years of Non-Urban History on Monday, September 28, 2026 at 6:00pm in W41-1216, the Sidara Auditorium in MIT SA+P’s newly opened Metropolitan Storage Warehouse.

The book is a primer on the landscapes and environments of the Arabian Peninsula, exploring how architecture and planning existed in the region prior to the discovery of oil. The book is structured around four chapters - desert kites, fish traps, agricultural planning, and seasonality.

Civil Architecture is a cultural practice based between Bahrain and Kuwait. It was founded by Ali Ismail Karimi and Hamed Bukhamseen. The work of Civil asks what it means to produce architecture in a decidedly un-civil time, presenting a new civic character for a global condition and offers alternate futures for the Gulf region.

The book is published by Kaph Books and supported by Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities and Graham Foundation.

📍 134 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

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@grahamfoundation by @mit_urbanism

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a month ago

On the anniversary of September 11, 2001, we honor Bella Carmelita Carriker (M.Arch ‘23) and her situated testimony, rigorous research, and political and ethical persistence to keep looking, even where it hurts.

Her essay, Slow Violence in Post-9/11 New York City, winner of The Avery Review’s 2022 Student Essay Prize, asks us to look beyond the images that came to define the day and toward its long aftermath: toxic exposure, displacement, housing insecurity, unequal recovery, and the communities whose suffering was obscured in the rush to “get back to normal.” Carriker shows how disaster unfolds across time—and how environmental and socioeconomic violence become entangled in the rebuilding of cities.

For work pursued in the SMArchS Urbanism proseminar, this is a vital reminder that research is also a form of responsibility: to attend to what official narratives leave out, to center lived experience, and to ask who is protected, who is displaced, and who is asked to bear the costs of recovery.

A shoutout to The Avery Review for its ongoing commitment to rigorous, critical, and publicly engaged architectural scholarship.

Read Bella’s essay in The Avery Review, Issue 57.
@mitsap
@mitarchitecture
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@bellacarmelitaaa by @mit_urbanism

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a month ago

Congratulations to Rania Ghosn, Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism and Director of SMArchS Urbanism @mit_urbanism), on receiving the Frank E. Perkins Award for Excellence in Graduate Advising.

Awarded by MIT's Graduate Student Council, the prize is named in honor of Frank E. Perkins, Dean of the Graduate School from 1983 to 1995, and is presented to one faculty member from each of MIT's schools in recognition of unbounded compassion and dedication toward graduate students.

Ghosn's teaching this year spanned Contemporary Urbanism Proseminar, Landscapes of Energy, Geo—Design, and MArch Thesis Preparation, reflecting the breadth of her engagement with students across research, design, and urbanism.

📸 Image credit: Rania Ghosn by M. Scott Brauer.

@mit @mitsap @mitarchitecture Portrait of Rania Ghosn standing between two illustrated architectural panels depicting elevated structures. She looks to one side while framed by the artwork, which creates the illusion of an architectural landscape surrounding her. by @mit_urbanism

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3 months ago

Congratulations to MIT Architecture (@mitarchitecture) Associate Professor and SMArchS Urbanism (@mit_urbanism) Director Rania Ghosn (@_rghosn) on receiving Honorable Achievement for Interdisciplinary Climate Change Curriculum in Climate Narratives from the Tulane Center on Climate Change and Urbanism.

Her course, GEO—DESIGN: Storytelling for Earthly Survival, reimagines geodesign through feminist storytelling and speculative design, inviting students to engage with a volatile planet through "sensing, modeling, listening, witnessing, and fabulation."

Organized through planetary portals — including volcanoes, glaciers, coral reefs, forests, and ocean depths — the seminar treats Earth not as a passive backdrop, but as a force that "conditions, interrupts, and exceeds design intention."

The recognition celebrates innovative approaches to climate education and the role of design in imagining new forms of planetary care. Rania has taught a series of experiments in climate pedagogy, beginning with her Fall 2018 course “Earth on Display,” in which they curated an on-site popup exhibition using natural history artifacts and specimens from Harvard's earth sciences museums, recontextualized them through drawing into their past-future sites, to narrate anthropogenic environmental transformations, and to make climate change legible and actionable to public audiences.

🙌 Congratulations, Rania.

📷 Credits: Student work by Angeline Jacques, Darle Shinsato, Kevin Marblestone and Emily Whitbeck, Meng Fu Kuo, Semine Long-Callesen, Joude El-Mabsout and Mengqi He, Jaya Eyzaguirre, Sebastian Kamau and Taesop Shin, Charlie Janson, and Nermine Hassanin.

@mit @mitsap Cutaway illustration reveals an underground quarry with excavation machinery, tunnels, conveyor systems, and transport trucks, exposing the hidden infrastructure of resource extraction. by @mit_urbanism

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4 months ago

Mohamad Nahleh (SMArchS AD ’21) @mohamadn8
The Litani Basin in Lebanon: a metabolic conversion of politics into cancer

4.228 Proseminar in Contemporary Urbanism
Instructor: @_rghosn
Teaching Assistant: @melgts_

An investigation into the Litani Basin as a contested, trans-scalar landscape where politics, infrastructure, ecology, and displacement are metabolized into spatial and bodily violence. Through drawings that move across river, aquifer, field, and settlement, the project plots territory as a living system shaped by extraction, contamination, corruption, and uneven development—forces that register as environmental and bodily harm, and as profoundly unequal conditions of survival. by @mit_urbanism

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5 months ago

A double celebration 🎉🎉
Miho Mazereeuw and Rosalyne Shieh celebrate their recently published books.

Design Before Disaster: Japan’s Culture of Preparedness
A timely guide to how Japan’s culture of bōsai can inspire resilient urban design and empower communities to prepare for disaster. The ethnographic fieldwork and space analysis offer a framework to design for anticipated disasters in effective interventions that empower communities.

Blanking: An Annotated Archive of Projects and Thoughts on Architecture
An intimate look inside the Schaum/Shieh studio, Blanking brings together projects, conversations, and ideas to reveal how architectural thinking is shaped through design, dialogue, and practice.

📅 Friday, April 24, 2026, 5-8pm
📍MIT Welcome Center (E38-195), 292 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142

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@urbanrisklab
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@park_books taken in MIT School of Architecture and Planning by @mit_urbanism

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6 months ago

Habin Park; Recording Banjiha: Tracing Seoul’s Semi-Underground. Thresholds 2026; (54): 130–137.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/THLD.a.221

Thresholds is the annual peer-reviewed journal produced by the MIT Department of Architecture.

Thresholds 54: RECORD considers a record as inheritance; to record is empowerment. Records are not merely collected data; recording erases and instantiates. History exists as a constellation of traces we piece together—ghosts of what came before, haunting the world around—in us as we are in them. Each mine drilled, every foundation laid, even the whispers of pollution left by past empires are blips on a geologic time scale that betray human conquest. Record[ing] mediates between an unpredictable future and the legacy of our past.

Thresholds 54: Record Co-editors
Hana Meihan Davis and Bridget Peak.

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@hanstere taken in MIT School of Architecture and Planning by @mit_urbanism

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6 months ago

Join us for this closing lecture with Jane Mah Hutton on Tuesday, April 21. @janemahhutton

Jane Mah Hutton is a landscape architect, researcher, and Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. Her work follows how building connects material supply chains, labor, and landscapes – from extraction and production to construction, demolition, and reuse. Her book, Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements (Routledge, 2019), traces five landscape materials that ended up in New York City over the past century. She is co-editor of  JAE 79.1 Architecture Beyond Extraction, Landscript 5: Material Culture – Assembling and Disassembling Landscapes (Jovis, 2017), and Wood Urbanism: From the Molecular to the Territorial (Actar, 2020). She also co-founded Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy. Her research has received major recognition, including the EDRA Great Places Book Award, the Olmsted Fellowship, and a fellowship at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

Caroline Murphy joins the conversation as respondent. @mithtc @caro.m.w

🗓️ Tuesday, April 21, 12-1pm
📍 7-429, Long Lounge, MIT Building

“GEO–MATTERS,” asks how designers might respond to the earth’s matter, forces and signals.

The series is organized by Rania Ghosn @_rghosn Director of SMArchS Urbanism, and co-hosted with the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) @mit_lcau

@mitarchitecture
@mitsap
@waterloo_architecture taken in MIT School of Architecture and Planning by @mit_urbanism

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6 months ago

Sasha McKinley @sashamckinlay (MArch’23) Sasha is currently a design researcher at @selfassemblylab

“A Kampung Ontology”
4.s23 Cosmopolitans and Cosmopoliticals
Instructor: Roi Salgueiro Barrio

This project asks what the urban kampung can offer a Jakarta newly compelled to reevaluate its identity after the loss of its capital status. Often excluded from dominant discourses of development and modernity, so-called “informal” kampungs reveal extraordinary spatial, social, and environmental resilience in the face of political exclusion and ecological pressure. In this sense, a kampung ontology becomes not only a critique of the global city, but a proposition for how Jakarta might reengage its environment, its citizens, its nation, and its place in the world. taken in MIT School of Architecture and Planning by @mit_urbanism

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6 months ago

Namhi Kwun, (SMArchS Urb’25) @namnamkwun
Namhin is fiunding partner of @honmiworks

“Rice Fields Beyond Home”
4.228 Contemporary Urbanism Proseminar
Instructor: Mohamad Nahleh @mohamadn8

How did rice become a fundamental geographic and cultural resource? What is the condition of rice farming within today’s socio-economic landscape?
In Gochon, on the western edge of Seoul, rice has been inseparable from the formation of everyday life and collective culture. Rice is not simply a remnant of past culture. It continues to shape contemporary life: gathering families at the dinner table, structuring ritual and community, and carrying meanings that exceed economic measurement. At the same time, rice can be read as a cultural and spatial symbol that resists the market logic of neoliberalism. It helps illuminate new relationships between farmers, urban consumers, and shared ideas of a better life. It exists thus at the dialectics of tradition and modernity, domination and resistance, poverty and abundance, self-reliance and subordination.
As older values are rewired by contemporary society, can cultural continuity still be sustained? In a world increasingly shaped by economic survival, will wheat, imported rice, or junk food replace the cultural meaning of rice in our society? taken in MIT School of Architecture and Planning by @mit_urbanism

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6 months ago