MIT School of Architecture and Planning

Louise Yeung, MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning (@mitdusp ) alumna, is New York City's new climate chief, appointed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani (@nycmayor ) in January to lead the Mayor's Office of Climate and Environmental Justice. For Yeung, the climate crisis and the affordability crisis are inseparable. Flooded basements, soaring energy bills, heat-related hospital visits: "The climate crisis is inextricably linked to the affordability crisis," she told The New York Times (@nytimes ). Her agenda spans immediate needs and long-term planning, from protecting rent-regulated apartments already at risk from flooding, to making utility rate cases more transparent and accessible for working New Yorkers, to neighborhood planning workshops that invite communities to shape a shared vision for the city's future. Yeung's first job in New York, in 2016, was managing a multibillion-dollar project to protect Lower Manhattan from coastal flooding. Three mayoral administrations later, it is still years from completion. "Working in climate change always has this tension of urgency and time scale," she says. 📰 Read the full profile in The New York Times at the link in bio. 📷 Vincent Alban / The New York Times @mit @mitsap @mitdusp @nytimes @mitalumni

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

What if the calmness of your mind could become visible through water, light, and vibration?🧘🏽‍♂️🧘🏽‍♀️✨ Grateful to Geshe Tenley from Kurukulla Center for Tibetan Buddhist Studies to be part of this project. #meditation #vibration #mindandmatter #mindfulness #reflectiveart 📸 @yuxiang.step @realxdd44

Beneath the streets of Querétaro, a 16th-century water system has been buried and forgotten for centuries. Invisible Infrastructures, on view at the Regional Museum of Querétaro (@museoregionalqro ) through May 2026, brings it back to the surface. The exhibition is the work of Chucho Ocampo (SMACT '21, @chuchocampo ), whose interdisciplinary research project used Ground Penetrating Radar to map the Acequia Madre, a hydraulic infrastructure that supplied the city with drinking water for hundreds of years before being abandoned and buried beneath the historic city center. Working with dérive lab, the Geosystems Mechanics Laboratory and Rock Physics Laboratory of UNAM's Institute of Geosciences, and the Regional Museum of Querétaro, Ocampo combines geophysical fieldwork, archival research, and sculptural interfaces inspired by ancient measuring instruments to examine what lies beneath our cities and what it tells us about how we manage water today. The ground we walk on is composed of layers of history. This project asks what happens when we look. 📸 Image credit: Chucho Ocampo, Invisible Infrastructures, 2025. Courtesy of the artist. 🔗 Digital interface accessible at the link in bio. @mit @mitsap @artsatmit @actmit @mitalumni

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.

Six technology sectors. One urgent question: Where does the U.S. need to invest to remain competitive, secure, and prosperous? "Priority Technologies: Ensuring U.S. Security and Shared Prosperity" brings together MIT faculty to examine semiconductors, biotechnology, critical minerals, drones, quantum computing, and advanced manufacturing. The book, edited by Elisabeth Reynolds, Professor of the Practice in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning (@mitdusp ), grew out of a seminar she has taught with economist and Nobel laureate Simon Johnson, who wrote the foreword. Contributors include Elsa Olivetti on critical minerals, J. Christopher Love on biomanufacturing, Fiona Murray on drones, and Jesús A. del Alamo on semiconductors, alongside Reynolds on advanced manufacturing and William D. Oliver and Jonathan Ruane on quantum computing. Across each sector, a shared set of challenges emerges: Supply chain vulnerabilities, gaps between U.S. research leadership and domestic manufacturing capacity, and the need for sustained federal investment in the university research ecosystem that has long driven American innovation. "In each of these areas, there are breakthroughs to be had, where the U.S. can leapfrog competitors and gain an advantage," Reynolds says. "These areas are front and center for U.S. national economic and security policy." Published recently by MIT Press (@mitpress ). 🔗 More at the link in bio. @mit @mitsap

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

Robots that can see through walls. Researchers at the MIT Media Lab have developed a new system that uses generative AI to reconstruct hidden 3D objects and entire indoor scenes from reflected wireless signals — the same type used in Wi-Fi. The work, led by Fadel Adib (@fadeladib ), associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Signal Kinetics group (@mit_sk_lab ) in the MIT Media Lab (@mitmedialab ), addresses a longstanding limitation in wireless vision: because signals tend to reflect in a single direction, large portions of a hidden object's surface are effectively invisible to sensors. The new system, called Wave-Former, builds a partial reconstruction from those reflections and uses a specially trained generative AI model to fill in the rest, boosting accuracy by nearly 20 percent over existing approaches. The team also developed an expanded system, called RISE, that reconstructs entire indoor scenes using reflections off humans moving through a room. A single stationary radar captures the signals, with no need for a mobile robot to scan the space, and without the privacy concerns associated with camera-based methods. The applications are wide-ranging: from warehouse robots verifying packed items before shipping, to smart home systems that can locate someone in a room to improve safety and efficiency in human-robot interaction. 🔗 More at the link in bio. @mit @mitsap

Did your invite to the MET Gala get lost in the mail? Don’t worry! Sunday, May 10, is your chance to join us for the MIT Gala—a fashion show of student-created looks! Where fashion meets fabrication, the MIT Gala (@the_mitgala ) returns as a one-of-a-kind celebration of creativity at the intersection of art, science, and design. This event is open to the MIT community, and is sponsored by the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Department of Architecture, and the MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD). 🗓️ Sunday, May 10 | Runway 8–10pm 📍MIT Media Lab, 6th Floor 🎟️ Tickets $8 🔗 Learn more & Register: link in bio (registration requires MIT login) slide 1: The battery-operated Blade Bird designed by Robin Liu and modeled by Miho Koda. 2024 MIT Gala. Image: Daka slide 2: Emily Pan’s rib skirt, modeled by Anna Chan, closely resembles human ribs, with a sternum and spine. 2024 MIT Gala. Image: Michelle Xiang slide 3: Ball gown, modeled by Yihong Amy Chen, presented by Chris Schmidt-Hong on the runway at the 2024 MIT Gala. Image: Michelle Xiang slide 4: Corset designed by Layla Stanton and sleeveless black dress by Aarushi Mehrotra at the 2024 MIT Gala. Image: Michelle Xiang @the_mitgala | @mitsap | @artsatmit

Congratulations to Katerina Cizek on her appointment to Canada’s National Advisory Group on the modernization of the country’s audiovisual sector. At MIT, Cizek is artistic director, research scientist, and co-founder of the Co-Creation Studio at the MIT Open Documentary Lab (@opendoclab , @mitdusp ), where her work explores new forms of documentary storytelling grounded in collaboration with communities. Her practice spans photography, film, and digital media, and focuses on the relationship between media, place, and lived experience. She is currently directing a short social history film on the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse (the “MET”), to be released in February 2027 following the School of Architecture and Planning’s move to the building. “I am honoured by this invitation to consider Future Media in Canada… We do this work at a critical moment globally for media, place and culture in the public interest.” 🔗 More at the link in bio. 📷 Photo: Jamie Hogge and Kat Cizek @mitsap @mitdusp

At 6pm ET on Monday, May 4, the Media Lab’s Opera of the Future group will host “Machine Symphony + After AGI: Two Visions of Creation in the Age of the Machine.” The program brings together works by graduate students Treyden Chiaravalloti and Antonis Christou to present a compelling double bill that considers the same question from distinct perspectives — one shaped by a hand-built orchestra of AI-embedded instruments, the other an original musical set ten years in the future. The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Learn more: https://www.media.mit.edu/events/a-double-bill-provoking-human-ai-creativity-with-hand-built-ai-instruments-and-a-techno-apocalypse-musical-set-ten-years-from-now/ or link in profile.

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