MIT School of Architecture + Planning

Iris Moon, PhD '13, has built a career around the stories objects tell, and the new ones they reveal when you look more closely.

An associate curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Moon completed her doctoral work in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program in MIT Department of Architecture, where she studied two French architects whose designs subtly criticized their patron Napoleon. She credits the experience of studying art within an architecture department for sharpening her ability to position her work within broader discourse.

That instinct carries through everything she does at The Met, from the centimeter-level decisions of how objects are placed in relation to each other, to the feminist reexamination of chinoiserie in her recent loan exhibition Monstrous Beauty, which paired works by contemporary Asian and Asian American women artists alongside historical European decorative objects.

Her 2024 book, Melancholy Wedgwood, published by The MIT Press, takes the same approach to Josiah Wedgwood, reframing the revered figure of English national heritage through the exploitation and colonial trade networks beneath his polished surface. "I'm interested in messy, sticky historical moments," Moon says. "Breaks, ruptures, complications."

🔗 Read more: https://alum.mit.edu/slice/met-curator-tells-new-stories-historical-objects

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | MIT School of Architecture + Planning | MIT Alumni Association

You will never catch Krystal Montgomery, '26, running to class. Literally. She is that fast.

A computer science and engineering major and design minor, Montgomery leaves MIT as a national champion, a software developer bound for Apple, and someone who found that learning to balance athletics and academics made her better at both.

Her track career at MIT was hard-fought. After considering quitting in her sophomore year, she found a new approach centered on sleep, nutrition, and mental toughness that transformed her performance on and off the track. By junior year, she was dropping times. Last spring, she and her teammates won MIT's first NCAA Division III Outdoor National Championship in the 4x400m relay. When she is not competing, her favorite training ground is the Esplanade along the Charles River, where the trees, the water, and the active community atmosphere keep her going.

Her design path ran parallel. After her first class in SA+P's architecture department opened up laser cutting, metalwork, and fabrication, she kept going. She took Marcelo Coelho's 4.043 (Design Studio: Interaction Intelligence) twice, building projects including an AI-powered binocular that lets users view reality through one lens while dialing into speculative visions of the past or future through the other. Her one regret: not discovering the maker spaces sooner.

"My last two years, I chose to focus on memories instead of being stressed over a lot of things," Montgomery says. "I feel like I chose each of the things I did intentionally, so I put my time in things that I'll carry with me past college."

📷 Photos: Maria Iacobo
🔗 Read her story: https://news.mit.edu/2026/designing-career-at-mit-krystal-montgomery-0527

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | MIT School of Architecture + Planning | MIT Department of Architecture

What does it mean to become another version of yourself?

Azra Akšamija, Director of Art, Culture, and Technology program at MIT, was among 30 artists whose work was featured in Persona: Photography and the Re-Imagined Self, presented earlier this year at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Her piece, Hallucinating Traditions (2024), presented animated portraits of Akšamija wearing speculative headpieces generated by AI trained on her own likeness alongside an extensive database of historical and regional costume references. The resulting images fluidly transformed, blending visual elements from multiple cultures and time periods, unsettling fixed ideas of tradition, identity, and adornment.

The portraits function as what Akšamija calls "cultural prototypes," prompting viewers to consider how ideals, values, and aesthetics continually shift, redefining the relationship between past, present, and future.

Persona brought together more than 80 historical and contemporary works from around the world, examining how artists have used photography across time as a tool for self-expression and reinvention, from face paint to artificial intelligence, crafting alter egos shaped by aspiration, social identity, cultural norms, and stereotype.

🔗 Read more: https://act.mit.edu/2026/02/azra-aksamija-in-persona-photography-and-the-re-imagined-self/
📸: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | MIT School of Architecture + Planning | Art, Culture, and Technology program at MIT

At the MIT School of Architecture and Planning's 2026 Advanced Degree Ceremony, Alejandro Aravena asked graduates a question that cut to the heart of their training: will the world tip toward civilization, or barbarism?

Aravena, founder of ELEMENTAL and 2016 Pritzker Prize laureate, drew on his firm's work in social housing, post-earthquake reconstruction, and a hospital for victims of sexual violence in Colombia to make the case for architecture as a fundamentally human discipline. The prefrontal cortex, he told graduates, is what separates us from the law of the jungle. And right now, we are turning backwards.

"Try to use this knowledge and wisdom you have and the training you have received in common interests, and not in just the self," Aravena said. "Let's try to bring back decency. Let's try to bring back kindness. Let's try to bring back honoring the truth."

Appreciating the value of people through belonging — the verb — instead of belongings. Imagine different possibilities. Tell different stories. Class of 2026, let's join forces, and together, make the prefrontal cortex great again.

📷 Photos: Justin Knight

🔗 For more, visit: https://news.mit.edu/2026/alejandro-aravena-sap-commencement-0529

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | MIT School of Architecture + Planning | MIT DUSP | MIT Media Lab | MIT Department of Architecture | MIT Center for Real Estate | Art, Culture, and Technology program at MIT | MIT Morningside Academy for Design

MIT's Class of 2026 gathered on Killian Court this week to celebrate Commencement, with 206 SA+P graduates among the 1,165 undergraduate and 2,817 graduate students receiving MIT diplomas this academic year.

The featured speaker was Lisa Su '90, SM '91, PhD '94, chair and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices and one of the world's leading technology executives, whose career has long been intertwined with MIT. Her message to graduates was direct: "Run toward the hardest problems. Hard problems really teach you what you're capable of."

Su drew on her own MIT experience to make the case for purpose-driven work at a moment when the tools at graduates' disposal have never been more powerful. "The world does not just need people who know how to use powerful tools," she said. "It needs people who know what to use them for. People with a sense of purpose. Judgment. Courage."

MIT President Sally Kornbluth echoed that call in her charge to the graduates, emphasizing the Institute's commitment to excellence, curiosity, and ethical responsibility. "MIT is custom-made for people whose curiosity never sleeps," she said. "Curiosity is also our intellectual rocket fuel, and that fact is enormously important for our society as a whole."

Congratulations to the SA+P Class of 2026.

📷 Photos: Gretchen Ertl, Jake Belcher
🔗 More: https://news.mit.edu/2026/spirited-mit-commencement-ceremony-run-toward-hardest-problems-0528

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | MIT School of Architecture + Planning

Few architects have made a more compelling argument for the social agency of the discipline than Alejandro Aravena.

Aravena, founder and executive director of ELEMENTAL, will deliver the commencement address at the SA+P Advanced Degree Ceremony on May 28. His practice, which he describes as a "Do Tank," has centered social housing, public space, and urban infrastructure, developing novel approaches to community engagement that have shaped how architects and policymakers think about the built environment. Projects range from community-engaged housing in Quinta Monroy to post-earthquake reconstruction in Constitución following Chile's 2010 disaster, to institutional work across the United States, Europe, and the Middle East.

Aravena received the Pritzker Prize in Architecture in 2016, the same year he curated the Venice Architecture Biennale under the title "Reporting from the Front," an exhibition that asked what architecture could contribute to the most pressing challenges facing humanity. He was also the first architect to receive the Gothenburg Prize for Sustainable Development, and currently serves as Chair of the Pritzker Architecture Prize Jury.

📍 Kresge Auditorium, MIT
🗓 May 28, 2026
🔗 Advanced Degree Ceremony info: https://sap.mit.edu/news/advanced-degree-ceremony-0
🔗 More about Alejandro Aravena: https://www.pritzkerprize.com/biography-ale-jan-dro-ara-ve-na

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | MIT School of Architecture + Planning | MIT Department of Architecture

Tod Machover, Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media and Faculty Director of the MIT Media Lab, will receive the George Peabody Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Music and Dance in America, the highest honor bestowed by the Peabody Conservatory.

Machover joins a roster of previous recipients that includes Stevie Wonder, Yo-Yo Ma, Herbie Hancock, Ella Fitzgerald, and Leonard Bernstein.

"Tod Machover's genuinely groundbreaking and prescient work at the intersection of music and technology, along with an overall and broad impact on the American music scene, make him an ideal recipient for the Peabody Medal," said Peabody Institute Dean Fred Bronstein.

Machover is recognized for creating music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries and for developing technologies that expand music's possibilities for everyone. His current projects include The Overstory, an opera based on Richard Powers' Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, set to premiere in spring 2028, and a new work for orchestra and live AI that will be premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in fall 2026.

Machover will also deliver the commencement addresses at the Peabody Conservatory's 2026 Graduation ceremonies on May 20 in Baltimore.

🔗 Read more: https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/tod-machover-to-receive-george-peabody-medal-for-outstanding-contributions-to-music-and-dance-in-america/
📸 Image credit: Natalia Tsarkova

A third of our lives happens in sleep, a state most technology ignores entirely. Adam Haar Horowitz, researcher in the Fluid Interfaces group at the MIT Media Lab, has spent years building tools to work with that space rather than around it.

His practice centers on hypnagogia, the threshold between wakefulness and sleep, where thought becomes associative, fluid, and untethered from logic. Using biosensor-equipped devices, audio cues, and engineered sleep environments, Horowitz and his collaborators have developed ways to detect that state and guide it, transforming sleep into a medium for creativity, research, and artistic exploration.

One of those works, Hotel Room #2: Communal Dreams, is currently on view at the MIT Museum as part of Lighten Up! On Biology and Time, on exhibit through August 2026. Three participants at a time enter a sculptural environment filled with pulses of light, sound, and motion and fall asleep together, turning shared sleep into a form of collective experience where the audience becomes the installation.

The same logic runs through his broader practice: Dormio, a biosensor glove that detects sleep onset and delivers targeted audio cues to shape dream content; Boreal Dreams, a film installation that continues into the viewer's bedroom overnight; and DUST, an app that brings these tools out of the lab and into everyday life.

"Dreams are not noise," Horowitz argues. They are a system that generates thought, processes experience, and produces material the waking mind can use.

📍 Hotel Room #2: Communal Dreams, MIT Museum, through August 2026, as part of Lighten Up! On Biology and Time.

🔗 Learn more: https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/exhibitions/lighten-up-on-biology-and-time

📸 Image credit: Judith Amores, Oscar Rosello, Adam Haar Horowitz, Anna Olivella for the MIT Museum, and Oscar Rosello

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | MIT School of Architecture + Planning

Later this week, MIT hosts a symposium honoring the scholarly legacy of Nasser Rabbat, the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. Over more than 35 years, his work has critically challenged methodologies inherited from the study of Western art and architecture.

Critical Historiography as Method brings together contributors to a Festschrift being organized in Rabbat's honor. The day-long program gathers students, mentees, and close colleagues whose own research reflects the critical and historiographical orientation he has modeled throughout his career, presenting papers organized around four themes: self-reflexivity and the field's future, the city as a scale of inquiry, the reception of art, and new frontiers for a new world.

Contributors include Nancy Demerdash, Talinn Grigor, Heghnar Watenpaugh, Pamela Karimi, and many others. Registration is required. A recording will be made available online in the days following the event.

📍 Dreyfoos Lecture Hall (E14-633), MIT Media Lab
🗓 Saturday, May 23, 2026, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
🔗 Register now: https://sites.mit.edu/festschrift/register/

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | MIT School of Architecture + Planning

When Indian policymakers decided which foreign companies could operate in their country, they were not just running economic calculations. They were making moral judgments.

That is the central argument of a new book by Jason Jackson, associate professor of political economy and urban planning in MIT DUSP. In "Traders, Specculators, and Captains of Industry: How Capitalist Legitimacy Shaped Foreign Investment Policy in India," published by Harvard University Press, Jackson traces how Indian policymakers evaluated firms, both foreign and domestic, through what he calls "moral categories of capitalist legitimacy." Would a company invest in local technology? Provide good jobs? Or would it extract resources and leave little behind?

The book draws on archival research and fieldwork to show how these moral frameworks, rooted in the legacy of colonial-era exploitation, shaped some of India's most consequential economic policy decisions, including the expulsion of Coca-Cola and IBM in the 1970s for failing to comply with technology transfer requirements.

"India is an exemplary case of ways in which moral beliefs shape economic policy decisions," Jackson says. "But at the same time, I think it's representative of a general feature of capitalism."

The book contributes to ongoing debates about economic nationalism, industrial policy, and globalization, and arrives at a moment when governments around the world are once again weighing the costs and benefits of foreign investment.

🔗 More about the book: https://news.mit.edu/2026/how-morality-ethics-shaped-indias-economic-development-0421

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | MIT School of Architecture + Planning