MIT Architecture

A big round of applause for MIT graduate students Coco Allred SMACT ‘26 (@coco_allred ), C Jacob Payne MArch ‘27 (@cjacobpayne ), Jessica Stringham SM ‘26 (@_thisxorthat ), and Harrison White MArch ‘27, who are the 2026 recipients of the Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts! 🥳 Allred designs interactive environments that turn solitary acts like drawing and weaving into collaborative ones, with work featured at the Kaunas Biennale. Payne builds architectural models and culinary devices that draw on overlooked histories, including a model evoking the vanished world of Southern juke joints. Stringham creates real-time visuals through live coding, performing in venues around the world using Murrelet, an open-source framework they built. And White fabricates objects that subvert material expectations, like baseball bats finished in industrial lacquer and chairs made from steel strips destined for kitchen sinks. The winners’ work will be featured in an upcoming Wiesner Student Art Gallery exhibition. 📸 Images courtesy of the artists 🔗 Read more about the winners at the link in bio #artsatmit #thisismit #schnitzer #visualarts #studentart

The 2026 Student Art Awards celebrate nine artists whose work spans lighting design, live coding, fabrication, film scoring, vocal jazz, and more. ✨ Xinyu Xu ‘26 (@xinyuxu_ ) takes home the Louis Sudler Prize for her transformative lighting design in MIT Theater Arts productions. The Laya and Jerome B. Wiesner Student Art Awards go to Clay Lewis ‘26 (@_claylewis_ ), Andrea Marcano-Delgado PhD ‘26 (@andreanmarcano ), Perry Naseck SM ‘25 (@perrynaseck ), and Gloria Zhu ‘26 (@riazh_ ) for their wide-ranging contributions to MIT’s creative life. And the Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts honors Coco Allred SMACT ‘26 (@coco_allred ), C Jacob Payne MArch ‘27 (@cjacobpayne ), Jessica Stringham SM ‘26 (@_thisxorthat ), and Harrison White MArch ‘27 for distinguished bodies of work in visual art, design, and interactive media. 🔗 Read more about all the winners at the link in bio #artsatmit #thisismit #studentart #mitarts #studentartawards

Mona Li @monali_samples (MArch ‘29) Moonscape 4.151 Architecture Design Core Studio I Moonscape proposes a mid-campus landmark for MIT SA+P that serves as an archival annex, exhibition hall, and public interface, presenting the school’s past, present, and future work to both the MIT community and a broader audience. Situated within the courtyard framed by Buildings 1, 3, 5, and 7, the project inserts a suspended volume into MIT’s dense sectional fabric. From the public courtyard entrance, the building appears as a hovering rectangular volume, with light filtering through along its perimeter. The structure is suspended by steel tension cables and anchored by a single entrance column that meets the ground and draws visitors upward into the main volume. Upon entering the courtyard, the cratered ground plane and controlled lighting create an atmosphere reminiscent of a lunar landscape. The formal language draws inspiration from sliced wood sections explored in the concept model: intersecting cylindrical volumes define light-filled program spaces, while the interstitial zones between them accommodate public functions. 📸 Andy Ryan

Thresholds 54: Record officially launches this Friday! The issue invites you into the liminal space between noun and verb, grappling with friction between the record and the act of recording. Our authors cover a wide-range of stories, across scales of time and geography. Come to the Long Lounge at 5:30pm on May 1 to snag a free copy at our launch event! You can also view or purchase the issue online at @mitpress . A massive thank you to the brilliant @ivvjsvc for her graphic design and to all our phenomenal contributors 🌟 We’re so excited to share the issue with you all ♥️ - Hana Meihan Davis @hanstere & Bridget Peak (Co-Editors)

HOOPcycle Milano is a MesoAmerican + contemporary basketball court on wheels designed for and in Italy. Created by architect @segal_rafi and artist @marisa_jahn , @thehoopcycle Milano is stewarded by @corvettostreetbasket and fabricated by @ilvespaio.eu @workbikegs Produced in partnership with the City of Milano (@comune_milano ), HOOPcycle’s premiere at Design Week Milano (Salone) included multiple stops at the city’s castle, a secret location, and at Corvetto’s Piazzale Gabrio Rosa! Photo and video by Marisa Morán Jahn Support from Dole Italia #basketball #bike #publicart

David Chipperfield | Thursday, April 30, 2026, Huntington Hall (10-250) and available to be streamed on YouTube. @david.chipperfield @davidchipperfieldarchitects 
The 31st Pietro Belluschi Lecture. Part of the Spring 2026 MIT Architecture Lecture Series. 
 David Chipperfield studied architecture at the Kingston School of Art and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. He worked for Douglas Stephen, Richard Rogers and Norman Foster before founding his own practice in 1985 and establishing a design methodology that is now used across five offices in London, Berlin, Milan, Shanghai and Santiago de Compostela. He is a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects and an honorary fellow of both the American Institute of Architects and the Bund Deutscher Architekten. Among the accolades he has received are the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, awarded in 2009, and a knighthood for services to architecture in the UK and Germany, awarded in 2010. He has received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for Architecture (2011) and the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association (2013), both given in recognition of a lifetime’s work. David Chipperfield was appointed a member of the Order of the UK’s Companions of Honour in 2021, Commander of Spain’s Orden de Isabel la Católica and member of Germany’s Orden Pour le Mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste in 2022 for his services to architecture internationally. In 2023 he was selected Laureate for the Pritzker Architecture Prize. In 2012 he curated the 13th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale under the title ‘Common Ground. He served as the mentor for architecture from 2016–17 for the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. In 2017 he founded Fundación RIA, a private, non-profit entity that works towards meaningful economic, environmental and cultural development in Galicia, Spain. David Chipperfield has published numerous books and articles, including ‘On Planning – A Thought Experiment’ (2018). He was also the 2020 guest editor of Italian design magazine Domus. 
Lectures are free and open to the public. 📸 Christian Werner

Join us today, April 24, for Architecture and Action, a celebration of two new books by MIT Architecture (@mitarchitecture ) faculty Miho Mazereeuw (@urbanrisklab ) and Rosalyne Shieh (@rfshieh ). The evening will feature short talks and discussion around "Design Before Disaster," (University of Virginia Press) which examines Japan’s culture of preparedness and approaches to designing for future risk, and "Blanking, An Annotated Archive of Projects and Thoughts on Architecture" (co-authored with Troy Schaum, The University of Chicago Press, @uchicagopress ) exploring how ideas are developed, shared, and built. Hosted by the MIT Urban Risk Lab, the event brings together research, practice, and teaching across the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. 📍 MIT Welcome Center (E38-195) 🗓 April 24, 5–8 pm 🔗 RSVP at the link in bio @mit | @mitsap

DEADLINE EXTENDED TO JUNE 1! Call for submissions Thresholds 55: Property Edited by Maia Adele Simon and Hana Nikčević – Property: a thing, often material, that is possessed. Property: an aspect or attribute of that thing. While seemingly concrete, the concept of property is frequently fragmentary, contingent, and ephemeral, premised in an array of theoretical descriptions. Constructed through social relationships and defined through reciprocal accord, ideas of property have been foundational in both western and non-western frameworks of culture and law, implicated in understandings of individual autonomy, rights, and the economy. From the enclosure of land to its representation in painting, from waqf funds to development mechanisms to environmental protection, to labor, protest, and repatriation, imaginaries of property have shaped art and architecture through history and across geographies. Thresholds 55 invites scholarly writing, criticism, and artistic interventions that interrogate these interactions. – Full call for submissions on our website (link in bio) and @e_flux Submission deadline: JUNE 1, 2026 – Graphic design: Willis Kingery

🏃‍♀️🏃‍♂️ As runners take on the Boston Marathon this Monday, what if their shoes could adapt with every step? Researchers at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning (@mitsap ), led by Skylar Tibbits (@skylartibbits ) from the Self-Assembly Lab (@selfassemblylab ), are developing a running shoe midsole that evolves over time using a phenomenon known as granular convection. Inside the shoe, particles of different sizes and stiffness reorganize through the impact of walking and running — softer, larger particles rise to provide cushioning, while smaller, stiffer ones settle below for support. Over the course of use — roughly the length of a marathon — the shoe adjusts to the runner’s movement and force. Unlike traditional footwear, which remains static, this approach allows a single, mass-produced design to adapt to individual performance through use. Good luck to all the runners tomorrow! 🔗 Read Tibbits's interview on MIT News. @mit | @mitarchitecture

Curry J. Hackett | Thursday, April 23, 2026, Long Lounge (7-429) @curryhackett “Other Channels: Imaging Black Life, Land, and Knowledge” The MIT NOMAS Lecture. Part of the Spring 2026 MIT Architecture Lecture Series. This talk asks how pedagogy, speculative fiction, and multimedia art can render what Katherine McKittrick calls a “Black sense of place.” Drawing on his transdisciplinary work and research, Curry J. Hackett reflects on how image-making, sound, archives, and AI might act as channels for narrating and re-presenting Black relationships to territory, history, and possibility. Curry J. Hackett is a transdisciplinary designer, visual artist, and educator exploring Black relationships to land, media, and memory. A Farmville, Virginia native, his work works across scales and mediums to speculate on the aesthetics and ecologies of the American South. Hackett’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and Metropolis, among others. He has exhibited at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, the Architectural Association School of Architecture, and the “Making Home”—Smithsonian Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.Curry holds architecture degrees from Howard University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and currently serves as Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

Rania Ghosn (@_rghosn ) is an associate professor at @mitarchitecture , where she directs the post-professional urbanism program. She is also a partner at @_designearth , an internationally recognized studio practice that deploys the speculative architectural project to make public the climate crisis. She is the co-author of Geographies of Trash (2015), Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (3rd ed. 2022; 2018), The Planet After Geoengineering (2021), and Climate Inheritance (2023). Rania is also a recipient of the United States Artist Fellowship, Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, and Faculty Design Awards. Today on #MadameArchitect, Rania talks to Julia Gamolina (@julia.gamolina ) about research, world-making, a new language for architecture and humor. Link in our bio and stories. Pictured here: 1. Rania Ghosn by M. Scott Brauer. 2. DESIGN EARTH, “Cosmorama,” United States Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale, 2018. Photograph: Tom Harris @tomharrisphotography 3. DESIGN EARTH, “Climate Inheritance,” Bauhaus Museum Dessau, 2021. #architecture #climate #designearth #mitarchitecture

Stone Matter - IAP 2026 This past January, during one of the winter’s biggest storms, two groups of MIT students carved through limestone, alabaster, soapstone, and African wonderstone as part of our IAP workshop. With limited infrastructure at MIT for stone-based work, the workshop was built around direct making, developing material understanding through the hands rather than the screen. Students were left with not only carved objects but a broader sense of stone’s place in architectural and artistic history. Taught by Cheng Qin, MArch ‘26 (@chubby_landscape ) This workshop is supported by CAMIT (@artsatmit ), IAP Mini Teaching Grant, Morningside Academy for Design(@mitdesignacademy ), and the Department of Architecture(@mitsap ).