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M.S. Advanced Architectural Design

Overview
The Master of Science degree in Advanced Architectural Design is a three-semester, post-professional program that provides outstanding young professionals—who already hold a Bachelor of Architecture or Master of Architecture—the opportunity to conceptualize design as a critical practice that shapes the world’s technological, relational, and environmental evolutions. The program is viewed as a framework for exploring both academic and professional concerns through a set of inquiries and premises: architecture and its design practices are critical in addressing contemporary challenges; architectural specificity is the result of transdisciplinary cooperation; architecture’s future agency lies in the discipline’s capacity to mobilize realities across different scales and time frames. These ideas are explored through innovations in representational tools and the embrace of new probationary artifacts, inviting students to shift away from the specialized mastery of specific scales towards methods of “transscalarity.” By aligning new models of response to new architectural modes of practice, the Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design program strives to empower graduating students in the face of unknown future scenarios.

The Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design program starts in the summer semester. Considered the core of the program, the summer semester consists of the Advanced Design Studio—offering up to eleven design studios each year—and two required courses that establish the critical and historical coordinates for the program: Transscalarities, that explores how the capacity for architecture to impact societies and ecosystems result in the way design operates ecologically across scales of space and time; and Arguments, which explores contemporary theory in a unique combination of coordinated seminar sessions taught by current Architecture PHDs and guest lectures. All invited speakers are collectively engaging with transdisciplinary ways of addressing climate via situated, material, and social-economic and political means in the making of societies.

In the fall and spring semesters, Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design students are joined with the third-year Master of Architecture students for the Advanced Studios. Like the Master of Architecture curriculum, Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design students must take a minimum of four elective courses in the History and Theory, Visual Studies, and Technology distributions.

The M.S.AAD is a designated STEM program eligible under the CIP (Classification of Instructional Programs) Code 04.0902: Architectural and Building Sciences/Technology. Learn more about STEM designation.
Advanced Design Studio
The Advanced Studios bring together students in the Master of Architecture and Master of Sciences in Advanced Architectural Design programs. These studios, which take place during the fall and spring semesters at the School, have always explored the future of architecture in a diversity of ways. Each studio creates its own world—with its own intersection of social, cultural, formal, material, economic, and environmental concerns—and students have almost 20 worlds to choose from. After selecting a studio, students conduct experiments and develop projects through concepts and massings, programs and forms, drawings and models, materials and atmospheres, metrics and narratives.

Summer 2024 Courses

Course Semester Title Student Work Instructor Syllabus Requirements & Sequence Location & Time Session & Points Call No.
A4402‑1 Summer 2024
Transscalarities: Arenas of Design
Andrés Jaque, Bart-Jan Polman
113 AVERY
F 1 PM - 5 PM (Tutorial: F 10 AM - 12 PM)
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
11763
A4488‑1 Summer 2024
Arguments
Xiaoxi Chen
113 AVERY
W 11:30  AM -1:30 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
11765
A4853‑1 Summer 2024
Advanced Architecture Tutorial
Larissa Belcic, Michelle Farang Shofet
M, W + TH 2 PM - 6 PM
FULL SEMESTER
0 Points
11767
A4853‑2 Summer 2024
Advanced Architecture Tutorial
Nerea Calvillo
M, W + TH 2 PM - 6 PM
FULL SEMESTER
0 Points
11768
A4853‑3 Summer 2024
Advanced Architecture Tutorial
Marco Ferrari , Elise Hunchuck
M, W + TH 2 PM - 6 PM
FULL SEMESTER
0 Points
11769
A4853‑4 Summer 2024
Advanced Architecture Tutorial
Uriel Fogué
M, W + TH 2 PM - 6 PM
FULL SEMESTER
0 Points
11770
A4853‑5 Summer 2024
Advanced Architecture Tutorial
David Eugin Moon
M, W + TH 2 PM - 6 PM
FULL SEMESTER
0 Points
11771
A4853‑6 Summer 2024
Advanced Architecture Tutorial
Dan Wood
M, W + TH 2 PM - 6 PM
FULL SEMESTER
0 Points
11772
A4853‑7 Summer 2024
Advanced Architecture Tutorial
Cruz Garcia, Nathalie Frankowski
M, W + TH 2 PM - 6 PM
FULL SEMESTER
0 Points
11773
A4853‑8 Summer 2024
Advanced Architecture Tutorial
Corneel Cannaerts, Michiel Helbig
M, W + TH 2 PM - 6 PM
FULL SEMESTER
0 Points
11774
A4853‑9 Summer 2024
Advanced Architecture Tutorial
Sebastián Adamo 
M, W + TH 2 PM - 6 PM
FULL SEMESTER
0 Points
11775
A4853‑10 Summer 2024
Advanced Architecture Tutorial
David Barragán
M, W + TH 2 PM - 6 PM
FULL SEMESTER
0 Points
11776
A4853‑11 Summer 2024
Advanced Architecture Tutorial
Laura González Fierro
M, W + TH 2 PM - 6 PM
FULL SEMESTER
0 Points
13776
A6853‑1 Summer 2024
Advanced Architectural Design Studio
Xiaoxi Chen
TBA
FULL SEMESTER
9 Points
11766
A4050‑1 Summer 2024
Arch Elective Internship
Karen Cover
1.5 Points
11755
A6805‑1 Summer 2024
Mapping and Data
5/28 - 7/7
0 Points
11867
A6900 Summer 2024
Research I
Danielle Smoller
2 or 3 Points
11757

Transscalarities:
Arenas of Design

Transscalarities queries the ways in which architectural devices of reference, which have shaped the discourse of the field over the last few decades, and are characterized by their transitioning through spatial, material, and temporal scales. This foundational course explores the agencies architectural devices unfold through transscalar conditions—that is to say, the specific forms of politics that architectural devices perform by participating in diverse dimensional and physical settings; and the way they multiply their reach, influence, and sensitivity by entangling, for instance, the microbiological to the mineral, the atmospherical, the ecosystemic, the genetic, and the planetary. Transscalarities identifies the field of architectural design as a rich ecosystem of alternative, diverse, and confronting methodologies, traditions, and positions.
Operating from both relational and material paradigms, this course characterizes architectural devices as both relational and environmental entities in the way they build up interdependencies with each other and with other entities; and in the way they participate in composites where economies, institutions, societies, biology, ecologies, technologies, normativities, media, environments, aesthetics, and cultures are enacted as intersectional. The architectural devices of reference that will be analyzed throughout the course, both in their embedded characteristics and in their trajectories throughout time, mobilize notions and positions that confront those mobilized by other devices.

Arguments

The Arguments series brings together a diverse group of speakers whose work addresses today’s most pressing challenges⁠—environmental, political, and social and beyond, by interrogating the way architectural devices and architectural practices gain collective relevance and by participating in environmental, technological and representational alliances, solidarities, defiances, disputes and controversies. Organized around a series of invitations to relevant scholars, professionals, artists, journalists or activists—half from the field of architecture, half from non-architectural fields—this course has as its main goal an interrogation of the way architecture is part of the realities that shape the evolution of the world’s societies and ecosystems.

Summer 2023 Arguments speakers included architect Rachaporn Choochuey of all(zone) architects; artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan; architect Junya Ishigami; scholar Shannon Mattern; architects Cruz García and Nathalie Frankowski of WAI Think Tank; environmental scholars Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass; artist Chip Lord of Ant Farm; and architects Fuminori Nousaku and Mio Tsuneyama.

Past Speakers:

Emanuel Admassu
Andreas Angelidakis
Samir Bantal
Daniel Barber
Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine
Neeraj Bhatia
Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen
Keller Easterling
Frida Escobedo
Simone Farresin & Lorenzo Pezzani
Marco Ferrari
Rahia Ghosn & El Hadi Jazairy
Maarten Gielen
Jack Halberstam
Charles Heller
Elise Misao Hunchuck
Joan Jonas
Lydia Kallipoliti
Lucy Kimbell
Ani Liu
Noortje Marres
Henrik Moltke
Vo Trong Nghia
Michael Osman
Laura Poitras
Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe
Amie Siegel
C. Riley Snorton
Cecilia Vicuña
Michael Wang
Ines Weizman
Danielle Wood

AAD Arguments
Rachaporn Choochuey
June 1, 2023
Current Faculty
Michelle Farang Shofet
Laura González Fierro
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