School of Architecture and Planning

Metropolis reporter Anthony Paletta details how MIT’s inaugural Future Fest “brought together visionary leaders across design, technology, and art to address the world’s most pressing problems,” and also featured the public debut of the redesigned Metropolitan Warehouse. The festival featured discussions, exhibits and demonstrations on architecture, design and technology, including a new technique that utilizes knitted fibers as a flexible formwork for concrete, a discussion on how AI could be used to increase sustainability in construction and exploration of how “reef legos” can rebuild beaches and combat costal erosion. “There are no shortage of things going wrong in the world, and others likely to follow,” writes Paletta, “but MIT’s Future Fest offered reassuring proof that we’ve not run out of means to address these problems.” 

At the STAT Summit, President Sally Kornbluth joined Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, for a panel moderated by STAT’s Anil Oza. During the conversation, Kornbluth emphasized the importance of curiosity-driven research and education at institutions like MIT, highlighting MIT for America, a new initiative aimed at ensuring learners and educators from Kindergarten through community college across the country have access to STEM education. “We want to both meet people where they are, give their kids the opportunity, and also make them understand us as people who care about their communities,” says Kornbluth.

The newly renovated, historic Metropolitan Warehouse, home to MIT’s School of Architecture + Planning “has become a teaching tool” for students who can look up at features such as the “cutaways of the terra cotta subway arches vaulting across the old building’s ceilings” and “understand what structural engineers were thinking 130 years ago,” writes Bloomberg’s Anthony Flint. “The whole multiyear process for rehabbing the Met has been left delightfully legible.”  

Boston Globe reporter Jon Chesto spotlights the fall fair event held as part of the MIT x GE Vernova Energy & Climate Alliance, during which, GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik shared his enthusiasm for hiring MIT graduates. “Something we talk a lot about inside Vernova is the world is changing very quickly but we need to change quicker and even faster than that so we can lead in the world,” says Strazik. “Over the last year-plus on this campus, we see a lot of opportunities for us to get better through bringing you into the organization.”  

Prof. Pat Pataranutaporn and graduate student Manuel Cherep speak to the Scientific American’s Mary Randolph about companies creating AI agents to assist users in personal tasks. “We have this narrative crisis about AI right now. There’s two opposite visions of the future, and while people worry about AI,” says Pataranutaporn, “there’s this cute AI tool that’s being released.” 

For The Architectural Record, reporter Izzy Kornblatt details how the Metropolitan Warehouse was converted into the MIT School of Architecture + Planning’s signature building, a reimagining that “makes the case for the reconstituting of existing structures as a creative act of design.” Kornblatt notes: “The completion of this project also marks a repositioning of design within both MIT and Cambridge. The building gives the School of Architecture and Planning distinctness—a perceptible structure of its own. Yet one of the project’s aims...is to frame design as a set of practices and techniques that are as relevant for scientists and start-up founders as they are for architects.”   

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, Visiting Scholar Ariel Ekblaw speaks to NBC News about floating, magnetic tiles that could be used to build structures in space. “We could self-assemble these [tiles] on the Moon,” says Ekblaw. “We could make habitats for the Artemis program. Once we have this idea of modular space tiles, there’s so many different things that we can do with self-assembly.”  

MIT researchers have created a microscope that can image electrical activity in neurons across the brain, writes Earth.com’s Eric Ralls. “We can now ask: Which neurons respond first?” says Zeguan Wang, first author on the study. “Where does a sequence begin, and how does activity spread to recruit the rest of the network?” 

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.”