The ODDS & MODS pedagogy platform offers a multi-year curriculum centered on material circularity. Each year a selected material for reuse will be explored from a variety of perspectives. This enables MIT students to enrich their explorations of material reuse by making connections across conceptually adjacent courses in design, research, computation, and fabrication.
Through the Spring 2024 CASTAWAYS Workshop & Studio, students explored the potentials of reused and surplus bricks.
The ODDS & MODS elective courses began in January 2024 with a skill building IAP workshop. Entitled, TOOLING UP for Material Circularity with ODDS & MODS this two week course enabled students to explore machine learning and AI frameworks for the characterization, design and assembly of geometrically irregular forms.
CASTAWAYS: Experiments in the reuse of brick
Instructor: Prof. Sheila Kennedy, Karl-Johan Soerensen, with support from Prof. Caitlin Mueller
Level: Graduate
Programs: MArch1 and SMArchs Students
Enrollment limit: 15
In this semester-long workshop, students conducted hands-on experiments with CASTAWAYS, a brick industry manufacturing term used to describe discarded, broken and/or undervalued brick stock. In the US alone, excess and waste brick stock of differing sizes and forms, is piled in a vast mass of embodied energy waiting for reuse. Students in the workshop researched brick manufacturing processes, explored aesthetic, environmental and spatial potentials for reused brick, learned from brick masons and explored how machine vision and neural network logics (AI) can enable the design and assembly of non-standardized, geometrically irregular, heterogeneous materials. Students developed critical perspectives and designed and tested physical prototypes that demonstrate new approaches to material reuse in brick.
CASTAWAYS: Experiments in the reuse of brick
Instructors: Prof. Sheila Kennedy, Prof. Caitlin Mueller, Celia Chaussabel
Level: Graduate
Programs: MArch1 and SMArchs Students
Enrollment limit: 12
The CASTAWAYS MA/MX studio and workshop focused on brick material circularity, exploring the design, sourcing, and prototyping of existing, heterogeneous brick ‘waste’ stocks and their reuse in specific economic and cultural contexts. Students engaged in "high" and "low" technologies, projective architectural design, hands-on fabrication, and field trips to brick yards. Together, the studio and workshop provided the technical and critical design thinking tools to enable students to position brick re-use as a disciplinary project for architecture, located within the specific environmental, economic, and cultural contexts of Massachusetts (MA) and Mexico City (MX).
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