Building Discourse: Proposition & Proof. MIT Department of Architecture, Master Architecture Thesis 2008-2013

Building Discourse examines the origins and consequences of the thesis project. Featuring twenty-four projects completed between 2008-2013, this volume of Building Discourse draws from the M.Arch degree program at MIT Architecture. "The theses included herein are [...] a collective discursive space framed by the idea that the work may be able to bridge those disciplinary traits that are deemed autonomous with the social, political and economic phenomena that is impacting the world today. [...] What [the students] demonstrate through their projects is the urgency and seriousness with which they consider world transformations-in viewing the environment, the speed of urbanization, protocols of manufacturing, and a range of other themes that are impacting us all today. At the same time, the students have a deep awareness of the artifice of the design project: as research, polemic, and a Petri dish for future intellectual development. The merging of these two interests marks the importance of this educational threshold-a symbolic end of the graduate studies, but in actuality a launching point for future studies. These theses, if measured by the tracks of previous students, will take this next generation beyond the traditional role of the architect, expanding our terrain, and challenging the very cultures that produce our disciplinary closure." - Nader Tehrani, Introduction