GRADUATE
INPROCESS 21 GAUD + PSPD School of Architecture Fall 2014 - Spring 2015
GRADUATE
INPROCESS 21 GAUD + PSPD School of Architecture Fall 2014 - Spring 2015
INPROCESS is the yearly publication of student work from the Pratt Institute School of Architecture Editor: Sandra Berdick + Patrick Gehling Assistant Editor: Olivia Paonita PSPD Archival Coordination: Ash Kadekar Undergraduate Archival Coordination: Shaked Uzrad, Mari Kroin, Russell Low, Jonathon Koelwer, Charles Driesler
Pratt Institute School of Architecture Administration: Thomas Hanrahan, Dean Kurt Everhart, Assistant to the Dean Pamela Gill, Assistant to the Dean
Pratt Institute Administration: Thomas F. Schutte, President, Pratt Institute Mike Pratt, Chair to the Board of Trustees Peter Barna, Provost
Graduate Administration: William Mac Donald, GAUD Chair Philip Parker, Assistant GAUD Chair Erin Murphy + Gloria Nyaega, Assistants to GAUD Chairs
PSPD Administration: John Shapiro, Chair of City and Regional Planning Eric Allison, Coordinator of Historic Preservation Jaime Stein, Coordinator of Environmental Systems Management Harriet Markis, Chair of Construction Management
PCCD Administration: Adam Friedman, Director of Pratt Center for Community Development
Additional Image Credits: Cover Image: Zach Grzybowksi Henry Smith-Miller, critic Interior Cover: Chong Gao David Ruy, critic
The following hardware and software was used for this publication: 3 Apple Mac Pro 3 desktop computers 5 Apple iMac desktop computers Canon EOS 6D camera Adobe Creative Suite CC Hewlett Packard Color LaserJet 5550dn Hewlett Packard Color Laser Jet 6015dn Netgear ReadyNAS Duo 500gb network drive Western Digital 4TB network drive Type Set to font families Interstate and Gotham Printed in Canada
The student staff of InProcess 21 would like to extend a thank you to the Fall 2014 - Spring 2015 student body and professors for their astounding contribution of over 122 gigabytes of work as well as many outstanding models and drawings. Additionally we would like to thank Kurt Everhart and Pamela Gill for their tireless efforts and Thomas Hanrahan, William Mac Donald and Philip Parker for their invaluable input and guidance. And finally, we would like to say farewell to Sandra Berdick and Shaked Uzrad who after many years of exceptional dedication to Archives and InProcess are graduating.
Foreword
005
007 01 9 031 045 057 07 3
Design Studios Semester 1 Semester 2 Thesis Semester 3
083 057 089
Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design
Design Studios Semester 1 Semester 2 Culmination Project Semester 3
Seminars
Core Media Core Elective International Programs
PROGRAMS FOR SUSTAINABLE PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT
093 097 099
101 107 121
Foreword Master of Science in City and Regional Planning Master of Science in Historic Preservation Master of Science in Urban Environmental Systems Management Master of Science in Facilities Management Bachelor of Science in Construction Management International Courses
125 126 127 128 129 130 131
Interdisciplinary Studios
133
RESEARCH
Foreword Bent Out of Shape Green Infrastructure DILE PIPES ECODE Police Design Build Green Week PrattSIDE
COMMUNITY
Community Projects Reclaimed Works Exchanging Contexts SAVI Pratt Center Lectures, School Culture, Events and Exhibitions Faculty
147 149 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 161 163 165 1 67 1 69 1 76
COMMUNITY
Master of Science in Architecture
RESEARCH
Core Design Studios Semester 1 Semester 2 Semester 3 Comprehensive Design Studios Semester 4 Advanced Option Design Studios Semester 5 Semester 6
PSPD
Master of Architecture
GAUD
TABLE OF CONTENTS GRADUATE ARCHITECTURE + URBAN DESIGN
Pratt School of Architecture
DEAN’S FOREWORD This 21st edition of Graduate In Process represents the work of over 450 students in Graduate Architecture and Urban Design and the Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development. Together the GAUD and the PSPD comprise eight graduate programs and the one linked undergraduate program that represent virtually every aspect of the built environment. The GAUD’s three degree programs include the accredited Master of Architecture, the M.S. in Architecture and the M.S. in Architecture and Urban Design. The PSPD is comprised of the accredited M.S. in City and Regional Planning, the M.S. in Facilities Management together with the B.S. in Construction Management, the M.S. in Sustainable Environmental Systems, the M.S. in Historic Preservation and the M.S. in Urban Placemaking Management. All of these programs have unique and important ways of approaching the making of cities and buildings, while sharing the spirit of creativity, collaboration and research that characterizes all of the students and faculty within the School of Architecture. The work of the GAUD is intensely progressive in its approach to design, emphasizing creativity and innovation at every level, from the form of buildings and cities to advanced technological systems in structures, sustainability and building performance. Complementing design and technology is a critical theory curriculum that offers theoretical perspectives on a global scale and exposes students to the most advanced and important thinking in architecture and urban design today. The faculty are composed of designers, theorists and practicing architects and engineers, drawing upon the unparalleled intellectual and professional culture of New York City. In recent years, many of the GAUD faculty have initiated significant research projects within the school, particularly in the areas of computation and fabrication and outreach to communities, including the public schools of New York where GAUD faculty and students give design workshops to young students. The students themselves manage both a community oriented research group entitled PrattsSide and the publication TARP, a theme-based journal of theory and design. At the core of the Master of Architecture program is the Integrative Design Studio where architects and engineers teach teams of students in a collaborative manner that directly reflects the structure of the best professional practices in architecture and engineering. The M.S. programs in architecture and urban design offer students with a professional education the opportunity to expand their understanding of theory and to develop thesis projects based upon their own, unique research. The programs in the PSPD share these qualities of rigor and speculative research, together with a strong commitment to improving society through direct engagement with communities and important professional organizations within respective disciplines. The City and Regional Planning program has a long and distinguished history of directly assisting communities in their planning efforts particularly with respect to social and environmental justice. The Pratt Center grew out of these efforts and is now one the nation’s oldest and most celebrated university-based urban research centers. The two PSPD program based in Manhattan are Facilities Management and Construction Management, and both of these programs are deeply involved with their professional communities. The Construction Management program has initiated an ambitious joint venture with Turner Construction that combines professional internships at Turner with classroom education. The work of the Historic Preservation program demonstrates a similar commitment to professional and community engagement with internships and coursework oriented toward preservation planning and practice. The Sustainable Environmental Systems program has expanded its activities in recent years to include substantive research work on coastal cities and water infrastructure. The newest program in the PSPD is the Urban Placemaking Management program and is one of the first of its kind in this emerging area of urban studies. Last year four of the PSPD programs worked together and sent 40 students to Havana to assess that city’s remarkable progress in preservation, social justice, sustainability and urban placemaking. All of this work and more is represented in this edition of In Process, and like the twenty editions before this one, it is a representation of each program’s mission and ideals. This edition is also a recognition of the high quality of student and faculty work and their deep commitments to their discipline. Most of all, however, this book should be enjoyed as a celebration of another extraordinary year of accomplishments in all of our graduate programs in the School of Architecture. Thomas Hanrahan, Dean
Graduate Architecture and Urban Design
CHAIR’S FOREWORD The Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (GAUD) program at Pratt Institute’s School of Architec-ture is a progressive design environment for advanced architectural research located in New York City. The program proposes speculative debate and experimental architectural production based on a relational construct among theoretical inquiry, computational research, digital design, and techno-logical investigation. To this end, Pratt Institute’s GAUD seeks to formulate a contemporary approach to architecture that is “ecological” in the sense that it provides collective exchanges which are both trans-disciplinary and trans-categorical. This ecological approach encourages feedback relationships among architecture, landscape, urbanism, technology, software programming, industry, manufactur-ing, political agencies, theoretical studies, and other categories and disciplines that are newly emerg-ing in contemporary culture. This approach seeks to productively intensify heterogeneous interests and agencies. In addition, the program sees architectural innovations in both the theory and practice of architecture and the interconnected phenomena out of which it emerges. Recent course at Pratt Institute’s GAUD have investigated such topics as iterative processes, fluid systems, emergent phe-nomena, logics of organization, complex urbanisms, globalization and politics, computational logics, material performance, and speculative fabrication. William J. Mac Donald, Graduate Chair
Chair William Mac Donald
Luis Ramirez
Alexandra Barker, critic
Master of Architecture
The spring context studio highlights issues of context as a topological condition and a programmatic one of circulation and accessibility. Digital techniques are further developed and diagramming becomes more advanced. This year the program was a Montessori school in Downtown Manhattan. In the fall of the second year, studios build in complexity, with a mixed-use housing project located in Soho that investigated the relationship between the site and the complex matrix of multiple programmatic conditions. This studio seeks to apply technical concepts introduced in the material assemblies and environmental controls seminars to the development of building envelopes and environmental systems in the projects.
Alexandra Barker, coordinator
DESIGN STUDIO FACULTY Carlos Arnaiz Alexandra Barker Gisela Baurmann StĂŠphanie Bayard Theoharis David James Garrison Craig Konyk
Carla Leitao Peter Macapia Philip Parker Erich Schoenenberger Maria Sieira Jason Vigneri-Beane
COMMUNITY
The core sequence comprises the first three semesters of the sixsemester program. The first year begins with investigations of material form and conventions of representation that use physical and digital formal manipulations to explore tectonic conditions of structure and envelope and programmatic potentialities. These studies are parlayed into projects exploring program and context that consist of small scale interventions into New York City infrastructural systems. This year the studios designed interventions into the city’s network of urban waterfront transportation.
RESEARCH
Our studio sequence is the fundamental mode of instruction in architecture. Studios work in a variety of media, from physical material explorations to digital modeling, representation, and fabrication. Studio projects cover a range of topics, from explorations of digital and analog representational techniques as generators of new formal and tectonic systems to investigations into issues of contemporary culture and emerging spatial, social, and political constructs.
PSPD
The three-year M. Arch 1 program guides students through an interdisciplinary approach to architectural education to prepare students to become leaders in the professional and academic realms. Students develop a comprehensive intellectual understanding of the emergent conditions of contemporary culture and environment and technical skills that place them at the forefront of the most innovative design practices.
GAUD
CORE DESIGN STUDIO
Master of Architecture | First Semester
009
GAUD CORE DESIGN
East River Ferry Terminal Network Manhattan and Brooklyn, New York The studio introduced the students to concepts, processes, and methodologies that are fundamental to contemporary architectural design. These themes are introduced through a series of physical model studies that investigate the architectonic potentialities of manipulating two dimensional materials to produce studies that transition from planar to volumetric, open to closed, and structure to surface conditions. Students translated these models into parametric digital models that could explore calibrated ranges of tectonic conditions and produced aggregated systems that could be manipulated to respond to imagined external pressures of site and internal programmatic potentialities. Students analyzed the systems they developed and generated graphic notation strategies. In the second half of the semester, students applied these techniques to the development of an intervention into water infrastructure sites along the water’s edge. Boundary conditions in architecture are examined as spatial zones with subdivisions that overlap and change according to daily or seasonal shifts. Students employed the systems they had developed in the material study to develop interventions into the existing urban fabric guided by their initial site and program analysis. The program this year was the design of a ferry terminal for the East River Ferry. The students chose from a number of site options along the East River. Ticket booths and other transportation support spaces as well as other cultural programs were incorporated into a series of infrastructural interventions into the landing sites for the ferry.
Alexandra Barker, critic
a Luis Ramirez b Maraike Crom c Matt Fischer
a b a
c b
a
Master of Architecture | First Semester
011
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Ferry Terminal Schaefer Landing, Brooklyn, NY Introducing the fundamental concepts, processes, and skills required for graduate architectural study is the primary focus of the first-year design studio. Initially students investigate conceptual and spatial relationships through exercises abstracted from the traditional architectural context to provide a field for experimentation. Through a series of non-uniform operations and digital production processes, students develop tridimensional systems which, although scaleless, have specific structural and spatial conditions and correlation to form and performance. Notions of movement and variations are introduced to the systemic organization to provide a method of layering design possibilities. The production protocol becomes an evolutionary process engaged concurrently in the architectural as well as the representational, with contingencies emerging from the constant confrontation between the physical model and the digital manipulations. In the second part of the semester, the studio focuses on the introduction of site and program to the studies, through the design of a small ferry terminal along the East River in New York City. The familiar yet mutable edge conditions of the river, particularly in the context of extreme weather conditions and potential climatic change, becomes a dynamic framework for study and research, focusing on scale, movement and infrastructure. Students develop generative mappings of the adjacencies of physical requirements within the built environment and the ever-present fluid conditions of shifting coastal lines. Earlier abstract explorations enable students to link conceptual ideas and formal studies through architectural design to challenge the traditional notion of place and program. Students integrate additional program to complement the ferry terminal, offering opportunities to develop the fluctuant conditions of the site further.
StĂŠphanie Bayard, critic
a Frederic Bellaloum b Tim Hao Li c Lisa DeJoseph
a
c a
b
b
a
Master of Architecture | First Semester
013
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Ceiling Tactics New York City, NY In this studio section, we undergo the study of material systems that can address the thematic of the given program by studying spatial structures that can mediate the relationships between flow, activity, orientation and overall spatial effects: procuring structures that can create ordering spatial elements for a diverse range of effects. Our studio section works with TENSION structural and formal systems: these study ways of linking spatial quality with site appropriation and programmatic relationships. TENSION structures or CANOPIES are active procurers of opportunities and strategies for continuity and linkages. As well, we study ways in which counter-currents tactics can be integrated to create cross-grain, scale difference and variation in those main over arching systems. The connection of these studies have the ultimate objective of creating various palettes of communication between spaces, focusing on different ways of accessing movements of user’s as they perceive centralization, decentralization, bifurcation, and networking movements.
Carla Leitao, critic
a Carole Zuriek b Dustin Heim c Yangchun Wu
a b
c
a
Master of Architecture | First Semester
015
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Ferry Terminal Brooklyn, NY The relation between architecture and infrastructure, a crucial problem since mass transportation emerged on an industrial and urban scale. Modernism required couplings that did not previously exist. The ferry terminal falls within problems of architecture distributed through infrastructure and infrastructure distributed through a building. This is one element of the research and concerns the building and the city. The second element of research involves the formal and technical specificity of computation. An algorithmic nest-list spatializes a sequence of numbers which is then topologically distributed and graphed; a first layer of complexity. This graph is mapped again into 2D space and given scalar and metric architectural properties, refined into a material module capable of being folded in 3D space; the second layer of complexity. The modules are then studied in combinations of points, edges, and surfaces, diagrammed and catalogued. This points to the fourth layer of complexity, which is the combinatorial possibility where we introduce an algorithm based on cellular automata. We displace the geometrical and topological tradition of the pictorial figuration of architecture and form, while reconstructing the terms of their relation by focusing on point-to-point, edge-to-edge, and plane-to-plane connections and various combinations of those combinations. Thus, it is the ontology of connections that determines the distribution, based on the differences within the module. A fundamental conflict: form versus pattern. The third element of our research which returns us to the problem of the city. Two groups looked at and mapped critical features of two major contemporary socio-political issues of distribution and dislocation; the rise in homeless families in NYC (nearly 45,000 children and adults in families – this figure does not include single adults) and the increasing criminalization of immigration. The homeless family is thus a citizen without a residence; the undocumented or illegal alien is a resident without citizenship. We researched how homeless families spend inordinate amount of time in public transportation between schooling, social services, job placement, and maintenance of family relations. For immigration and deportation, there is a constant shuttling of undocumented alien residents from facility to facility for processing, hearings, and trials. Here the research involved the various legal processes, the federal, state, and municipal entities involved, the communities affected, the juridical and policing strategies, and the locations and duration of detention, incarceration, and deportation. Peter Macapia, critic
a Shantal Chahin b Shane Williams c Alihan Oney
a
a
b b
c
Master of Architecture | First Semester
017
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Curating Water East River, NY As a way into an intensive design ecology the core studio looks at material performance, its tracking, mapping and the ways that these analytics and observations can provoke an agile and attentive architect and architecture. Four primary intertwined researches feed the project – water’s dynamic properties, East River observations – Curated Water, ferry operations, and social events at the river’s edge are each given material evidence in drawing and animations. The studio privileges the back and forth of observation and production as fundamentals in multiple media for architecture. Water in its variation and the many passages in and across it that the ferry takes is a subject, site and material model in the studio. The restless material differences presented by the river, its flows, solidification, cresting, transparency, and reflection are not only source material for recalibrating concepts of order they are the distinctions that the projects curate – frame, combine and show - while providing the ferry’s landing site. This studio works with processes of accumulating vast difference in a thick field of excessive variation – a water surface formed by the multiple currents of water and air, the tide, wind, bottom contour, ship wakes, reflections from shorelines. Reading or simply seeing this surface is an act of intense patience and a recognition that capturing it is an illusive proposition just as gaining an awareness of its complexity and forms of connectedness is necessary. Spatial and material logics are excavated from this field and formed in architectural continuities – figures which are tested, matched, remotivated, and transformed.
Philip Parker, critic
a Suzanne Agbayani b Kebin Tan c Annie Paz d Haley Williams
a
a
b
b
c
c
d
Master of Architecture | Second Semester
019
GAUD CORE DESIGN
LINKAGES // RESILIENCE // Coast Guard South Street, New York As introduction to rule-based design work the studio conducted thread model experiments. Modeled on the research at the Institute of Lightweight Structures under Frei Otto in the 1960-80s, they are an experimental method to materially compute path systems that interpolate between direct way and minimal way systems. In a systematic set up of controlled variations, they arrive at specific linkages -accumulations, bundlings, feltings, crossings, cell formations, knots, etc. The resultant configurations are termed indirect way systems. Their combinatory language identifies an organizational and structural framework that can be applied in the spatial and structural choreography of site and program. Pedagogy and space are closely intertwined in a school proposal. Repetitive elements and substantial scalar changes require in-depth studies of the architectural program. Students developed experimental program models to originate spaces specific to their chosen pedagogy and to expand on the given program interfacing the school with its context. An elementary school at the tip of Manhattan Island presents exceptional opportunities and challenges for urban and architectural design considerations. The particular site on Manhattan’s South Street offers stunning views of NY harbor, Governors Island, Staten Island, the Brooklyn and New Jersey waterfronts, plus Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. The panoramic display of many of New York’s most soughtafter attractions brings with it the exposure to all of the city’s fiercest natural forces - blazing sun, winds, rains, blizzards, and floods. The flat ground of a previously built-upon site conceals a naturally soft boundary between water and land, streetscape and harbor floor. Students were asked to consider and actively engage the site and its forces in their design proposal, and to reconstruct it through a decisive architectural statement.
Gisela Baurmann, critic
a Elena Smirnova b Dillon Sirimongkhon c Kebin Tan
a
a
b
c
c
Master of Architecture | Second Semester
021
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Elementary School Pier 14, Manhattan The goal of the studio was to challenge each student to first think about the subject and the challenges presented by the assigned site while questioning the given program and in so doing redefine it. An additionnal critical goal was for the student to develop a personal design development language which could best express their architectural idea. Hand drawing and the inventive use of digital tools and techniques was encouraged, along with the making of physical models. The studio was not meant to simply be about the design of a school. It was meant to be about the extension of an existing urban condition that mediates between the dynamic urban fabric of the financial district of Manhattan and the turbulance of the East River. We strove to conceive of a new kind of urban place which would not only accomodate the program of an elementary school but would be an experiential destination for visitors and changing demographics of the area.
Theoharis David, critic
a Yangchun Wu b Fernando Taveras c Lunjia Li
a
a
b
b c
b
Master of Architecture | Second Semester
023
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Elementary School Lower Manhattan, NY The studio required the vertical organization of an education program for a math themed elementary school on a highly constrained urban site with significant flooding potential. The interaction of the community, the susceptibility of the ground floor to flooding and the need to reinforce the identity and purpose of the school were guiding considerations. As this was the first applied problem of the studio sequence, the studio emphasized the development of architectural fundamentals. Site, space, sequence, structure, massing, and environmental response were considered individually and as a holistic assembly.
James Garrison, critic
a Valerie Hill b Dustin Heim c Haley Williams
a
c
b
b a
c
Master of Architecture | Second Semester
025
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Social Assemblage: Designing Creative Communities Battery Park, NY If nothing else, an Elementary School is a Creative Community of Learning; an environment for the instillation of values, ideas and social learning. This semester the Studio will treat the design of an Elementary School as a first urban construct or a village. Beginning with the assigned precedents of specific first constructs below, the Studio will propose how common shared spaces and hierarchies of scale and type form into a matrix of learning. Inventive strategies for employing these “learning villages� on the site in Battery Park, the formative site of New Amsterdam and later New York, will create its own center; a focus for kindergarten through sixth grade students to grow, learn and understand how a community functions. In this way the architectural solution is integral to the pedagogical imperatives of Elementary Education.
Craig Konyk, critic
a Lisa DeJoseph b Maria Aurora Bonomi Durer Bacchetti c Patrick Gehling
a
a
b
c
c
Master of Architecture | Second Semester
027
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Escher Fields Lower Manhattan, NY This studio section inquires upon topics of formal, material and programmatic configuration that suggest inspiring forms of programmatic contiguity, adjacency, spill-over and crossover. As well, the studio section does research that is evocative of possible future formal and programmatic connections across school spaces and between the school and surrounding communities by, among other strategies, looking towards the integration of diverse types of speculative/extrapolative concepts and forms of classroom interaction. Programmatically, we look into the variety of activities that happen in classrooms in different schools of thought regarding formative education. The objective here will be to understand how teaching/learning theories have imparted different spatial needs and have forged spatial morphologies. Some of the schools of thought on teaching/learning that students will engage include Montessori, Waldorf, Cognitive approach, Behavioralist, Humanist, Piaget (constructivist), Kolb. As well, we look into the ways in which more recent problematics regarding the early introduction of particular content has had influence in the thinking of classroom space. This includes the integration of learning tools based on digital software, digital displays and virtual learning environments; as well, discussions on teaching how to code digital programs in early education, and the new emphasis on strategies to advance and improve competency and ability in STEM subjects. Formally, the section will experiment with the definition of spatial character by exploring and expanding on techniques of subdivision and compartmentalization into more diverse modalities of ‘connectivity’ and of suggestion of spatial gradient. The goal is to use evolved understandings of strategies of ’connection’ and ‘disconnection’ to rethink how classrooms are spaces that aim to be read in multiple ways regarding programmatic performance.
Carla Leitao, critic
a José Abreu b Maraike Crom c Ok Bun Lee
a
a b
b
c
a
Master of Architecture | Second Semester
029
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Nurture Lower Manhattan, NY A couple of months before this studio began, the Chancellor for New York City schools, Carmen Farinha, gave an impassioned speech about making meals in school a better experience for students. There is the food itself, which every year decreases in sugar and fat and increases in whole grains and veggies. There is also the experience of having a meal, and in six different schools the Department of Education had begun experimenting with alternate models to the usual cafeteria set up (diner style booths, for example). For this studio project, an elementary school in Manhattan, we used school meals as a starting point for design. The cafeteria may be the last place we think of as a learning space, but at least one chancellor thinks it’s worth some design attention. What if we gave priority to the programming and design of how students eat while at school? The focus on food brought with it the integration of a greenhouse in which the school community could grow food they eat, and this in turn to the possible integration of the greenhouse activities into classroom lesson plans (e.g. life cycle of plants). We broke down “lunch” into its component parts: Where is food prepared? Can students participate in its preparation? When is food accessible? Where do students and teachers have their meals? What about the social and learning potential surrounding meals. While this investigation was going on, students also visited and drew plans of an existing New York City school. These two parallel activities, rethinking the school cafeteria and learning the typical organization of a school, led students to confidently rethink the organization of all school spaces, and in the process understand the careful choreography of who is where when that is the typical school day. Students started by abstracting the cafeteria program (place to eat, place to prepare meals), and later continued to evaluate and rewrite the entire school program (where students read, where students write, where teachers present that day’s lessons). In some projects new hybrid programs emerged (for example, discussions of assigned readings during lunch, or collaborative small group work fueled by a healthy snack). And because we had to thoroughly understand the school program in order to experiment with it in this way, we gained a deep understanding of how an elementary school works.
Maria Sieira, critic
a Adam Chernick b Frederic Bellaloum c Xiao Li
a a
b b c
a
Master of Architecture | Third Semester
031
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Precise Hyberbole: Vertical living in Tomorrow’s City Soho, NY Vertical living multiplies the ground, lifting homes into the sky and giving shape to the latent potential of urban density. The studio embraced the promise of the tower in the city, conceiving architectural scenarios through which specific physical relationships enabled new physiological effects. We researched spatial concepts that were related to the idea of compact vertical living. We were interested in the possibility that extreme episodes of aggregation might provide their own new formal strategies to think of urban community. The studio’s work was grounded on the idea of limitless productivity based on a limited spatial compaction. There was a serious optimism at the center of the student work that conceives of the inevitable skirmishes between residents in urban neighborhoods resulting from more urban intensity as a fruitful dynamic. Recent residential development is SOHO has treated verticality as a simple arithmetic with little or no chance of reinventing the experience of dwelling in the city. The studio’s efforts were intended as a direct response to the challenge of designing domestic spaces in an ultra-luxury district with an aggressive real estate culture. The students engaged in a close reading of the structural and circulation constraints endemic to vertical residential buildings as a creative opportunity to generate precise hyperboles. The unit layout and their individual relationship to shared spaces served as a parametric zone of disputation that gave students a useful medium along which to understand the differences between their projects. Over the course of the semester, we became increasingly convinced that truth in architecture could be re-imagined through a willful consideration of how the systems that cohabit a vertical structure can be re-organized in non-linear ways that in turn produce alternative visions for life in the city.
Carlos Arnaiz, critic
a Wayne Erb b Agathe Ceccaldi c Craig Sinclair
a
a
b b
c
a
Master of Architecture | Third Semester
033
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Mixed-Use Housing SoHo, New York City In this housing studio, students research the physical, environmental, social, and cultural conditions of a NYC urban site, one that currently has some sociopolitical import in New York City. It is both a housing studio and an urban context studio and students examine the urban dwelling unit’s contingencies relative to urban systems and infrastructure.
James Garrison, critic
a a Theron Bowers b Gayoung Lee
b
b
a
Master of Architecture | Third Semester
035
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Rich Door | Poor Door SoHo, New York City New York City’s reliance on private development to solve its public housing shortage has produced some curious anomalies. Recently, in the summer of 2014, a luxury condominium in Manhattan was scheduled to open with two very separate and distinct entrances; one for the luxury owners and the other, on a side street, for the below market tenants whose residency allowed a zoning bonus. Thus sprung the awkward situation of a first and second-class of occupants in the building which self-identified solely on income by the choice of the entrance that they were allowed to use. Students were instructed to research the current debate concerning the “Poor Door” controversy and how it relates to affordable housing initiatives in New York City, summarizing the main points in the debate. How did this become an approved policy to encourage developers to create affordable housing in the first place? Students were asked to critique the policy and its implementation. Does the policy have any merit? If not, what is necessary to remediate it? How best to combine Luxury Housing with Affordable Housing? Should Luxury Housing be combined with Affordable Housing? Students were then asked to propose a design that incorporated ways in which both income populations could share the same housing. What role does architecture play in the social life of the city? Can the design of architecture influence social and economic equality while still maintaining the diversity of populations that make New York such a vital place to live?
Craig Konyk, critic
a Robert Meyerson b Nina Djurkovic c Linnéa Moore
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b
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Master of Architecture | Third Semester
037
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Degree of Compactness, Principles and Strategies SoHo, New York City The starting premise of this studio was presented as an investigation in hyper-dense building volume tightly packed within existing Manhattan fabric and the strategies with which these dense volumes can be broken down into their inner Urban Mix Use matrix. With the highly regulated space requirements on housing units and the access thereof, the relationship between perimeter surface and inner mass crystallized as an essential question of the studio. The studio investigated principle of form making in an urban infill lot and subsequent strategies for interior subdivisions to determine the degrees of compactness and hyper density that can be achieved. The resulting space organization required challenging the normative understanding of living space and its supporting infrastructure. The site for this studio was located in the dense urban fabric of SoHo Manhattan where residential real-estate cost have ranked among the highest in the country and commercial high end retail has flourished over the past years. The studios work resulted in a vigorous discussion of future growth potentials of dense urban spaces and the confrontation with vital living qualities associated with such hyper dense conditions. These discussion let to novel solution for Urban Mix Use buildings that aim to alter the normative standards of mix used typologies.
Erich Schoenenberger, critic
a Mark Berlinrut b Lou Wright c CJ Rabey
a b
c a a
b
a
Master of Architecture | Third Semester
039
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Storied Housing SoHo, New York City The etymology of the word “story” confounds both its meanings; it is a short version of “history” that also, as a special use, denoted a tier of painted windows or sculptures (ones representing a historical subject) on the face of a building. This conflation of meaning around the word “story” is productive for this semester’s trope of “storied housing.” We read a short story by Jonathan Lethem, ‘Lostronaut’ (2008), a typical Lethem work in that it uses science fiction to get the reader to see the quotidian and the common place with fresh eyes. For us too, the first task was to see anew what a domestic environment is all about. Lethem’s story is structured as letters from an astronaut, Janice, trapped in space, to her partner, Chase, who is in Manhattan, where they both live. Two things come out of this story that are significant to the program of housing: 1) inside the space capsule environment, the basics of living (eating, sleeping) are exaggerated and abstracted; and 2) the astronaut imagines for herself life in Manhattan in a way that foregrounds all that makes living in Manhattan programmatically intricate (what makes it urban). Following the Lethem model, and as preparation for the project, students wrote a fiction, a letter, from the point of view of a specific character/Manhattan dweller. These fictional letters reveal both program and site for the project. The urban is revealed in the relationship of the character/dweller to the urban context in which the project will be built. What do these characters/dwellers do all day, what places do they frequent and how do they get there? There is the immediate environment of the apartment, yes, but also the entrance from the street, a place to receive mail and deliveries, a place to leave your garbage, a place to leave your bike safely overnight, a place to rehearse your instrument without disturbing your neighbors, a place that can be reserved and used to host a party. Then there is the Manhattan environment, both local (the urban life, the sounds, the smells, the temperature shifts throughout the day and throughout the year) and the greater urban context of New York City. Chinatown with all its particularities is nearby; public transportation makes parks, museums, other neighborhoods accessible to SoHo dwellers, the city a complement to their dwelling units.
Maria Sieira, critic
a Emily Walek b Jason Vayanos c Patrick Toh
a b
a b
c
Master of Architecture | Third Semester
041
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Habitat Soho, NY This mixed-use housing studio was concerned with a broad question of habitat beyond that of dwelling in the strict anthropomorphic sense. It sought to open the boundary of housing to a fluid relationship with the city, its flora, its fauna and its sub-natural environments. Students were asked to consider a building without presuming an envelope that would establish, by default, interior and exterior environments in opposition to each other. Driven at first by digital techniques for recursive, iterative and relational design of units and organizational logics, projects began as open aggregates of dwelling units and exterior programmatic spaces, networks of circulation, structural strategies ranging from the composited to the exoskeletal and frameworks for the cultivation of structured nature to infiltrate the volumetric property within which the project is proposed. Without defaulting to an enveloped building and, in turn, a volumetric maximization of the site, students were able to explore ways in which living units could be condensed in order to further open their projects to daylighting, airflow, rainwater and other environmental phenomena in an effort to reduce mass, glare, heat island effects and problematic runoff patterns. Exploring the notion of a coordinated yet unconsolidated aggregate of housing units provided opportunities for students to imagine gradients and admixtures of insides and outsides, privacy and publicity, individuals and collectives, figurations and abstractions, income levels, construction processes and synthetic ecological environments implanted in a highly urbanized scenario such as SoHO. While the primary program of housing became itself mixed – the mixing of habitats, insides, outsides, life forms and environmental phenomena – students were also asked to mix in alternative programs to support the micro-ecological aspirations of the studio such as micro-farming, spice gardens, aviaries, culinary schools, resource harvesting, oxygen bars and spas. In some cases, projects evolved architectural scenarios in which resources would be looped throughout the spatial and temporal logics of the buildings, sites and inhabitants.
Jason Vigneri-Beane, critic
a Sarah Young b Emma Spilsbury c Matt Dennis d Sandra Berdick
a
b
c
a c
d
c
Master of Architecture | Third Semester
043
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Materials and Assemblies What is architecture made of? How is it documented and built? This course explored critical building concepts of materiality, structure, envelope, environment, life safety and constructability. Precedent and construction documentation studies augmented these discussions and culminated in the design and detailing of a complete exterior wall section, coordinated closely with each student’s design studio project. The primary objective of the course was to teach the student with a comprehensive conceptual knowledge of building systems to use as a foundation for integrating and applying knowledge developed in Environmental Controls, History & Theory, Structures and Computer Media coursework that can then be applied to designing and detailing actual construction documents.
Karen Brandt + Steven Chang + Frank Lupo + Jessica Young, critics a Emma Spilsbury b Theron Bowers c CJ Rabey d Anthony Andrews
a
b
c
d
Agathe Ceccaldi + Kaysey Thomas + Patrick Toh Kutan Ayata, critic
Master of Architecture
DESIGN STUDIO FACULTY Kutan Ayata Alexandra Barker StĂŠphanie Bayard
Jonas Coersmeier Erich Schoenenberger
INTEGRATED BUILDING SYSTEMS FACULTY Meta Brunzema Stuart Bridgett Cristobal Correa Claire Fellman
Sarrah Kahn Bob Kearns Sameer Kumar Bruce Nichol
COMMUNITY
Alexandra Barker, Coordinator
RESEARCH
The projects are developed from extensive site and climate analysis, material research, structural and mechanical system design, and documentation of construction details. This year, the project was to design a supermarket in a range of urban climatic regions and cultural contexts. Studio sections located their projects in El Paso, Texas, Smokey Point, Washington, Miami, Florida, Buffalo, New York, and Elgin, Illinois this year.
PSPD
In the Master of Architecture fourth semester design studio, students undertake the design of a Comprehensive Architectural Project (CAP). Students work in groups with a program of moderate complexity on sites with varying climatic conditions to produce a project with a high degree of technical resolution. To accomplish this, the course is taught concurrently with the Integrated Building Systems seminar (IBS), the culminating course in the technology sequence, where instructors in the disciplines of structural, mechanical, environmental and facade engineering advise students alongside the design instructors in the studio. The students are able to develop a collaborative approach across disciplines and employ system integration strategies at the urban scale.
GAUD
COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN STUDIO
Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester
047
GAUD COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN
Borderline Supermarket El Paso, Texas The project for this studio was a supermarket that would address the needs of a community at the border of two countries with a blend of different cultural practices and traditions. The project site was a block from the Santa Fe Bridge crossing from El Paso,Texas to Mexico in the Chihuahan Desert. The students were to consider it a potential urban strategy to address the serious issues facing the state. Texas has the largest “grocery gap” in the nation, which means it has a lower number of supermarkets per capita than any other state. This shortage of supermarkets creates very real barriers to access of healthy foods, particularly for lower-income Texans. This site is traversed daily by over 14,000 people who travel from their homes in Mexico to work in the US. The studio researched the adaptive characteristics of desert plants and animals as well as traditional desert building construction practices as drivers for their design concepts. One group designed a roof for their building that was inspired by a lizard’s water-channeling skin. Another project separated the program spaces for the food products by their required temperature and humidity and used rammed earth enclosures and perforated canopies to modulate desert temperature differentials. Others designed separate structures for prepared food and raw materials and provided space to grow some of the food on site.
Alexandra Barker, critic a Kealy Vaughn + Christian Porfido + Emily Walek b CJ Rabey + Emma Spilsbury + Wayne Erb c Lou Wright + Leila Thackara + Robert Meyerson
a b
c
a
Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester
049
GAUD COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN
“Objects in mirror are stranger than they appear” Smokey Point, Washington The studio generated proposal for a supermarket above the I-84 Highway north of Seattle, accessed both from north and southbound directions. We explored the potentials of surface resolution in an architectural object at multiple speeds. What could be the possibilities of an architectural character if perception is experienced at very different velocities? How could the definitions of “architectural parts” oscillate between the experience from a speeding car passing by and the experience of an approaching pedestrian? How could we estrange the roadside?
Kutan Ayata, critic a Dillon Keane + Thomas Alia + Yufan Zheng b Sandra Berdick + Jianing Song + Brigitte Ngo c Kaysey Thomas + Agathe Ceccaldi + Patrick Toh
a b c
b c
a
Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester
051
GAUD COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN
A SuperMARKET Miami, Florida The CAP design studio, taught concurrently with the Integrated Building System seminar, emphasizes the relationships between conceptual ideas taught in the Design Studio and the associated technical aspects of the studio projects explored in the seminar. The close relationship between the two classes gives students the opportunity to engage multiple facets of a programmatically complex building, from the primary structural system to the finish materials, fully developing the project to the level of architectural detailing. The site, located along the Miami River between the densely urbanized Brickell neighborhood and Little Havana, traditional home of many Cubans and South Americans, is subject to frequent flooding all year round. The Miami River, heavily used as a boat delivery route for local seafood from the Atlantic, provides a great opportunity for public water access through redevelopment of the river’s edge. The curious juxtaposition of prolific vegetation and dense urban environment becomes an opportunity for multifaceted design mediating between a wild natural places and artificial ground. The diverse population of the neighborhood offers a variety of possibilities for a supermarket while incorporation the farmer market currently in Brickell district, which is relocated on the site. Today, the demand for organic and local produce is expanding as fast as the search for exotic taste and cultural references. This studio proposes to design a combination ecological supermarket and farmer’s market. Concurrently, investigations of the repetitive flooding of the site, sustainable food production, distribution structures and socio-political considerations redefines the traditional organization system.
Stéphanie Bayard, critic a Linnéa Moore + Jason Vayanos + Kirsten Schroeder b Fayad Shahim + Paul Wishinski + Eta Strulowitz c Elyse Handleman + Abby Hancock + Nina Djurkovic
a
b
b
b
c
a
c
Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester
053
GAUD COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN
Food SPAN Erie Canal Harbor, Buffalo NY In a comparative analysis of the historic and current use of natural and man-made waterways, we speculate on a sustainable future of transportation. Shipping on rivers and canals still remains the most energy-efficient way to ship goods, yet the waterways adjacent to our site are mostly used for recreational activities and tourism. However, after decades of decline, commercial shipping has returned to the Erie Canal. At a regional scale we study how many farmers can gain access to our site, how many local farms could potentially be activated. By utilizing the river we aim to exemplify a more sustainable food future. We begin our site study with infrastructural research at multiple scales. Considering the historic and present-day interconnectivity, we study various means of transportation as they pertain to the program of a supermarket, i.e. we focus on the movement of people and food. Scaled drawings are the primary medium of this investigation. Through carefully crafted architectural line art, we process the given source material and arrive at relevant findings for each study. In this way the information is moved into the realm of intentional analysis and design production. We do not assume an objective analysis, but cultivate the author’s intentionality, which gains expression through a deep study of the site. In parallel we develop formal, organizational and structural models, and consider them as three expressions of one integrated building system. We conduct a thorough study of structural system taxonomies, and investigate specific structural hybrids with respect to both, their direct relation to formal and programmatic optimization, as well as their interactive relation to finer tectonic, material and energetic design principles. The method of probing, testing and rewriting serves as an introduction to the Generative Routine, whether it is employed for the making of computational, manual or conceptual models. In principal we do not discriminate between bits and atoms, and we consider digital material and physical material as equally defined by specific properties. We consider the frequent transposition between these materials as the primary space of architectural invention.
Jonas Coersmeier, critic
a Dimitry Zemel + Emma Weiss + Eunmee Hong + Matthew Hallstein b Erika Canas + Gayoung Lee + Rawan Yassin + Raymond Chen
a
a
b b
a b
b
Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester
055
GAUD COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN
Shopper Tactics Elgin. IL “… Shoppers pushing their carts along the edges of the center store, pausing at the edge of each aisle to peer down. Without much to pique their interest, and amid a cacophony of packages and signs, all screaming out for their attention, more people shop these aisles in a highly tactical manner.” Anna Lappé This comprehensive studio set out to challenge the institution of a supermarket in a suburban Chicago setting in a high visibility location adjacent to an interstate highway. American suburbia thrived in the twentieth century with supermarkets and strip malls playing an essential infrastructural role in its success. Recent years have however changed the landscape of shopping. Even though Supermarkets are an essential part of our culture, they are now forced to reinvent themselves as the competition of online shopping and other food delivery services have become increasingly popular. In fact some of the food services conveniently enabling the shopper to order all ingredients including the recipe for a meal with on simple online selection. This creates the pressure for supermarkets to use their brand as a way to stand out and provide the experience to be the destination for shoppers. With this in mind the studio researched successful signature buildings and product branding with the aim to develop a building that is defining and representing its brand through its appearance and performance. The student’s research in programmatic and performative ideas together with material research aimed to produce a material expression allowed for a versatile range of proposals that challenge the notions of the traditional suburban supermarket. The resulting projects shared their ambitious for a new interior organization and simultaneously displayed novel solution for destination buildings.
Erich Schoenenberger, critic a Kesra Mansuri + Yujie Liu + Oscar Chimpana b Jenny Arizala + Sarah Young + Mark Berlinrut c Jeremy Hill + Matt Dennis + Alex Behnke
a b c
c b
c
Sha Sha Qin
Sulan Kolatan, critic
Jason Vigneri-Beane, coordinator
DESIGN STUDIO FACULTY Vito Acconci Meta Brunzema Hina Jamelle Sulan Kolatan Thomas Leeser
Peter Macapia Philip Parker David Ruy Henry Smith-Miller
COMMUNITY
For both sets of students, the option studios are an environment in which the important challenges of advanced studio culture may intensify both collectively and individually emerging positions on contemporary design thinking, intelligence and execution. Accomplished instructors with diverse and progressive interests are invited to lead these intense and exploratory studios that contribute deeply to the evolving identity of the program. Themes explored in the option studios this year included: elegant formations and digital techniques, synthetic ecologies and architectural innovation, new buildings for changing populations, cultural centers and urban transformation, urban and ecological interfaces, provocative relationships between street and tower, architectural protagonists in world-cultural events, the radicalization of scale, vertical farming and systemic design, digital techniques and complex organizational logics.
RESEARCH
The Graduate Architecture and Urban Design program’s option studios create a progressive environment for (upper-level) first-professional and post-professional students to engage in advanced design research through a number of specially formulated themes in contemporary architectural design research, practice and discourse. For first-professional students, they act as a vehicle to push capabilities accrued throughout the core curriculum through advanced design scenarios. They bring post CAP-studio skills into more speculative venues that are further intensified in relation to advanced electives accessible at this point in the program. For post-professional students they are opportunities to confront new territories and emerging questions in architecture culture in the ascent towards a thesis formulation.
PSPD
ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN STUDIO
GAUD
Master of Architecture + Master of Science in Architecture
M. Arch + M.S. Arch
| Fifth + Second Semesters
059
GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN
A Building You Make As You Use It Our semester project is based on lines & shadows…the models for the course, the prototypes, the examples are Giovanni Battista Piranesi & Hugh Ferriss…Picture a world, a universe, that has no illustrations, no likenesses, no images – that is configured only in lines, only shadows, only blurs…These are your building-blocks, your materials, your mortar & pestle, they’re multiplied into particles & pixels…Go re-begin a world (you might be re-re-beginning over & under & in-between & through)…” The drawings of Piranesi and Ferriss hold a number of kindred qualities- from the complex interplay of lightness and darkness composed through a deceivingly simple hatching of lines, to the dissolution of monumental architectural forms into the ephemeral, to the creation of labyrinthine spaces in which interior and exterior experiences become both blurred and reconstructed inversely. Through the adroit deployment of these constituent opposites grow immersive worlds with lives of their own. The challenge of the studio was for the participants to themselves create rich new worlds from a selfidentified collection of elemental parts, whether simply using the line and shadow preferred in the precedents or through a calculated use of sound, particle, projection, or the passage of time.
Vito Acconci, critic
a Daniel Hoch b Seth Embry c Jeff Bonhomme
a
a
b
b
c
M. Arch + M.S. Arch
| Fifth + Second Semesters
061
GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN
Ludic City Brooklyn’s Tech Triangle, NY “Ludic City” is an experimental studio that explores the “Abundance” paradigm within a culture that has been transformed by information technology. In fact, information is the formal abstraction of any content into a symbolically operative format – or digital code. The studio premise is that architectural design is not merely constructed from necessities – and instead it condensates from a wealth of possibilities; and that we should learn to cultivate and actualize these potentialities. Through processes of abstraction – physical, virtual, historical, and mythical materials can come together in new and inventive ways. Our studio explores a new intellectual space for architects – one that focuses on abstracting and articulating an abundance of data on a symbolic substrate, rather than dealing with data “mechanistically”; seeking to “control” or “manage” the issues at hand. Our focus area is Brooklyn’s Tech Triangle – a rapidly transforming area marked by hundreds of new start-up technology companies mixed-in with old-time Brooklyn residents, immigrants and scores of young families. Here, the old material infrastructural order of the city - governed by data-driven empirical approaches - is challenged by the liminality, lightness and playfulness of the digital realm. Things vs. Bits! Planning vs. Play! Representation vs. Storytelling! Scarcity vs. Abundance! To explore the “Abundance” paradigm, each of the students chose an existing non-profit organization – and developed a process for maximizing its evolutionary and adaptive capacity. Rather than designing pre-determined and optimized architectural forms, each student developed spatial platforms that are like “apps” or learning devices. Here, the architecture becomes much like a search engine that lets you interact, sort, and bundle information – and produces unexpected experiences and engagements.
Meta Brunzema, critic a a Ivan Aguirre b Han Saem Lee
b
a a a b b
M. Arch + M.S. Arch
| Fifth + Second Semesters
063
GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN
Elegant Formations: Mixed Use Tower Pudong. Shanghai. China Today’s digital techniques allow us to deal with the full complexity of material systems, by offering the tools to create effects that exceed the sum of their parts. Elegant Formations examines ways in which this can contribute to the formulation of architecture, utilizing generative techniques for the evaluation of growth patterns and their variation in the development of form. The act of designing using digital techniques is reliant on a two-way exchange of information. By allowing for positive feedback, these systems become open to opportunities to incorporate responsiveness, contingency, and the accidental in their generative process. Digital techniques circumvent pre-determined analytical processes that focus on fixed formal issues such as figure/ground, ideal types and static program. Instead, these projects give primacy to FORMations that are in variation, scale-less, accumulative and subject to changes that may shift in part to whole relationships, spatial qualities and color. In addition, projects using digital techniques incorporate program, space, structure, and enclosure into a singular formation that incorporates a range of experiences and formal variations of gradated intensities. The explorations of Elegant Formations seek to push beyond the austerities of digital technique, encouraging concerns for refinement, precision, to unleash a visual intelligence pertinent for architectural design. The most sophisticated of contemporary projects use this intelligence to achieve nuances within the formal, spatial and material variation of projects. The site is on a new economic zone of Pudong in Shanghai, China. As a background-in 1993, the Chinese government decided to set up a Special Economic Zone in Chuansha, creating the Pudong New Area. The western tip of the Pudong district was designated as the Lujiazui Finance and Trade Zone and was proposed to become the new financial hub of modern China. Several landmark buildings were constructed in Lujiazui to raise the image and awareness of the area. These include the Oriental Pearl Tower, the Jin Mao Building, and the supertall Shanghai World Financial Center, the Shanghai Walt Disney Park recently opened in 2016. The goals for each student is to deal with a range of familiar architectural issueshow to turn a corner, how to add to an existing building, vertical circulation and structure for example. The intended result is a project exhibiting innovative architectural features in variation, produced using topological surfaces and component arrangements with different spatial and material qualities contributing to the development of architecture.
Hina Jamelle, critic
a Milad Showkatbakhsh + James Maldonado b Anson Nickel + Dan Tomita c Maria Nikolovski + Ulrika Lindell
a
b
c
c
M. Arch + M.S. Arch
| Fifth + Second Semesters
065
GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN
The Geometry of Green_ Does Resilience have Form? Mutualism is a term often used to denote relationships between biological and ecological systems, for instance between insect species and floral species. Unlike in a symbiosis, the relationship here is not vital for either side. Neither the insect nor the plant depends on this mutualism to live. But they both live better with this relationship than without it. Similarly, architecture, computation and ecology do not need each other to exist. But their existence –and by extension our lives-- can be enhanced through mutualistic strategies among them. This studio will build on the idea that architecture can be more phytological or geological in form, scale and material; link formal/computational research to ecological parameters to adapt and tune our designs; connect formal/computational research to new material research and robotic fabrication in order to test the feasibility of complex forms and ecological viability of new materials; consult ecologists on matters of ecology. What are the implications of plant and geomorphology on resilience? Is nature good at resilience despite or because of the complexity and multi-scalar qualities of its objects, crusts and membranes? Does it matter? How? Is architecture (especially as designed and built currently and throughout the “modernist� period) bad at resilience despite or because of the lack of complexity and multi-scalar qualities of its objects, crusts and membranes? Does it matter? How? A must-have of ecological resilience is bio-diversity. Architecture currently is not in the business of providing habitat. Thus the rapid growth and multiplication of cities around the world is accelerating the decline of global bio-diversity at an alarming rate. What is the relationship between multi-scalar complex forms and habitat? Can architectural design go beyond human habitat? Does it matter? How?
Sulan Kolatan, critic
a Asli Baysan b Esteban Garces c Sha Sha Qin
a
a
b
c
b
M. Arch + M.S. Arch
| Fifth + Second Semesters
067
GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN
Architecture in the Entertainment Society: Architecture as Entertainment We live in an all-encompassing entertainment society where media in all its forms influences and controls our social, political, economic and cultural relationships and interactions with others and our environment. Film, television, the Internet, music, literature, art and architecture all are subjected to various interests of corporate and political culture, ultimately leaving us solely to consume products of a hyper capitalist system with sophisticated strategies of co-opting everything potentially divergent of its ideology. Entertainment has become the modus operandi for everything from apple pie, to soap, to wars, and of course, also to some degree for architecture. If we for a minute assume that resistance to this sophisticated system of absorption is futile, maybe one could imagine a strategy of total and extreme acceptance as the only remaining possibility of opposition: Entertainment as a device for disruption of the status quo. If we look at constructs with the sole purpose to entertain, we have to consider of course amusement parks with their elaborate and extravagant structures, machines and contraptions solely designed for a cheap thrill of a physical sensation of displacement. We also need to look at film and video games with their dis-topic visions of doom, often interspersed with medieval imagery or settings of elaborate architecture in a spectacularly unnatural nature. But all these examples have one thing in common: Either the architecture is left rather intact in its preconceived and overwhelmingly conventional notion of what architecture is or should be, or it is left out all together, resulting simply in an apparatus, a giant machine capable of achieving pleasure through a strong sense of disorientation.
Thomas Leeser, critic
a Monica Wynn b Danica Selem c Justin Koziol
a
b c
b
M. Arch + M.S. Arch
| Fifth + Second Semesters
069
GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN
Glitch During his now famous decent from orbit, astronaut John Glenn and everyone else in mission control were gravely concerned about a warning light that started flashing in the space capsule. The warning light indicated a possible problem with the heat shield. If detached, the capsule would be incinerated during reentry. After a frightening sequence of improvised adjustments, John Glenn safely returned to earth. Later investigations revealed that there was actually nothing wrong with the heat shield—it was the warning system that had mal-functioned. In a later account, Glenn spoke casually about this event as a “glitch” in the system. Because no one at that time knew what he meant by “glitch,” he went on to explain that it was a term they had invented in reference to the various problems they constantly grappled with in the complex electronic systems being designed for the space program and that this particular glitch was due to a small but unexplainable voltage spike in the electronic warning system. It is interesting to note that this is often attributed to be the first recorded use of the word ‘glitch.’ Relative to current technologies, systems designed during the space race were primitive. Though systems have advanced, glitches remain (look up ‘2010 flash crash’ and you’ll see what I mean). Isn’t it interesting how ubiquitous the word ‘glitch’ has become? I think we can safely assume that as long as we have systems, we’ll have glitches. I mention this story and title the studio with this peculiar word because I’m interested in two things with this studio. First, I’m interested in systems. Though as architects we use the word ‘system’ daily (circulation system, structural system, formal system, tectonic system, plumbing system, etc), we seldom pause to consider what a system actually is. Second, and more importantly, I’m interested in why systems inevitably glitch. Though we struggle to eliminate glitches from our systems, it is fascinating to me that many of the most celebrated moments in architectural history often seem to be the result of unexplainable deviations from predictable systems. Why are the exceptions to the rules so poignant?
David Ruy, critic
a Addie Duplisse-Johnson b Matt Boker
a
a
b
b
b
M. Arch + M.S. Arch
| Fifth + Second Semesters
071
GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN
The Physical Domain Brooklyn Navy Yards, NY The Brooklyn Navy Yard has an infamous history, and will be the site for our studio’s design exercise. The Cove, located at the confluence of the sea and the east river, began as a protected channel and soon was developed to host the building and repair of vessels shaped for war. The agrarian topography was soon married to objects whose form was derived by fluid dynamics; the oceanic. From the Navy Yard’s beginning, rapidly evolving scientific discoveries have resulted in remarkable transformations of the known. The purpose of innovation here has also changed, just as chaos theory has succeeded Newtonian. Technological advances in materials science, fabrication and testing lead civilization and the development of its tools to unknown and unanticipated realms. Zooming further and further in, science’s instruments come closer and closer to abstract idea of precision, and discover new structures and interactions that organize the forms we interact with and manipulate. Development, research, and commodification of material science can influence civilization in radical and unpredictable ways: think of the technological revolutions in warfare that brought the Navy Yard into existence. What can architecture’s expertise in logistics and form finding (assemblies and geometries) manage in fact. What sorts of representations result in built form? The Site will be the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a 21st Century drydock (landscape) – earth bound, water bound, or both. The project could manifest the properties of new technologies in the form of development of an intelligent rain-screen, super lightweight mega spans, a portable, or transformer building – re-combinable in the spirit of Cape Canaveral.
Henry Smith-Miller + Michael Licht, critics
a Alex Cornhill b Gee-Ana Sanchez c Thea Sarkissian
a b
a c
b
Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester
073
GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN
JOHN LAUT/LAUTER/LAUTNESS/LAUTNER, ARCH/TECT ‘Reality/Time-less/Life-giving/Free-spaces... Total... Improve... Intangible/Life/Heart/Soul/Spirit/ Freedom/Changing-toinfinity... Valid enduring...Real architecture... Timeless durable... Changing/growing/living...’ ‘Real architecture... Everything in life... Free, enduring spaces... Heart... Soul... Spirit... Infinite...’ ‘Continuity... Beautiful... Idea... Essence...’ ‘Left out of popular-media-made architecture...’ ‘Liberal... New...’ ‘Free, human: Ideas to improve & change... Growing, individual environments... Vary to infinity... With human feelings... & whole being... Requirements/ideals... Take a chance for joy/ inspiration... Intangibles... Live real spaces contribute to civilized life... Beyond status & money...’ ‘A building is worth more or less than more or less than a thousand pictures...’ ‘Future of architecture/bound with life itself/remaining superficial as the non-feeling science & merchandise society dictates/no art...’ ‘With total, human communication we could go to infinity with improving life/giving the real back into life for human beings...’ ‘With infinity of man & nature there is no good/bad/better/ best but choice & development of ideal values...’ ‘Future of architecture/future of civilization/future of peace/ future for human life: Are the same...’ ‘There is too much to say...’ ‘Architecture is no place to be indulging in superficiality…’ all quotes from John Lautner’s book: John Lautner, Architect
Vito Acconci, critic
a a Maria Nikolovski + Danica Selem b Milad Showkatbakhsh c Taylor LaForge
b
a
c
c
Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester
075
GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN
MoUFF Museum of Urban Flora and Fauna Central Park, New York The studio is based on reinterpreting the small museum, a building type housing and exhibiting objects of historical, scientific, artistic, or cultural interest. The site’s location in Central Park is intended to provide typological points of reference such as the Museum of Natural History on one hand, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the other. The Museum Mile extends these references. Furthermore, Central Park is arguably a major habitat within New York City, and raises questions about flora and fauna to be addressed in the work. How do we exhibit and house (once) live things? What are the relationships between live and still things? Can the museum do something other than preserve, reserve and represent? Additional working terms are introduced to provoke thought and inform the design process: aesthetic, synthetic, artificial, artifactual, natured, nurtured, naturalized, natural, biotic, abiotic, phyto, geo, bio, eco, live, still, inert, adaptive, biotic, antibiotic, digital, material, grown, designed, handmade, manufactured, formed, cut printed. Studio Uber-Topic: Grey Space as Green Space If we can turn grey space green by designing the morphomaterial qualities of built space, architectural objects and urban surfaces in such a way that they can operate more like natural systems, we can create the potential of a future urbanism where there is not only more actual green space in cities, but where patches of green/blue infrastructure join synthetic built space to become inextricably linked in a mutualistic mode of super-sized ecosystem services instead of being engaged in a zero-sum-game competition for limited urban terrain as they currently are.
Sulan Kolatan, critic
a Minji Jung b Lauren Miller c ManĂŠ Nalbandyan d Melissa Braxton
a b
b a
c
d
d
Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester
077
GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN
The Tower and the End of Streets: Between Heaven and Hell This studio focused on structural morphology, space, and program and the problematic relation of the tower to the street concerning the changing nature of the city along four major axes of concern. First, structure and space: the use of genetic algorithm, topological optimization, and structural analysis to speculate on different construction and spatial logics in the assembly of buildings. We ask, given the temporal demands for rapidity of construction, and given the possibility of greater sensitivity to the analysis and fabrication of structural parts that can be custom built and intricately modified, how might we change the spatial logic, structural system, and construction logic of the tower, and work more efficiently within dense urban zones? Second, the tower’s literal relation to the street in its urban logic given the anticipated shifts in policies concerning urban density curbing the use of automobiles, technological shifts towards new automobile technologies, the emphasis by local government (globally) to expand public space in relation to the street for tourism and commercial/leisure development. Here we ask: how are these urban changes able to incorporate a new architectural vocabulary at the street level? What happens when street, plaza, and sidewalk are desegregated? Third, the shifts in program and real-estate development, where we look at the changing practices of zoning and investment, the shifts from office tower to residential and mixed use, and the problematic socio-economic aspects of this in the correlation between major development of luxury hi-rises and the shortage of affordable housing as well as the massive (national) growth in homeless families. Here we ask: what kind of fantasy can we pretend to continue to promote in the tower, given these conflicts? Fourth, we look at the geopolitical crises in which the urban street has now become a conflict between two agendas: on the one hand the struggle for democratic action and on the other the urban policies that are trying to domesticate the street as a kind of recreation/leisure motif, which are genetically tied to the reinvention of the street in 19th century around the focus of the city as urban spectacle and the rise of the middle class, leisure and recreation. How do we formally invent while acknowledging conflict as a permanent, even democratic, principle of the city?
Peter Macapia, critic
a a Olivia Vien b Seth Embry
b
b
a
Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester
079
GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN
Estuarium Hudson River, NY If science and art have evolved through tracking and tracing, through the window, lens, microscope and telescope, camera, cinema, video, from enhancing the visual / tactile spectra to articulating the electro/magnetic ones while producing virtual simulations; how is a laboratory of monitoring apparatus distributed across the globe, into its crust and atmosphere and how does this engage a public? What are its architectural as distinct from purely technical possibilities? In what ways do this expansion of techniques of measure and questions of the limits / excess of technology meet in the public space of the River? What other spaces, spatial possibilities and events are afforded by these meetings? Three Parts 1. Liquid Boundaries, Liquid Flow: Lines of Fluid Difference and Continuity Produce the delicate, intricate, temporal, changing traces of boundaries, vectors and fields where water changes direction in flow; changes states among solid, liquid, and gas; and passes in and out of other materials. Develop material exchange, structural and circulatory assemblies with the line dynamics. 2. Monitoring, Measuring, Simulating Apparatus: Phases of the analytical machine. Produce the lines of specific monitoring, measuring simulating apparatus in both physical and biological research. 3. Intensives sites: Hydro – Atmos – Bio Lines Produce traces of biological, hydrological, meteorological variation at the site. Propose an Estuarine Pier at the Hudson River.
Philip Parker, critic a Esteban Garces b Angela Ka Kee Lee c Han Saem Lee d Alex Cornhill e Lindsay Schragen
a b
d c
c e
b
Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester
081
GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN
Collective Urbanism Brooklyn Navy Yards, NY While societies globally are experiencing various stages of transformation, the United States has found itself in a seemingly unshakable malaise since the beginning of the twenty first century. Mired in economic inequality, wage stagnation, housing crises, social disinvestment, crippling debt, and sclerotic national government, societies have increasingly looked to their cities for corrective action. A prime example is the recent election of progressive mayoral administrations in New York; that have made the creation of affordable housing and workspace central to their restorative agenda. The agenda for this studio is to produce implementable design proposals for a specific site in New York City, with emphasis on envisioning new models of collective living and working – Collective Urbanism – that is economically accessible for current and future residents. Students will speculate through large-scale or small-scale interventions that may enable new forms of energy production, public policy, engineering, transportation or other drivers to create new platforms for advanced urbanism. Students will begin the studio working with a prominent site on the Brooklyn waterfront, the Brooklyn Navy Yard upriver from DUMBO and Brooklyn Bridge Park where new housing, open space, and infrastructure are emergent. Each student will develop and envision these new forms of Collective Urbanism. Technological advances in materials science, fabrication and testing lead civilization and the development of its tools to unknown and unanticipated realms. Science’s instruments come closer and closer to abstract idea of precision, and discover new structures and interactions that organize the forms we interact with and manipulate. Development, research, and commodification of material science can influence civilization in radical and unpredictable ways: think of the technological revolutions in warfare that brought the Navy Yard into existence. What can architecture’s expertise in logistics and form finding (assemblies and geometries) manage in fact. What sorts of representations result in built form? The goal of the studio will be to propose new models for form, (policy, and economies) that together produce Collective Urbanism. Henry Smith-Miller + Michael Licht, critics
a Zach Grzybowksi b Ulrika Lindell c Chang Cheng
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c
b
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Pablo Escudero
Jason Vigneri-Beane + Thomas Leeser, critics
Master of Science in Architecture GAUD
The three-semester Master of Science, Architecture Program is an investigative, rigorous, and progressive environment for experimentation and research into advanced architectural design and discourse. Option studios, seminars, a range of electives and a thesis sequence are opportunities for both individual and collective work on themes/practices that examine existing assumptions and potential futures in architecture. Studios and courses look closely at emergent forms of organization, computational techniques, and parametric design; networks, flows, and collective intelligence; complexity in urban, architectural, and institutional systems; innovative building systems, advanced materials, and digital fabrication techniques; trans-disciplinary thinking from scientific models to new forms of media; scenarioplanning and near-future thinking; multi-dimensional agency in architecture and urbanism; globalization, ecology and far-from equilibrium thinking.
PSPD
The development of architectural innovation through “preresponsive� projects intended to explore unknowns and uncertainties while positioning design-research in relation to complexity, dynamics, connectivity, infrastructural change, ecological intensification, spatial transformation, programmatic speculation, advanced materiality, parametric logics, rapid techno-social change, and the creative destruction of architectural norms at multiple scales.
Jason Vigneri-Beane, Coordinator
DESIGN STUDIO FACULTY Thomas Leeser William Mac Donald
Philip Parker Jason Vigneri-Beane
COMMUNITY
This year’s thesis sequence developed speculative projects around the question of automation. A sense of speculative realism (as opposed to sensationalized futuring) provided a framework for collective research to be mined and expanded in the formulation of thesis projects that might ultimately propose architectural structures that are evolved, differentiated, intelligent and inflective of future-potential logics of architectural organization, production and performance. In thesis research students developed projects that explored a wide range of issues in the context of automation including algorithmic thinking, architectural robotics, procedural construction, responsive systems, systemic behavior and intelligent structures.
RESEARCH
DESIGN STUDIOS
Master of Science in Architecture| First Semester
085
GAUD DESIGN STUDIOS
Elementary/Intermediate School with Public Library Battery Park, New York City, NY The project is conceived to challenge anachronistic architectural and planning ideas of process and production, which result in ‘singular’ unique design solutions ‘freeze framed’ in time. This new method and approach is to be understood, in contrast, to more normative design methodologies, which seek to rely on the use of icon, symbol, narrative, and representation of ideas in architectural terms. Our alternative polemic will be to ‘yield’ the architecture of an elementary school, with a new means using of generative, open-ended systemic design techniques as applied to designing progressive educational environments. The school can be thought of as a responsive ‘hypernetwork’ of evolving relationships, evolutionary architecture. Our method of approaching the E Scapes Elementary School Project, as a systemic hybrid, is derived from a series of theoretical articles that Sulan Kolatan and I wrote on Network Theory and its implications in architecture, urbanism and landscape. The first version of ‘Networkedness_MUTEN’ [Mutually Environmental Systems] is a lecture given at the Pompidou Center in Paris. An article is titled ‘Impact of Network Logic on Space and its Making’ by Kolatan, S. and MacDonald, W. from the book ‘Disappearing Architecture’. Important in this excerpt is the question “What is ‘natural’?….. The meaning here is that …’everything is becoming more ‘naturalized’…. more to the point, perhaps, our studio will attempt to show that it is possible to design processes and architecture that together exhibit the qualities and behaviors of ‘naturalized systems.’ Our focus will be to interpret and generate emergent qualitative spatial/time fields mapping relationships between various cultural realms [education, domestic, work, leisure, tourism, etc.], that currently and projectively, inhabit our range of specific sites. These fields will be mined for latent strategic and tactical operations. The school will be interpreted as a field of operations and processes which will be invested into the spatio/time/form/matrix of urbanity. The intent is to create a ‘finely tuned instrument of generative hybrid processes’ based on the premise of emergent fields that are continually able to provide criteria so as to afford a range of architectural result with time. The school delineates an ideal opportunity for this investigation as its success is dependent on its ability to adapt to an ever-changing ‘modus operandi’ of learning. We will be exploring specific organizational techniques through the ‘lens’ of network theories and their deployment in the design of architecture and landscape in order to derive innovative educational environments. Pedagogically, the studio will use ‘minimal surface geometry’ as a means of exploring ideas of space, volume, form, material and incremental aggregate systems, simultaneously. Ideas of program will be addressed in order to develop interpretative ‘affordances’ of range of use rather than simple notions of functional and quantitative assignment.
William Mac Donald, critic
a Maria Sol Echeverri b Nada Asadullah c Cansu Demiral d Ugur Imamoglu
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c
b
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Master of Science in Architecture| First Semester
087
GAUD DESIGN STUDIOS
Estuarium Hudson River Park between pier 40 and Battery Park The recognition that ecosystems span across the metropolis entwining themselves with estuaries, building, and urban infrastructure establishes the possibility – necessity - of other architectures where the many terms of these meetings are reconfigured. The estuarine water’s measurable traces, its tidal movements and flows over effecting surfaces, provide variable forms of dynamic, mixing material organization that may be cast into vital roles with other living material patterns. “In biology, species are an example of strata, particularly if selection pressures have operated unobstructedly for long periods of time allowing the homogenization of the species gene pool. On the other hand, ecosystems are examples of self-consistent aggregates, since they link together into complex food webs a wide variety of animals and plants, without reducing their heterogeneity.” Manuel Delanda. The tidal estuary in the metropolis and its estuarine life are not a frontier or a next wave as much as they are already a site of complex meetings among diverse populations including human and many others. During its geological and human scaled histories, this zone has been diverse in its material, biota, and form however in its current state the territory has a remarkably limited even monolithic meeting of land and water and a limited range of boundary conditions among its organisms. The project is set out to provide more and more varied forms of habitat and meeting; it is a way of testing the permeability of architectural membranes. When species meet, architecture has historically concentrated on the human collection, domestication, husbandry, companionship, even instrumentality of other species when not finding them as a model of excess – wildness. This meeting is implicated in the housing and containment of other plants and animals; in twins of destruction and preservation; in the tracking and miming of their movements; and the their hunting and gathering. It has seen animals and animal traits as surrogates; found magical and totemic powers in their physical abilities and appearance and built models of change – animation and transformation based on their actions. More recently the meetings themselves articulated The project is set out to provide more and more varied forms of habitat and meeting; it is a way of testing the permeability of architectural membranes.
Philip Parker, critic
a Luis Alfonso King b Juan Pablo Gaitan c Ricardo Diaz
a b a
b c
b
Master of Science in Architecture | Third Semester Thesis
Temporary Automata “Temporary Automata” is a solution for designing a flexible apparatus which tries to escape the stage of final actualization of the form and function by moving between virtual and actual properties of the machine. In this case, it uses an “exoskeleton” structure which can expand and move. It also has “exo-organ” system in which infrastructures and other equipment for the machine can be attached and detached easily. The apparatus can be seen as any form of architecture in which the body of the object is considered as machine that performs a variety of tasks. Some of these results can be occupied by human beings while the rest remain some machines which handle performing specific tasks.
Farhad Binazedeh with Jason Vigneri-Beane + Thomas Leeser, critics
089
GAUD THESIS DESIGN STUDIO
Produce Berries Top of the Highways, NYC This research work is focused on the producing of berries top of the highways from the point of view of waste minimization and environmental best-practice technologies and automation. Environmental best-practice technologies aim to satisfy consumer demands, while the production process is optimized in order to automate the system and use spaces which are efficient. The optimization includes the reduced waste berries by decreasing the distance from production to consumers, less energy and water use by hydroponic system, produce more fresh and organic berries, while, as a result less process waste and effluent is generated. Our proposal is develop highways infrastructures to be more efficient to use as a land to some metropolitan cities like New York City; some functions included producing berries in BQE (Brooklyn Queen Expressway), entertainment spaces in top of the Gowanus Expressway or the other highways to use another functions. For the future densely populated city of New York development of utilization of top of the highways methods are effective, economic, and environmentally friendly.�
Faranak E. Farahani with Jason Vigneri-Beane + Thomas Leeser critics
Master of Science in Architecture | Third Semester Thesis
Soft Architecture What informs the form? In the last half century the “user” has become the unit of measurement for designers. The criteria to evaluate success it is related with the amount of users that a system has, and the parameters which command design, are the parameters dictated by the “user” of the system. But what about the systems that interact with those systems? Are the user’s desire and behaviour are the only parameters to take into account when designing? Are functionality, comfort and convolution of form the primordial and sometimes the only information to address? How deep are we able to see inside the complexity of the relationships that we depend upon our ecosystem? In this sense “user centric approach” obscures complex information from the ecosystems in which we are embedded. Epigenesis, a term addressed by C. H. Waddington, gives us an insight on how form could emerge gradually, sensitive and dynamic out of a homogenous environment loaded with complex and vital information. The form, in epigenetics, is not fixed from the beginning, some general features are determined by genes, but its specific ones are contingent on the surrounding circumstances and environmental conditions. This exploration uses programming – in the software meaning– to develop a code, a genetic anchor that produces effects under specific conditions. In other words, there is not a preformed object, but there is a code triggered by certain real time events and circumstances. The system is thus adaptable as the information is continuously updated through feedback loops that consequently change the effect over form. In order to perform the exercise we have “planted” three cloned artefacts: (X), (Y), and (Z), in public sites in New York. In spite of the fact that the code is genetically identical for the three artefacts, in the years to come they will render the social and environmental differences to which they are exposed. The artefacts, through their slow and constant growth will record in its shape the specific contingent information that each site provides.
Pablo Escudero with Jason Vigneri Beane + Thomas Leeser, critics
091
GAUD THESIS DESIGN STUDIO
FRAMEWORK: Self-Organizing Maps in Architecture Williamsburg, Brooklyn Autonomous associative networks, such as Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs), can act as abstract candidates for program simulation experiments. The properties of SOMs allow us to introduce a whole new area of analysis and conception of a building and its components. Through SOMs, rather than looking for optimization and knowing the outcome (logistic networks), we can find new relationships between space, materiality, function and activity. This will allow us to move away from preconceived and deterministic notions of the architectural program of a building into the development of proactive thinking that can be both unspecific and concrete at the same time. Through understanding the way in which neural networks work, the Kohonen Algorithm and SOMs are able to explore a new way to think about architectural design and a new method to facilitate architects in processing multiple hierarchic information through design. This would entail setting up a series of experiments to test the new method, applying SOM software, and simulating and collecting data to further prove this new method is reliable and practicable. A set of constraint have been set up to regulate it making sure the experimentation is specific and precise. Due to their ability to create associations between data input, SOMs allow design to become frameworks, rather than buildings. A framework can be understood as a layered structure indicating what kind of programs can or should be built and how they would interrelate. It is this characteristic which show the potential of SOMs in architecture and the repercussions in the built context. By using this method, architecture design will not be constrained by information and other factors which are out of the range of human thought; SOM can fully take over the data processing and self-organizing. Architecture will not be the space that is manipulated by designers, it will adapt and bring multiple complex information from the users and reorganize it by the way they act, but a new pattern will be generated to suit the user in multiple levels. Of course, the data input are also regulated by certain rules to be sure the information that is applied is effective and specific.
Ivan Aguirre with Jason Vigneri-Beane + Thomas Leeser, critics
Juan Cuock
Kutan Ayata, critic
DESIGN STUDIOS
David Ruy, Coordinator
DESIGN STUDIO FACULTY Kutan Ayata Ferda Kolatan David Ruy
COMMUNITY
Intensive and ambitious in its scope, the program is structured around a single urban design project that is continuously developed by each student across three studio semesters. Each studio semester has a specific focus that is supplemented by advanced seminar topics in histories of urban design, urban planning and zoning policies, GIS, and digital design technologies. This year, the program continued its speculative investigation of producing new land masses within the New York City estuary. Students examined the spectacular and problematic opportunities that come with creating new land where none existed before. The geoengineering scenarios considered how this problem might articulate a new kind of architectural ground leading to new urban typologies. Projects developed extensions of this premise into new real estate economies, new infrastructures, new zoning logics, and perhaps mostly importantly, new experiences. Examining as a precedent, the astonishingly artificial geology of New York City itself, students were asked to consider the profound and paradoxical coherence of a city that is always changing.
RESEARCH
As of 2010, for the first time in human history, the majority of the global population now lives in cities. As noted by the World Health Organization, seven out of ten people will be living in cities by the year 2050. Given the astonishing scale at which urbanization is taking place today, how we are designing our cities is becoming synonymous with how we are designing civilization itself. Mirroring the complexity of the contemporary situation, the program is itself highly international. From all corners of the world, students converge on this program in New York City, a city that remains one of the great laboratories for urban thought and innovation.
PSPD
The Graduate Architecture and Urban Design program is a unique three semester program for students that have already completed a professional degree in architecture. Preparing students to take leadership positions in the 21st century, the program takes into consideration the most urgent questions confronting the design of cities today. Guided by leading design professionals and scholars, students develop powerful contemporary design techniques and a sophisticated conceptual outlook in order to advance new strategies and new possibilities.
GAUD
Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design
Master of Science in Architecture + Urban Design | First Semester
095
GAUD DESIGN STUDIOS
The 6th Borough Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn The 6th Borough is a speculative urban design project, which investigates the transformative potentialities of the East River estuary. A major artery and natural habitat, which both connects and separates four of New York’s five existing boroughs, the estuary has often been marginalized within the context of the city. The students will propose design scenarios, which provide new ideas for a future city that fully engages the immense and unprecedented potential of one of its most vital, diverse, and dynamic elements. Part city, part infrastructure, part landscape and environment, the estuary escapes any singular categorization and encourages radical as well as subtle approaches. While specific design solutions will be developed for the site, an emphasis will also be placed on the culturally charged relationships of Nature to Culture, and Ecology to Technology both of which have become particularly relevant within the current urban discourse. The East River estuary has long been perceived as the waterway that separates Manhattan from its sibling boroughs Brooklyn and Queens and, along with the Hudson, outlines the iconic edge of the island of Manhattan. As such the East River found itself at the periphery of both Manhattan as well as the other boroughs, thus drawing a line of separation still echoing the fortified past of the island’s first settler days. This year’s studio focused on Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. Built originally around Gowanus Creek in the 17th century to serve mills and farm land, the canal later expanded and became industrialized in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the process Gowanus Canal has become one of the most polluted waterways in the city while the neighborhoods around it have become increasingly more residential and populated. In 2010 Gowanus was declared a Superfund site opening up federal resources to clean it up and reintegrate it into the fabric of the city.
Ferda Kolatan, critic
a a Asena Gurmeric b Jomana Baddad
b
b
Master of Science in Architecture + Urban Design | Second Semester
097
GAUD DESIGN STUDIOS
Architectural/ Infrastructural Hybrids East River Estuary Brooklyn, NYC A City is made of parts; parts that organize circulation and transportation, parts that enable built form, parts that provide landscapes. These all build towards the establishment of a metropolitan organism. It is in the relationship of these parts where new urban conditions begin to emerge. Conventionally the growth and behavior of the city is regulated by top-down zoning procedures wherein design becomes a complying afterthought as buildings fill a gap prescribed for them. The hope of diversity within regulation often results in a devaluing of the specific design intervention as all irregularities are concealed in categories set by a governing municipality. Recent alternatives to this model have produced a range of different strategies that seek to give design greater agency. Examples include the ‘city as building’, large scale ‘island’ developments, and parametrically driven homogeneity. All these approaches fall prey to overly deterministic strategies and lack the diversity desired in urban morphologies. It is at the critical juncture of architecture, infrastructure and environment that new models of urbanism must strive for more open-ended potentials in the way they integrate, hybridize and instigate future growth.
Kutan Ayata, critic
a Juan Cuock b Chong Gao
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Master of Science in Architecture + Urban Design | Third Semester Culmination Project
A Sickly Sweet Landscape Newtown Creek, Brooklyn Like a gigantic table full of cupcakes, there’s nothing natural about this place. It is something made by people, for people. The existing landscape is populated with generic residential developments, brutal industrial manufacturing buildings, and the city’s largest wastewater treatment plant. It is also one of the most polluted landscapes in the world. In the creek itself, there is in some places a 25 foot thick layer of what some call “black mayonnaise,” a horrific paste of industrial and human waste containing among other things, arsenic, polychlorinated biphenyls, and cesium-137, a leftover from the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in the sixties. Bulk petroleum storage in the area has leaked enough oil into the environment here to fill a supertanker. The famous Exxon Valdez oil spill was small compared to the unending discharge that happened here. However, thanks to the cleanup operations underway, all the black mayonnaise will be wiped up and flushed. Though we tend to wash traumatized landscapes with generic green, I want to use other colors and paint a different picture. I want to use this cleanup operation as an opportunity to make a completely artificial landscape, something that doesn’t try to rewind the history of this place back to the garden of eden. I want to make a gigantic table and put a lot of objects on it. I want it to be like a vast collection of candies and deserts. Each of these objects are a public pavilion. They’re small pavilions. Each of them can be occupied through a public sign-up sheet. Some of them will be kept for special occasions. Like central park, I want people to roam all over and under it and use it to pursue whatever they’re interested in. I wonder what central park would be like if it was some kind of public co-working space. Some areas are more crowded with objects than others. Some are for family sized groups, some for individuals, some for accidental collectives. The piling up of objects wrinkles the ground like a tablecloth. Some areas are more wrinkled than others. Like brush strokes, wall thicknesses, piles of earth, paths, and bridges, compose a painting that you can step into and occupy. The endless greening of space is boring. I’m interested in imagining a different outcome.
Chong Gao with David Ruy, critic
099
GAUD CULMINATION DESIGN STUDIO
Decorating the Traumatized Ground Decorative Voids. Removal of contaminated soil and sealing it. It is intended to be a permanent monument to the history of this ground. Attenuated buildings (long linear buildings) snake around these decorative voids. The project assumes a degree of generic repetition within these linear buildings relative to leasing conventions. Hidden cross-sections – some famous architectural cross sections have been dissolved into the linear extrusions. These are not intended to be recognized. They are intended to be experienced as anomalies in the generic repetition. These anomalous moments punctuate the linear buildings. All the buildings are raised slightly to maintain a degree of independence from the ground. It is intended to be experienced in the background. Occupants and visitors would only have a partial view of the project— there is no ‘façade.’
Sara Aghajani with David Ruy, critic
Shinjin Ma
Hannibal Newsom, critic
Graduate Architecture
SEMINAR FACULTY Robert Cervellione Christopher Kroner Hart Marlow Benjamin Martinson
Hannibal Newsom Bridget Rice Jason Vigneri-Beane
COMMUNITY
Philip Parker, Assistant Chair
RESEARCH
Mapping, modeling, animating, scripting, rendering, filmmaking, play into the multiple outputs of printing, cutting, milling, assembling, vacuum forming in an expanding realm of technical expertise in digital production. Computer Media One and Two sought out the linkages among critical, affective, conceptual, and technical action, they seek to establish the multiple modes of intensifying the relations among forms of design practice and architectural ambitions. The core courses proposed for the architect to become both more expert and more aware of the implications embedded in the long history of design media. They anticipated a more nuanced and agile invention and engagement between architecture and media formed in seminars and studios.
PSPD
As much as it seeks out and produces clarity the architectural drawing complicates our relations with architecture and the world in the drawn, rendered, and modeled image. The presumed agency of the architect, representation, production, and generation become entangled in the back and forth, give and take feedback of architecture’s acts of drawing – its media events. Architecture and design media are of course not alone or isolated from other forms of production. Our project in Computer Media continued the long formation of architecture’s development of its working spaces through projects, discussion, lectures and readings. This is where the many linkages among media as an active design instrument, media as a filter or screen of reception, and media as an inhabited territory – a medium become evident and mutually informing. The projects began with investigation of a media apparatus and continue with specific instances of media’s historical relations to architecture and its many forms of production. This work builds in increments toward and intensive collaboration between architect and media where architecture is understood to unfold in a broad, diverse and active media ecology.
GAUD
CORE MEDIA
Master of Architecture | Core Media
103
GAUD CORE MEDIA
Computer Media I Computer Media 1 maintains that our most vital and critical questions in architecture enjoy a lift, an intensification when the media of their inquiry reaches a limit, a threshold of communication, and have to be recalibrated to proceed on an altered track. The course sought to cultivate the necessary agility for the negotiation of the critical leap in the architect’s movement into new forms production when these limits are encountered. It proposed to introduce and reintroduce critical practices, locating specific movements among concepts and object, topologies and tectonics, process and objects, and image and sense in architecture. Projects interrelated historical practices and conventions in forms of artistic practice, scientific representation, cartography and graphic media with contemporary techniques to establish a nuanced participation in the evolution of design intelligence formed in media. Projects explored in depth the limits of the trace, cut, fold, and projection in a series of computational works beginning with the most clear incision into a thing, extending through its most distant and removed movement and changes. Modes of generation, modeling, rendering, mapping, and animating matter are deployed as instruments with varying effects to be played where they act as participants with the architect in the architecture’s production. Finally, projects recognized the working spaces of architecture as being continuously reformed and intimately linked with the exchange in and among media practices.
Christopher Kroner + Hart Marlow + Benjamin Martinson + Hannibal Newsom + Bridget Rice, critics a Dillion Sirimongkhon b Yangchun Wu c Tianyu Yang d Tatiana Rodriguez e Shijin Ma
a b
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Master of Architecture | Core Media
105
GAUD CORE MEDIA
Computer Media II Digital considerations of tectonics, kinematics and parametrics established similar yet different forms of engaging systemic architectural constructions consisting of assemblies, collectives, populations and interconnected sets of componentry. Each of these paradigms of modeling provided a mode of conceptualizing designed systems in relation to time, process, performance, differentiation and iterative formation. Consequently, each media explored simultaneously configured and catalyzed an architectural imagination within its specified field that is enhanced and intensified. Computer Media 2 was organized into two parts. One part developed tectonic/kinematic modeling techniques by using a range of time-based software that included architectural, animation and video platforms. The other part developed tectonic/parametric modeling techniques with architectural, parametric design and representational software with an emphasis on technical proficiency, precision and complex yet legible delivery. Each half of the course concentrated on design media’s capacity to inform behaviors and relationships among constructions wherein strong internal and systemic logics of form and organization become agile enough to be responsive and adaptive to varied external inputs. In addition, both parts of the course contributed heavily to studio culture by fostering students’ capacity to produce efficient models and simulations activated through iteration, generative processes, relational dynamics, cascading change, nested behaviors, feedback loops, productive constraints and complex formations of continuous tectonic change. The course was heavily invested in methodology, craft, technique and other deeply disciplinary aspects of media and architectural idiom. At the same time, the course also emphasized the public nature of design and presentation by creating multiple opportunities for students to view their work together, as a collective, in shared digital and printed formats ranging from small (monitor) to medium (screen, pin-up) to large (wall-size projection) to disseminated (web-based video sharing).
Robert Cervellione + Christopher Kroner + Hart Marlow + Benjamin Martinson + Jason Vigneri-Beane, critics a Lena Smirnova b Jose Gutierrez c Dillion Sirimongkhon d Maria Aurora Bonomi Durer Bacchetti e Haley Williams f Yangchun Wu
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GAUD Exhibition
ELECTIVE SEMINARS
PSPD RESEARCH
The GAUD program offers a range of elective courses concentrating on contemporary approaches to technique and trajectories in history and theory. Courses include content from digital media (scripting, dynamic models, interactive systems) to digitally-driven fabrication technology; representational techniques (film, new media) to innovative structural logics; cross disciplinary models (biology, landscape, emergent systems, legislative constraints) to sociopolitical constructions. This collection of electives provides an environment that both fosters innovation and deepens knowledge in particular areas of architectural and urban discourse and production.
GAUD
Graduate Architecture + Urban Design
COMMUNITY
SEMINAR FACULTY Robert Cervellione Catherine Ingraham Ferda Kolatan Brian Ringley
David Ruy Maria Sieira Michael Szivos Jeffrey Taras
M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S Arch + UD | Core Elective
109
GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS
GAUD ++ Exhibition + Computer Logics [left page] This year’s GAUD exhibition grouped the visual work of the previous year in a large hanging installation. The collection of work takes the form of a field of hanging panels that have been precisely rotated to form a spatial catalog of the work. The panels are rotated in a way to both visually reveal and obscure slices of the work as visitors move around the floating volume forming a three dimensional lenticular effect. The rotation of each panel is held in place through a CNC cut disk, two strings, and a weight that keeps the panel aligned. The overall form of the piece is vaulted creating cavities for visitors to explore the work as well as view the models below. By vaulting the volume it not only references the gravity driven nature of the piece but also allows visitors to be immersed in the paneled volume without disturbing them. The hanging installation was made of over 800 panels. These were each custom laser cut, assembled, and clad with custom cut images. From underneath the gradual rotation of the panels towards the apex of each vault can be seen. This pattern helps produce a visually dynamic filter of the work that comes alive as you move around it, but also frames the work through the healthy turbulence that exists in the school and the work. It the experimental nature of the school that is the common influence and thread that connects everything in the curriculum. [right page] This course pursued various methods through which the role of the designer can shift from “space programming” to “programming space”; the designation of software programs to generate space and form from the rule-based logic inherent in architectural programs, typologies and building code. Through the use of a native scripting language, students were able to effect the software and their workflow in a more natural way. Through a way that becomes more responsive to outside conditions. Students were no longer be designing solutions, but systems to produce a variety of solutions. Students approached the objectives from two ends. 1. The use of rule-based algorithms to produce a range of formal strategies and 2. The use of the software’s native scripting language to generate custom tools to adjust those formal strategies. This course also has a secondary agenda, demystifying the tools of design provided by particular software packages and consequently empowering the designer to invent their own software tools and practices.
Mike Szivos, critic
a GAUD ++ Exhibition b Chia-Yi Huang c Alex Cornhill
b a
c c
c
M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S Arch + UD | Core Elective
Digital Fabrication Architects continually deploy and employ materials to aesthetic effect, such as lightness, mass, transparency and reflectivity. Schools, architecture offices and for-profit firms maintain material libraries to meet the demands of architects for better, more functional and, especially now, cheaper materials. This class takes off-the-shelf materials as a point of departure and investigates how architects can manipulate, extend, and modify existing materials through design and experimentation with digital fabrication tools, especially the CNC router. We began the semester with an introduction to digital fabrication, and specifically the use and safe operation of a 3-axis CNC router. Students learned the standard milling tactics offered by contemporary CAM software, such as curve machining and parallel finishing. The students then sought to subvert these stock operations through a productive patterning exercise, in which they explored the interactions between bit geometry, cut path and surface geometry to create an emergent 3D patterning. The students then engaged in a mold-making and thermoforming exercise, through which they learned to produce 3D surface geometry using the CNC mill, and then used those surfaces as molds to thermoform materials such as Corian and acrylic. The final assignment empowered students to produce a highly considered and finished 3D surface of their own design employing their recently learned tactic. Students were encouraged to look beyond the material pallet of MDF and Corian used thus far, and to explore options such as plaster, epoxy resins and concrete. Some students went so far as to produce their own hybrid materials by creating custom laminations of plywood and acrylic, or epoxy resin and plywood. Working from a design proposal, through prototypes, and to a finished product, students learned to turn material and budget limitations into design opportunities and produced finished work of a high caliber.
Jeffrey Taras, critic
a Lou Wright + Fayad Shahim b Ivan Aguirre c Agathe Ceccaldi + Kesra Mansuri
a
b c
111
GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS
Scripting To design is to impose order. Architecture is the expression of meaningful order in the built environment. Traditionally the systems of order we, as designers, had at our disposal were orders we could execute through hand drawing and drafting – such as the grid or symmetry. With computation, however, the strategies for creating and utilizing ordering systems is greatly expanded. We can learn from and adapt order found in natural systems, or physics, or mathematics. In the end, we may be able create wholly new forms of order based on programmatic rules. In this class, students used computer programming to explore methods of drawing dynamic, self-organizing, agent-based systems. Students developed digital drawing projects through the effective use of computational models. For example, the C# programming language inside of Rhino Grasshopper is used in the class, software developed as a user-friendly way to learn programming for visual output as well as well as explore various external sources and controls to interact and inform the scripted systems.
Robert Cervellione, critic
a a Chong Gao
a
M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S Arch + UD | Core Elective
Computer Aided Construction Advances in composite materials and corresponding manufacturing techniques necessitate new models for the instruction of digital fabrication, specifically Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) machining, in architectural education. With the ease of design and manufacturing platform development brought about by the emerging cultures of visual programming (e.g. Grasshopper, Dynamo) and more intuitive, dynamically typed scripting languages (e.g. Python, DesignScript), the applicability of precision tool pathing within a free-form parametric modeling environment needs to be re-evaluated. To this end, this graduate seminar on the topic of computeraided construction has been developed in order to include new computational models. These models aim to enhance design-for-manufacturing workflow by including downstream fabrication constraints within the initial data inputs of a parametric definition. Students will create speculative architectural assemblies from laminate composite stock composed of a rigid lumber, a thermoplastic, and a high-durometer rubber (with inherent performance properties of rigidity/ornament, folding/opacity, and bending/twisting, respectively) chemically bonded under evenly distributed pressure within a vacuum bag. The assemblies range in function from shading devices to structural bays, and in scope from individual masonry units to entire cladding modules. Because they are machined from a laminate stock composed of a varying-property material stratum, the assemblies are capable of performing in both different manners (e.g. rigid flat vs. rigid fold vs. flexible bend/ twist) and varying intensities (e.g. less to more folded, less to more flexible) at any given moment throughout the laminate, relative to the depth by which the stock is machined by CNC tooling. Design considerations, performance benchmarks, and manufacturing concerns are linked in both computational (design method) and tectonic (built product) fashion. A novel designfor-manufacturing process model that acknowledges both creative and analytic thinking at both ends of a complex workflow is derived, discussed, and repeatedly tested in the context of ongoing integration attempts.
Brian Ringley, critic
a a Diana Ruiz
a
113
GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS
Automation in Architectural Manufacturing Industrial robotic automation is commonplace in manufacturing, having been integrated into a wide range of processes from the automated cinematography and live performance projection mapping of Bot & Dolly to Tesla’s vaunted robotic assembly line for its Model S electric car. While architectural manufacturing has more recently implemented this technology (perhaps most notably on the academic side by the ICD/ ITKE Research Pavilion program), the conventional means for programming robotic motion have proven problematic when applied to architectural challenges for two primary reasons. Industrial robotic arms have been developed exclusively for, and therefore are better suited for, mass production in a controlled environment. They are considerably less well-suited for the in-situ mass customization of bespoke architectural project delivery. Proprietary offline programming environments of industrial robotic arm manufacturers are not directly linked to the design model, meaning variation and iteration must be performed manually through an export/import process. Contemporary data-driven, parametric design platforms allow for the design to manufacturing workflow to converge into a unified model through interoperable software methods. Historically it’s been critical for designers to maintain open lines of communication with construction personnel and fabricators to successfully realize their collective vision. This course will seek to improve these lines of communications while rectifying the architecture-specific issues outlined above through a data-driven parametric design workflow which integrates upstream analysis, geometric modeling, and downstream robotic toolpathing into a single live definition, allowing for a direct relationship between initial data inputs and robotic motion. Each robotic technique may require its own end-of-arm tooling as well as custom molds and jigs, which is very costly. Clustering methods and genetic optimization algorithms will be implemented in the panel rationalization process to control variation.
Brian Ringley, critic
a Chang Cheng + Pablo Escudero + Peter Liu + Denise Tang b Sandra Berdick + Maria Nikolovski + Milad Showkatbakhsh + Chris Testa
a b a
a
M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S Arch + UD | History + Theory Seminar
Architecture and Film This is a film seminar in the context of an architecture school. It’s a seminar, not a lab, so we bias critical discourse over the nitty-gritty of this or that cool effect. We want quick and dirty production [like those Godard films from the 1960s, breathless indeed!] and lots of thinking and talking. Specifically, it’s within the context of architecture theory, because in the just so words of K. Michael Hays, “[its] mediatory function releases unnoticed complicities and commonalities between different realities that were thought to remain singular, divergent, and differently constituted” [this is a book that should be on your bookshelf: Hays, K. Michael, ed. Architecture Theory since 1968. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998]. He continues: “The world is a totality; it is an essential and essentially practical problem of theory to rearticulate that totality.” Let’s study film as if it were architecture--making space with moving images [and later, when you return to architecture studio, try studying architecture as if it were film, playing up the time and psyche components of architecture, watch what happens]. To be clear, this is not the architecture in film but rather the architecture of film, that precise preposition oh so important. In 15 weeks you will rearticulate this totality in 3600 frames. I say this is not a lab, but as with architecture the work we do here is both precise and arbitrary, and so I give exactly two minutes as the time-site constraint for this particular work of film architecture. Do with it as you will.
Maria Sieira, critic
a Jeremey Hill b Diana Kokoszka c Fayad Shahim
a b c
115
GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS
Design Finesse: Real Fictions In recent discourse the long standing principles of fact, fiction, and fetish have been significantly challenged and new concepts of determining our perception of “the real” have been explored. The once clear demarcation line between these terms has all but dissolved, leaving us with a much stranger reality of fictionalized facts and factual fictions. Speculative Realist thought questions both our world of ideas as well as what we perceive to be objectively real, thus opening up discussions about new paradigms for design thinking and making. In the age of the Anthropocene, surrounded by Hyperobjects, we have come to accept that the real (or nature) can no longer be understood within neat categories that originated in preindustrial humanist times. Contemporary artist, and photographers in particular, have begun to produce work that aims to articulate a new kind of real, one that deliberately works facts, fictions, and fetishes into strangely contorted objects. The seminar studied examples from these fields and developed projects that engage similar topics with a focus on design and architecture. In architecture the term “object” usually means one of two things: Firstly, the totality of a building as an object, in which all individual building parts and systems are being absorbed into a singular expression. Secondly, building components are seen as subordinate objects, which gain significance through performative collaborations with other parts. In an attempt to overcome these categories, we sought alternative ways of seeing (and making) objects by formally hybridizing mundane bits and parts from large internet retailers, and representing these through a fictitious advertisement campaign. The resulting objects, the real fictions, display factual materiality, dimensions, and geometries, while their ambiguous nature evokes potentially new qualities and applications.
Ferda Kolatan, critic
a Zach Grzybowski b Ulrika Lindell c Matt Boker d Mané Nalbandyan
a b c
d
M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S Arch + UD | History + Theory Seminar
Advanced Representation and Propaganda This elective seminar examined the various modes of architetctural representation that have become dominant in contemporary digital culture. The seminar has a dual goal of achieving technical proficiency with contemporary techniques while simultaneously developing agendas of architectural propaganda. Towards these goals, students are introduced to both technical and theoretical concerns with lectures situating current practices within a historical context. Particular attention was given to a genealogy of radical practices from 1968 to 2001, constituting what may be considered a prehistory of digital representational techniques and their sometimes hidden theoretical agendas, students individually engage a semester-long project that experiments with extensions to current practices.
David Ruy, critic a Min Yu Chen + Badal Thakker + Sara Aghajani + David Guo b Robert Meyerson + Wayne Erb c Rosagnelina Casto + Jeffrey Bonhomme d Kaysey Thomas + Patrick Toh
a a b c d
117
GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS
Plasticity in Architecture There have been important contemporary paradigm shifts in architecture because of the computer. It appears, now, that we are currently reaching the end of at least one learning curve associated with this shift, and new questions are now arising. The Plasticity seminar asks students to pick one organism and study its systemic relationship to a milieu/environment. Unlike the transformational processes we have been investigating in digital architecture—which often attempt to mimic evolutionary developmental systems—Stephen Jay Gould believed that physical laws (forces) do not directly shape forms, but are, rather, indirect “blueprints for optimal shapes.” This is to say that an organism’s form is not a direct result of forces but a result of indirect, complex and compensatory responses to forces. Homeostatic mechanisms might, for example, avert deformations produced by environmental forces. As Caroline O’Donnell wrote in her book, Niche Tactics (Oxford: Routledge Press, forthcoming 2015), “it is not the defining of the context that allows [a] giraffe to emerge, but the abstraction of that context.”
Catherine Ingraham, critic
a a Anson Nickel b Michael Monroe
b
a
Michael Chambers Jason Vigneri-Beane, critic
Graduate Architecture + Urban Design GAUD
INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS
PSPD
PROGRAM COORDINATORS + FACULTY Sulan Kolatan Jason Vigneri-Beane
Dillon Sirimongkhon Sulan Kolatan, critic
COMMUNITY
Sulan Kolatan + Jason Vigneri-Beane Coordinators
RESEARCH
While the Graduate Architecture and Urban Design program benefits enormously from its New York location as a hub for both local and imported resources it recognizes the importance of operating at sites across the world at the levels of both architectural/urban and global experience. Graduate architecture and urban design students have a range of exposure to explicitly international content and faculty in courses that make excursions to Europe, Asia and South America as short-run features of the coursework. However, in order to give more robust architectural, urban and cultural experiences to students in this period of globalization the GAUD program offers full-immersion study abroad opportunities in Rome and Istanbul. Each program engages a complex of issues that are shaping architectural and urban discourse and practice. At the same time, these issues are understood as part of a trajectory that includes the historical material that is an inextricable presence in these locations. The Rome program includes trips to Florence, Siena and Venice while the Istanbul program also travels to Ephesus and Aphrodisias. In combination the programs provide a powerful framework for graduate students to deeply engage the materials, practices, events and influences that have catalyzed the development of our discipline.
M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + UD | International Program
121
GAUD INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS
Fielding Istanbul Istanbul, Turkey The studio/seminar will focus on the synthetic and natural forms of Istanbul as a case study for design in an environment of complex problems and rapid change. Often defined as “wicked problems�, these issues are shared by metropolises around the world albeit with local inflections. Starting with field studies of existing areas, students will record intersections of culture/nature in the two currently prevalent urban conditions in Istanbul: (master)-planned and unplanned. We will discuss the ecological and cultural impact of these top-down and bottom-up strategies at various scales of nature/culture systems. As part of this trajectory, the group will examine the relationship between ecology, memory and innovation through contemporary theory. The design component will include emergent computational techniques to develop a game plan-based urban design strategy. We will connect with the fieldwork of the Stockholm Resilience Center and EMBARQ in/on Istanbul to share mutual ideas and approaches, and to probe possible new forms of collaborations in/on the city.
Sulan Kolatan, critic
a Dillon Sirimongkhon b Yangchun Wu c Michael Chambers
a b c
a b c
a
M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + UD | International Program
123
GAUD INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS
Differential Rome Rome, Italy Rome is an extremely powerful environment through which to study contemporary architectural and urban design principles. It is a complex construction that has emerged in adaptive, iterative and explosively dynamic ways. Rather than being planned and composed in the traditional ways that one might assume, the city has been, and still is, in a process of constant formation. It proved to be a catalytic landscape for the convergence of population dynamics, commercial flows and geological resources that would set in motion an astonishing amount of cultural activity and physical production. It grew rapidly and then devolved back into rural environment that was still strangely contained with ancient city walls. It grew again in a polycentric way through locally intensified urban meshworks that simultaneously densified and differentiated the physical environment. At multiple scales ranging from regions to zones to infrastructural systems to neighborhoods to piazzas to buildings, the city physically demonstrates accretion, differentiation, adaptation, selforganization, appropriation, heterarchy, flow, decentralization and cascading change. These terms, and others, form the discursive framework through which we study the city as a system of objects, a system of relationships and a complex of memes on an extraordinary trajectory from the historical to the contemporary. While Rome is the primary environment of study, additional visits to the cities and structures of Florence, Siena and Venice offer powerful similarities and differences for deeper understandings of complex architectural and urban thinking that have evolved in varied physical, cultural, economic and environmental conditions. While it is of deep importance to study this material discursively it is also important for us to study it through contemporary representational techniques. Therefore, students are asked to produce drawings of the physical and temporal conditions that we study and, in doing so, develop techniques, notational systems, composites and other representational innovations.
Jason Vigneri-Beane critic a Carole Zuriek b Xiao Li c Tianyu Yang d Yasmine Zahlan e Michael Polanco
a c
b
d
e
International Program, Cuba
Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development
Through internships, partnerships studios, demonstration of professional competence, and directed research, students have ample opportunity to work on real-world and real-time issues.The programs teach in the evening, except for the Historic Preservation program’s courses, which are concentrated on two weekdays and evenings, give students opportunity to apply for internships and fellowships. The Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development with the graduate Communications Design program founded SAVI, the spatial Analysis nd Visualization initiative. SAVI supports PSPD studios and research with depth in GIS analysis and with an added focus on how best ti represent data, e.g. infrograpgics. As part of its hands-on approach to urbanism, PSPD collaborates closely with the Pratt Center for Community Development -one of the nation’s formost university-based research and technical assistance organizations in the service of disadvantaged communities. PSPD aso enjoys a relationship with the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance(NYC-EJA) with Project for Public Space(PPS), New York City Economic Development Corporation, New York Landmarks Conservancy and many other city agencies.
David Burney, Coordinator of Urban Placemaking and Management Regina Ford Cahill, Chair of Consruction Management & Facilities Management Nadya Nenadich, Coordinator of Historic Preservation John Shapiro, Chair of City and Regional Planning Jaime Stein, Coordinator of Sustainable Environmental Systems
COMMUNITY
PSPD also offers linkages to the undergraduate Construction Management program, with the opportunity to focus on real estate development: Brooklyn Law School, with the opportunity to earn a joint master’s/Juris Doctor; and the Pratt Center for Community Development, with the opportunity to combine study and advocacy.
RESEARCH
Studio coursework emphasizes teamwork and interdisciplinary, integrative thinking as an effective method of acquiring professional skills. The studio typically involves a real client and culminates in a multidisciplinary proposal that is evaluated by an array of distinguished professionals and community leaders. The studios emphasize hands-on work where the students can have an immediate impact on public policy and community action.
PSPD
The Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development(PSPD) is an alliance of six programs with a shared value placed on urban sustainability-defined by the “ triple bottom line” of environment,equity, and economy.Each of the six graduate programs maintain it’s independance, degree, and depth of study. Yet with the advice of coordinations and department chairs, students can move between the six programs, with the further option to follow set tracks for specialized or multifaceted studies.
GAUD
PSPD FOREWORD
Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development
MASTER OF SCIENCE IN CITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING The 60-credit City and Regional Planning (CRP) Program trains students as practicing urban planners whose knowledge encompasses communities, cities and regions. The curriculum aligns with the design-centered programs in the School of Architecture, with a further focus on sustainable development, participatory planning and social change. Since its inception over 50 years ago, the City and Regional Planning Program has remained true to its emphasis on combining an education that emphasizes practice over theory, participatory planning over top-down policy making, and advocacy over technocracy. Studio courses generally combine two or more of the four concentrations of the Program: community development, environmental planning and policy, preservation planning and physical planning. Often, studios relate to the ongoing work of the Pratt Center for Community Development, one of the nation’s first and foremost university-based research and technical assistance organizations in the service of disadvantaged communities. Studios involve real clients facing significant planning challenges, consistent with the CRP Program’s emphasis on participatory planning and equity issues. Past and current studios have taken students to work on plans for Ward 9 in New Orleans; collaborate on a regional planning framework for a town in Goa, India; and work to preserve locally-owned businesses as well as the unique neighborhood character in New York’s East Village. The CRP Program offers a unique chance for students to make a difference as they complete a first-rate education.
John Shapiro, Chair of City and Regional Planning a a Fundermentals of Planning Studio
Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development
MASTER OF SCIENCE IN HISTORIC PRESERVATION
127
PSPD
The 44-credit Historic Preservation graduate program was created to go beyond the traditional concept of historic preservation education. Rather than focus mainly on the conservation and restoration of historic structures, Pratt’s program embraces a broad spectrum of preservation issues, including heritage, public policy, community planning, sustainability, and advocacy. The program encourages students to understand preservation policies and methods as part of a broader historical and social context, while providing the range of skills that practitioners need in today’s professional environment. Residing within the Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development in the School of Architecture, the historic preservation program is wide-ranging rather than narrowly defined. It draws on Pratt’s interdisciplinary resources in graduate architecture, urban design, city planning, environmental management and real estate. Students become familiar with broad concepts of building consensus and affecting public policy, as well as building, district and cultural preservation. A range of professional opportunities are available to preservation graduates today. Preservationists find employment in government agencies, community and advocacy organizations, historical societies, museums, architectural offices, and as consultants to architects, developers, and planners. Preservationists participate in the design of buildings; frame government policy; assess the importance of sites and structures; carry out historical research; evaluate and rule on proposed alterations to historic buildings; design interpretive exhibits, plaque programs and publications; award grants and government funds for preservation; evaluate the impact of proposed new developments; and organize civic campaigns for preservation. Studio coursework in the HP Program emphasizes teamwork and interdisciplinary, integrative thinking as an effective method of acquiring professional skills. The studio typically involves a real client and culminates in a multidisciplinary proposal that is evaluated by an array of distinguished preservation professionals and community leaders. HP students are also required to complete at least one internship, where they gain hands-on experience in the field. In the past, students have interned at the NYC Department of City Planning, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, Long Island Traditions, the Municipal Art Society and the New York Landmarks Conservancy.
Nadya Nenadich, Coordinator a a Preservation, Economic Development + Sustainability Studio
Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development
MASTER OF SCIENCE IN SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS The 40-credit Sustainable Environmental Systems Program studies the nexus of environmental science, policy and design. The curriculum is steeped in Pratt’s community based ethos and examination, through the lens of social justice, of the systems our urban environments construct to manage water quality, solid waste and energy. Graduates are prepared to take on a range of roles as policy analysts, sustainability consultants, low impact developers, researchers and advocates, collaborating with environmental scientists, designers, policy makers and communities. The SES Program combines a foundation of theoretical and technical core courses with innovative mini-courses taught by cutting-edge practicing professionals. Students learn the interdisciplinary skills needed to: assess contemporary environmental issues; catalyze innovative environmental problem solving; uphold environmental and social justice; and engage diverse stakeholders in designing and developing sustainable plans and policies. SES studio courses are either place-based, as in a zero-carbon studio for a neighborhood, or sector-based, as in a sustainable economic development studio.
Jaime Stein, Coordinator
MASTER OF SCIENCE IN URBAN PLACEMAKING AND MANAGEMENT Pratt Institute’s graduate degree in Urban Placemaking and Management, provides an excellent practicebased education for professionals.Students are immersed in the coreskills of analysis, conceptual design,and management of the public realm in cities. Courses are taught at night, and our practicing professors provide a wealth of contacts and references. The 40-credit program equips students to qualify for employment in a range of institutional,governmental, non-profit, and private sector settings. The great majority of students obtain relevant internships and jobs at national organizations like Projects for Public Spaces, local civic organizations like the NYC Environmental justice alliance, independent organizations like New Yorkers for Parks, innovative public agencies like the NYC Department of Transportation, and urban design consultancies such as Gehl Architects. Being the first program of its kind, students gain a broad theoretical knowledge of the historical, political, and social frameworks with which to conceptualize the public realm, while developing skills to analyze urban space and understand the relationship of public space to public policy and private development. The UPM program also emphasizes team-oriented, interdisciplinary studio learning. Through studios and internships, students further gain practical understanding of the planning and design of public space, including management and the integration of the principles of sustainability into public space development.
David Burney , Coordinator a a Sustainable Environmental Systems Studio b UrbanPlacemaking + ManagementPlanning+Policy
b
Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development
FACILITIES MANAGEMENT
129
PSPD
This year’s theme was healthcare and the WinterSchool student competition scenario was designed around the students developing an open plot of land next to the Kufstein hospital. The project scenario touched on built environment elements such as: project management, sustainable urban development, healthcare facilities, net-zero and energy efficient concepts, market analysis and perspectives and SWOT analysis, and residuum cost analysis. There were over 200 students in attendant with 13 teams of approximately 13-15 students from Austria, Germany, Netherlands and Norway. Pratt students and professors represented the US. There were also extra curriculum team activities such as a night of ice stock sport contest and dinner outing. Pratt’s Facilities Management Program is looking forward to continuing and growing our relationship with the University of Applied Science Kufstein Tirol Austria, and the many business consultants and professors from Norway and the Netherlands. We look forward to participating in the next year’s WinterCongress and WinterSchool.
Regina Ford Cahill, Chair of Construction Management a a Facilities Management Studio
INTRODUCTION
The 16th annual FM & REM WinterCongress 2014 and the 3rd annual Facility Management & Real Estate Management WinterSchool was held at the University of Applied Science Kufstein Tirol Austria from January 29th through February 5th 2014. Facilities Management Adjunct Professor Gerald McGowan, Professor Audrey Schultz and FM MS students MinWook Lee and Leo Kim attended. This is the third year that Pratt’s Facilities Management professors and students have been invited to attend the WinterCongress and WinterSchool. Professor McGowan was a coach for the student teams and lectured on Trends in FM. Professor Schultz was also a student team coach and lectured on Health Care Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) projects and Integrated Project Management. Students Min-Wook Lee and Leo Kim participated in the international student competition.
Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development
CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT Construction Management is the art of orchestrating and focusing all the needed forces toward an efficient process and the successful completion of a project. The Construction Manager’s raw materials are often a vacant piece of land, a set of construction drawings that may be 500 pages, and a project manual the size of three Manhattan phone books. The Construction Manager is charged with the task of assembling a virtual factory for construction; contending with numerous local, state, and federal regulations; and coordinating skilled and unskilled craftspeople, unions, contractors, subcontractors, architects, engineers, planners, consultants, and the owner/developer. The day-to-day challenges of construction management make for some of the most demanding assignments in the world, whether a manager is overseeing the construction of a towering skyscraper or a low-rise condo. Construction management is a collaborative effort. The key relationships among leaders can be represented by a triangle, with the owner at one point, the architect/engineer at another and the construction manager at the third. Given the growing complexity of design and construction, whether urban, suburban, or rural, there are no major projects that are built without this crucial team in place. Pratt’s School of Architecture has the distinction of being one of the first and one of the few, schools in the nation to offer this degree program. The faculty consists of leading professionals, including the project manager and the director of safety and site safety management of the World Financial Center; former assistant commissioner and director of design for NYC public works; chief, Division of Material Assurance, Safety and Landfill Remediation, NYC Department of Environmental Protection; a member of the Industry Advisory Committee, NYC Department of Buildings; the vice president and project executive for a leading construction management firm managing major national and international multimilliondollar projects; and a principal of the largest specifications consulting firm in the Northeast.
Regina Ford Cahill, Chair of Construction Management a a Construction Management Site Visit
Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development
INTERNATIONAL COURSES
131
PSPD
The current list of international courses includes: - Austria. Facilities Management. - Buenos Aires, Argentina, Preservation & Adaptation - India. Innovations in Urban Planning & Sustainability - Istanbul, Turkey. Redevelopment and Justice. - Rotterdam, Netherlands. Climate Adaptation Strategies - Tokyo, Japan. Urban Design and Placemaking - Sao Paulo, Brazil, Community Development & Sustainability Innovation Within the PSPD we believe in preparing our students with not only the tools and knowledge to practice locally, but also the perspective to approach these complex issues while evaluating the milieu of local environment, equity and economics concerns. We better understand our own milieu when taken out of our comfort zone through international travel and study.
John Shapiro, Chair of City and Regional Planning a a Cuba Studio b Cuba Studio
b
INTRODUCTION
The PSPD is responding to the challenges of the “global village” with courses that run partly or entirely abroad. These courses are as much about students learning global innovations and practices as about providing opportunities for students to study in foreign places. As respective examples of a seminar and studio: Pratt students have traveled to Brazil to consider innovative approaches to affordable housing in the New York–São Paulo Exchange; and with Indian students fleshed out the community details of a regional sustainability plan for Goa.
Land Use + Urban Design Studio
Studio courses generally combine two or more of the four concentrations of the Program: community development, environmental planning and policy, preservation planning and physical planning. Often, studios relate to the ongoing work of the Pratt Center for Community Development, one of the nation’s first and foremost university-based research and technical assistance organizations in the service of disadvantaged communities. Studios involve real clients facing significant planning challenges, consistent with the PSPD Program’s emphasis on participatory planning and equity issues. Past and current studios have taken students to work on plans for disaster preparedness in Manhattan’s Lower East Side; collaborate on a regional planning framework for a town in Goa, India; and work to preserve locally-owned businesses as well as the unique neighborhood character in New York’s East Village. PSPD studios offers a unique chance for students to make a difference as they complete a first-rate education.
PSPD STUDIO FACULTY Eddie Bautista David Burney Elizabeth Finkelstein Michael Haggerty Daniel Hernandez Mary Kimball Mathew Lister Elliot Maltby Ben Margolis
Jonathan Martin Gita Nandan Mercedes Narciso Juan Camilo Osario Stuart Pertz John Shapiro Ron Shiffman Jaime Stein Ayse Yonder
COMMUNITY
Each of the four graduate programs maintains its independence, degree, and depth of study. Yet with the advice of Coordinators and Chairs, students can move between the four programs, with the further option to follow set tracks for specialized or multifaceted studies. Studios bring together students from all four graduate programs for interdisciplinary teamwork.
RESEARCH
PSPD is an alliance of four programs with a shared value placed on urban sustainability — defined by the “triple bottom line” of environment, equity and economy.
PSPD
INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS
GAUD
Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development
Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development | Interdisciplinary Studios
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PSPD PSPD INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS
A Vision for a cleaner greater Greenpoint Brooklyn, New York, NY Greenpoint has faced a number of historical environmental burdens including an outsized percentage of New York City’s waste transfer stations and one of the largest oil spills in the United States, in which millions of gallons of petroleum products leaked into Newtown creek over several decades. The situation in Greenpoint faces many challenges relating to the condition of trash. With the new residential developments, population growth has been estimated to increase by 10,000+ people. Due to a shortage of trash cans within the 1122 zip code, pedestrians have to walk upwards of 15 minutes before reaching a trash can on commercial streets like Franklin Street and McGuinness Boulevard. Students belonging to the Sustainable and Environmental Systems program worked with a non-governmental organization named ‘Curb Your Litter’ on a project developing an efficient strategy for waste management. During the first half of Fall 2015 semester, the Sustainable Communities studio worked in four groups which analyzed the History of Greenpoint ranging from the origins of Greenpoint as a verdant landscape to its Industrialization in the 19th Century until todays current scenario of gentrification in the community and proposed rezoning by the NYC DCP. This project was made possible with the funding provided by the Office of the New York State Attorney General and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation through the Greenpoint Community Environmental Fund. Among the assets and strengths identified in this neighbourhood, strong community organizations dedicated to bettering Greenpoint, active commercial and manufacturing districts and proximity to the waterfront stood out the most. In evaluating the area’s needs, students were concerned with the client’s focus of reducing litter, as well as cohesion between manufacturing and residential areas, access to public greenspace and the waterfront, sustainable transportation infrastructure, and retaining Greenpoint’s culture and the diverse talents of its residents. This studio addressed at least one of these issues and contains corresponding indicators to measure progress, as well as recommendations for action with the hope that the client; Curb Your Litter’s mission of achieving sustainability in Greenpoint is successful.
Jaime Stein + Ron Shiffman, critics a a Images of Student Work
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Protecting the Future of the Coast Red Hook , NY Currently, NYC is undergoing a sea-change in its built environment; Super Storm Sandy was a wakeup call to the region, reminding us of our vulnerability to extreme weather events, and the future impacts of climate change. Since then, there has been considerable effort on behalf of the design community and various government agencies to try to address the issue of how our waterfront communities will deal with rising sea levels and potential degradation our coast that sits in direct harm. These areas are at the forefront of what is to come in the next century. A wide variety of design proposals are underway towards implementation from Hunt’s Point in the Bronx, to Hoboken New Jersey, to Coney Island, each with a very different approach and community response. This studio aims to look in depth at the issues facing such coastal communities, through the example of the South Brooklyn Red Hook integrated flood Protection System (ifPS). The studio has the advantage of occurring simultaneously to real world conditions; the Red Hook ifPS feasibility Study just kicked off this past December. The ifPS feasibility Study is led by Dewberry engineering and is managed through the Mayor’s office of Resiliency Reconstruction (oRR), the NYC economic Development corporation (eDc), and in partnership with the Governor’s office of Storm Recovery. Students in this course through integrated team approach and multi-disciplinary design proposals developed effective and innovative flood protection measures, while simultaneously being sensitive to community, and context, and provide a better social and economic fabric. The complexity of the project allows students to understand the methodologies for decision making, how to turn limitations into beneficial parameters, and how community goals have design implications. Topics such as the future of NYC’s maritime industry, waterfront development, job opportunities, alternative energy production, ecological restoration, NYC agency regulations, transportation, feMA and National flood insurance Protection requirements, economic development, tourism, social cohesion, and emergency preparedness are just a few of the larger issues that will be considered in the process of conceptualizing an ifPS.
Jaime Stein + Ron Shiffman + Gita Nandan, Tom Jost , Zehra Kuz, critics
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Green Infrastructure Design Build Studio The focus of the Green Infrastructure Design Build Summer 2015 Studio was the adaptive reuse of the Bayview Correctional Facility in Chelsea on the corner of West 20th Street and 11th Avenue. The Bayview Correctional Facility was a facility for women, which has been decommissioned due to the flooding of the structure from Superstorm Sandy. The aim for the studio was to redesign the site without destroying the building structure and to establish a closed loop water system. The students developed ideas for the adaptive reuse of the building and programming within the building. The challenge of the project was the site needed to include green infrastructure, urban agriculture, and storm water management; and it had to have a net zero water loss. The studio developed ideas for redesigning the space into an indoor agriculture facility growing crops through aeroponics and aquaponics including mushroom farming with a year round farmers market on the ground floor. The proposal included a farm/garden and greenhouse as well as a blue and green roof systems on the roof. The studio kept an overarching guidance following some design concepts from ‘‘Growing Up: An Evolving Urban Organism’’ and designed the former Bayview Correctional Facility as a socially driven, climate-resilient vertical farm, increasing local employment and food security while setting a replicable example for efficient, organic urban agriculture. Elements in this project such as water collection was designed using methods in aquaponics. Other growing methods will include indoor mushroom cultivation and aeroponics, in which leafy greens are grown using very little water in a closed-loop system that mists the plants’ roots. The entire project [ farm, restaurant, and market ] was designed to function with close coordination with residents of the nearby Elliott-Chelsea NYCHA houses, providing employment and educational opportunities and responding to the local food needs and preferences. Crops will change as the community’s needs, assets, and aspirations change: the organism will co-evolve with the community.
Gita Nandan + Elliot Malby, critics
a Cathy Yuhas b Chou Pony c Tom Stork
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Lab Analysis of Public Spaces Fort Greene, Brooklyn, NY Brigadier General Edward Fowler was a civil war hero from Brooklyn and was originally stationed in Fort Greene Park before being deployed to the Battle of Bull Run. The General Fowler Statue was dedicated in 1902 to Fort Greene Park. The statue was taken down sometime in the 1960s due to corrosion and then moved to Lafayette Square in 1976. At the same time Lafayette Square was renamed to Fowler Square where the statue resides today. Through community meeting records the monument has significance within the neighborhood, and it was deemed a priority during the DOT redesign to allow General Fowler to remain within the square. Students in this workshop analyze the space using methods and techniques for public realm in cities and to the understanding that the design of new public spaces and the development of public space management strategies depend on rigorous analyses of existing urban conditions and the needs and activity patterns of public space users. They learned to observe public spaces through the use of statistical data collection, interviews, photography, and video. Analyzes spatial characteristics involving use, circulation, programming, servicing, landscape, etc. Students learn to use conceptual diagrams, mapping, and architectural drawings (site plans, elevations, and sections) to communicate findings. The goal of this course was to develop a design recommendation for Fowler Square in a people-centric manner that serves the surrounding community’s needs.
David Burney + Margaret Walker, critics
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PSPD INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS
Planning and Urbanism Japan This course takes place during the summer semester and it introduces graduate and undergraduate students to city planning and urban design issues in Japan with a two-week visit to Japan in partnership with Japanese academic urban planning programs at various Japanese universities, including Waseda University and Tokyo Institute of Technology. Students will be exposed to Japanese contemporary culture and participate in shared-learning opportunities facilitated through coordinated activities with Japanese professors, professionals and students. The activities range from lectures/ seminars hosted by Japanese professors, presentations of studio work by Japanese and American students, joint walking tours (with Japanese collaborators) of areas of key historical and urban importance in Tokyo, Kamakura and Kyoto, and short planning field exercises (pairing Japanese and American students in small groups to conduct observational exercises). In addition, the course professor lead a variety of architecture/ planning-oriented walking tours of important and interesting urban sites and neighborhoods in the Tokyo metropolitan area. The course is presented in three parts: The first involves a series of lectures/seminars taught at Pratt Institute Manhattan to introduce students to contemporary and traditional Japanese history, culture, society, geography, aesthetics, architecture/planning, and urban theory. Several seminars introduce students to relevant aspects of contemporary Japanese culture, language and etiquette. The second part of the course includes approximately twoweeks of study tour in Japan and provides students an opportunity to experience, study and learn about Japanese planning and urbanism in partnership with Japanese academics, students and planning/architecture professionals. Student activities range from short lectures/seminars, guided walking tours of areas of key historical and urban importance in Tokyo, Yokohama, Kamakura, Kyoto, Nara, Nikko, and Sendai (actual destinations TBD). In addition, the professor will lead a variety of excursions to national museums, historic places, important and interesting urban/architecture sites, and neighborhoods in the Tokyo metropolitan area. Students will be exposed to Japanese contemporary culture and participate in shared-learning opportunities through coordinated activities with Japanese colleagues. The last part of the course takes place back in New York, where students work in groups for the remainder of the summer semester to complete course assignments.
Jonathan Martin+ Alexa Fabrega, critics a a Images of Student Work
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Sustainable future in the face of change Havana, Cuba In the Spring semester of 2016, a group of City and Regional Planning and; Urban Placemaking and Management students from Pratt Institute’s Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development visited Havana, Cuba for a week in January and a week in March. The purpose of the trip was two-fold: to lay the foundation for future partnerships with Pratt, and to research a unique city with a nontraditional planning structure. Havana’s distinct political and socio-economic landscape offered an opportunity to explore a markedly different setting than New York City’s. This inimitable experience provided students with a different perspective to learn from and to gain a more profound understanding of the diverse world around us. Ultimately, the trip facilitated a pathway for mutual exchange of ideas with Havana counterparts to build stronger and more resilient societies. The studio presented students with the tools to understand the existing landscape in Cuba and develop a methodology for sustainable development. They can serve as examples to provide a deeper understanding of green infrastructure solutions, successful public spaces, improved transit options and policies, tools for civic engagement, and methods for engaging the local economy in the midst of Cuba’s growth.
David Burney + Jill Hamberg Ron Shiffman, critic a a,b,c Images of Students works
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Matt Boker + Ulrika Lindell + Lindsay Schragen Robert Cervellione, critic
Pratt School of Architecture
Thomas Hanrahan, Dean
FACULTY Meta Brunzema Robert Cervellione Deborah Gans James Garrison
Sulan Kolatan William Mac Donald Philip Parker Jamie Stein
COMMUNITY
Research is not only confined to these centers, but can be found throughout the studios in all of the programs within the school. The research culture in these pages defines the center of our research activities here at Pratt, but this culture is also a catalyst for a broad range of research activities across the entire school that will only continue to grow in the coming years.
RESEARCH
Broadly, the areas of research in the School of Architecture fall under the headings of urbanism, sustainability, computation and structural / material studies. Specific Graduate Architecture and Urban Design research during the year involved the continuing development of Green Infrastructure improvements on campus, material and software research with Bentley Systems, and consultation with the City Council of New York to solve the problem of overcrowded schools. PrattSIDE continued its ongoing research in assisting underserved communities and the world, and the sustainable aspects of all of this research was displayed in the annual Green Week exhibition.
PSPD
The following pages document the work and activities of our primary research centers and laboratories in the School of Architecture. Some of these centers have been in existence for many years while others are a relatively recent phenomenon. Nevertheless, the idea of research as a pursuit in the school has been growing exponentially in recent years, and the energy and production of these centers has been growing in importance as well.
GAUD
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Master of Architecture | Research
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Bent Out of Shape Location The seminar focuses on the use of parametric design tools to model and simulate material behavior, specifically adaptable green faรงade systems that integrate structure, skin, glass, and plant life. Parametric systems were set up to design, visualize, analyze and fabricate the system through Kangaroo, a live physics engine for interactive simulation, optimization and form-finding directly within Grasshopper. The design and conception of each project blended computational design tolls as well as traditional techniques of paper folding that were envisioned as a new exterior faรงade for Higgins Hall. By utilizing these advanced computational design tools, it allowed for complex fold and cut patters to be generated and simulated at large scales in order to predict real world behaviors. The exhibitions are the final testing phase where each project is created at full scale. Issues such as material and machine tolerances, structure, full-scale production, performance, and assembly are confronted by each team.
Robert Cervellione, critic a Matt Boker + Ulrika Lindell + Lindsay Schragen b Keith Alfaro + Peter Liu c Zach Gryzbowksi + Daniel Hoch + Justin Koziol + Michael Monroe
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Master of Architecture | Research
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Green Infrastructure Pratt Institute, NY At the southeastern corner of the campus lies Cannoneer Court parking lot, a 50,000 sq ft lot bordered by the Institute’s gymnasium, a dormitory, Classon and DeKalb Avenues. The Cannoneer Court site had three challenges which shaped the proposed green infrastructure intervention. Firstly, rain events of one inch or more resulted in ponding water. In 2000 the Institute renovated the parking lot using permeable pavement. After 10 years the permeability of the pavement failed and rainwater began to pond. The second design challenge was the additional runoff from the adjacent gymnasium. The ARC Building, is a 50,000 sq ft building whose rooftop contributes significant stormwater runoff to the parking lot site. Lastly, the existing parking lot could not lose any parking spaces. The design team led by Sustainable Environmental Systems (SES) Director, Jaime Stein consisted of Professor Paul Mankiewicz (founder and Director of the Gaia Institute) and SES graduate students. The team’s intervention was not to repave or regrade the parking lot but to work with the existing pavement and site slopes to develop a series of stormwater conveyance trenches and infiltration zones to manage a 2.5 inch rainfall without losing a single parking space. To begin, the team divided the lot into a grid of drainage sheds. Using the runoff coefficients for each material, we calculated the total stormwater volume for each grid. Working with the site slopes and overland flow of water the pattern of permeable pavers, bioswales permeable paver trenches began to emerge. The overall design speaks to the selection and strategic placement of infiltration surfaces (permeable pavers) trenches (also made of permeable pavers), bioswales. The design iterations led to many adaptations on the original design. Two design elements which were deemed too experimental for the grant requirements included the use of recycled glass aggregate (show section) to create the subsurface void space and the absence of geotextile below the pavers as well as below the engineered soil of the bioswales. Another requirement of the grant was to have an overflow to the existing sewer system. Experimentation was allowed for this requirement and a raingarden was placed on the western border, positioned between the ARC Building and the lot. This project was successfully built in December of 2015 by Tam Green Materials, the Architect of Record was Gita Nandan of Thread Collective.
Jaime Stein, director
a a Marcel Negret + Kate Selden
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Master of Architecture | Research
DILE Manhattan, NY DILE researches the local, school specific, and urban issues of educational spaces– learning environments. It collaborates at Pratt with Art and Design Education on projects where the spaces and practices of education come into focus to bring design and STEM related knowledge to K-12 students in New York City Public Schools. It collaborates in a wider arena with public and not for profit agencies working to expand and deepen the ways that educational spaces and practices are integral to strengthening public education in New York City. Specific projects include collaborations with Community Board One and the Public Schools Over–Crowding Task Force to locate sites for schools in lower Manhattan, collaborations with eight public elementary schools in Brooklyn and Manhattan to co-develop and teach STEAM curricula and innovative elementary school design, collaborate with Staten Island Technical High School on STEAM projects with graduate student mentors, and work with Arts and Design Education at Pratt in the Unison school to bring graduates students into the middle school as architectural design instructors and mentors. DILE’s mission is to develop the coevolution of architectural spaces and educational practices and contribute to their ongoing and increasingly dynamic synergy. Participants: Graduate Architecture and Urban Design, Pratt Institute Faculty: Robert Cervellione, Sulan Kolatan, Philip Parker, William MacDonald, Alihan Polat; Staff: Erika Schroeder Graduate Assistants: Sandra Berdick and Addie DuplisseJohnson, Jeffrey Gaudet; Build Schools Now Board Members: Wendy Chapman and Buxton Midyette New York City and State elected officials and committees Community Board 1, President Catherine McVay Hughes State Senator, Daniel Squadron’s office; Paul Goldstein Speaker of the New York State Assembly, Downtown Manhattan Schools Overcrowding Task Force; Council Member Margret Chin’s office; Congressman Jerry Nadler’s office; Department of Education’s Public Affairs Director, Ben Goodman
William MacDonald + Philip Parker, Coordinators
a Tribeca Trib Online Article b Pratt GAUD c Student Work by Ugur Imamoglu
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PIPES Manhattan, NY As public schools and public libraries are continuing to expand and change their public roles to become sites of information exchange and social life in the broadest terms this is an opportune time to reassert the influences of design and policy on each other. At a time when climate change is provoking lower Manhattan to redesign its urban space while it is becoming more dense through population growth, and its infrastructure is deteriorating it is necessary to gather professionals and future professionals to develop new models of discussion, collaboration and exchange among disciplines. Two forums were set to debate and influence future design propositions for New York City schools and libraries, to extend one another in new forms of resilient public space. These concentrated discussions drew professionals from architecture, education, library science and public policy into provoking new and progressive spaces, uses and organizations at the intersections of public space and public policy. The forum is an extension of the Graduate Architecture and Urban Design’s Design program’s Design Initiative for Learning Environments (DILE), which instigates progressive design models and research for educational practices. These two programs invite public school advocates, researchers and experts in public libraries as informational and social spaces to debate and speculate on the confluence of public spaces formed in schools, libraries and public infrastructure. Participants: Aileen Wilson, Acting Chair, Art and Design Education, Pratt Institute; William Mac Donald, Chair, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design, Pratt Institute; Philip Parker, Assistant Chair, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design, Pratt Institute;Buxton Midyette and Wendy Chapman, Co-Founders Build Schools Now; Paul Goldstein, Director District Office, NY State Assemblyman Sheldon Silver’s Office, Head of the Overcrowding Schools Task Force in Downtown NYC; Ayisha Irfan, Policy Analyst, Education, Justice and Policing, Office of Manhattan Borough President, Gale A. Brewer; Rosalie Genevero, Executive Director of the Architectural League;James Lima, Founding President of the Governor’s Island Preservation and Education Corporation; Jeremy Siegel, Principal Partner, BIG Architecture; Catherine McVay Hughes, President, Community Board 1; David Giles, Research Director at Center for an Urban Future; Cristobal Correa, Pratt Institute, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design
William Mac Donald + Philip Parker, Coordinators a a PIPES Symposium
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Master of Architecture | Research
EcoDE Manhattan EcoDe aims to engender design-led and organism-driven poly-disciplinary urban ecology research collaborations because ecological problems not only require knowledge input from many different fields, but also new kinds of agile collaborative modes between design and the (natural and social) sciences. The wicked ambiguity of ecological problems together with the urgent need to project possible alternative scenarios for urban growth in the face of climate change, stand to benefit from a design-led poly-disciplinary approach. Such collaboration would harness the “best of both worlds”, blending scientific knowledge with the projective scenario-based contingency-aware capacities of design. Ecological problems like design problems are problems of deciding what is better when the situation and terms of resolution are ambiguous. Design research is concerned with the ways that the supporting structures, assumptions, apparatus, methods of analysis and production, along with the movement of ‘information and material’ are effecting the designer and design processes. EcoDe’s design research is intended not so much to codify or produce a single model of ‘proper’ design or design processes as it attempts to provide alternatives specific process through a knowledge of historical and contemporary underpinnings of design practice and revisions based in experiments with design media and indeterminacy. Ecological problems are fundamentally different from the ones scientists or technologically driven are used to addressing and ultimately solving, they are more like design problems. To name but a few of the differences between ecological and technological or scientific problems: first, these are not problems for which there exist finite solutions. Second, scientific problems are clearly defined at the outset, whereas ecological ones have too many contingencies, entail contradiction and are incompletely framed. Third, ecological problems cannot be finally pinned down because the conditions that create them are in constant flux and information is incomplete. Fourth, the very people searching for solutions often are part of the problem. These are some of the reasons ecological problems are called “wicked” and some of the ways that they are similar to design problems. EcoDe is design studio based and currently working with scientists from Rutgers University and SUNY Stony Brook, Engineers at ARUP, and the Hudson River Park Trust.
Philip Parker + Sulan Kolatan, Directors
a Student Work by Ricardo Diaz b Student Work by Melissa Braxton c Student Work by Esteban Garcés
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Police Design Build Brownsville, Brooklyn Since January 2015, twelve of Pratt institute’s architecture graduate students have been designing a community connection pavilion with the help and supervision of Pratt instructors Jim garrison of garrison architects and Deborah Gans of Gans studio. Police stations throughout the world are being re-designed to integrate more with the public. The 73rd precinct in Brownsville, Brooklyn, is in a location that could greatly benefit from this design ideal, and it is the location that is tackled here (though the modular design strategy used could be easily replicated throughout the city). When the class first started thinking about how to design the pavilion, each student proposed a design idea and an ideal site location. Through much discussion as a class, as well as with the 73rd precinct, these twelve designs were narrowed to four, and then finally one, though the process was never about choosing the best design - it was about incorporating the best aspects of each design. While the architecture and its location on the site were important, also important were the implications for both the police and the community. It was necessary to consider the effects on both, as well as address safety, privacy, transparency and community participation. Participation and community involvement were highly integrated in the design process. From a community designed mural, to manufacturing scheduled to occur at a location near Brownsville, and even the design and construction oversight by local Pratt students, this pavilion constantly seeks to get the public involved. The design was even presented at a community meeting in Brownsville in order to get feedback about the implications of the design for Brooklyn, as well as potentially for the rest of New York City. At that meeting, community members started out skeptical, but left hopeful for the changes that such a pavilion could help to bring about. And while architecture does not work miracles, it does provide a location for positive changes to begin to occur.
James Garrison + Deborah Gans, critic
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Master of Architecture | Research
Green Week Exhibition March 2015 Higgins Hall Lobby Gallery Green Week is an annual event that celebrates sustainabilityrelated work at Pratt and beyond. Since 2007 - during the last week of March, exhibitions, lectures and public events have been held at many venues on the Pratt Campus, with a special focus on showing innovative and sustainable student work. Green Week is organized by Pratt’s Sustainability Coalition, a group of faculty, administrators, students and staff of Pratt Institute from a variety of disciplines including art, design, architecture, planning, and science, who have been meeting monthly since October 2005. The coalition is dedicated to identifying, interpreting, inspiring, incorporating and instituting ecologically responsible practices into curricula, operations and programs at Pratt Institute. The group meets monthly. For more information, see http://csds.pratt.edu/about-the-sustainability-coalition/ Each year, the School of Architecture contributes to Green Week with an exhibition of student projects in the Higgins Hall Lobby Gallery. In 2015, the Higgins Hall Pit Gallery exhibition showed innovative designs of sustainable student dormitory buildings by a group of third-year undergraduate architecture students. The Spring semester of 2015 marked the formation of an advisory committee to advance the mission of the Sustainability Coalition at Pratt. To celebrate this event and to look back on the many successes of the Coalition, the Higgins Lobby Gallery featured an exhibition which included a timeline of the Coalition’s many accomplishments from its origins to the current day. The exhibit also included both local and global PSPD student research. Alternating Spring semesters, the PSPD students travel to Rotterdam in the Netherlands to explore community based climate change adaptation and resilient delta cities (a continuation of the RAMP program). The Green Week work featured a series of New York and Rotterdam case studies in coastal resilience. To showcase local research, the PSPD featured the Taconic Fellowship supported Open Sewer Atlas http://openseweratlas. tumblr.com/, an open data mapping analysis of NYC’s sewer system and a collaborative research with the City’s Stormwater Infrastructure Matters Coalition http://swimmablenyc.info/ Student work from: Graduate Planning Undergraduate Architecture Higgins Hall Exhibition Coordinators: Jaime Stein. Brent Porter
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prattSIDE Putnam Triangle Putnam Triangle Canopy is an installation designed and built by PrattSIDE - an organization of graduate and undergraduate architecture students from the Pratt Institute. Developed to respond to community requests to make the plaza more pleasant to inhabit, the rope canopy’s supplemental seating and planting further enliven the space in the underused corner of the plaza and create a visual landmark at Putnam Triangle. The overhead canopy of rope is supported by a steel frame and concrete base. The rope is woven in a way to create planes represented in white and blue that curve into different directions creating a visually stimulating effect. As you move underneath the installation or drive by, the ropes produce a moirÊ optical illusion, seeming like they are in motion. Putnam Triangle Canopy is a collaborative project of PrattSIDE, Fulton Area Business Alliance and Pratt Center for Community Development supported by NYC Department of Transportation. It was financed by the Taconic Fellowship grant from the Pratt Center for Community Development and Neighborhood Plaza Partnership in collaboration with IOBY through generous donations by our supporters. This temporary structure is designed to be easily adapted, reused or replicated in other plazas around the city.
Matt Boker + Danica Selem, coordinators
a prattSide Logo b prattSide concept presentation c model of intervention
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Vertical Studio Final Reviews
Pratt School of Architecture
RESEARCH COMMUNITY
Philip Parker, Assistant Chair of GAUD
PSPD
Students and faculty in the graduate architecture programs actively participate in and build the communities with the arts, and sciences in exhibition and research venues and in many projects focused on K-12 education, community and environmental justice, advancements in design, imaging and fabrication technologies. These may span a range of generations as the education programs often do, or they may extend well into the realms of the very concrete issues of the environment as imaging and development projects. They may engage a larger community of citizens and professionals in a global dialogue and collaboration on questions of water and contemporary modes of urbanization as part of our International programs. Collectively, the overlap and resonance of these varied constituencies contributes to a more integral and hopefully active participation of architecture in its many communities.
GAUD
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Master of Architecture | Research
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RAD K-12 [RECLAIM WORKS PROGRAM] Brooklyn, NY Rising Architects and Designers (RAD) takes place in selected NYC public schools. Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (GAUD) students develop curriculum and mentor young people in studio-style classes focused on addressing physical and spatial challenges in their communities. “All six team presentations by the local middle school students were characterized by a seriousness of purpose and creative thinking that was beyond their extreme youth.” —Theo David FAIA, Architect, and Professor, School of Architecture Through research, ideation and building three-dimensional prototypes young people act as the architects and engineers as GAUD students guide them through the design process. “I simply can’t express enough gratitude on behalf of our students and myself for the amazing experience you gave them today...Perhaps the most telling of all, even though students heard me saying it was time to go, it was difficult to tear them away especially from that 3D pen! So thank you.” (Academic Leader, Brooklyn Middle School participating in the Rising Architects and Designers Program)
Erika Schroeder
a Student Presentations b Group Photo c GAUD student Ran Tian d GAUD Rodrigo Guajardo e GAUD students Thomas Alia + Ran Tian
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Exchanging Contexts: Teaching and Learning Manhattan + Brooklyn, NY
The GAUD is committed to community engagement at all levels. To start, all first year students are required, as part of their studio requirements, to have first hand experience with users and precedents in their community. The Design 2 studio in the spring semester of the first year curriculum consists of the design of a school in New York City. While students are designing their projects, they visit an elementary school and participate in workshops. This allows our students to experience the very architecture program for which they are designing. This visit is always a powerful experience for students. The design of the interior spaces in particular becomes more nuanced and imaginative after these visits. Schools all over New York City have generously opened their classrooms to our students and we are grateful to them for making available this valuable experience to our architects-inthe-making. Conversely, we have also received great feedback from teachers, principals, and also the elementary students themselves who sometimes visit the School of Architecture during final reviews. The Structures 2 course in the technology sequence, also during the spring semester of the first year, sets up collaborative opportunities with schools through which architecture students can co-design a playground structure with its user. Beyond the required research in their community, one that is embedded in the core curriculum, students also have the opportunity to volunteer in their community. This volunteer work can also involve visits to schools and working in partnership with principals and teachers. The program is supervised by professors in the GAUD that are also licensed architects and students can obtain credit hours toward their community service requirement (toward licensing). The GAUD is committed to making community involvement and engagement a central part of the students training as architects. The two-pronged approach, making initial engagement a required part of their coursework that is directly connected to their design work, and later making available opportunities for further involvement, makes it clear to the architect-to-be that first hand research in the community is both necessary and beneficial to the discipline of architecture.
Maria Sieira, faculty
a GAUD students Matt Fischer + Marie Jacobsen + Shantal Chahin + Xiao Li + Adam Chernick + Emma Jung b GAUD student Shantal Chahin c GAUD student Emma Jung d GAUD student Suzanne Agbayani e GAUD student Alex Truica f GAUD student Frederic Bellaloum
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Spatial Analysis + Visualization Initiative SAVI Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has caused a revolution in the collection, organization, analysis and presentation of data. GIS allows information to be collected in data form, visualized in spatial form, analyzed and layered in map and ‘infographic’ forms. GIS has the power to inform diverse networks of stakeholders: decision makers, municipal agencies, researchers, artists, community and civic organizations – to understand and visualize complex spatial relationships. Pratt Institute’s Spatial Analysis and Visualization Initiative (SAVI) is a GIS-centered enterprise that aims to create a “commons” for practice-based learning accessible to all Pratt students, faculty and community-based organizations. SAVI promotes a cross-disciplinary, collaborative learning and research community where faculty and students can share projects, ideas, resources and tools via a service center and research lab. Students and faculty across campus will find SAVI beneficial for research projects, studios, course work, theses and art projects. The Initiative also intends to provide New York City-based nonprofit, civic and community-based planning organizations with access to GIS technical assistance, analysis, training and access to resources that allow independent GIS work. These groups will be able to efficiently document existing conditions of urban areas, more meaningfully contribute to policy discussions, and create their own visions for improving quality-of-life and sustainability. SAVI is an independent center under the Office of the Provost with three founding partners: the Programs for Sustainable Planning & Development, the Pratt Center for Community Development, and the graduate Communications Design Department. This cross-disciplinary approach empowers Pratt to expand upon its contribution to the well-being of New York City and its neighborhoods.
Jessie Braden, Director of the Spatial Analysis + Visualization Initiative a a SAVI
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Master of Architecture | Community
Pratt Center for Community Development The Pratt Center for Community Development occupies a unique niche at Pratt Institute, operating both “outside the gates” of the Institute and firmly within the School of Architecture. It is in many ways an independent non-profit organization and simultaneously an academic department enriched and supported by the Institute’s resources, ideas, and energy. In practice, Pratt Center is a “think and do” tank devoted to solving problems relating to the physical and socioeconomic challenges of contemporary urbanism. For the past 50 years, Pratt Center has worked closely with Pratt Institute planning and architecture programs to incubate and further its mission to create a more just, equitable and sustainable city for all New Yorkers. The community groups with whom Pratt Center collaborates are on the front lines of today’s crucial struggles for greater social justice and equity and projects directly confront crises facing low- and moderate-income communities throughout the city. Pratt Institute student interns play a major role in most of the Center’s urban planning and policy projects and are given substantive responsibilities, which may range from conducting community interviews, to producing GIS and zoning analyses, to developing schematic drawings of NYC neighborhoods. The relationship is mutually beneficial: Pratt Center interns have the opportunity to engage fully in vital projects and to witness community-based planning and design in action. Pratt Center benefits greatly from their energy, enthusiasm and fresh perspectives of the Institute’s young scholars.
Adam Friedman, Director of Pratt Center a a Pratt Center collaboration
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EnergyFit Initiative The EnergyFit NYC Pilot, an initiative of the Pratt Center for Community Development, seeks to increase energy savings and reduce carbon emissions in New York City’s one- to fourfamily homes by offering homeowners a specific package of energy saving measures common in particular building types. This standard measures approach makes it easier, cheaper and quicker for homeowners to save money while also improving home comfort, health, and safety. The Pilot’s first phase, which began in January 2016, focused on one- and two-family, attached, gas-heated, masonry homes. Its long-term goal is to support the design of a citywide program aimed at increasing energy retrofits in a range of residential building types. The Pilot builds on Pratt Center’s multi-year Retrofit Standardization Initiative which confirmed that buildings constructed during a similar time and of similar materials require the same types of upgrades to maximize energy efficiency and home health and comfort. The measures for the Pilot’s first phase are valued between $5,200 and $5,600 and are expected to save participating residents approximately 13% in their annual energy usage
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a Andrew Whalley b Williams + Tsien c Lecture: Spring Series d Melissa Braxton Review e PAK CAP Review f Shelf Life CAP Review
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Robotics Shop Lazer Cutting Shop 3d Printing Shop Wood Shop CNC Shop Metal Shop
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Master of Architecture | School Culture
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a First Year Studio b Third Year Studio c Second Year Studio
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Pratt School of Architecture | Lecture Series
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Pratt School of Architecture | Faculty
Graduate Architecture and Urban Design
Erik Ghenoiu Adjunct Associate Professor
William MacDonald Chair
Matthew Herman Visiting Assistant Professor
Philip Parker Assistant Chair
Catherine Ingraham Professor
Vito Acconci Adjunct Associate Professor
Hina Jamelle Visiting Assistant Professor
Nicholas Agneta Adjunct Associate Professor
Bobby Johnston Adjunct Assistant Professor
Maria Aiolova Adjunct Assistant Professor
Robert Kearns Visiting Assistant Professor
Gilland Akos Visiting Assistant Professor
Carisima Koenig Visiting Instructor
Jonathan James Alexander Adjunct Assistant Professor
M. Ferda Kolatan Visiting Assistant Professor
Adrien Allred Adjunct Assistant Professor
A. Sulan Kolatan Adjunct Professor
Ramon Carlos Arnaiz Adjunct Assistant Professor
Craig Konyk Adjunct Associate Professor
Kutan Ayata Adjunct Assistant Professor
Christopher Kroner Adjunct Associate Professor
Alexandra Barker Adjunct Associate Professor
Sameer Kumar Adjunct Assistant Professor
Elizabeth Barry Adjunct Associate Professor
Sanford Kwinter Professor
Gisela Baurmann Visiting Assistant Professor
Wilfried Laufs Adjunct Associate Professor
StĂŠphanie Bayard Adjunct Assistant Professor
Thomas Leeser Adjunct Professor
Cole Belmont Visiting Assistant Professor
Carla Leitao Adjunct Assistant Professor
Karen Brandt Visiting Professor
Qian Liu Visiting Assistant Professor
Christian Bruun Visiting Assistant Professor
John Lobell Professor
Meta Brunzema Adjunct Associate Professor
Ariane Lourie-Harrison Visiting Assistant Professor
Vincent Burns Adjunct Assistant Professor
Peter Macapia Adjunct Assistant Professor
Robert Cervellione Visiting Instructor
Radhi Majmuder Adjunct Assistant Professor
Steven Chang Adjunct Assistant Professor
Elliott Maltby Adjunct Associate Professor
Jonas Coersmeier Adjunct Associate Professor
Hart Marlow Visiting Assistant Professor
Christobal Correa Adjunct Associate Professor
Diana Martinez Visiting Assistant Professor
Theoharis L. David Professor
Benjamin Martinson Visiting Instructor
Manuel De Landa Adjunct Professor
Deborah McGuinness Visiting Assistant Professor
Giuliano Fiorenzoli Professor
Bruce Nichol Visiting Assitant Professor
Matthew Flannery Adjunct Assistant Professor
Signe Nielsen Adjunct Professor
Michelle Fowler Visiting Assistant Professor
Hannibal Newsom Visiting Assistant Professor
Frances Fox Visiting Assistant Professor
Brian Ringley Visiting Assistant Professor
Deborah Gans Professor
Alihan Polat Visiting Assistant Professor
James Garrison Adjunct Associate Professor
Bridget Rice Visiting Assistant Professor
James Graham Visiting Assistant Professor
David Ruy Associate Professor
Mike Flynn Visiting Assistant Professor
Theo Prudon, PhD Visiting Assistant Professor
Kent Hikida Associate Professor
Erich Schoenenberger Adjunct Assistant Professor
Adam Freed Visiting Assistant Professor
David Reiss Visiting Assistant Professor
James G. Howie Adjunct Professor
Paul Segal Adjunct Professor
Adam Friedman Visiting Assistant Professor
Steven Romalewski Visiting Assistant Professor
William P. Hudson Visiting Assistant Professor
Benjamin Shepherd Adjunct Associate Professor
Ben Gibberd Visiting Assistant Professor
Alison Schneider Visiting Assistant Professor
Hillary Lobo Visiting Assistant Professor
Maria Sieira Adjunct Assistant Instructor
Henry Gifford Visiting Instructor
Ronald Shiffman FAICP FAIA Professor
Stephen LoGrasso Visiting Assistant Professor
Henry Smith-Miller Adjunct Professor
Eva Hanhardt Adjunct Associate Professor
Toby Snyder Visiting Assistant Professor
Mary Mathews Professor
Nathaniel Stanton Adjunct Associate Professor
Justine Heilner Visiting Assistant Professor
Martin J. McManus Visiting Assistant Professor
Michael Szivos Visiting Assistant Professor
Daniel Hernandez Visiting Assistant Professor
Jaime Stein Coordinator, Environmental Systems Management Program
Jeffrey Taras Visiting Instructor
William Higgins Visiting Assistant Professor
Meredith Tenhoor Adjunct Assistant Professor
Jeanne Houck, PhD Visiting Assistant Professor
Scot Teti Visiting Assistant Professor
Anne Hrychuk Visiting Assistant Professor
Maria Ludovica Tramontin Adjunct Assistant Professor
Keenan Hughes Visiting Assistant Professor
Jason Vigneri-Beane Adjunct Associate Professor
Georges Jacquemart Visiting Associate Professor
Michael Young Visiting Assistant Professor
Ned Kaufman Adjunct Associate Professor
PSPD
Urvashi Kaul Visiting Assistant Professor
John Shapiro PSPD Chair, Associate Professor
Gavin Kearney Visiting Assistant Professor
Lisa Ackerman Visiting Assistant Professor
Katie Kendall Visiting Assistant Professor
Moshe Adler Ph.D Visiting Associate Professor
Brad Lander Visiting Associate Professor
Chelsea Albucher Visiting Assistant Professor
Frank Lang Visiting Assistant Professor
Eric Allison Ph.D Adjunct Associate Professor
Matthew Lister Visiting Assistant Professor
Eve Baron, PhD Visiting Associate Professor
Tina Lund Visiting Assistant Professor
Eddie Bautista Visiting Assistant Professor
Elliot Maltby Adjunct Associate Professor
Christine Benedict Visiting Assistant Professor
Paul Mankiewicz PhD Visiting Associate Professor
Michael Bobker Visiting Assistant Professor
Jonathan Martin PhD Adjunct Assistant Professor
Carlton Brown Visiting Assistant Professor
William Menking Professor
David Burney Visiting Assistant Professor
Jonathan Meyers Visiting Assistant Professor
Joan Byron Visiting Assistant Professor
Norman Mintz Visiting Associate Professor
Damon Chaky PhD Assistant Professor
Amy Anderson Nagy Visiting Assistant Professor
Carol Clark Visiting Associate Professor
Gita Nandan Visiting Assistant Professor
Carter Craft Visiting Assistant Professor
Christopher Neville Visiting Assistant Professor
Ramon Cruz Visiting Assistant Professor
Signe Nielsen Adjunct Professor Juan Camilo Osorio Visiting Assistant Professor
Stefanie Feldman Visiting Assistant Professor Patricia Fisher-Olsen Visiting Assistant Professor
Stuart Pertz Visiting Assistant Professor
Ira Stern Visiting Assistant Professor Gelvin Stevenson, PhD Visiting Associate Professor Samara F. Swanston JD Visiting Assistant Professor Lacey Tauber Visiting Assistant Professor Petra Todorovitch Visiting Assistant Professor Meenakshi Varandani Visiting Assistant Professor Meg Walker Visiting Assistant Professor Edward Perry Winston RA Visiting Assistant Professor
Russell Olson Visiting Assistant Professor Clifford Opurum Visiting Assistant Professor Jack Osborn Visiting Associate Professor Sharvil Patel Visiting Assistant Professor Edward D. Re Adjunct Associate Professor Carol R. Reznikoff Visiting Assistant Professor Joseph Tagliaferro Visiting Assistant Professor Simon Taylor Visiting Assistant Professor
Kevin Wolfe RA Visiting Assistant Professor Vicki Weiner Visiting Associate Professor Joseph Weisbord Visiting Assistant Professor Sarah Wick Visiting Assistant Professor Andrew Wiley-Schwartz Visiting Assistant Professor Kevin Wolfe Visiting Assistant Professor Ayse Yonder PhD Professor Arthur Zabarkes Visiting Assistant Professor Catherine Zidar Visiting Assistant Professor
Construction & Facilities Management Harriet Markis CMFM Chair Howard Albert Visiting Assistant Professor Gail Bressler Visiting Assistant Professor Kathleen Dunne Professor Matthias Ebinger Visiting Assistant Professor William E. Henry Visiting Assistant Professor
Thomas Hanrahan Dean, Pratt School of Architecture
PRATT INSTITUTE 200 WILLOUGHBY AVENUE BROOKLYN, NY 11205 SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE 61 ST. JAMES PL BROOKLYN, NY 11205 TELEPHONE 718-399-4304 www.pratt.edu