INPROCESS 22

GRADUATE

INPROCESS 22 GAUD + GCPE School of Architecture Fall 2015 - Spring 2016

GRADUATE

INPROCESS 22 GAUD + GCPE School of Architecture Fall 2015 - Spring 2016

INPROCESS is the yearly publication of student work from the Pratt Institute School of Architecture Editor: Patrick Gehling Assistant Editor: Olivia Paonita GCPE Archival Coordination: Neelu Mariguodar and Shingo Sekiya Undergraduate Archival Coordination: Mari Kroin, Russell Low, Jonathan Kroewler, Charles Driesler, Michelle Runco, Lin Siu

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

GCPE 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: Ugur Imamoglu

Jason Vigneri Beane, critic Interior Cover: Linnea Moore Philip Parker, 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 Enterprise M750 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 22 would like to extend a thank you to the Fall 2015 - Spring 2016 student body and professors for their astounding contribution of over 147 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 Patrick Gehling and Mari Kroin who after many years of exceptional dedication to Archives and InProcess are graduating.

Foreword

005

007 02 1 031 047 059 07 3

Design Studios Semester 1 Semester 2 Thesis Semester 3

085 059 091

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

GRADUATE CENTER FOR PLANNING AND THE ENVIRONMENT

095 099 101

103 109 121

Foreword

127

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

128 129 130 131 132 133

Interdisciplinary Studios

135

RESEARCH

Foreword Parametric Form Green Infrastructure DILE Green Week PrattSIDE

COMMUNITY

Community Projects K-12 RAD Exchanging Contexts Delta Cities SAVI Pratt Center Lectures, School Culture, Events and Exhibitions Lecture Series Faculty

149 151 153 155 156 157

159 161 163 165 167 169 1 71 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

GCPE

Master of Architecture

GAUD

TABLE OF CONTENTS GRADUATE ARCHITECTURE + URBAN DESIGN

Pratt School of Architecture

DEAN’S FOREWORD This issue of Graduate InProcess 20 marks two decades of publishing the student work of the School of Architecture. The first volume of InProcess was a single book of 60 pages, while today we publish Undergraduate InProcess with 256 pages and Graduate InProcess with 178 pages. That first volume, while slender in size, nevertheless established the direction and vision for all of the subsequent volumes which remains in place today. The work from that book was deeply engaged with the disciplines of design, urbanism and planning, but was also profoundly challenging and experimental, reflecting the ambition of all of our students to transform their respective professions through, talent, dedication and idealism. This 20-year volume celebrates these emerging leaders with equally new and visionary work that promises to re-make buildings and cities for the next generation.

Graduate InProcess 20 is composed of the work of eight programs in the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute’s Brooklyn and Manhattan campuses, a school embedded in the two most creative urban communities in the world. Three of these programs form the GAUD, or Graduate Architecture and Urban Design, known for advanced design methods and design research. Four other graduate programs, together with the undergraduate Construction Management Program, make up the PSPD – the Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development - distinguished by their progressive urban and ecological agenda. Together they comprise over 450 students focusing on virtually every aspect of the design, planning, building and ecological challenges facing cities today.

The GAUD is composed of three separate courses of study; a three-year professional Master of Architecture program and the three-semester post-professional programs of Master of Science in Architecture and Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design. The two postprofessional degrees began as a single program in the 1960’s, eventually reaching their current articulation in the 1980’s. They now offer students with professional degrees the opportunity to re-think the disciplines of urban design and architecture and strike out in their own original research directions. The professional Master of Architecture was founded in 2000, and brings together students of all collegiate backgrounds. In recent years, the Master of Architecture has been recognized with high rankings, and now offers students a sophisticated and diverse range of design tools and experiences. The GAUD stresses advanced computation techniques, new collaborative teaching models and an emphasis on meeting the social and ecological challenges of the day. All GAUD students share advanced studios in the latter semesters, exploring research themes reflecting our rapidly changing urban culture and the particular interests of the design critics.

The PSPD (Programs for Planning and Sustainable Development) are a unique cluster of 4 graduate programs together with the single undergraduate program of Construction Management. The PSPD represents many interests, but has a common goal in advancing a vision of a just and ecologically responsible society while using the most advanced tools and techniques available in their respective field. Several of the PSPD programs have a highly developed research agenda with a strong record of sponsored research.

The Master of Science in City and Regional Planning is the oldest and largest of these programs, founded in the 1950’s and now grown to 100 students. Graduate Planning attracts a diverse enrollment dedicated to an equitable, diverse and economically dynamic city.

The Pratt Center grew out of this program and is a nationally recognized model for urban research. The Master of Science in Urban Environmental Systems Management also grew out of Graduate Planning, developing its special emphasis on green infrastructure for 21st century cities. This program is relatively new but already has developed impressive research initiatives.

The other three programs, the Master of Science in Historic Preservation, the Bachelor of Science in Construction Management and the Master of Science in Facilities Management are more focused on individual structures, but their emphasis on urban buildings and their understanding of management as an aspect of contemporary urban culture offers them many opportunities to share courses and professors with all of the other programs in the PSPD. Construction Management and Facilities Management are both several decades old and draw upon the expertise of New York City’s building and construction industry leaders. Many of these leaders are graduates of these programs. The most recent addition to the PSPD is Graduate Historic Preservation, offering a unique perspective on preservation, emphasizing both conservation and community, culture and its context. Graduate Preservation benefits from a very diverse group of students sharing a passion for cities and their history.

All of these programs in this volume of Graduate In Process 19 share the same commitments to urban culture and a belief that their discipline can make a difference in meeting the challenges of the future through innovation, creativity and an ethical understanding of society. The following pages offer an extraordinary glimpse into that future.

Thomas Hanrahan, Dean

Graduate Architecture and Urban Design

CHAIR’S FOREWORD InProcess 20 Graduate Architecture publication introduces Graduate Architecture and Urban Design’s (GAUD) progressive design environment for advanced architectural research. The GAUD proposes speculative debate and experimental architectural production based on a relational construct among theoretical inquiry, computational research, digital design, and technological investigation. To this end, 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, manufacturing, political agencies, theoretical studies, as well as categories and disciplines that are newly emerging in contemporary culture. This approach seeks to productively intensify heterogeneous interests and agencies through an integrative model of education.

Students in all three GAUD programs, Master of Architecture, first professional degree; Master of Science in Architecture and Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design, post professional degrees, are immersed in an exploratory design studio culture. The three distinct degrees in two programs - Architecture and Urban Design - resonate through shared coursework, students, faculty, and events, intensifying the School of Architecture’s unique position within an art and design institute. This mix supports the ability to integrate diverse theoretical and technical knowledge in speculative design work while emphasizing critical thinking and critical making. Students and faculty are engaged in the design of contemporary experimental architectural projects and the integration of academically rigorous history and theory, computer media, and technology seminar courses.

The program understands innovation, in both architectural theory and practice, as inextricably interconnected with phenomena out of which it emerges. Recent courses in GAUD have investigated such topics as iterative processes, fluid systems, emergent phenomena, logics of organization, complex urbanisms, globalization and politics, computational logics, material performance, and speculative fabrication.

New initiatives in the GAUD have resulted in enhancing the International Study Abroad Programs [ISAP] in the contexts of both Rome and Istanbul. The Istanbul program, in particular, has strategically partnered with Bilgi University in Turkey. This collaboration provides one example of our investment in investigating shared ecological issues confronting architecture and urbanism internationally. These ‘watered’ venues construct a parallel case study for the examination, analyses, and proposed design for New York City and Istanbul, as ‘world cities’. Initially, working with New York City and Istanbul, eCODE, the Ecology and Design Research Center, supported by an Innovation Grant at Pratt Institute, is dedicated to initiating a new discourse in ecological thinking. eCODE will situate new research models at the evolving nexus between architecture, design, and technological innovation in urban and media ecology. This hybrid research model proposes cogent alternatives to what have become anachronistic approaches in many current practices of ‘sustainability’. This research emphasizes new more aggregative forms and projective methods of practice where collaboration occurs across levels and regions of different expertise towards a generative open-ended systems of architectural and urban production relative to time. Establishing a relation between design and education, our new RAD_K-12 [Rising Architects and Designers K-12] Program provides an opportunity for GAUD students to examine the role of contemporary design education across three generations.

The production of new learning environments is explored through the collaboration between the students and faculties of GAUD and several Elementary Schools in New York City, Battery Park City School [PS/IS 276] ; Brooklyn School of Inquiry [PS 646]; Blue School, William Penn School [PS 321], along with New Dorp High School.

William J. Mac Donald, Graduate Chair

JosĂŠ Abreu

Erich Schoenenberger, 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 an elementary school located in various sites in downtown Manhattan.

In the fall of the second year, studios build in complexity, with a mixed-use housing project located in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn that investigated the relationship between the site and the complex matrix of multiple programmatic conditions along waterfront.

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

FACULTY Carlos Arnaiz Alexandra Barker Gisela Baurmann StĂŠphanie Bayard Babak Bryan Theoharis David James Garrison

Carla Leitao Peter Macapia Philip Parker Erich Schoenenberger Maria Sieira Jason Vigneri-Beane

COMMUNITY

The core series comprises the first three semesters of the sixsemester program. The first year begins with investigations of material form and conventions of representation through 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 Privately-Owned Public Spaces (POPS), open exterior and interior plazas and arcades in corporate developments that were established in exchange for increased square footage of rentable office space.

RESEARCH

The 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.

GCPE

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

Community Center Privately Owned Public Space sites, Manhattan, NY This studio introduces the students to concepts, processes, and methodologies that are fundamental to contemporary architectural design.

The Fundamentals design studio introduces students to form and space-making through the investigation of material potentials, limits, and performance. This approach to design proposes that new formal and spatial potentials can emerge out of processes of formation and material properties. Material flexibility, memory, strength, and transparency are manipulated through a range of analog and digital tools and techniques to generate proto-architectonic models that explore a range of spatial conditions and transitions, including surface to volume, structure to skin, and enclosure to aperture. Students analyze the systems they developed and generate graphic notation strategies.

In the second half of the semester, students apply the techniques and studies to the development of an intervention into contested public terrains in the city of New York. This year, the sites of focus were Privately-Owned Public Spaces (POPS), which are the products of agreements between corporations and the city to allow businesses to build higher than previous zoning allowed in exchange for giving over some of their space on lower levels to public access.

Today, these spaces are often underdeveloped plazas with large expanses of paving, public art, and plantings. Several are sunken or raised areas whose detachment from street level discourages public use. The intervention recharges the public programming of these sites by providing a place for the general public and especially populations of local service workers to address basic community needs. Some projects provide spaces for medical clinics, while others provide sites for street theater performances and community gatherings.

Alexandra Barker, critic

a. Michael Lu b. Mai Passara c. Jamie Niver d. Alican Taylan

a b

c d b

a

Master of Architecture | First Semester

011

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Community Center New York, NY This studio introduces the fundamental concepts, processes, and skills required for first-year graduate architectural design.

Initially students investigated conceptual and spatial relations through exercises abstracted from the architectural context.

Through a series of non-uniform operations and digital production processes, students developed unit modules based on the conceptual relationships of form and performance.

Units were aggregated in systemic ways and introduced notions of movement and variations. This protocol became an evolutionary process engaged simultaneously in the architectural production as well as in representation, with contingencies emerging from the constant confrontation between the physical model and the digital manipulations.

The initial material investigations allowed students to link conceptual ideas and form through architectural design.

Explorations were tested contextually in small Privately Owned Public Space (POPS) in Manhattan where students were asked to design a Community Center within dense commercial districts. The projects attempted to design a space specifically geared toward the various communities working on premises and challenged the notions of public and private spaces as well as their usage. The flexibility and variable connections of the earlier aggregations became an opportunity for the project to adapt the project to multiple conditions such as cultural, social, programmatic or seasonal parameters.

StĂŠphanie Bayard, critic

a. Alireza Kabiri b. Shangqing Yang c. Tong Shen

a

a b

c

Master of Architecture | First Semester

013

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Community Center New York, NY The Fundamentals Studio design project is structured as an architectural intervention into the urban infrastructural fabric of New York City. We introduce architectural concepts through investigating the themes of contested boundaries and terrains. In this case, our sites are the privately-owned public spaces (POPS) scattered around the city and are most prevalent in business districts. Our project is to design an intervention that seeks to intensify the programmatic potential of these sites in order to foster interactions across the diverse set of human and non-human residents and visitors working and living in their midst. The intervention will serve as a site of exchange of services and information across these populations and may include a daily or seasonal shift in its programmatic intent.�

In our section, for the initial material studies, we studied geometric operations and constructions that, on synthetic and abstract dimensions, engage thinking about the overlapping and, simultaneously, of the differentiating realities of spaces.

The studio worked with some of M. C. Escher’s drawings/constructions for their suggestion of complex spatiality as per suggestion of: - co-habitation of different realms - undifferentiated foreground and background ; concepts of fields that become objects and vice versa - differentiated contiguity - spatial packing - self-similarity and gradient transformation - paradoxical tri-dimensionality The objective of these studies is to: - understand structural dynamics of these drawings/constructions in terms of how they create their particular perceptions and spatial fields - inspire the discovery of formal 2D, 3D, dynamic, structural and material strategies that create evoking and relatable spatial qualities - use found spatial qualities to create programmatic spaces

Carla Leitao, critic

a. Sebastian David Guzman b. Allison Gorman c. Rachael Hissom

a

b c

b

Master of Architecture | First Semester

015

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Stone Cold Plaza Manhattan, NY In reverse order: from the end of the beginning to the beginning of the end.

Who and what can the corporate tower plaza be for? We tend to think of the occupants of towers and the workers as primarily belonging to corporations. But there is another distinct class of workers occupants that function as service, cleaning, security, and facilities staff. These occupants occupy a totally different logic, different time zone, and represent a different demographic background. In order to avoid converting the plaza into a neutral field by placing a pavilion on top of it, we look to redefine the space of the plaza through architectural terms dedicated to research on two fundamental levels: the re-examination of social relations pertaining to the economic heterogeneity of the city, as well as the spatial, tectonic, programmatic, and formal conditions of an architecture, derived from new systems of algorithmic and generative explorations as well as technologically compatible with new logics of fabrication and assembly. We looked at histories of corporations and corporations in these towers. We looked at, for example, the legal and economic history of corporations and their relation to major global and transnational markets, how the corporate plaza entered the history of architecture and the modern city, as well as the backlash of immigration as an effect of globalization and governmental politics of trade such as NAFTA. Thus in addition to establish a rich resource of programmatic ideas for what kind of facility to design in relation to the plaza, we examined how the formal language of our projects might relate to a mixture of different sociopolitical conflicts. So two forms of research; the city and program, on the one hand, and radically new design principles using concepts of advanced precast fabrication, structural and spatial analysis.

Students develop the earlier work through a generative system using nestlist algorithms that generate networks that are then spatialized and materialized into a geometry. The system begins again after this moment with a combinatorial module that is then folded (in multiple ways), and spatially deployed through another algorithm that uses cellular automata to connect “this to that.� What will count as architecture here and why? The project represents the question of whether that autonomy does in fact work and can it still persist today?“ This is the formal, spatial, and tectonic research of our material and computational architectural research.

Peter Macapia, critic

a. Alexandria Gill b. Xiaoli Zhang c. Sanghoon Seo

a

c

b b

c

Master of Architecture | First Semester

017

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Community Center: Sedimentation Various sites, NY In producing contemporary public space the intense and varied material dynamics of social fields, dynamics of material aggregates and the actions of design practice agility in design practice is a key. Projects propose revisions of publics in public spaces just as they propose new forms of material and temporalized media in forming those publics. The line as a fundamental unit of continuity and difference, as boundary, vector and field is examined, played and developed in the studio.

Material dynamics or the behavior of bits, waves and fields of animate and inanimate stuff evidenced and measured provide a way into thinking structural and material relations and the dynamics of social, political, aesthetic and practical human relations. In the studio we pay attention to forces of attraction, cohesion, and repulsion, or the ways that at a range of scales materials join into larger aggregates, into identifiable and recognizable entities and divide forming new entities.

Slips among human, material and not so human behavior are developed. Our project is focused on the entanglement of these and the ways that their shared territories become significant in architecture.

Privately Owned Public Space and Public Space One lesson available to us from the experiment of POPS is that public space is certainly more than the quantity of acreage allocated and decorated; public space in this next POPS phase proposes that qualitative access to the city and its many functions matter. How does architecture participate in making more of the public space of the city more public where simply being open and accessible is not enough, instead the public dimension will include other forms of meeting, address, exchange, and participation for more varied people.

We explore architecture’s abilities to afford exchange among diverse publics. In this scenario public is the space that is actually contestable, not the already agreed upon territory or the agreed upon forms of address, exchange or participation; public space is the space that occurs before the resolution of these questions after that it is all safe for those on the inside and still questionable for those not already inside.

The projects work in existing POPS spaces to afford other opportunities for populations, species, and actors to meet, exchange, intersect and change.

Phillip Parker, critic

a. Qiang Guo b. Yixin Xu c. Viktoria Usui-Barbo d. Olivia Paonita

a b

b c d

c

Master of Architecture | First Semester

019

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Community Center: Double Identities Various sites, New York This studio explored multiple ways in which tectonic transformations across architectural categories can create structures that are simultaneously concrete realities and identities in formation. Students were asked to develop explicitly material models that, while based on the properties, behaviors and intelligence of a single self-consistent material, would articulate and execute transformations across any number of proto-architectural categories such as surface becoming volume, structure becoming skin, inside becoming outside, two-dimensional becoming three-dimensional and so on.

Operations at play in the modeling of material transformations were simultaneously developed as abstract drawings and notational systems in a parallel set of graphic iterations.

While these formations were robust entities with many anticipatory architectural conditions, they were still unformed enough to be pressured, repurposed and further transformed by the folding-in of program and the pressure from and infiltrations of forces, vectors and constraints of the site. Program consisted of formal and informal spaces in and around high-rise buildings in Midtown Manhattan that would support after-hours staff who might be commuting in to service office space. Spaces would keep plazas active and provide break space and amenities for people working overnight as much as for people working during the day. At the same time, projects sought to provide some relief to the stone deserts that Privately Owned Public Spaces tend to become by developing small programmed structures that double as platforms for non-anthropocentric entities such as plants, water, birds and other animal life that might come and go in the city. Ultimately, the architecture that was to emerge was to be simultaneously abstract and real, novel and informed, alien and embedded, self-consistent and differentiated and systemically unique to the materials, populations and events that flow in, around and through it.

Jason Vigneri-Beane critic

a. Gregory Sheward b. Sera Ghadaki c. Isidora Concha

a

a

b

c b

b

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

021

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Linkages/Resilience Lower Manhattan, NY 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, street-scape 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. Viktoria Usui-Barbo b. Alican Taylan c. Yuki He

a b

c b a

c

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

023

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Elementary School Pier 14, Manhattan, NY In my design studio, there is openness to diverse ideas which signal my own desire to learn, a demand that I make on myself as a teacher and builder, and which instructs my students on a life principal that will be crucial to their future work in architecture. The variety of student work testifies to the dialogical, exploratory nature of collaboration in the studio, just as the required thoroughness of the development of the work indicates the seriousness with which this exploration is carried out.

The goal of the studio was to help each student attain the ability to conceive of architecture in a unique way, devoid of any dependence on preconception, or current trends.

It was meant through individual questioning and research, to strengthen their creative process by which a meaningful work of architecture came into being, expressive at once of relevant precedents, theoretical positions, technological exploration, programmatic invention and pragmatic concerns.

The studio was also meant to assist them in developing their own representational personality by exploring diverse methods of presentation and design development including digital investigations, hand drawings, mixed media and physical models.

To conclude, this semesters’ addressing of the subject and theme, was not just about the design of an elementary school. It was about the extension of the existing urban fabric re-imagined through the program of a school and inspired by the contrasting dynamics of the natural and constructed environment of the given site. It was meant through thinking, questioning of the program, and a process of design, theirs‌ to strengthen their identity, to help them define themselves as individuals of ideas, and integrity capable through independent thought of generating a dynamic, comprehensively developed, realizable and meaningful work of architecture.

Theoharis David, critic

a. Qiang Guo b. Reese Christensen c. Jisi Chen

a b

b a c

a

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

025

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Elementary School Lower Manhattan, NY The design of an elementary school, placed upon a pier in NYC’s east river and separated from the pedestrian city by an elevated perimeter highway presented dramatic challenges and opportunities. As the Cities need and appetite for education, community activity, and recreation seems to be perpetually unfulfilled the contemporary school, particularly when located in a dramatic setting, can be broadly viewed as infrastructure. The resulting designs include simultaneous, secure, and separate access for the public and the school while allowing the joint use of the site. Typical collective program elements including the auditorium, library, gymnasium, and cafeteria are planned to be available to the public when school is not in session. For the studio such arrangements were constantly challenged by the overwhelming power of site that demanded a proportionate response.

Jim Garrison, critic

a. Mai Passara Tungvijitkul b. Jamie Niver c. Alireza Kabiri

a

c

b

b a

c

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

027

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Elementary School Lower Manhattan, NY The project for designing this primary school began with a critical analysis of the act of learning itself. Drawings and mappings of how young students engage in the learning process were developed and expanded into spatial models.

The scale-less constructs, not yet an architectural proposition, served as the basis of iterative investigations. Amalgamated with critical precedent studies and site analyses, these proto-spaces were transformed into preliminary architectural propositions. Refinements of scale, accessibility, materiality, and objectivity and programming were layered into these projects to present their ultimate form.

Parametric associativity served as the intellectual backbone of these projects. Both analog and digital modes of parametric analysis were investigated to enable associations between the seemingly discrepant components of the complex program. The physical form of these investigations was a resultant of filtering and layering each new challenge of scope, program, site to the initial scale-less and form-less constructs.

The projects evolved both deliberately and subliminally in response to these and other influences. Intent and response were equally considered as valid and responsible motivators.

Ultimately, the projects were taken from a rough schematic to a solidly developed functioning primary school in an urban infill site. The physical requirements for access, space, light and egress, in conjunction with the underlying analytical foundation translated into a multi-storied architecture. Additional constraints of zoning restrictions and environmental considerations further refined and developed these projects.

In the end, the propositions stand as developed schools, that in their core, maintain faithfulness to their initial conceptual ideals.

Babak Bryan, critic

a a. Michael Lu b. Olivia Paonita

a

a b

b

b

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

029

GAUD CORE DESIGN

School In the Park Lower Manhattan, NY This school in the park was conceived as an inhabited public intervention. Various studies throughout the semester, including a visit to Brooklyn’s Free School, a short walk from Pratt, gave the students an in depth understanding of how a school can work. The projects are the result of investigations that considered, simultaneously, the two drivers of the project: the fact of an object-like intervention of this architectural addition to a park (speculative fiction on our part as this is not a current site for a NYC school) and investigations into various manipulations of a school program. Our starting point for the reconfiguration of the school was the documentary film by Amanda Wilder “Approaching the Elephant,” 2014. Here is the synopsis of that film that was also the inspiration for rethinking learning spaces in studio: Year one at the Teddy McArdle Free School in Little Falls, New Jersey, where all classes are voluntary and rules are determined by vote. Wilder is there from the beginning to end of the school year, documenting and observing founder Alexander Khost, eleven-year-old Jiovanni, seven-year-old Lucy, along with an entire indelible cast of young personalities as they form relationships, explore their surroundings and intensely debate rule violations, until it all comes to a head.

APPROACHING THE ELEPHANT is a vivid portrait of unfettered childhood and human relationships.

Students were also asked to consider the potentials in melding together the program of a playground and the program of a public park. The architectural intervention has the potential of disrupting in a productive way the unspecificity of socalled green space. The access control required in a school playground also posed challenges in separating, at least during the school day, those that could and couldn’t enter the space. But there is also the potential for the drop-off and pick-up space around a school building to be also the interstitial space between the learning spaces of the school and the public space of the city.

Maria Sieira, critic

a, Nadine Oelschlager b. Allison Gorman c. Inyoung Kim

a

c b

b

c

a

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

031

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Finding Cracks in a Dream Bay Ridge, Brooklyn Completed in 1964, the Verrazano Bridge remains the longest suspension bridge in the Americas. Running beneath this steel behemoth and built 30 years earlier lies the Belt Parkway—an infrastructural homage to automobile connectivity across a metropolitan region. These twin infrastructures represent the modern imagination of a city extending outwards into the hinterlands and facilitating territorialization through the free movement of people and goods. Our current cultural paradigm certainly depends on network structures yet we have also become acutely aware of our cities’ environmental limits. We seek micro centers of exchange, co-exist across poly-nucleated fields and live in world saturated with highgrade uncertainty.

Our studio began with the question of how we live in the shadow of these two massive infrastructures. We took the confluence of both movement and nature on the site as a means to meditate on our complicated relationship to these terms at a time of extreme climate change. Scale, figure and shape took on a different degree of order enabling a distinct combinatory potential hitherto unnoticed. Students burrowed through the practices of geology, mathematics, and landscape to produce alternative futures for these old intersections of modernist projects. However much we tried our work appeared to be dwarfed, both literally and figuratively, by our surroundings and as such the studio’s architectural operations had to cut across scales. In fact, there was a curios convergence of micro clustering with mega-figures among all projects. We discovered the importance of continuous openings in formal systems, or cracks, as a means to facilitate both publicness and privacy in collective housing. The language of cracks in formal systems allowed us to produce semicoherent architectural arguments for how collective housing addresses our postmodernist dreams.

Carlos Arnaiz, critic

a a. Frederic Bellaloum b. Lisa DeJoseph

a b

b

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

033

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Mixed-Use Housing Bay Ridge, Brooklyn The studio examines the dramatic increase in density that New York City’s growth exerts on its peripheral communities. The projects included market rate and affordable housing as well as a mixed use public program of the students choosing. The mixed use both created and challenged the identity of the projects. The housing and the chosen public use presented a challenge to the autonomy of each. This became the thesis for the studio and led to interesting and perhaps un-reconcilable conflicts and tensions. The for site this studio overlooked New York Harbor and the Belt Parkway in Bay Ridge at a point adjacent to the Verrazano Bridge.

Jim Garrison, critic

a. Tim Li b. Maraike Crom

a

b

b

a

b

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

035

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Mixed-Use Housing Bay Ridge, Brooklyn Housing is the primary component of any city. Historically, people first gathered together for shelter/housing. As technology and resources allowed, public institutions developed and spaces to house them followed. Government, religion, commerce all found their own homes within the city- the places where inhabitants meet to work, shop, play, worship, learn, govern, etc. In a dense city such as New York, these other institutions and businesses often occupy the street level of a residential building, forming a buffer between the private home and the public street. The project for this studio was a mixed-use housing project, occupying an entire block in Bay Ridge Brooklyn.

As the basic component of a community, housing is intimately tied to the way a society lives. Technology has radically shifted the way we understand community, work and play. Housing typologies have not changed in step with these rapid changes.

This research driven studio focused on context as the primary driver in the design process. Context is understood in the broadest terms possible including the physical, social, economic, historical, environmental, technological and other forces affecting the project.

We started the semester with research, in teams of two students. Each group was assigned a site condition to document: adjacent structures, traffic patterns, public transportation, environmental conditions, zoning, etc. Each group was also assigned broader contextual phenomena to research: global trends in housing, social media, Gig-economy, Sharing Economy, Collaborative Consumption and new construction related technology (prefabrication, CAD/CAM, 3d printing, BIM, etc.).

The shared research led to many questions. How do the Gig economy, collaborative consumption, social media and other changes facilitated by technology influence the way we live and work? Should it manifest in our housing? What function does the city serve as the physical connections facilitated by the urban condition become less essential and virtual connections proliferate (dominate)? What is the role of the city in this age of globalization, virtual communities and commerce?

How do commerce, housing and culture intersect?

The goal of the research was to provide a base from which each student formulated their own unique speculative position regarding housing. From this, each student generated their own unique program, spatial requirements and ultimately the design of their individual projects.

James Slade, critic a. Youngeun Jung b. Jose Gutierrez c. Xiao Li d. Dustin Heim e. Matt Fischer

a a

c b

d e

c

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

037

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Urban Mix Bay Ridge, Brooklyn The studio’s semester investigations started with interpretations of manipulated and overexposed imagery retrieved from detailed photographs of abstract processes. The discourse amid the existing fabric of the Bay Ridge Brooklyn site and possible ideas for a new urban mixed use program was triggered by superimposing the generated imagery with the existing urban fabric of the site. This exchange was followed by a rigorous interrogation of the current city grid, the distribution of building use, open space, infrastructure and landscape integration. Following this research the students developed speculative ideas for the mixed-use program through urban scale site drawings establishing the organization of infrastructure and massing. The resulting drawing outlined a detailed urban strategy for the site. The subsequent three-dimensional models expanded these investigations into an understanding of massing, building height and volume on the site.

Detailed explorations of assorted materials and textures at various scales were instrumental in establishing an exterior expression of the skin of the volume. In dealing with the relations of material form, their physical surroundings and their intended purpose structures, interior subdivisions, organization and porosity were defined in an opportunistic fashion.

The resulting space organization intended to challeng the normative understanding of living space and its supporting infrastructure both on an urban scale as well as at the scale of individual living spaces.

The studio’s work produced a range of projects that critically investigate urban spaces and confront the vital question of essential living qualities associated mixed use and housing development. The final projects of the students show critical and novel Urban Mix Use buildings that aim to alter the normative standards of mix used typologies.

Erich Schoenenberger critic

a. Suzanne Agbayani b. JosĂŠ Abreu c. Patrick Gehling

a

b c

b

b

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

039

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Bay Ridge Housing Brooklyn, NY This studio project is both a housing project and an urban intervention. This project is situated within a physical, social and cultural context at three different scales: [1] The immediate site context of the project is the waterfront housing developments along Shore Road.

[2] The socio-cultural context of the site is the neighborhood of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

[3] The larger context of the project is the the NYC housing plan for 2030. The goal of this plan is the creation of sustainable and affordable neighborhoods. Students were asked to respond to this larger NYC context by developing a mixed-use program that includes dwelling units as well as a mixed-use component.

Students developed a program for the project that includes a variety of apartment sizes and had the overall intent to house inhabitants from different economic levels. This project is considered within the context of NYC’s goal to “create homes for almost a million more New Yorkers while making housing and neighborhoods more affordable and sustainable. By 2030, New York City will be home to over nine million people—nearly one million more people than lived here in 2005.”

The NYC housing plan for 2030 is an important reference for the studio. Here are its goals: “As we prepare for the challenges and opportunities that will come with population growth, we must set our goals beyond just increasing the number of housing units—which will continue to be a major focus for the City. We must also create and maintain sustainable, affordable neighborhoods. We recognize that strong neighborhoods are among our greatest assets. Each neighborhood has its own distinctive character, history, and culture; maintaining this diversity plays a vital role in the continuing health of the city.”

Maria Sieira, critic

a. Takuya Toyama b. Yangchun Wu c. Luis Ramirez

a b

c a b

b

b

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

041

GAUD CORE DESIGN

LoLux / High Lux Urban Housing Bay Ridge, Brooklyn The architectural design studio LoLux invents a combinatory logic for ultra luxury and affordable housing, and proposes a new kind of residential project and urban intervention in the neighborhood of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

It simultaneously focuses on the two primary growth markets of New York City’s real estate: Luxury condominiums and subsidized housing. We study these two extreme segments in context, probe into their interaction and systematically work out areas of synergy in order to add value for all stake holders and to the community at large. We find great potential in bringing together these two housing domains, far greater than what is currently realized in the industry‘s practice.

The city commonly provides incentives such as tax breaks and air rights for developers to include affordable housing units in new condominium developments. However, the incentivedriven combination of these two drastically different housing types has led to socially questionable results, which point at common forms of segregation, spatialized through architectural means - ‘rich door, poor door’. They do not reflect the genuine desire of all New Yorkers for an advanced housing culture within a heterogeneous society.

The studio encourages the discussion of socio-economic and political forces in urban housing, and how they relate to architectural responsibilities and opportunities. It takes a pragmatic, opportunistic position as it focuses on core architectural expertise, granting architecture the status of an autonomous discipline. Finally, the studio takes the hopeful position that architecture holds the potential for improving human coexistence.

Hyper density is a result of enormous real estate pressures and normative spatial assets, yet it offers opportunities for non-normative forms of social interaction in the domestic and semi-public domain.

Jonas Coersmeier, critic

a. Esme Sang b. Dillon Sirimongkhon c. Michael Chambers d. Annie Paz

a b

bb c d c

c

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

043

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Materials & 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.

Gabrielle Brainard + Stephen Chu + Frank Lupo + Benjamin Martinson, critics

a. Maraike Crom b. Frederic Bellaloum c. Youngeun Jung d. Patrick Gehling

a

b

d

c

a

d

Arif Javed + Alihan Oney + Erick Maldonado Erich Schoenenberger, critic

Master of Architecture

DESIGN STUDIO FACULTY Kutan Ayata Alexandra Barker StĂŠphanie Bayard

Jonas Coersmeier Erich Schoenenberger

INTEGRATED BUILDING SYSTEMS FACULTY Gabrielle Brainard Stuart Bridgett Meta Brunzema Cristobal Correa

Bob Kearns Nick Koster Sarrah Khan Kate Kulpa

COMMUNITY

Alexandra Barker, coordinator

RESEARCH

The projects are informed by 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 theater in a range of urban climatic regions and cultural contexts. Studio sections located their projects in Berlin, Germany, Miami, Florida, Rio de this year.

GCPE

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.

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/landscape 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 within the building, and site strategies that address the urban scale.

GAUD

COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN STUDIO

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

047

GAUD COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN

Ipanema Cultural Center Rio de Janeiro, Brazil The project for this studio is a cultural center and performance space that will be a locus for traditional and emerging dance and music genres for the beachfront community of Ipanema. The project is located on a wedge-shaped site facing the beach. The students researched local building practices that respond to the region’s tropical monsoon climate.

They studied bossa nova, samba, capoeira, and other dance and music native to the city as well a the structural characteristics of local vegetation and marine life.

One group designed a series of structures interconnected by walkways that wove in and out of a double skin building envelope with exterior sun-shading devices. Another project wrapped the theater’s geodesic domed structure with concrete walls that organized support spaces. Other projects explored large cantilevers to suspend the theater over partially shaded exterior amphitheaters.

Alexandra Barker, critic a. Tianyu Yang + Yasmine Zahlan + Jianfei Zhao b. Annie Paz + Fernando Taveras + Haley Williams c. Maraike Crom + Jeffrey Gaudet + Carole Zuriek

a b

c a

c

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

049

GAUD COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN

Things in the Park Miami, Florida The discipline of architecture (as well as the arts) has always been obsessed with the question of representing/recreating/ redefining “nature” through various strains of its histories, i.e. from Baroque, Rococo to Art Nouveau, from Modernism, to Biomimicry , and even recent tendencies of green, sustainable approaches continue these ambition in specific trajectories in order to establish responsible relations with our environment. The two common pitfalls of all these attempts can be summed up as the following; One; some operate at the assumed fault line of nature-culture divide, as though only things that human do not make have an inherent quality of “natural” authenticity, therefore they cannot be cultural and visa versa. Second; the aesthetic argument either aims for a simulacrum, resulting in literal interpretations of an assumed holistic unity (green roof/ground carpet buildings) or in absolute abstractions (pure geometry against nature) resulting in a reference laden experiential absence… What if we took this problem yet again but aim to operate away from these opposite poles? What if we claim that we can produce specific objects that can begin to undermine our assumptions of the culture/nature divide? What if we claim that authentic “natures” can be constructed and these constructions can produce specific cultures.

The studio will explore the design of an experimental music theater in the Museum Park, Downtown Miami. The aesthetics of its ambiguity as an object in the Park and specific means of its technical assembly were central in our investigations.

Kutan Ayata, critic a. Luis Ramirez + Dillon Sirimongkhon + Atefeh Zand b. Suzanne Agbayani + Rick Gee + Egan Kobayashi c. Lunjia Li + Xiao Li + Yangchun Wu

a

c

b

b

b

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

051

GAUD COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN

Alternative Theatre Venice, Italy CAP studio, taught concurrently with the Integrated Building System seminar, emphasizes the relationships between conceptual ideas taught in the Design Studio and technical potentials of the studio projects through collaboration with engineers and consultants. The tight relationship between the two courses gives students the opportunity to engage multiple facets of a programmatically rich and complex building, from the primary structural system to the finish materials, fully developing the project to the level of architectural detailing.

Th Alternative Theater Studio proposed to design a theatre in Venice, that would afford a variety of production types, where the relationship between actors and spectators offers a relevant element of spatial creation. Correlations between audience and performers, as well as rituals associated with attending shows, were addressed through conceptual and practical filters. Often the experience of the theater places the spectator in an inward looking space disconnected from the outside world, but in this case the theater was studied as a building type that has the potential to present itself as a lively public space. Interactive and alternative theatre offers new spatial opportunities in which multiple circulatory and technical systems become a tridimensional labyrinth, and a way to rethink regular audience and performing spaces.

Embedded in the specific geographical and spatial conditions of Venice, erasing boundaries between water and land, the blur of roles between audience and actors become framework to design a contemporary experimental theatre, where the specific site of the project with its multiple accesses and possibilities of backdrops, offers a unique site for traditional and new theatrical productions.

StĂŠphanie Bayard, critic

a. JosĂŠ Abreu + Patrick Gehling + Youngeun Jung b. Keith Alfaro + Frederic Bellaloum + Hao Li c. Priscilla Bargas + Lisa DeJoseph + Ok Bun Lee + Elena Smirnova

a b

c a

c

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

053

GAUD COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN

Dance Theater

Cultural Forum, Berlin While Berlin commonly adheres to continuing the urban fabric in a strictly contextual tradition, the studio identifies this site as an assembly of urban solitaires, and encourages the expression of strong urban form for the capital’s new dance theatre.

In postmodern architectural discourse - since the mid-20th century - contextualism is the critique of assumed early modern tendencies of privileging the particularity of the program over that of the location, a certain indifference to context and the desire to always arrive at a unique solution.

It can also be seen as the critique of abstraction of the architectural problem. Consequently contextualism promotes a dialogue between the building and its surroundings, in part to conserve both the physical and historical continuum of the urban fabric.

In the studio we consider design as a decisive act of architecture, and we promote its built expression as a proactive participant in the changing city -ecology, -fabric and -form.

This design has clearly moved on from the indexical project, and it has emancipated itself from the regime of the network, which hinges on the relational doctrine of contextualism.

We are invested in the cryptic autonomous reality of the city and all of its actors, do not reduce them to relational characters or ‘agents’, but conceive each one as a singularity in their own right. We do not undermine urbanity for a set of occurrences, nor are we content with parametrically mapping and reflecting such ‘forces’ into invertebrate urban receptacles.

Instead, we are taking an object-oriented approach to the city. This approach does not assume that any intervention is justified by sustaining the city’s current condition or its historical continuity. It does not pair context and building construct in a parent-child relationship. It welcomes the arrival of an architectural prodigy.

The studio’s integrated aspect focuses on the study of structural system taxonomies. Students study structural categories with respect to their intrinsic formal opportunities. In the early part of the semester, the integration of structural performance and formal expression is tested via physical models. Physical model making is a primary means of design production in the studio.

Jonas Coersmeier, critic

a. Washington Garces-Carpio + Daniel Longoria + Dan Lovett b. Maria Aurora Bonomi Durer Bacchetti + Jose Gutierrez + Tatiana Rodriguez c. Matt Fischer + Marie Jacobson + Takuya Toyama

a b a

a b b

c

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

055

GAUD COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN

Klanghaus Toggenburg, Switzerland Sounds and Music have and have had an essential role in the culture and traditions throughout the world. Recognizing the importance of music, the UNESCO Committee for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage has started to protect music which is characteristic of the identity of peoples who use music and other aspects of culture in their traditions.

The challenge for this semester was to define form and space to house the international music heritage.

The unique building is to be created, the “Klanghaus”, in the natural sound space of “Schwendisee” in Toggenburg Switzerland an idyllic, pristine alpine mountain valley. The students were asked to propose a unique building that will serve as a space where sound in all its aspects can be researched and experienced.

The students investigated form / material / assembly of traditional but unusual and obscure Musical instruments with the objective to gain knowledge from the relationship of space, material, mass and shape of such instruments. Bases on these instruments research the students developed proposal for the “Klanghaus” with two main objectives; one, the relationship of the pristine alpine mountain scape to this newly introduce object and two, the relationship of the interior volume to its acoustical qualities.

The resulting project represent comprehensive proposals for buildings set in the alpine landscape with a carefully crafted material and formal expression incorporating a series of sound spaces.

Erich Schoenenberger, critic a. Arif Javed + Erick Maldonado + Alihan Oney b. Shiyeun Lau + Dustin Heim + Valerie Hill c. Adam Chernick + Garrett Lord + Maxwell Smith + Priyanka Poddar

a a c

a b

b c

c

Kaysey Thomas

Philip Parker, critic

Master of Architecture

DESIGN STUDIO FACULTY Vito Acconci Meta Brunzema Hina Jamelle Sulan Kolatan Thomas Leeser

Frank Lupo Peter Macapia Philip Parker David Ruy Henry Smith-Miller

COMMUNITY

Jason Vigneri-Beane, coordinator

RESEARCH

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.

GCPE

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.

GAUD

ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN STUDIO

M. Arch + M.S. Arch

| Fifth Semester

059

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

DRESSED TO KISS/KICK/KILL -FLAR-ING-OUT-(-1-)[-4-SLEEVE-SUP-PORTS-18-28-Eng-lish-Petti-coat-Bus-tle-],[-OS-CAR-SCHLEM-MER-1922-]-FROM-SHOULDERS-OUT-TO-HIPS-TO-SHAKE-TO-RUFF-LES-(-Pi-erre-Car-din)-FROM-SHOUL-DER-IN-TO-HIPS-FROM-SHOUL-DER-TO-DRAPING-(-Car-din-1990-)-FROM-HEAD-DOWN-TO-FLOOR-(-Christo-bal-Bal-en-ci-aga-19-67-)-FROM-HEAD-OUT-TO-FLOOR-AROUND-IT-(-Yo-ji-Ya-ma-mo-to-19-98-9-)-BLOAT-ED-/-BLOATING-(-Mart-in-Mar-giel-a 2000-3)…

-FLAR-ING-WAY-IN-THROUGH-(-2-)[-SAM-BU-RU-(-late-20thCen-tu-ry-)][-NORTH-CON- GO-(-late-20th-Cen-tu-ry-)]-SKIRT-OVER-SKIRT-O-VER-SKIRT-O-VER-,-ET-C-(-Hus-sein-Chal-ay-an-)SKIRT-OUT-BACK-SKIRT-A-SIDE-A-PART-(-Jun-ya-Wa-ta-na- be)WIND-UP-DRESS-IN-WIND-(-Yea-kee-Teng-1982-3-2-005-6)-TENTAS-DRESS-/DRESS-AS-OV-ER-OV-ER-WEAR(-Vik-tor-&-Rolf-2-000-)-[-FROM-SHOUL-DERS-IN-TO-KNEES-FROM-A-CIRC-LEOF-FAB-RIC-WITH-O-PEN-ING-CLOSED-]-FROM-SHOUL-DERS-DOWN-TO-SKIRT-OUT-(-Is-a-bel-To-le-do-19-88/19-95-)…

-FLARE-FLOW-FLY/FLAR-ING-OUT-DOWN-UP-IN-(-3-)-WOOLY-FLUF-FY-SPON-GY-PUL-PY-FLOP-PY-FLIM-SY-MALL-E-ABLE-MOLD-A-BLE-SHAP-A-BLE-SUP-PLE-E-LAST-IC-FORM-ABLE-SUP-PLE-WIL-LOW-Y-LITHE-SPRING-Y-(-Al-ex-an-der-McQueen-2-000-1-IM-PRES-SION-A-BLE-RE-SIL-I-ENT-(-Cha-lay-an2-000-)-MECH-AN-I-CAL-CLO-THING-(-Cha-lay-an-2-000-1-)-UP/-DOWN-A-LONG-(-Is-sey-Mi-Ya-ke-19-98-)-SACK-A-SUIT--(Mi-Yake-2-000)-FLOP-A-LONG-(-Ya-ma-mo-to-)- STICK-UP(-Ya-ma-moto-19-91-)…

-FLARE-A-DARE-(-4)-ALL-O-VER-OFF-&-OUT-(J.-Mee-gin-Yoon)…

-SHOUL-DERS/HIPS/BUMPS-(-5-)[-4-SLEEVE-SUP-PORTS-LEFTTO-RIGHT-:-ENG-LISH-ca.-18-28-AM-ER-I-CAN-ca.-18-35,18-25,ca.18-90’s]-PACK-ING-/-WRAP-PING-(-Ba-len-ci-a-ga-19-61-)-SQUASH-ING-/-WRAP-PING-(-O-liv-ier-They-skens-19-93-)-SHIOULDERS-OF-WINGS-/-HUMP-ON-THE-SIDE-/-WINGS-OF-SHOULDERS-(-Car-din-)-HUMP-ING-(-Mc-Queen-)-BREAST-PLATE-/ CHEST-OF-DE-SIRE-(Wa-ta-na-be)-HUMP-INGS-&-HOP-INGS-(Comme-des-Gar-cons-1-2-3-)-RE-SHOUL-DERS-DE-COL-LARS-(Vik-tor-&-Rolf-)-STIFF-SHOUL-DERS-IM-PACT-ED-(-Mi-ya-ke-)…

- R E - V E A L - I N G - / FA K- I N G / H I D - I N G - ( - 6 - ) - & - F O O L I N G - P L A S -T E R - P L A S T- I C - P L A S M A - [ - D O L - LY- L O O P ] - ( - M c - Q u e e n - ) - P O C K - M O C K - S E R R - A -T E D - W O O D / IN-EX-PRES-IVE-(-Cha-lay-an-/-Car-din-/-Their-ry-Mug-lerMar-giel-a/-Mi-ya-ke-)-EX-PRES-SIVE-/-SION-CIR-CLE-IN-THESQUARE-(-Car-din-)…

-TRANS-PAR-ENT/ENC-Y-(-7-)-[BOUE-SOERS-19-21]-TRANSFER-TRANCE-TRANS-ACT-TRANS-CEND-TRANS-FER-TRANSFIX-TRANS-FORM-TRANS-FUSE-TRANS-FUSE-TRAN-SIENTTRAN-SIT-TRANS-LATE-TRANS-I-TION-TRANS-LATE-TRANS-LUCENT-TRANS-MIGRATE-TRANS-MIT-TRANS-PIRE-TRANS-PLANTTRANS-PORT-TRANS-POSE-TRANS-VERSE…

Vito Acconci, critic

a. Emily Walek

a

a

a

M. Arch + M.S. Arch

| Fifth Semester

061

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

The Abundance Studio: Estuarium at Pier 26 Tribeca, New York The Abundance Studio seeks to develop data-driven design methods for new institutions that are at the nexus of social, political, ecological and spatial interactions. The studio premise is that architectural design is not merely constructed from necessities; instead it condensates from a wealth of potentialities that need to be cultivated. Through processes of abstraction – physical, virtual, historical, and mythical materials can come together in new and inventive ways.

The project is an Estuarium - a building for scientific estuarine research; public exhibitions, education and community programming located at Pier 26 in Tribeca, NYC – on an 80,000 SF pile platform in Hudson River Park. The challenge was to design a landscape and building that can sustainably evolve, and support a rich environment for scientists, educators and community members for years to come.

Early in the semester, students engaged with some of the public and non-profit stakeholders of the Estuarium – the Hudson River Park Trust, Clarkson University, New York Hall of Science, the Sloop Clearwater and the marine field station River Project. The task was to abstract from their multidimensional (and often contradictory) research and public agendas, as well as the complex urban and estuarine site.

The studio projects experiment with several design approaches that capture the spatial, environmental and cultural richness of the Hudson River Estuary and its waterfront – without flattening it into clichés. Interviews, investigative research and design tools were developed to make the invisible elements of the Estuary visible and meaningful for the public - for instance the exciting life of micro-planktons, the dynamic effect of river currents or water cycles at the scale of regional watersheds.

By abstracting from the “Generic” and organizing the research data in an indexical fashion – students developed designs that sort, cultivate and celebrate this abundance of data. With this design approach, their urban and architectural interventions became like “apps” or learning devices that sort and bundle data abstractly – much like a search engine – to produce rich, provocative and memorable narratives.

Meta Brunzema, critic

a. Abigail Hancock b. Elyse Handelman c. Fayad Shahim

a b

a c a

b

M. Arch + M.S. Arch

| Fifth Semester

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. CJ Rabey + Sandra Berdick b. Gayoung Lee + Raymond Chen c. Nicole Livanos + Matt Hallstein

a

b

c

M. Arch + M.S. Arch

| Fifth Semester

065

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

3, 000 seats + 3,000 bikes: CINEMA + CYCLE The New Home of the Golden Orange Film Festival The city of Antalya is host to Turkey’s highly regarded International Golden Orange Film Festival. The municipality is planning to build a permanent home for the festival. The project will focus on the design of a 3,000+ seat theater as the new home of the Golden Orange Film Festival. While thinking about the contemporary mega-theater, as both an evolutionary type and a 21st century urban icon, students will consider the historic and natural setting as well as the new bike initiatives as a primary mode of transportation to and from the event space.

Antalya is a well-known tourist node on the Mediterranean shore of Asia Minor. Its sand beaches, and dramatic landscape features such as the Taurus Mountains and the Duden waterfalls provide a unique setting whilst embedding it within the Braudelian conception of Le Monde Méditerranéen as a natural and cultural “ecosystem”.

The World Resource Institute for Sustainable Cities (WRI) and EMBARQ Turkey have targeted Antalya as one of their cities to promote sustainable urban mobility.

The “mega event space” and “sustainable urban mobility” currently occupy opposing ends of the spectrum of urbanization philosophies. The studio will question this apparent incompatibility through a method of cross-examination at both ends in the following ways: 1. Can the mega object be resilient?

2. Can biking become a mega event?

3. Do material, morphology and the presence of many scales have agency here?

4. Collective memories of landscapes and practices taking place in them are critical to urban (sociological) resilience.

Architecture and the city play a similar role as triggers of memory. Can there be a connection between aesthetics and resilience?

Sulan Kolatan, critic

a. Maria Sol Echeverri b. Pablo Gaitan c. Nada Asadullah

a

b

b

c

a

c

a

c

M. Arch + M.S. Arch

| Fifth Semester

067

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

In-Appropriation: The Museum of Self We are obsessed with images, our culture increasingly defines itself trough an exponentially increasing number of images, primarily photographs, mostly repetitive, disseminated on the internet. We are obsessed with images of ourselves, posted on blogs, internet sites, Facebook, and similar image-based means of instant publicity. We are obsessed with images taken in famous locations or extreme environments as if proof of our existence dependent on having been at those locations. We are obsessed with collecting. Collecting ever increasingly banal objects and self similar images, images who’s shear number can hardly be seen and most probably will never be seen by anyone. We live in a self absorbed world where we appropriate our environment to validate ourselves through an endless taking of Selfies.

In April 2014, a man diagnosed with body dysmorphic disorder recounted spending ten hours a day attempting to take the “right” selfie, then attempting suicide after failing to produce what he perceived to be the perfect selfie. Selfies are particularly prevalent in sites of touristic importance, where the surrounding is appropriated as a backdrop to enhance once importance.The first Selfie is a Daguerreotype taken in 1839 by Robert Cornelius, which was also one of the very first photographs of a person, THE MUSEUM OF SELF Museums are agents of appropriation. Museums play important roles in promoting national agendas, and in embodying the values and very “idea” of a group or a people.Of interest here is the museum not as an object, but as a spectatorial experience or, more precisely, a relationship between viewer and text in order to understand the archival collection of images (and objects) as a phenomenon to create new histories, alternative stories, and misreadings of history.

The presence of vast and unmanageable information amassed through web technologies has made the event of (in) appropriation a very prolific act in fields related to the visual and audible. If we consider “archival documents” of (internet) museums, of the Architecture of museums, as the actions and building representations of our culture, this studio speculates what would be the side effects of this phenomenon to architectural typologies when confronted with these hyper narcissistic acts of self representation and endless repetition.

If, what was originally the private space of museums with primarily collection of objects that previously had been socially restricted, subsequently had been made public with the task of social management, and now is entering a phase in which the private sphere is externalized primarily with images within the public domain, how does this reshape the idea of social value, culture and the architecture of the museum itself?

Thomas Leeser, critic

a. Mark Berlinrut b. Rawan Yassin c. Agathe Ceccaldi

a a c

b b

c

b

M. Arch + M.S. Arch

| Fifth Semester

069

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

Mute Icons National Mall, Washington D.C. What should we look like? The goal of this studio is to understand how this is a deeply architectural question. Behind the many technological, utilitarian, and formal problems of architecture, there are basic questions regarding architecture’s representational content. Do we look like we’re free? Do we look like we’re confident? Do we look like we’re progressive?

Do we look like we’re diverse? Do we look like we’re technologically advanced? Questions such as these are difficult to sort, but even if we could give priority to any one of them, how are we to represent any of these extremely complex and nuanced predications as an architectural object? Further, what would constitute supporting evidence of the correctness of representational decisions by the architect when any conclusion would necessarily exclude possibilities and constituencies?

The difficulties of representational problems in architecture highlight a more political side of the history of abstraction in architecture: a possible solution is to represent nothing. Some in the 20th century declared that representational problems no longer exist in architecture—there is nothing left for the architectural object but technological innovation, programmatic elaboration, or finance and investment. Others declared that abstraction itself becomes a new form of monumentality. This can be convoluted because it might be an idea of representing the crisis of representation itself. Nonetheless, it avoids the problem of architecture alienating individuals with inappropriate messages.

As we grapple with the strange milieus of the 21st century, is it time now to consider a different strategy? If the first option is to choose between icons that are all doomed to be imperfect representations and the second option is a futile attempt to deny iconicity altogether, could it be possible to embrace iconicity while actively negating its own legibility? Is it possible for an architectural object to be a mute icon?

David Ruy, critic

a. Paige Barnum + Kealy Vaughn b. Craig Sinclair c. Kaysey Thomas + Dwayne Erb

a

c

b

b

c

M. Arch + M.S. Arch

| Fifth Semester

071

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

Collective Urbanism: Work+Live+Play Navy Yards, Brooklyn, New York 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.

The studio agenda 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.

The studio will begin with an examination of global models for collective urbanism. What defines “affordable”? What defines “urban”? What, if any, are the latent environmental, economic, or social values of these imperatives? Questions of program, mixed-use, and the future of urbanism beyond the sole issue of housing will be paramount.

The site, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, finds emergent new housing, new open spaces, and new infrastructures. Each student is asked to develop and envision new forms of Collective Urbanism.

Wallabout Cove, now known as the Brooklyn Navy Yard has an infamous history. 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. 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, that together produce Collective Urbanism. Speculation will frame the work this semester as we consider the nature of taking a very large risk. Speculation by definition is both the process of thinking or meditating on a subject, a judgment, conclusion, opinion, or theory reached by conjecture. It is also an investment involving higher than normal risk in order to obtain a higher than normal return (not strictly monetarily).

Henry Smith-Miller, critic

a. Lou Wright b. Rob Meyerson c. Sarah Young

a a

c b

c

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

073

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

Acconci Design Studio This studio is about mobility and transformation. The project engaged research about movable, transformable and mobile elements, spaces and concepts. Every path along this idea developed projects that would raise different questions and challenge architecture and its steadiness.

How does architecture relate to mobility?

How can space be transformed?

How can it transform the user and vice versa?

-Agathe Ceccaldi

Ampliato Pavilion: the fold and the extension.

Ampliato derives from the Italian verb “ampliare,� meaning to expand, enlarge or widen. This pavilion can be deployed to a location, an open space, whether a piazza, a park, or (hoisted) on a roof top. Once assembled, it unfolds and it telescopes.

It can be utilized for any event: a fashion show, a cinema, an art exhibit, etc. Its interior can be configured for any program using the pedestal floor and the rigid cable suspended platform systems. The telescopic body can be adjusted depending on need. The pavilion is meant to attract. Its shape and combination fiber-optic glass facade provide aesthetic opportunities. The fiber-opticsystem can be programmed with varioues lighting schemes while the glass allows for visual spectacle piquing curiosity. The Ampliato Pavilion structure can expand contract, fold and unfold, it displays and attracts.

-Theron Bowers

Vito Acconci, critic

a a. Agathe Ceccaldi b. Theron Bowers

b a

a

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

075

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

In MoMo BiTe: natured culture project no 2 New York City The studio project is situated in New York City, Its size is significant to the eco-morpho-aesthetical agenda of this studio’s design research as emerging economic and resilience findings tell us that both mega- and small cities are at a disadvantage when compared to midsized cities.

Students will investigate new architectural forms engendered by intermodal mobility, in particular, in the transfer from water transport to cycling.

For coastal cities like New York the connective and boundless presence of water offers a valuable opportunity for alternate mobility with 520 miles of coastline!

A complementary mode presents itself as biking. Firstly, it is already an increasingly popular way of transportation in New York. And secondly, it goes beyond avoiding the problems of urban pollution and congestion by providing positive benefits to public and environmental health.

Intermodal transfer terminals are an increasing present-day urban building type. The studio will develop this transportation typology without limiting itself to an optimization paradigm typical for infrastructural projects.

The studio will approach the In MoMo BiTe project from the point of view of these different constituencies. Each student group will weigh the known or assumed interests of each category. Students will be encouraged to avoid anthropocentric optimization-driven design-thinking in favor of one that is heterarchic or weighted amongst these various categories and their interests – with a slight tilt toward humans.

The Latour Litanies as well as Flat Ontology discourses will be reference points. The goal is to shed exclusively human considerations with regard to habitation, functionality and even aesthetics in order to include considerations of the demands (desires?) of other forms of life as well as non-biotic, synthetic and artificial forms, systems and things.

Sulan Kolatan, critic

a. Fayad Shahim b. Virginia Li c. Eunmee Hong

a b

c a

b

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

077

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

Living Just Enough (for the City) Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, UN/New York, Downtown Brooklyn, Shenzhen, Copenhagen, Chicago

How might the “justice facility” operate as a new way of listening to the city? What kind of architecture might introduce an interface between the public, juridical procedure, and urban conflicts, that would transform our relation to conflicts of justice? How might a justice facility operate as a new way of witnessing the city?

This studio, Living Just Enough, engages architecture, the city, and juridical procedures given the dynamics of race, the education gap, economic disparity, as well as large scale global shifts in immigration. Students researched juridical problems that directly affect the spatial and social logic of the city and developed projects for a new type of courthouse that emphasized sound and listening. We examined the high rate of confession in Tokyo, informal settlement land rights in Rio, race, criminality, and juvenile courts in Chicago, peer youth justice in Brooklyn, environmental justice at the UN, policing in Shenzhen, and asylum courts in Copenhagen. We asked how justice and architecture engage in forms of distribution and spatialization of power relations. Three examples served as a starting point: Karlheinz Stockhausen’s helicopter quartet, 1993, part of Mittwoch aus Licht (Wednesday from Light), a Supreme court hearing on the death penalty for juveniles in Roper v Simmons (1993) and the radio play from Stevie Wonder’s 1973 Living for the City. In these examples the listener changes, is redistributed, and spatialized in a fundamentally new way. Our main question is this: how might we imagine an architecture that engages the space of the city, given its heterogeneity, its mixtures of class, race, religion, ethnicity, educational background, etc., with the principles of justice?

Would this be a monolithic building, a unique place, an isolated space? Or does the crisis in justice need to somehow enter back into the city through some other kind of distribution and spatialization at the intersection of contradictory conditions?

Peter Macapia, critic

a. Wayne Erb b. Jason Vayanos c. Paige Barnum

a b

a c

b

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

079

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

Aqueous Solutions: Recycling Gansevoort Peninsula Design processes in our era of material and conceptual excess evolve to take on a fresh speculative mode, to produce through forms of radical affiliation as much as conceptual reduction. Processes capable of multiplying affects of one body through another take on even greater urgency when the public stakes for architecture are so many and varied.

The interplays of material recycling, water’s passages, environmental scaled art production, active recreation, a cultural districts expansion, reinvigorated biota, and tidal river surges provide the provocation for new forms of address, other modes of negotiation and insight. Projects form other processes and artifacts at Gansevoort Peninsula.

Our prompt - What happens when we join the museum with production, recycling and recreation with the river? What forms of building, art and public are in the mutations of these? How does architecture engage and reimagine its relations with biological, social and physical change?

Philip Parker, critic

a. Kaysey Thomas b. Kirsten Schroeder c. Emily Walek d. Linnea Moore

a b

c d

d

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

081

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

Prudent Agression Navy Yard, Brooklyn In 1997, Hollywood tycoon Bob Shaye released the blockbuster comedy Austin Powers and commissioned artist Ed Ruscha to edify his strategic philosophy, “Prudent Aggression”, in a painting of the same words. Agile, judicious, anticipatory, while assertive and dynamic – this studio will adopt the strategy of Prudent Aggression to redefine the familiar (yet foreign) territory of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. (italics intentional) A Brooklyn Navy Yard Redux, essentially a sequel to the investigations made in our previous Fall 2015 Studio, “Prudent Aggression”examined potential development of the Yard as a 21st Century urban Community, sharing its Borough with Clinton Hill, Fort Green, Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO. At the water’s edge and devoid of convention Urban infrastructure, students we asked to question the normative and propose alternate forms of mixed-use development for the Yard’s occupation.

Henry Smith-Miller, critic

a. Emma Spilsbury b. Sandra Berdick c. Bridgette Ngo

a b

a c b

c

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

083

GAUD ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN

QueensWay Queens, NY Who has not heard of the High Line? Now forget the High Line and all its trademark elements. It has become an extraordinary economic real estate engine for the Chelsea Art District.

What if the charge was to reclaim an abandoned length of rail infrastructure in Queens and have it become not an overheated tourist attraction, but a living breathing delivery system of culture to the most ethnically diverse Borough in the City of New York. What if it were charged with being a cultural connector, knitting together communities north and south of Forest Park with the larger city park system and the New York City bicycle lane system? What if it were a linear park that delivered programs of art, music, maker-space facilities , horticulture, urban farming , active and passive recreation, fitness, poetry reading, ethnic culture, food, art and music festivals. This is what the QueensWay aspires to be.

The QueensWay is a real project in its infancy. It proposes to transform a 3.5 mile stretch of the abandoned Rockaway Rail Line into a linear park accommodating pedestrians and bicyclists, a park that delivers culture and connects the communities and amenities of Rego Park and Forest Hills ,Richmond Hill , and Ozone Park to Forest Park.

The Friends of the QueensLine and the Trust for Public Land have formed a partnership to promote the realization of this project in the coming years. We have received Grants from the State of New York totaling to date over $800,000 to first conduct an feasibility study ( conducted by Claire Weiss WXY and landscape architect Susannah Drake dland) in 2013 The Metro Hub has been selected as the first segment to be designed by Susannah Drake founder of dland.

Through site, cultural and precedent research and analysis , students will formulate a thematic masterplan for the Metro Hub section of the QueensWay. Working with the thematic masterplan students will program and design a Community Cultural Facility on one of three sites fronting on Metropolitan Avenue . Students will explore the aesthetic and structural possibilities of “bridging� for both the Community Cultural Facility to the north and the design of a railroad pedestrian bridge linking the Metropolitan hub with Forest Park to the south.

Frank Lupo, critic

a. Chia-Yi Huang b. Abigail Hancock c. Robert Meyerson

a b

b a

c

c

Park Changbum, Jason Vigneri-Beane + Thomas Leeser critics

Master of Science in Architecture

Jason Vigneri-Beane, Coordinator

FACULTY Thomas Leeser William MacDonald Philip Parker Jason Vigneri-Beane

COMMUNITY

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.

RESEARCH

This year’s thesis sequence developed speculative projects around megastructures, microstructures, infrastructures, responsive structures, ecological structures and mediated structures.

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 architectures that are evolved, differentiated, intelligent and inflective of future-potential logics of architectural organization, production and performance. In the the thesis studio students developed projects that explored a wide range of issues based on these six types of structures including algorithmic thinking, architectural robotics, procedural construction, responsive systems, systemic behavior and intelligent structures.

GCPE

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.

GAUD

DESIGN STUDIOS

Master of Science in Architecture| First Semester

087

GAUD DESIGN STUDIOS

E_Scapes Elementary School New York City, NY Stuart Brand, in his book, How Buildings Learn, emphasizes the necessity to consider in-completion and time in architecture. Brand attributes the following statement to Brian Eno in a teleconference on design, ‘We are convinced by things that show internal complexity, that show the traces of an interesting evolution. Those signs tell us that we might be rewarded if we accord it our trust.

An important aspect of design is the degree to which the object involves you in its own completion. Some work invites you into itself by not offering a finished, glossy, one-reading-only surface. This is what makes old buildings interesting to me. I think that humans have a taste for things that not only show that they have been through a process of evolution, but which also show they are still part of one.’

The advent of advanced computational theory in architectural design has offered the opportunity to design evolutionary systems of architecture through generative processes and techniques.

Our ‘Systemic Hybrid’ method allows for the investigation of incremental and aggregative processes and systems in volumetric relations of form, space, and time. The studio will focus on a synthetic design research into complex adaptive geometries, that will eventually yield the potential of ‘open-ended systemic hybrids’.

The ‘systemic hybrid’ method leads to continually generative architectural solutions with the potential to respond to sponsored systemic change via evolving variables [such as context, time, use, politics, economy, history, in other words culture at large]. The goal is to create an ‘adaptable’ and ‘anticipatory’ architecture_ an educational scape. An architecture able to be altered with time, in time and by time. An architecture with these traits and attributes is especially beneficial when it is deployed as an educational environment due to its necessity to continually adapt to and adopt new educational techniques, desires and demands.

Our generative and hybridic open-ended systems are based on notions of both architecture and landscape and understood as surface and volume. The intent is to derive a system of design, which, yields multiple solutions rather than a final conclusion.

Indeed, an architecture that ‘affords’ a ‘continual emergence’ of form, space, and use over time. This ‘affordability’ is a by product of time and a new ‘re’-‘laxed’ relationship between form, use and functional assignment. This affect is achieved by the deployment ‘recombinative’ gradations, and their qualitative interplay registered via intensity mappings of space, time, program and form. Of particular interest, for the selected sites, is to address ecological issues pertaining to coastline flooding and the significance of the ideas concerning both ‘resilience and robustness’ in architecture and public infrastructure.

William MacDonald, critic

a. Ghaflan Abadi b. Luis Carbonell c. Pietro Franceschinni

a

c

b

b a

c

Master of Science in Architecture| First Semester

089

GAUD DESIGN STUDIOS

WaterShed Hudson River, NY The studio draws upon water’s long entwinement with human history and evolution of life forms. It looks at more recent excesses of our engagements to stress and redeploy water’s persistent traces in architecture. How are water and architecture, water and cities coevolving?

Unlike the generic wood shed or the recently constructed Salt Shed that contain their material and perhaps more like the proposed Culture Shed in the adjacent Hudson Yards the WaterShed is a form of water access, it provides ways to engage water’s other qualities, it affords a new visibility, experience and public agency to the Hudson River. It is a building that gives other forms of exchange among the public, culture, water and aquatic life forms, more than containing water the WaterShed as the entangled set of tributaries will selectively redistribute water’s innumerable processes and qualities.

Projects reform cultural appropriations of water, its biological necessity and the contemporary bounding and unbounding of the city and Hudson River with one another. As universal solvent and necessity for life water has infiltrated and permeated every aspect of human history and our evolution, projects attempt to open a few connections into this long and persisting affair. They seek to provoke architecture’s coexistence with water and to open a discussion of architecture, its solidity, its forms and processes and the ultimate solvent.

Phillip Parker, critic

a. Gong Chen b. Pimnara Thunyathada c. Amer Habib

a

c

b

b

a

Master of Science in Architecture | Third Semester Thesis

Superterranean Superterranean is a study of the lost space within our current cities. The approach to fill this void using natural intelligence in the sense of self-organizing nature. We approach it not as a building, but as a living organism, with the manipulation of carefully coordinated, yet open network of architectural elements. Architecture would not take a stable form or configuration, but instead drifts through perpetual states of temporal flux, creating a form of contemporary futurism. A reflexive network, much like a biological specimen exhibiting flexibility, adaptability, and basic intelligence. This process would give us the capacity to create a structural network that reanimates architecture discourses with social and environmental approaches. These buildings have the ability to form and adapt to their surroundings until they become statically fixated on a rigid form. With combined studies of geological landscape formations, we explore the nature of systems, cybernetics, and human behavioral systems, to achieve our goal of a living architecture.

The aims of this project is to maximize the zoning boundaries in such a way to restore relief in extreme dense conditions as well as supply the desired spaces for added density in sparse conditions, accommodating to users specific needs.The spaces are created with focus on residential spaces in terms of density and public spaces in terms of relief. Spaces of study, reflection, production, art, and performance are all fabricated within. With this in mind, this thesis presents a morphogenic, morphodynamic way of fulfilling spatial needs within the city.

Whilst using New York’s density as the natural form of terrain, we establish the connection between the existing building and ground beneath, growing our own form of intelligent terrain raised aloft the existing buildings, forming a deeper relationship between the old and the new complex geometry.

This additive layer would become New York’s new superterranean layer, uniquely adhering to people’s individual needs.

Within the adaptive system lies restrictions within the form based on its function- commercial, residential following the grid, and continuous residential leaping from one grid to the other forming a continuous loop of landscape. These specific types of terrain manifest themselves within the spaces. As they are all constrained within their set of individual boundaries, there is a play of form of whether these spaces are directly connected with their existing terrain, its building underneath, or whether they dismay creating their own suspended dwelling spaces.

Nada Asadullah with Jason Vigneri-Beane + Thomas Leeser critics

091

GAUD THESIS DESIGN STUDIOS

Recon[form]ation Manhattan, NY The project is located in Manhattan on the waterfront over the Hudson River. The proposal is conceived as a public floating park which uses a reconformation strategy as dynamic input.

The park is envisioned as a performative landscape where a close relationship with the inhabitants of the city is encouraged by the use of responsive and dynamic spatial strategies.

Inspired on a swarm system, reconformation is a strategy that looks for reconfiguration but has an unconventional way to deliver it. It is based on the idea of the reconfiguration of the matter. Therefore, it is an ephemeral architecture made by small elements which present changes in their spatial arrangement to adopt multiple forms. Reconformation is a strategy for spatial flexibility and also it is a responsive system which performs according to user’s necessities and environmental conditions.

The reconformation is an automated strategy composed by smart units. Conceptually, these units are a population of agents that follow rules of self-organization. Technically, these objects are robots that have electro-mechanic characteristic which allow them to move autonomously guided by a computational program. Architectonically, these elements are pieces that form different surfaces. These units act in relation of a fixed ground that serves as a board where they can detect targets to follow.

There are two types of smart units; a flying unit which has the ability to fly as a drone and is used for air conformation such as walls or covers, and a floating unit which stays floating in the water and moves around to create ground conformations, also, this last one has an hydraulic mechanism to construct various kinds of floors and furniture by changing the slope of its upper face.

Maria Sol Echeverri with Jason Vigneri-Beane + Thomas Leeser critics

Master of Science in Architecture | Third Semester Thesis

The Uncanny Object Radicalisms like environmentalism and anthropocentrism have corrupted architecture, making it rigid and predictable.

Fluctuating changes are a constant in the world and architecture is failing on its adaptation capacities. One of these radical transformations is happening in the Arctic where glaziers and icebergs are melting at a record pace and all ice dependent organisms such as polar bears, seals and fishes are suffering changes on their habitats.

The ‘Uncanny Object’, unlike any other research station for animals is conceived as a place of reconnection between animals and humans not trying to adapt animals to human behaviors, but adapting humans to habitat conditions.

Achieving with this approach a recalibration on the levels of wildness in architecture. The project takes advantage of the non-existing formal constraints of the site to create a non-contextual shape capable of reshaping itself according to atmospheric conditions and season. Leaving to the wind, water and snow the responsibility of the project’s final shape.

Given the extreme conditions and the limited the access to different materials and technologies the main material used in the project is ice. Using a retractile fabric that in contact with water shrinks itself, two problems were solved ice melting and animal’s habitat.

Since the idea of this thesis was design an architectural object capable of adapting to radical changes without altering animal’s space, the research station is located inside the ice, leaving the surface above free for animals. Using self-structural surface as metaballs, the result is a free column space in the interior that supports multidimensional surface from the ice.

Moreover, the structural surface hosts isolation pillows made of Aerogel, which eliminates heat/cold transfers from the exterior to the interior and vice versa. This station provides scientist with laboratories, living accommodation and green house spaces to harvest food through hydroponic crops. In order to investigate animal and environmental issues all year round, the project will be buried by snow during winter season and it will be floating near the coast during summer time.

This project has an uncanny behavior and aesthetic that generates the feeling of attraction, but at the same time of rejection, since it is an object that decontextualizes familiar objects to create this uncanny sensation of something that is familiar to our cognition, but at the same time is strange. It is the unfamiliar familiar architecture.

Juan Pablo Gaitan with Jason Vigneri-Beane + Thomas Leeser critics

093

GAUD THESIS DESIGN STUDIOS

Robotic Micro Housing Manhattan, NY Lack of housing stock and rapid inflation of property prices is the major concern of cities. Especially in Manhattan it reached to a ridiculous point. Average housing prices hit all time high $2 Million in 2016 according to Curbed New York. Also our lifestyle is not helping with this problem.

Every year more people moving into cities and living alone.

Moreover, nomadic lifestyle of 21st Century people making the situation even worse. People are moving from one apartment to another or one city to another almost every year.

One of the solution to this housing crisis is “Micro Housing� which is based on fitting all needs of a person into a single space. However, micro housing design still very limited with furniture design strategies.

Architects more focused on designing transforming furnitures rather than designing transformable spaces which is a very questionable approach. The idea of the Robotic Micro Housing project developed with the passion of creating the most efficient, mobile and spacious apartment unit. The challenge was creating a compact but spacious apartment unit which can transform. Solution was the idea of using walls like Greg Lynn did with his RV house project. Vertical surfaces added to floor area by rotating the whole unit. Thus, floor area multiplied within the same volume. However, it brings some infrastructure problems. Since wet spaces need an undisrupted connection with the infrastructure design of the unit split into two parts. One part designed fixed while the other part rotatable.

Form of the unit developed accordingly. Triangular front part designed to accommodate three basic space needs for individuals such as living room, bedroom and dining room.

Triangular part blends into circular shape for the purpose of mobility. This part is the core of the unit. It contains engines for the wheels and rotational front part. Also, infrastructure such as water storage, battery, ventilation and electromagnets and bathroom of the unit placed in this part. Circular shape blends into a more conventional square space which accommodates kitchen and entrance. Also design of the endpoint allows for male-female connection with another unit.

It is just a beginning of more responsive, flexible, efficient and liveable apartments. It is a system proposal rather than a design proposal.

Ugur Imamoglu with Jason Vigneri-Beane + Thomas Leeser critics

Sahil Dagli + Sabarish Parthasarathy Ferda Kolatan, critic

DESIGN STUDIOS

David Ruy, coordinator

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.

GCPE

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

097

GAUD DESIGN STUDIOS

The 6th Borough New York Over the past five years, the U.D. Studio I has investigated the transformative potentialities of the East River estuary for the city of New York. This ongoing investigation is called “The 6th Borough” and has focused each year on a different part of the estuary engaging in a wide range of infrastructural, environmental, programmatic, and cultural questions pertaining to the ever-developing water front in New York.

A mayor artery and natural habitat, which connects and divides four of New York’s five boroughs, the estuary has often been marginalized within the larger context of the city. The U.D. Studio I proposes projects that speculate on a future city, which fully engages the immense and unprecedented potentialities of one of its most vital and dynamic elements. Part city and infrastructure, part landscape and environment, the estuary escapes any singular categorization and encourages radical as well as subtle approaches.

This year’s project is based on the fictitious account of the aftermath of a hurricane hitting New York in the year 2020.

The stage is set for a radical transformation of the concepts governing over the waterfront development in New York City.

The destruction and the crisis that followed have opened up a window of opportunity to engage urban design ideas that fully acknowledge the limitations of the status-quo and seek to shift the discourse of what the waterfront city of the future may look like.

By utilizing definitions and concepts such as the Anthropocene and Hyperobjects, the studio fully acknowledges the blurring of boundaries between the natural and technological domains, and seeks to find adequate architectural expressions for it. If we challenge ourselves to include non-human agencies, be they technological or natural, into the planning and design of our cities, what are the possible future scenarios that can be imagined?

The “fictional” approach formulates a critique towards the ethics of the fact-based and scientific methodologies that usually govern over planning and urban design. The studio is explicitly rejecting any data mapping and analysis and focuses instead on the intricate material qualities that bind together technological objects with urban infrastructure and a synthetic nature. Agencies and aesthetics of all things engaged in the making of this city are considered as equally important and relevant design components.

Ferda Kolatan, critic

a a. Romeo Niccolai + Masaaki Ito b. Sahil Dagli + Sabarish Parthasarathy

b

a b

a

Master of Science in Architecture + Urban Design | Second Semester

099

GAUD DESIGN STUDIOS

Bewildered Gowanus Brooklyn, NY Transformation of former industrial urban territories is a real challenge facing urban centers around the world and New York City is not sparred. Common methods of taking on these challenges are usually human centered neutralizations where either all residue of the former condition is erased or alternatively it is transformed into a new urban condition with an aesthetic of consensus. The Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, the most toxic waterway in America, is such a site currently under transformation. Our studio explored ways in which this territory is not tamed, not cleaned up, not neutralized but rather accelerated towards a bewildered speculative future where new architectural-infrastructural hybrids define new urban conditions.

Kutan Ayata, critic

a. Asena Gurmeric b. Bruna Kherlakian c. Menka Desai

c

a

a b

a

c

Master of Science in Architecture + Urban Design | Third Semester Culmination Project

Horrific Beauty To curb the spread of the pollutants in the Gowanus neighborhood, a slurry wall has been introduced around the canal, that took up the extents to which the toxicity had spread, as its demarcating border. The wall contains openings for the roads to pass through it, leading to the man-made clusters of circular tanks.

These tanks are an attempt to retain a certain part of the original ambience of the Gowanus canal. It is an unconventional method of creating an artificial environment amidst the now accepted contaminated one.

The negative spaces between the tanks in each cluster are pulled outwards to become long arms. These facilitate the much needed architecture that accomodates the spaces to monitor the tanks, the elaborate irrigation system and the research centers.

Each circular tank comprises of two vessels. The inner one has perforated walls for the water to seep in for irrigation purposes. It is almost floating in the outer vessel so as to have the liberty to rotate for appropriate light and view. This inner environment is created artificially to curate species fo plants and flowers.

This apparatus is repeated and located at different points in a way that every major tank of the cluster could be directly accessed by the existing roads of the city.

The existing urban fabric has been punctured to provide space for that estranged natgure of toxicity which was not only accepted but was admired for its beauty. The ripple that was created by domesticating the contamination of the canal was seen in its most physical form. High rise buildings started to come up around the canal keeping “it” as the focal point.

As higher up you went from the center, the more beautiful the picture you’d get! With this idea, the real estate started to arrange itself around the new view conveniently. The buildings became taller and taller surrounding the canal. It became the new glorified object to look at and admire.

“Once inside, one could get lost either in the artificially attempted to the unexpected, but harbored, beauty of the site”.

Menka Desai with David Ruy, critic

101

GAUD CULMINATION DESIGN STUDIO

The Future Anterior Monuments of the Eco-Age West Nile Virus Pandemic The West Nile Virus pandemic was the most wide spread disease of the 21st century, causing over 25,000 deaths. Its spread was caused mainly by the exponential increase of mosquitos breeding in swamp like areas in hurricane hit big cities.

----------------------------------------------------2035 Hurricane Van Hurricane Van was the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the three deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. The total damage is estimated to have been around $400 billion (2051 USD). Over 7000 people died and more than 2000 families were left homeless. The hurricane caused mass immigration towards inland areas, leaving the coasts of many states abandoned.

----------------------------------------------------2051 Coastal Flight After hurricane Van most coasts of New York City were no longer inhabitable. Coastal areas that were not hit by the hurricane faced the risk of being hit by future hurricanes and the diseases which followed. This eventually caused the coastal flight. Thousands left their homes on the coast to move inland.

----------------------------------------------------2058 Repopulation Act The New York Cities Board passed the ‘repopulation act’ in order to redevelop the areas along the coastal regions, increasingly abandoned since the hit of mega hurricanes followed by the west nile virus pandemic spread by mosquitos.

----------------------------------------------------2094

Asena Gurmeric with David Ruy, critic

Reese Christensen

Benjamin Martinson, critic

Master of 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.

GCPE

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

105

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.

Hart Marlow + Benjamin Martinson + Hannibal Newsom + Bridget Rice, critics a. Xiaoli Yang b. Fan Xu c. Alireza Kabiri d. Reese Christensen e. Nadine Oelschlager f. Viktoria Usui-Barbo g. Olivia Paonita

a

d e

b

c

f

g

Master of Architecture | Core Media

107

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. Liyu Xue b. Viktoria Usui-Barbo c. Janice Kwok d. Howard Tsu e. Swinya Chavanich

a

d

b c

a

e

Haley Williams

Jonas Coersmeier

Graduate Architecture + Urban Design

GCPE 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

ELECTIVE SEMINARS

COMMUNITY

SEMINAR FACULTY Robert Cervellione Jonas Coersmeier Catherine Ingraham Ferda Kolatan Hart Marlow

David Ruy Brian Ringley Maria Sieira Jeffrey Taras

Digital Fabrication Architects continually deploy and employ materials to 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 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 a. Annie Paz + Jeffrey Gaudet b. Valerie Hill + Daniel Longoria

a c

111

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Scripting + Form 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. Gregory Sheward b. Pakarang Chomprang

c

a

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 toolpathing within a freeform 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.

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.

Once the parametric definition and base geometries are formalized, material performance is achieved solely through the manipulations of the analytical thresholds at which performance modes are substituted for one another. Furthermore, students will now have an understanding of downstream manufacturing limitations, and can control threshold switches based on whether or not tooling will fit or reach, or whether or not material will delaminate, warp, chip, splinter, burn, scuff or otherwise fail given its geometric properties (e.g. tall, thin) relative to its material properties (e.g. directionality of lumber grain or thermoplastic extrusion). Design considerations, performance benchmarks, and manufacturing concerns are thusly linked in both computational (design method) and tectonic (built product) fashion

Brian Ringley, critic a. Adam Chernick + Kesra Mansuri + Ugur Imamoglu b. Eric Salitsky + Nicole Livanos + Sarah Young

b

a b

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: 1.

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.

2. 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.

A mass-customized architectural assembly will be proposed, simulated, and prototyped using HAL-generated ABB RAPID code to drive the ABB IRB 140 industrial robotic arm’s IRC5 controller. This assembly will be a series of vaulted shell structures constructed from thin plastics such as high impact polystyrene (HIPS) sheets. In order for such a thin material to span the structure, stiffness (or an improved resistance to deflection under load) must be considered at both the local level of the panel’s shape and the global level of the shell’s form and panel-to-panel connections. Stiffness will be added to the HIPS panels by testing heat-based deformation of the plastic, such as creasing and stretching to create depth along the spanning axis and induce double-curvature.

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. Nada Asadullah + Changbum Park + Cansu Demiral + Maria Sol Echeverri + Ricardo Diaz

a

a

M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + UD | Core Elective

Architecture and Film Architecture theory at its best enables, not just the entry of other fields into its own discourse, but the possibility of architectural readings in those other disciplines.

Students study theoretical premises in both disciplines. They do this in preparation for the study of cinematic strategies that reflect contemporary cultural space, the very space on which these young architects will be called upon to act; they examine the optical and analytical devices of contemporary narrative film within the context of architecture theory. This is not the architecture in film, but of film; not buildings and sets, but the structure, contingencies, and configuration of the medium itself.

The films studied in this course are formally complex, and studying the cinematic strategies they employ helps the architecture student develop the intellectual agility necessary for the critical production of “film architecture,� a one-to-five minute narrative film that examines a particular spatial investigation.

Maria Sieira, critic a. Kealy Vaughn b. Eric CaĂąas c. Washington Garces Carpio d. Takuya Toyama e. Shane Williams

a b c d e

115

GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS

Advance Representation and Propoganda This elective seminar examined the various modes of architectural 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. With a dual focus on practical 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 a. Abigail Hancock b. Linnea Moore

b a

b

M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + UD | Core Elective

Form Fitting In this course, students are tasked with investigating the adjacencies of related design disciplines as a means to create a body of research which speculates on its potentials in architecture. Understanding the method to produce a research project, synthesizing of this information, and producing an intellectual agenda are the central learning objectives for students.

The point of investigation in this semester is the processes and techniques related to tailoring as they are associated with making form. The proportional system used by tailors was developed through the study of the anatomy called Anthropometry. Tailors use these measuring techniques to produce a garment pattern which can be altered and fitted to an anatomy.

Students used these principles as the basis for their research agenda. Using historical garment patterns, the research proposed new hybrid configurations that speculate on an objects anatomy. Individually students proposed the digital craft needed to materialize the tailored object through the combined use of additive and subtractive manufacturing processes. Finally, as a class students produce a catalog of these research outcomes with precedents ranging from futuristic prosthetics to intense analysis of historical fabric construction.

Hart Marlow, critic

a. Mark Berlinrut b. Frederic Bellaloum c. Arif Javed

a

b c

117

GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS

Material Articulation Oscillations between Space and Object Throughout history humans have appropriated tools and invented new technologies not only to improve their everyday odds of survival and to protect themselves from the elements, but also in order to express their deeply rooted ideas, both material and immaterial, of the world they inhabit.

Such ideas, naturally, cannot be expressed in merely functional causality as they do not obey a logic of practical reason or problem-solving. But it is precisely this autonomy, which has afforded craftsmen, builders, and architects the necessary space to explore their tools and develop techniques that push material properties to their limits, and sometimes beyond, in order to enter unprecedented territories. The manifestations of this type of design approach is what I call “Design Finesse�.

Architecture history has frequently been punctuated by distinct periods of Design Finesse. Almost in every era we find stylistic markers of excess in design and the attempt to transform the ordinary into the extra-ordinary through intricate techniques and material articulations. While this approach has often been derided by critics and deemed as extravagant and superfluous, one can also look at it as the most extreme, explorative, even courageous cultural production of its time This year’s seminar topic will be the exploration of the Rocaille. This complex name-giver to the age of Rococo has a number of fascinating characteristics that make it an ideal candidate for a contemporary re-investigation. The Rocaille is known for its indeterminate qualities in regards to perspective, space, scale, geometry, form, and content. Yet, it is also highly specific, detailed, and disciplinary in the ways in which it achieves these indeterminacies. Most notably the Rocaille is indeterminate towards its own medium not unlike computergenerated designs. From etchings to furniture to interiors, the Rocaille is never exhausted in a single category and presents itself in each medium as a unique object.

The students began with an in-depth study of specific Rocaille etchings by two of the most celebrated 18th century Rocaille artists: Juste-Aurele Meissonier and Jean Mondon.

After understanding the foremost characteristics of these two masters and learning about their techniques and aesthetic preferences, the students worked on drawings and physical models, which translated these principles into a contemporary context.

Ferda Kolatan, critic

a. Matt Hallstein + CJ Rabey b. Suzanne Agbayani c. Kasey Thomas + Jason Vayanos

a b c

a

M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + UD | Core Elective

Nanotechtonica Nanotectonica examines the relationship between natural and architectural systems in the context of emerging technologies. It is a research and production seminar, which studies structures and organizations as they occur in nature at multiple scales, and it utilizes generative design and fabrication techniques to arrive at intricate architectural assemblies.

The exploration is based on the study of recent architectural history and a lineage of naturalists, engineers and designers who pioneered ecological thinking and building.

Nanotectonica focuses on incorporating emerging tools of analysis, design and production into the architectural design process. The course investigates a new understanding of living systems and it engages in the contemporary discussion of the term ‘natural structures’. It studies the pairing of nanotechnology with algorithmic design and production tools for a deeper understanding of natural systems. The search is not limited to the phenotypical expressions of nature, but seeks to decipher its organizing principles. The course addresses the analytical routines of an evolving scientific method in the age of exponential technological development.

Nanotectonica is a research and production seminar that links media and history courses with design studio. It discusses technological development in the historic context and applies emerging technologies in the architectural design- and fabrication process.

Jonas Coersmeier, critic

a. Nicole Mastrantonio + Anthony King b. Haley Williams c. JosĂŠ Abreu + Michael Chambers d. Heather Alfore + Maeleen Taylor

a b c d a a

119

GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS

Plasticity The physicist Erwin Schrödinger wrote in 1967 that living organisms “suck orderliness from their environment.” They feed on a “well-ordered state of matter” and are powerfully supplied with negative entropy (a measure of order) in the form of sunlight. Another physicist, Ilya Prigogine, wrote twenty years later that “the denial of time and complexity” was central to classical Newtonian science. He goes on to say that when we move to systems governed by time—farfrom-equilibrium systems—a new type of order emerges that is a “coherence of mechanisms of communication.” The leitmotivs of this order are “nonlinearity, instability, fluctuations.”

The Plasticity course begins with cybernetics, known as firstorder systems theory, and moves to theories of emergence and complexity, known as second-order systems theory. The word plasticity refers to the adaptive and dynamic nature of these systems, most of which are biological or aligned with the biological.

Plasticity also refers to our evolving interest in digital design, where forms seek to animate, in some sense, the dynamic systems used as parameters. One of our desires is for architecture to move and adapt as if it were a living system. Paleontology has argued that plasticity—the evolution of mobility and more generalized adaptive capacities in living organisms—is what led humans to develop a complex brain. Technological evolution, in this paleontologist’s view, has taken over our biological evolution and carried it forward outside our bodies.

Students present different scenarios of living systems—animal, vegetable, or hybrids—coupled with a landscape or environment. Here we are looking for the aggregations in energy systems and environments from which order might be drawn, communication and technical talents, dissipative structures, the closure and openness of systems, and the possibility that the idea of system cannot fully account for the dynamic state of matter apparent in any animate/inanimate complex.

The course uses, and impinges upon, historically powerful notions, in architecture, of purpose, epistemic fields of design and program, experience and perception, and the status of objects, nature, and life.

Catherine Ingraham, critic

a. Michael Chambers b. Lisa DeJoseph c. Alihan Oney

a b c

a

Alex Truica

Sulan Kolatan, critic

Master of Architecture

Sulan Kolatan

Jason Vigneri-Beane

COMMUNITY

PROGRAM COORDINATORS + FACULTY

RESEARCH

Sulan Kolatan + Jason Vigneri-Beane Coordinators

GCPE

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 shortrun 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 fullimmersion 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 Barcelona program also travels to Madrid, Granada and Cordoba. 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.

GAUD

INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS

M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + UD | International Program

123

GAUD INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS

Studio Title Barcelona, Spain The cultural history of Spain offers a unique opportunity to simultaneously study Western and Eastern mapping tools as well as the cultural theories that underlie their use. The seminar will particularly focus on Roman, Moorish, Christian, Jewish and Roma (gypsy) influences and their mutual effects on each other.

The seminar will examine patterns through mapping tools and techniques. On the one hand, will look at how Barcelona’s urban, i.e. manmade patterns are mapped onto landscape and terrain, i.e. natural patterns. On the other, we will study how ornamental patterns are mapped onto Barcelona’s architectural surfaces. The seminar will track the development of these two mapping techniques through time and in relation to the tools and cultural theories. Students will have the unique opportunity to draw on local resources as well as historic sites to understand first-hand the feedback between analytical theories and tools and the man-made environment.

The interrelationship between geography and history will be studied by adopting Braudel’s longue durée approach in order to understand the city’s current physical state.

A trip to the Andalusian cities of Granada, Cordoba and Seville, will make it possible to compare and contrast western and eastern modes at these two scales of pattern-making techniques.

Sulan Kolatan, critic

a. Virginia Li b. Fan Xu c. Alex Truica e. Group Photo

a

b

a c

e

M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + UD | International Program

125

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, self-organization, 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.

Within these similar and different conditions one finds astonishing works of architecture that, while deeply disciplinary, have strong and surgical relationships with other disciplines and scales with which they are composited. These relationships are multidirectional in the sense that architectural space simultaneously has a relationship with internalized painterly space and externalized urban space. Architectural details have relationships with micro-scaled sculptural details that create complexes of intellectual reference and macro-scaled faรงade compositions that speak to large scale public space.

The finely tuned design of these relationships creates an environment wherein one finds the most extraordinary works of internal precision and external association.

While it is of deep importance to study this material discursively it is also important for us to study it through contemporary representational techniques. 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. Olivia Paonita b. Maeleen Taylor c. Alex Truica d. Marlon Davis

a b

c

d

Interdisciplinary Studios, Fort Greene Park Lab: Analysis of Public Space

Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment

Through internships, partnerships, studios, and directed research, students have ample opportunity to work on real-world and real-time issues. Courses are taught in the evening (except for the Historic Preservation program’s courses, which are concentrated on two weekdays and evenings) in order to give students time during the day for internships and fellowships. Eighty percent of GCPE students take on an internship or fellowship, which deepen their educational experience and provide important networking opportunities.

GCPE’s practice-based approach to urbanism is deepened through partnerships and close alliances with the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance (NYC-EJA), the Project for Public Spaces (PPS), the World Monuments Fund, Planners Network, the New York City Council, community boards, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and many other city agencies.

Eve L. Baron, Ph.D., Chair of the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment and Coordinator of City and Regional Planning David Burney, Coordinator of Urban Placemaking and Management Nadya Nenadich, Ph.D., Coordinator of Historic Preservation Jaime Stein, Coordinator of Sustainable Environmental Systems

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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.

RESEARCH

GCPE also offers linkages to the undergraduate Construction Management program and the graduate programs in Facilities Management and Real Estate Practice, all available at the Pratt Manhattan campus. City and Regional Planning students can earn a joint Master of Science/ Juris Doctor from the Brooklyn Law School. Additional opportunities for all GCPE students are available through our close partnerships with the Pratt Center for Community Development, which works with community-based organizations, small businesses, and the public sector to develop innovative strategies toward an equitable and sustainable NYC, and the Spatial Analysis and Visualization Initiative (SAVI), a Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-centered initiative that provides students and faculty across disciplines access to GIS and visualization resources.

GCPE

The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment is a unique alliance of four graduate-level programs with shared values placed on urban sustainability and community participation, defined by the “triple bottom line” of environment, equity, and economy. Each of the four programs—City and Regional Planning, Historic Preservation, Sustainable Environmental Systems, and Urban Placemaking and Management—maintains its independence, degree, and depth of study. Yet students can move among the four programs, coming into the GCPE through one and taking electives in any of the other three, with the further option to follow set tracks for specialized or multifaceted studies.

GAUD

GCPE FORWARD

Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment

MASTER OF SCIENCE IN CITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING The 60-credit City and Regional Planning (CRP) Program, one of four affiliated programs within Pratt’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE), 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. Students take 40 credits of required coursework in foundational skills, economics, law, history and theory, research and methods, and studio.

Electives can be taken from CRP’s broad range of courses, or from any of the other three GCPE programs: Historic Preservation; Sustainable Environmental Systems; and Urban Placemaking and Management, or from sister programs Construction Management and Facilities Management and the new Real Estate Practice program.

Since its inception over 50 years ago, the City and Regional Planning Program has remained true to its emphasis on practice over theory, participatory planning over top-down policy making, creativity over boilerplate, 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 low- and moderate-income communities.

Studios involve real clients facing significant planning challenges, consistent with the CRP’s emphasis on participatory planning and equity issues. Past and current studios have taken students to work on plans for historic downtown Havana, Cuba; to collaborate with community stakeholders in Red Hook, Brooklyn on an equity-building, integrated flood protection system; and to create policy recommendations responding to the Jackson Heights, Queens community needs to transform below-ground residential floor area into safe, affordable housing. The CRP Program offers a unique chance for students to have an immediate impact on policy and decision-making as they complete a first-rate education.

Eve L. Baron, Ph.D., Chair of the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment and Coordinator of City and Regional Planning a a. Planning Studio

Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment

MASTER OF SCIENCE IN HISTORIC PRESERVATION

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Pratt Institute’s M.S. degree in Historic Preservation offers a unique approach to preservation education in which students spend their first year in intensive coursework focused on the core elements of historic preservation practice, and their second year specializing in a particular aspect of urban preservation and built environment management. Historic Preservation at Pratt strives to go beyond the physical aspects of preservation in order to understand what role our discipline plays within a larger context of community planning and sustainable practices. For this reason, after an intense year of core courses that provide a solid foundation in the critical areas of historic preservation practice, students are encouraged to develop their particular interests.

Students will spend their second year on a Thesis project and elective courses within their chosen Area of Focus where we seek to help students develop their own passions and expertise while in school so that they graduate with a body of knowledge that can inform and contribute to the profession.

Upon the successful completion of a Thesis, students become qualified historic preservation practitioners with a focus that at once broadens their knowledge base and deepens their expertise – thus enhancing their skills and the range of work that they are equipped to handle as they enter this transdisciplinary field. In addition, students have the option to explore international studios and practice on offer from the other programs.

Nadya Nenadich, Ph.D., Coordinator of Historic Preservation a a Preservation, Economic Development + Sustainability Studio

INTRODUCTION

Pratt’s Historic Preservation Program prepares students for leadership in a rapidly-changing preservation field. The Master of Science in Historic Preservation (HP), offered at Pratt’s School of Architecture on the Brooklyn campus, is designed to meet today’s increasing demand for preservation professionals. Students learn the interdisciplinary skills needed to assess contemporary preservation issues and contribute greatly to an ever-expanding field. The Historic Preservation program aims to train preservationists that are highly knowledgeable in the field as well as critical enough to push the boundaries of the discipline. Rather than focusing on the preservation of the past the program focuses on diverse strategies to manage change in the present. Even though preservation focuses predominantly in the past it is a truly forward-looking profession fueled by the possibility and the need to find creative solutions that protect cultural resources by ensuring their use and continuity through time.

Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment

MASTER OF SCIENCE IN SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS The 40-credit Sustainable Environmental Systems (SES) 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 urban 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. Every SES student is assured an internship with organizations, agencies and professional practices. In the past, interns have been placed with Living City Block, the New York Industrial Retention Network, New York City Council, Department of City Planning and most recently the program has awarded nine fellowships to work with the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance.

In addition, the Pratt Center provides the opportunity for students to participate in their projects, such as an initiative to make buildings in Bedford Stuyvesant more energy efficient.

This professional experience enriches seminar discussions and studio courses, provides students with a wealth of contacts in the field and strengthens their job qualifications.

Jaime Stein, Coordinator of Sustainable Environmental Systems a a Sustainable Environmental Systems Studio

Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment

The 40-credit program equips students to qualify for employment in a range of institutional, governmental, nonprofit, and private-sector settings. 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.

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.

The core knowledge and skills base of placemaking as a discipline are delivered over four semesters through a combination of lectures, seminars, case studies, and studio-based exercises. Students pursue a curriculum of study structured by four academic knowledge streams: design and infra-structure, economics, planning and policy, and management. The program offers students the flexibility to develop advanced knowledge and skills through electives in three areas of focus, each corresponding to an area of employment for placemakers: • Community-Based Design • Parks, Open Space, and Green Infrastructure • Transportation and Main Street Management Graduates are equipped to effectively analyze, manage, and influence the complex process of public-realm design and management.

David Burney, Coordinator of Urban Placemaking and Management a a Lab: Analysis of Public Space Studio b Havana Studio

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INTRODUCTION

The Master of Science (M.S.) in Urban Placemaking and Management (UPM) prepares professionals for this rapidly growing field. Students learn to create successful, vibrant, equitable, and economically viable public spaces using a bottom-up, community-driven, people-centric approach.

The program is for students with professionally oriented undergraduate education, professional degrees, or professional experience in architecture, engineering, environmental or landscape design, urban planning, and related studies. Students are immersed in the core skills of analysis, conceptual design, and management of the public realm in cities.

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MASTER OF SCIENCE IN URBAN PLACEMAKING AND MANAGEMENT

Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment

MASTER OF SCIENCE IN FACILITIES MANAGEMENT Facilities Management is the profession of “Mastering the Built Environment” The Pratt program is taught by practitioners with extensive industry experience in fields related to Facilities, Property and Real Estate Management, Architecture, and Business and Finance. They employ case studies, site visits and internships that expose students to the wide range of challenges in planning, operating and sustaining facilities in the context of emergent technology.

Coursework is augmented with lectures by working professionals, tutorials, and field trips that give students a first-hand look at facilities and systems in action. Trips include telecommunications site visits, fire safety director tours and multistory building tours. Pratt’s Partners in Progress program provides guest lectures, internships, and vital networking opportunities with facilities managers of major corporations.

Core Competencies for mastering the Built Environment include: • Understanding the FM history, practice and profession.

• Planning, managing, and heading projects • Managing building systems, facility operations, occupant services and maintenance operations.

• Applying assessment, management and leadership principles of facility organizations and their stakeholders.

• Applying financial management tools to the Facility program and organization.

• Applying human factor principles to the facility operation and stakeholders.

• Using FM Computer Applications

Regina Ford Cahill, Chair of Construction Management

a a Facilities Management Studio

Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment

The Real Estate Practice (REP) program prepares graduates to seek employment in the field by complementing one of the core competencies of Pratt Institute—education in the design and development of the built environment. Community-based development goals have become essential to the development process. Real estate professionals today thus need flexibility to practice across sectors while ensuring financial viability.

Pratt’s Masters of Science (MS) in Real Estate Practice provides students with theoretical and practical knowledge and experience in the core disciplines of real estate business; finance, development, investment and real estate law.

The goal of the program is to build student’s capacity to practice the business of real estate with a focus on public-private partnerships, as well as housing and urban development, with a commitment to achieving the triple bottom line benefitting society, the environment and the economy. A key objective is to graduate students as real estate entrepreneurs who have the core skills to secure professional employment in the real estate business while supporting social inclusion, environmental sustainability and commercial viability.

Special Opportunities and Internships for all programs: • Attendance at the Nation Facilities Management Trade Show in Baltimore, MD • Participate in the Pratt sponsored Sustainable International Student CM/FM/RE Workshop. We teamed with Business Academy South West (BASW) from Denmark and Steven’s Institute.

• Program sponsored Lecture Series for the Construction Management and Facilities Management students.

Topics include: Pest Control; Fire Prevention and Sustainable Green Design construction practices and technology; Graceworks lecture on effective communication and presentation skills.

• Kufstein Winter Congress in Austria • Career Fairs and Networking events

Regina Ford Cahill, Chair of Real Estate Practice a a Real Estate Practice Programs

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MASTERS OF REAL ESTATE PRACTICE

Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment

INTERNATIONAL COURSES The GCPE 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 Cuban planners, designers, architects, and sociologists created a preliminary framework for envisioning a sustainable future for Havana, Cuba.

The current list of international courses includes: - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Environmental Sustainability - Havana, Cuba: Preservation and Adaptation - Rotterdam, Netherlands: Climate Adaptation Strategies, Multi-Modal Transportation - Tokyo, Japan: Urban Design and Placemaking - Paris, France: Preservation

Within the GCPE we believe in equipping 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 with insights gathers from international travel and study.

Eve L. Baron, Ph.D., Chair of the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment and Coordinator of City and Regional Planning a Havana Studio b Tokyo Studio c Rotterdam Studio

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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. Sometimes 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 GCPE’s emphasis on participatory planning and equity issues. Past and current studios have taken students to work on plans for resilience in the South Bronx; collaborate on a sustainability and preservation planning framework for a neighborhood in Havana, Cuba; and plan for a 50-year horizon in East Harlem. GCPE studios offer a unique opportunity for students to make a difference as they complete a first-rate education.

GCPE STUDIO FACULTY Beth Bingham David Burney Paula Crespo Elizabeth Finkelstein Michael Haggerty Jill Hamberg Rob Lane Elliot Maltby Ben Margolis Jonathan Martin Jonathan Marvel

Gita Nandan Mercedes Narciso Nadya Nenadich Chris Neville Juan Camilo Osorio Ron Shiffman Jaime Stein Meg Walker Vicki Weiner 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 among 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 and collaboration on multi-dimensional urban issues.

RESEARCH

The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE) 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.

GCPE

INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS

GAUD

The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment

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Jackson Heights studio Jackson Heights Bronx, NY In Fall 2016, the studio worked with Chhaya CDC in Jackson Heights, Queens, an organization that advocates for the housing needs of South Asians in NYC, to develop comprehensive planning strategies to assist them with their Basement Apartments Safe for Everyone (BASE) campaign.

Students explored existing conditions and trends in Jackson Heights, in relation to land use, urban design, demographic and socio-economic, and housing, and natural resources, including the community’s ecological footprint and potential climate change impacts. Based on this research, the studio provided planning and programmatic recommendations associated with the multiple challenges and opportunities in the legalization of basement apartment units in the neighborhood. This included identifying best practices to guarantee the safety and quality (resiliency, energy efficiency, etc.) of basement dwelling units, types of services that need to be in place to support the creation and maintenance of these units, and economic development opportunities that can benefit the community overall.

Ayse Yonder + Mercedes Narciso

+ Juan Camilo Osorio, critics a a Images of Student Work

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Delta Cities Resilience Studio 2016 Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY The primary goal of the studio, was to produce multidisciplinary design proposals that create 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. An IFPS can simply be a line on a map. But a successful and fruitful vision must be much greater than a utilitarian structure that holds back the encroaching seawater. Each team (consisting of approx. 3 students) will determine a conceptual framework to work within taking the design from an overall vision to an outline of implementation. Based on the student’s background, interest and skills, each team will determine their approach, and the project’s focus. While students have the opportunity to explore a wide variety of issues, from planning to urban design to architectural interventions, we will look to understand how each of these has a spatial relationship and weaves together in a multidisciplinary fashion. Through an iterative exploration process, students will determine best practice recommendations.

The final deliverables will be a useful tool for the Red Hook Community, through the Red Hook New York Rising community Reconstruction Planning committee, to be able to further envision the opportunities, challenges, and potential for such infrastructure. These proposals can help the community build an understanding to further their vision and dialogue with the Dewberry engineering team as the feasibility Study moves ahead.

Jaime Stein + Gita Nandan + Thomas Jost + Zehra Kuz, critics a a Images of Student Work

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Green Infrastructure Design Build Studio Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY The Green Infrastructure Design Build Summer Studio, co-taught by Professors Elliott Maltby and Gita Nandan (principals at thread collective LLC), has been exploring how Green Infrastructure can be a model for addressing larger urban scale issues since 2011. In the past the class has provided designs for The Bowery Mission, Pratt’s North Hall, DEP Green Roof, Red Hook’s Resilient Coast Line, NYCHA properties, and The Bayview Correctional Facility.

The 2016 class focused on development of Gowanus Field Station, a platform for the STEM participants, and for community members more broadly, to engage with the urban ecology and stormwater issues of the Canal. The Field Station will provide a physical location on the waterfront for people to gather where currently there is a lack of public space, integrating green infrastructure and interactive educational resources to “decode” the canal. With the GCC, we share the conviction that decisions about the future development of the Canal be informed by the public and their understanding of the urban ecology through a spatial, embodied experience.

Working from a broad range of research, the class explored design based solutions aligned with current and proposed waterfront policies. The designs meld site with small scale installations, urban planning, and metrics based thinking around water, health, public space, and species diversity.

Skills including green infrastructure design and detailing, graphic presentation, metrics analysis, and urban design are introduced and strengthened through the course deliverables.

Class worked to define ‘green infrastructure’, an evocative term that is used more narrowly by the DEP in relation to stormwater management, but also more broadly to consider a range of ecosystem services [another sticky term].

How can a green infrastructure proposal be a part of the range of solutions the city pursues in relation to flooding, while addressing other ecological and social pressures on urban space – such as local food production or increased biodiversity? What does a performative landscape look like, are there alternatives to the best management practices, is there room for experimentation / research when the stakes are so high? These are a few of the questions we will be tackling together and teams will be answering with their designs.

Gita Nandan + Elliot Malby, critics a a Images of Student Work

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Delta Cities Resilience Studio: South Bronx SMIA South Bronx, Bronx, NY The Fall 2016 studio focused on the multiple coastal communities in the South Bronx Significant Maritime Industrial Area. The study area includes the communities of Hunts Point, Soundview, Longwood, Mott Haven Port Morris, and bounded by the Bronx River and the Harlem River. For a client, the studio will work primarily with The Point CDC, The New York City Environmental Justice Alliance and their newly formed coalition of diverse South Bronx stakeholders known as the South Bronx Community Resilience Agenda (SBCRA). Together we will explore the challenges faced by people who live in this community and to focus on some of the most acute challenges that they face; including strategies within the five themes of: + Increasing continuity in coastal protection interventions; + mitigating impacts of truck traffic; + Coordinating the development of community preparedness plans; + Industrial retention and workforce development; + Planning for growth in the face of real estate speculation.

While there has been significant focus on the industrial and institutional uses that dominate this part of the City, this studio will look at how to build sustainable communities that can thrive and grow in partnership with the changing industrial landscape of the community, within the larger context of regional and national industrial and climate change adaptation trends.

The studio comes at an opportune time, as there has been significant recent study of the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center, multiple recent Brownfield Opportunity Area studies and the post- Sandy Hunts Point Lifelines Housing and Urban Design (HUD) Rebuild by Design (RBD) effort. These efforts, and many other both recent and past studies and plans provide a detailed accounting of the challenges faced by the people who live and work in this part of New York City.

Jaime Stein + Gita Nandan + Thomas Jost + Zehra Kuz, critics a a Images of Student Work

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GCPE INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS

Lab Analysis of Public Spaces Fort Greene, Brooklyn, NY NYC Parks and Recreation Department and the Fort Greene Park Conservancy asked UPM to develop vibrant and appropriate placemaking proposals for Fort Greene Park aiming to improve accessibility and circulation through traffic analysis, activity mapping, and user surveys, with special attention paid to possible connections to the Avenue NYC grant-winning Myrtle Avenue Revitalization Project. Fort Greene Park is located in the center of the Fort Greene and Clinton Hill neighborhood, surrounded by mixed residential and commercial area. Because of its prime location, the park has the opportunity to strengthen connections to the neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill while linking these neighborhoods to downtown Brooklyn via Flatbush Avenue.

Students in this workshop analyzed the space using methods and techniques for public realm in cities and to understand that the design of 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 the public space through series of data collecting initiatives, including activity mapping, behavioral observation, pedestrian traffic analysis, and intercept surveys. Data was gathered during a period of four weeks from late summer to mid-autumn.

Based on the analysis, design recommendations were developed in a people-centric manner that serves the surrounding community’s needs. Behavior mapping identified the northeast and southwest areas of the park as the most underutilized, therefore recommendations were made to bring a level of activation that can attract new audiences to the park and encourage an interaction between its diverse community members, who are currently the highest proportion of park users. By introducing universally attractive and Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper (LQC) features or flexibly installed amenities on a short-term basis, formal events and informal activities can develop into annual festivals and permanent amenities based on public response. The proposed corridor presents neutral territory in which underutilized space can become a catalyst for attracting new users to the park, as well as bring returning users to new areas of the park, foster new interactions and a greater sense of community.

David Burney + Margaret Walker, critics a a Images of Student Work

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East Harlem Studio East Harlem, New York, NY The East Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan was the focus of study for the Fall 2016 Historic Preservation and Neighborhood Planning Studio. Students from the departments of Historic Preservation, City and Regional Planning, Urban Placemaking, and Sustainable Environmental Systems were challenged to plan for a distant and uncertain future for this waterfront community undergoing a city-led rezoning that promises dramatic change in the future. In planning for the year 2046, students were encouraged to look beyond the current conditions as well as the short term impacts of the proposed rezoning in East Harlem.

Working in three phases, the students first projected the most likely future scenarios that would change the physical, social, and economic characteristics of East Harlem by the year 2046.

Building on this, the team determined how these potential futures can (and should) shape preservation and planning efforts now in order to protect the neighborhood and better prepare for the equitable adaptation to change.

Students addressed for whom they were planning for 2046, and how to plan for a community that does not yet exist. This process was informed through consultations with community organizations, advocates, and preservationists now active in the community, with an understanding that these stakeholders will shift considerably in 2046. Plans were drawn upon to build recommendations for East Harlem that would foster an equitable, resilient, and culturally rich neighborhood within the context of established future driving forces.

Beth Bingham, Rob Lane, Vicki Weiner, John Shapiro, critics a a Images of Student Work

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Ricardi Diaz+ Chris Edgemon + Jianing Song Robert Cervellione, critic

Pratt School of Architecture

Thomas Hanrahan, Dean

FACULTY Meta Brunzema Robert Cervellione Sulan Kolatan Mark Parsons

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.

GCPE

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

RESEARCH

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Parametric Form Advancements in additive manufacturing have provided new ways to think about the process of making in architecture but largely have evolved from a technology designed for small objects utilizing layered based methods that were adopted from 2d printing or cnc machining. These current methods pose challenges for the scaling up of the process to building scale elements both in terms of time and material. The research intends to improve upon current methods of production for freeform surfaces by overcoming some of the limitation currently used in the fabrication of such forms by utilizing an additive, moldless , and continuous extrusion of a fiber reinforced polymer attached to an industrial robot the self supporting surface is drawn in space at high speed and with precision.

This research proposes a novel method for the fabrication of complex freeform surfaces through an additive approach of robotically assisted extrusions of light-cured resin . The research outlines a new process for large scale fabrication of freeform surfaces that can be deployable on site.

The main drivers of the research are to explore three main areas of large scale site deployable additive manufacturing.

These factors are the delivery system, the speed and precision, and the material being applied. In order to scale additive manufacturing methods up to building scale a new way to deliver the material must be conceived in which speed and precision are coupled together with a rugged system that can withstand on site conditions and with material that is suitable for final use.

Robert Cervellione, critic

a. Dan Lovett + Luis King + Yufan Zhang b. Raymond Chen + Gayoung Lee + Anthony King c. CJ Rabey + Emma Spillsbuy + Lou Wright d. Ricard Diaz + Chris Edgemon + Jianing Song

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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. Virginia Li b. Kirsten Schroeder c. Emily Walek d. Fayad Shahim

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Green Week Exhibition March 2016 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 2016, the Higgins Hall Pit Gallery exhibition showed innovative designs of sustainable student dormitory buildings by a group of third-year undergraduate architecture students.

The graduate architecture exhibition featured designs for an Estuarium - a building for scientific estuarine research; public exhibitions, education and community programming located at Pier 26 in Hudson River Park, NYC. The challenge was to design a landscape and building that can sustainably evolve, and support a rich environment for scientists, educators and community members for years to come.

Early in the semester, students engaged with some of the public and non-profit stakeholders of the Estuarium – the Hudson River Park Trust, Clarkson University, New York Hall of Science, the Sloop Clearwater and the marine field station River Project. The task was to abstract from their multidimensional (and often contradictory) research and public agendas, as well as the complex urban and estuarine site.

Higgins Hall Exhibition Coordinators: Meta Brunzema. Brent Porter

a. Student work from: Graduate Architecture Undergraduate Architecture

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RESEARCH

PrattSide (LEFT) Putnam Triangle Canopy is an installation designed and built by PrattSIDE - an organization of graduate and undergraduate architecture students from the Pratt Institute..

It is 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 moirĂŠ 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.

(RIGHT) Since last year, PrattSIDE effort to strenghten the community and local non-profit has been focused in the neighborhood around the Pratt Institute. As part of this community, the students got to work with their neighbors and improve part of Bedford-Stuyvestan and Cliton-Hill.

The 200 Lexington Community Block Association represents the voice of the community. It is a diverse community of apartments, homes and public housing. The community meets once a month to discuss issues such as block safety, neighborhood beautification and ways in which to become a more united community. Kassa Belay is the current Block President who represents the voice of the community to the municipality and surrounding block associations.

The Clifton Place Block Association Community Garden established in 1991 is located on the corner of Bedford and Clifton. The Garden developed from the community’s need to reclaim and transform the vacant city owned lot into a place of beauty. Since its establishment, Clifton Place Garden (short) has served as a place where neighborly bonds are strengthened, the passion for gardening and nature is shared, friendships develop and neighborhood children learn. Clifton Place Garden is a growing community that continues to build ties with the community through collaboration with other organizations, online blog, and community workshops.

In collaboration with these two associations, PrattSIDE is developing a composting youth participation as well as the redesign of the composting bin and fish pond for the garden.

Mark Parsons

Vertical Studio Final Reviews

Pratt School of Architecture GAUD

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.

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Philip Parker, Assistant Chair of GAUD

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RAD K-12 [Rising Architects and Designers] Brooklyn, New York 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. 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.

In spring children worked in pairs to design seating for the classroom and school. Students discussed the ways in which chairs and seating could become more conducive to learning and then designed the ideal form in or on which they would best learn at school. In the fall children were introduced to the ‘site’ and in small teams explored three areas of the school: gym, playground, and cafeteria. The children examined how the design of these spaces in the school could be improved.

This year for the first time middle school students were introduced to 3D modeling and 3D printing technology. They were taught by GAUD students how to navigate between digital and analog tools for design production. First design ideas were tested with paper models and further developed as 3D digital geometry. The students learned about the principal processes of 3D output technology and gained hands-on experience in the operation of 3D printers.

Rising Architects and Designers (RAD) is funded by New York Building Foundation, and Con Edison Inc. with support from Pratt Institute. 3D printing was sponsored by SHAPEWAYS.

Jonas Coersmeier

a. Student Work b. Group Photo c. GAUD Students Jose Gutierrez + Elena Smirnova

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Exchanging Contexts: Teaching and Learning Manhattan + Brooklyn, NY Students visited the Brooklyn Free School, located just a few blocks from school, our thanks to the faculty, staff, and students that hosted our visit. The school has a mission which at the time of this writing can be found on their website: “Brooklyn Free School’s mission is education for social justice.

Always advocating for young people’s voices to be heard, BFS engages students and staff in democratic decision-making and problem solving. We honor student choice and facilitate student-centered learning through play and exploration, constructivist teaching, collaborative course work and selfdirected student initiatives. We support social and emotional development through conflict mediation, personal reflection, diversity awareness and community responsibility. BFS works in the service of students and their families, partners with progressive educators, and embraces our larger community.”

Our tour guide was an elementary school student and we were immediately impressed by how articulate and self possessed she seemed. The school takes a chance on letting the students decide what they want classes to attend and what subjects to focus on, and as a result students learn early on to take initiative and completely “own” their learning process.

We concluded the session by sharing some of our preliminary plans and sections for the school we were designing in studio.

Here too we were impressed by how much they had to say about these early designs, both as users and design critics.

Maria Sieira, faculty

a. GAUD Students Allison Gorman + Holly Wilson b. GAUD Students Nadine Oelschlager + Yomna Abu Dabat c. GAUD Student Im Young Kim d. GAUD Students Xu Fan + InYoung Kim e.GAUD Student Allison Gorman

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Resilience Red Hook, NY Currently, NYC is undergoing a sea-change in it’s built environment; Super Storm Sandy was a wake up call to the region, reminding us of our vulnerability to extreme weather events, and the future impacts of climate change. in the three years since, 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 of 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 has 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.

The primary goal of the studio, with it’s integrated team approach, is to produce multi-disciplinary design proposals that create 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, critic

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Spatial Analysis + Visualization Initiative SAVI Pratt Institute’s Spatial Analysis and Visualization Initiative (SAVI) is a Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-centered multi-disciplinary research lab and service center that focuses on using geospatial analysis and data visualization to understand urban communities. SAVI has several focus areas under this theme: providing technical assistance and training to New York City community-based organizations, performing data and GIS analysis for clients and research partners, recommending best practices for acquiring and utilizing open data, and providing support to Pratt students and faculty.

Technological relevance is critical to SAVI’s mission, providing CBOs with the latest spatial technology and access to GIS technical assistance, analysis, and training. These groups look to SAVI to efficiently document existing conditions of urban areas and, working with this information, more meaningfully contribute to policy discussions and create their own visions for improving quality-of-life and sustainability.

Furthermore, extensive experience working with both spatial and non-spatial New York City data has allowed SAVI to specialize in demographic analysis and develop a deep understanding of the nuances inherent to the collection and management of this information. This unique skillset has served SAVI since 2013, building an extensive client list including: Museum of the City of New York, Neighbors Allied for Good Growth, Hester Street Collaborative, Brooklyn Navy Yard, Brooklyn Arts Council, North Star Fund, and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.

Jessie Braden, Director of the Spatial Analysis

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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 year 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 frontlines 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 fully engage 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

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EnergyFit In 2015, the New York City Council awarded Pratt Center to develop the EnergyFit Pilot and complete retrofits in a specific building type: 1-2 family attached, masonry, gas heated homes built before 1930. In the first six months of the initiative, we finalized program design, onboarded a home performance contractor, and developed a multi-prong outreach strategy and outreach materials that enabled us to publicly launch in January 2016. Between January and June 2016, we connected with 730 interested homeowners, conducted 414 intakes and 89 assessments and completed 32 retrofits. Each home had the same package of work installed, and included: Three-tiered air sealing and weatherstripping of the residence(s) and the basement air sealing and insulating the roof hatch air sealing and insulating the attic cavity health and safety tests including testing for high levels of carbon monoxide and gas leaks Blower door tests conducted the day of the retrofits demonstrated the positive impact of the retrofits on these homes: on average, homes experienced a 29% reduction in air infiltration (e.g. cool air entering during the winter requiring greater use of the heating system to maintain a set temperature or the reverse for air conditioning). We have also been conducting quarterly surveys with participating homeowners to gather qualitative feedback. A report detailing our interim findings was released in October 2016.

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a. 1st Year Studio Review b. 3rd Year M.Arch Studios c. Lecture: Elizabeth Diller d. Lecture: Mark Foster Gage e. Pratt Kitchen

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Pratt School of Architecture | Faculty

Graduate Architecture and Urban Design

Matthew Herman Visiting Assistant Professor

William MacDonald Chair

Hina Jamelle Visiting Assistant Professor

Philip Parker Assistant Chair

Robert Kearns Visiting Assistant Professor

Vito Acconci Adjunct Associate Professor

Carisima Koenig Visiting Instructor

Nicholas Agneta Adjunct Associate Professor

M. Ferda Kolatan Visiting Assistant Professor

Maria Aiolova Adjunct Assistant Professor

A. Sulan Kolatan Adjunct Professor

Gilland Akos Visiting Assistant Professor

Craig Konyk Adjunct Associate Professor

Jonathan James Alexander Adjunct Assistant Professor

Christopher Kroner Adjunct Associate Professor

Adrien Allred Adjunct Assistant Professor

Sameer Kumar Adjunct Assistant Professor

Ramon Carlos Arnaiz Adjunct Assistant Professor

Wilfried Laufs Adjunct Associate Professor

Kutan Ayata Adjunct Assistant Professor

Thomas Leeser Adjunct Professor

Alexandra Barker Adjunct Associate Professor

Carla Leitao Adjunct Assistant Professor

Elizabeth Barry Adjunct Associate Professor

Qian Liu Visiting Assistant Professor

Gisela Baurmann Visiting Assistant Professor

John Lobell Professor

StĂŠphanie Bayard Adjunct Assistant Professor

Peter Macapia Adjunct Assistant Professor

Cole Belmont Visiting Assistant Professor

Radhi Majmuder Adjunct Assistant Professor

Karen Brandt Visiting Professor

Elliott Maltby Adjunct Associate Professor

Christian Bruun Visiting Assistant Professor

Hart Marlow Visiting Assistant Professor

Meta Brunzema Adjunct Associate Professor

Diana Martinez Visiting Assistant Professor

Robert Cervellione Visiting Instructor

Benjamin Martinson Visiting Instructor

Steven Chang Adjunct Assistant Professor

Signe Nielsen Adjunct Professor

Jonas Coersmeier Adjunct Associate Professor

Hannibal Newsom Visiting Assistant Professor

Christobal Correa Adjunct Associate Professor

Brian Ringley Visiting Assistant Professor

Theoharis L. David Professor

Alihan Polat Visiting Assistant Professor

Stefanie Feldman Visiting Assistant Professor Patricia Fisher-Olsen Visiting Assistant Professor

Manuel De Landa Adjunct Professor

Bridget Rice Visiting Assistant Professor

Mike Flynn Visiting Assistant Professor

Matthew Flannery Adjunct Assistant Professor

David Ruy Associate Professor

Adam Freed Visiting Assistant Professor

Michelle Fowler Visiting Assistant Professor

Erich Schoenenberger Adjunct Assistant Professor

Adam Friedman Visiting Assistant Professor

Frances Fox Visiting Assistant Professor

Paul Segal Adjunct Professor

Ben Gibberd Visiting Assistant Professor

Deborah Gans Professor

Benjamin Shepherd Adjunct Associate Professor

Henry Gifford Visiting Instructor

James Garrison Adjunct Associate Professor

Maria Sieira Adjunct Assistant Instructor

Eva Hanhardt Adjunct Associate Professor

Erik Ghenoiu Adjunct Associate Professor

Henry Smith-Miller Adjunct Professor

Justine Heilner Visiting Assistant Professor

Jaime Stein Coordinator, Environmental Systems Management Program

Martin J. McManus Visiting Assistant Professor Russell Olson Visiting Assistant Professor

James Graham Visiting Assistant Professor

Michael Szivos Visiting Assistant Professor

Daniel Hernandez Visiting Assistant Professor

Ira Stern Visiting Assistant Professor

Clifford Opurum Visiting Assistant Professor

Catherine Ingraham Professor

Jeffrey Taras Visiting Instructor Meredith Tenhoor Adjunct Assistant Professor Scot Teti Visiting Assistant Professor Maria Ludovica Tramontin Adjunct Assistant Professor Nanako Umemoto Adjunct Professor Jason Vigneri-Beane Adjunct Associate Professor

GCPE

John Shapiro GCPE Chair, Associate Professor Lisa Ackerman Visiting Assistant Professor Moshe Adler Ph.D Visiting Associate Professor Chelsea Albucher Visiting Assistant Professor Eric Allison Ph.D Adjunct Associate Professor Eve Baron, PhD Visiting Associate Professor Eddie Bautista Visiting Assistant Professor Christine Benedict Visiting Assistant Professor Michael Bobker Visiting Assistant Professor Carlton Brown Visiting Assistant Professor David Burney Visiting Assistant Professor Joan Byron Visiting Assistant Professor Damon Chaky PhD Assistant Professor Carol Clark Visiting Associate Professor Carter Craft Visiting Assistant Professor Ramon Cruz Visiting Assistant Professor

William Higgins Visiting Assistant Professor Jeanne Houck, PhD Visiting Assistant Professor Anne Hrychuk Visiting Assistant Professor Keenan Hughes Visiting Assistant Professor Georges Jacquemart Visiting Associate Professor Ned Kaufman Adjunct Associate Professor Urvashi Kaul Visiting Assistant Professor Gavin Kearney Visiting Assistant Professor Katie Kendall Visiting Assistant Professor Brad Lander Visiting Associate Professor Frank Lang Visiting Assistant Professor Matthew Lister Visiting Assistant Professor Tina Lund Visiting Assistant Professor Elliot Maltby Adjunct Associate Professor Paul Mankiewicz PhD Visiting Associate Professor Jonathan Martin PhD Adjunct Assistant Professor William Menking Professor Jonathan Meyers Visiting Assistant Professor Norman Mintz Visiting Associate Professor Amy Anderson Nagy Visiting Assistant Professor Gita Nandan Visiting Assistant Professor Christopher Neville Visiting Assistant Professor Signe Nielsen Adjunct Professor Juan Camilo Osorio Visiting Assistant Professor Stuart Pertz Visiting Assistant Professor Theo Prudon, PhD Visiting Assistant Professor David Reiss Visiting Assistant Professor Steven Romalewski Visiting Assistant Professor Alison Schneider Visiting Assistant Professor Ronald Shiffman FAICP FAIA Professor Toby Snyder Visiting Assistant Professor

Gelvin Stevenson, PhD Visiting Associate Professor

Jack Osborn Visiting Associate Professor

Samara F. Swanston JD Visiting Assistant Professor

Sharvil Patel Visiting Assistant Professor

Lacey Tauber Visiting Assistant Professor

Edward D. Re Adjunct Associate Professor

Petra Todorovitch Visiting Assistant Professor

Carol R. Reznikoff Visiting Assistant Professor

Meenakshi Varandani Visiting Assistant Professor

Joseph Tagliaferro Visiting Assistant Professor

Meg Walker Visiting Assistant Professor

Simon Taylor Visiting Assistant Professor

Edward Perry Winston RA 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 Kent Hikida Associate Professor James G. Howie Adjunct Professor William P. Hudson Visiting Assistant Professor Hillary Lobo Visiting Assistant Professor Stephen LoGrasso Visiting Assistant Professor Mary Mathews 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