Beijing Urban Design Studio
This MIT OpenCourseWare studio pairs MIT and Tsinghua University architecture and planning students in a joint five-week urban design project in Beijing. Running since 1995, the collaboration has involved nearly 250 students and faculty and won MIT's Irwin Sizer Award for innovation in education. Students spend weeks in residence at Tsinghua, take study tours to relevant sites, and work with the Beijing City Planning Institute as the studio's client on real, often contested urban sites. The OCW materials include studio assignments, project briefs, and site documentation used across the program's runs, giving a picture of how a binational design studio tackles large-scale planning problems in a fast-changing city. There is no certificate, but the course provides a full sense of the studio's structure, deliverables, and collaborative method between the two schools.