Architecture

Using AI, satellite, and ocean current data, MIT spinout Coastal Assembly constructs artificial reefs designed to help rebuild beaches restore shrinking beaches, writes Fast Company’s Adele Peters. “We take 10 years of data, and we say, where do we predict the critical areas of erosion will be in the coming months to year,” says Prof. Skylar Tibbits, co-founder of Coastal Assembly. “That tells me where the best place is to intervene—what’s the part that is most critical, where we should focus our time, effort, and money.” 

New York Times reporter Quinn Glabicki highlights Coastal Assembly, an MIT spinout that uses AI, satellite and ocean current data to monitor communities threatened by coastal erosion and create underwater structures to regrow beaches at nearly 900 coastal sites. “We can go to any community around the world and understand what has happened and then propose a solution that is very precisely tailored to them,” says Prof. Skylar Tibbits, one of Coastal Assembly’s founders.  

The New York Times’ Christopher Hawthorne highlights the Metropolitan Warehouse as “the new central hub for the School of Architecture and Planning.” Hawthorne notes that by “slicing into the brick exterior of the warehouse a la Gordon Matta-Clark, the architects have added giant windows while hanging new studio spaces from the existing ceiling. This is adaptive reuse with some bite.”  

In a video short, The Boston Globe’s Daniel Kool spotlights “The Living Bucentaur,” a parade of 250 people dressed in repurposed sail cloth to celebrate the opening of the School of Architecture and Plannings’ new home in the Metropolitan Warehouse. “In 1916, when MIT moved from Boston to Cambridge, they built this elaborate barge called Bucentaur. It was white and it had this beautiful decoration with angels and stucco and everyone was wearing costumes and waving tea squares,” says Prof. Azra Aksamija. “This project is in a way a reenactment.”  

MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) Dean Hashim Sarkis speaks to WBZ News Radio’s Emma Friedman about “The Living Bucentaur,” the Sept. 8 procession made up of 250 people, to SA+P’s new home in the redesigned Metropolitan Warehouse. “This is really a very conscious reenactment of the moment that MIT decided to move to Cambridge from Boston,” says Sarkis. “After all, moving into this building is an act of renewal.” 

Priti Paul ‘90, director of Apeejay Surrendra Group, and her sister Priya, chairperson and executive director of Apeejay Surrendra Park Hotels, are honored on Forbes’ list of “Women Hospitality Leaders Who Should’ve Been In The Room,” by Jacques Ledbetter. Paul has led Apeejay’s “real estate and design work and helped shape projects across the family enterprise,” writes Ledbetter. “Together, they [Priti and Priya] represent the ownership, design and operating sides of hospitality in India.”  

Prof. John Fernández joins Edgar B. Herwick, host of GBH’s “The Curiosity Desk,” to discuss Singapore’s success creating sustainable infrastructure, from having two thirds of buildings in Singapore certified green to constructing covered walkways for public spaces, and enhancing biodiversity in the city. “They have been, for many decades, very intent on being a resource efficient country,” says Fernández. “These incremental improvements go a long way towards reducing energy consumption and emissions.”  

MIT researchers have developed a design tool to highlight the environmental factors that can reduce anxiety, homesickness and boredom during long-duration stays in space, writes Earth.com’s Luis Arrais. “Much like how in our homes the arrangement of our furniture, the size of our rooms, the people we live with, even the shelves we use to store our belongings all contribute to our sense of wellbeing,” says graduate student Mich Lin. 

In a Financial Times opinion piece, Prof. Carlo Ratti discusses alternatives to implementing traditional air conditioning systems, which move rather than reduce heat, that could be used in Europe as temperatures continue to rise. “The best answer, then, is a mixed system, co-ordinated in real time, with sensors to track temperature, occupancy and demand, and algorithms deciding when to produce, store and distribute cooling in step with the electricity grid,” writes Ratti. 

The Boston Globe’s Mark Feeney chronicles MIT’s adaptive reuse of the historic Metropolitan Warehouse into the new home of the School of Architecture and Planning. “As spaces, our studios used to be a lot more like labs, but now they are grand and full of light and celebratory in a way that hopefully enables better work,” says Prof. Ana Miljački, Head of the Department of Architecture.  

Dezeen’s Ellen Eberhardt describes how the renovation of the historic Metropolitan Warehouse, the new home of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, maintains “details such as the building's fortress-like corner towers and crenellated corbeled cornices, while punching new windows into its two-foot-thick walls.” Eberhardt highlights how “the project included careful ‘cutting strategies’ and the application of new support systems to shift existing loads within the building to make room for modern academic spaces such as studios and makerspaces.”  

For The Architect’s Newspaper, reporter Fred A. Bernstein details the renovation of the Metropolitan Warehouse, the new home of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, transforming the fortress-like storage warehouse into “light-filled classrooms and studios.” The building is “going to be a living laboratory and a teaching tool for generations of students,” shares Prof. John Ochsendorf. “Twenty years ago, MIT took me inside and asked if I could see a way to reuse the building. And I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ It was hard to imagine it could be as open and light-filled as it is. That took heroics.” 

In a “radical example of adaptive reuse” and a reimagining of a historic Cambridge landmark, MIT has transformed the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse into the new home of the School of Architecture and Planning, bringing together MIT’s architecture and design programs into one connected academic hub, reports Boston Business Journal reporter Maya Shavit. “There will be new installations and new manifestations of our students’ creativity every single week,” explains Prof. John Ochsendorf. “That’s unpredictable and messy, but it’s also part of the fun of being at a place like MIT where people are constantly inventing the future.”

In a Los Angeles Times opinion piece, Prof. Carlo Ratti and contributor Mario Carpo make the case that AI is built to imitate human creativity and is less capable of original design. “In a profession that defines itself through invention, GenAI increasingly is seen less as a creative genius and more as a ‘stochastic parrot’ — a term introduced in 2021 by leading AI researchers to describe a technology that learns to repeat the most likely sequences found in whatever data it’s been shown,” write Ratti and Carpo. 

Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, joins Hakeem Oluseyi, host of GBH’s “Particles of Thought,” to discuss the lab’s work utilizing AI to enhance robots’ ability to move, reason, and act like humans. “The objective is to bring AI’s ability to understand text, images, and other online information to make physical machines intelligent, and if we achieve this then AI will not just reside in our computers—it will drive, it will walk it will fly, it will interact with us in the physical world.”