J. Meejin Yoon
(Photo by Richard Howard.)
J. Meejin Yoon has been appointed Head of MIT’s Department of Architecture, beginning July 1, 2014. Widely honored for her work in architecture, design, and education, she is the first woman in this post.
MIT News highlights her teaching innovations:
In 2013, Yoon was presented with the Irwin Sizer Award for the Most Significant Improvement to MIT Education. As director of the undergraduate program in architecture since 2010, she brought an inventiveness to the program in ways that expanded the notion of design and architecture within an institute of technology, according to her nominator Nader Tehrani.
“Meejin’s trajectory at MIT has been an important one,” says Tehrani. “It not only displays the design talent with which she earned her position here to begin with, but also the curiosity to expand and learn from the particular culture that only MIT can offer, a curious blend of the arts and sciences. She not only puts them dead center in her own inventive research, but also translates them into a productive brand of pedagogy.”
Last year Yoon introduced a new course unique to MIT with support from the D’Arbeloff Fund. Co-taught with Neri Oxman at the Media Lab, “Design Across Scales: Integrative Design across Disciplines, Scales and Problem Contexts” explores the reciprocal relationships among design, science and technology. The course brought students together from over a dozen MIT departments to focus on design as a way of looking at the world that promotes the synthesis of knowledge from many different disciplines in order to unlock creative solutions to our most challenging problems.
OCW is proud to showcase this innovative new course by Prof. Yoon, 4.110J Design Across Scales, Disciplines and Problem Contexts, as well as her teaching in three other graduate classes:
- 4.107 MArch Portfolio Seminar
- 4.123 Architectural Design, Level I: Perceptions and Processes
- 4.143 Immaterial Limits: Process and Duration
