INPROCESS 23

GRADUATE

INPROCESS 23 GAUD + GCPE

School of Architecture Fall 2016 - Spring 2017

GRADUATE

INPROCESS 23 GAUD + GCPE School of Architecture Fall 2016 - Spring 2017

INPROCESS is the yearly publication of student work from the Pratt Institute School of Architecture Editor: Olivia Paonita Assistant Editor: Wanlapa Koosakul GCPE Archival Coordination: Carlos Rodriguez Estevez and Shingo Sekiya Undergraduate Archival Coordination: Jonathon Koewler, Russell Low, Charles Driesler, Michele Runco, Kalam Lin Siu and Wina Wu

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: David Erdman, GAUD Chair Philip Parker, Assistant GAUD Chair (2005-2017) Alexandra Barker, Assitant GAUD Chair (starting Summer 2017) Erin Murphy. Geoffrey Olsen + Gloria Nyaega, Assistants to GAUD Chairs

GCPE Administration: Eve L. Baron, Ph.D., Chair of the GCPE 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 Regina Ford Cahill, Chair of Construction Management, Facilities Management, and Real Estate Practice

PCCD Administration: Adam Friedman, Director of Pratt Center for Community Development Additional Image Credits: Cover Image: Jose Gutierrez Nanako Umemoto, critic Interior Cover:

Jose Abreu, Youngeun Jung + TianYu Yang and Ok Bun Lee, Shijin Ma, + Yujie Lu Alexandra Barker + Alihan Polat, critics

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 23 would like to extend a thank you to the Summer 2016 - Spring 2017 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, David Erdman and Alexandra Barker for their invaluable input and guidance.

And finally, we would like to say farewell to Olivia Paonita, Jonathon Koewler and Russell Low who after many years of exceptional dedication to Archives and InProcess are graduating.

Foreword

005

007 01 7 025 037

047 063

Master of Science in Architecture

Thesis Semester 3

Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design

Culmination Projects Semester 3

Seminars

Mediums Core Electives International Programs Summer Programs

GRADUATE CENTER FOR PLANNING AND THE ENVIRONMENT Foreword

Master of Science in City and Regional Planning Master of Science in Historic Preservation Master of Science in Urban Environmental Systems Management

PRATT MANHATTAN CENTER

Master of Science in Facilities Management Bachelor of Science in Construction Management International Courses Interdisciplinary Studios

LECTURES + EVENTS

Critiques Pratt Sessions + SOA Lectures Exhibitions

DIRECTED RESEARCH

Coursework Prior Directed Research

079

087 095 101 115 121 127

129 130 131 133 132 133 133 151 153 155

159 161

COMMUNITY

Community Projects K-12 RAD Exchanging Contexts Delta Cities SAVI Pratt Center

164 165 167 169 171

School Culture Lecture Series Faculty

173 175 1 76

COMMUNITY

Core Design Studios Semester ‘1 Semester 2 Semester 3 Semester 4 Directed Research Studios Semester 5 Semester 6

RESEARCH

Master of Architecture

GCPE

GRADUATE ARCHITECTURE + URBAN DESIGN

GAUD

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Pratt School of Architecture

DEAN’S FOREWORD This 23rd edition of Graduate In Process represents the work of over 450 students in Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (GAUD), the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE) and the Pratt Manhattan Center. Together the programs in the GAUD, the GCPE and the Manhattan Center comprise eight graduate programs and one linked undergraduate program that represent virtually every aspect of the built environment. The GAUD’s three degree programs include the accredited Master of Architecture, the M.S. in Architecture and the M.S. in Architecture and Urban Design. The GCPE is comprised of the accredited M.S. in City and Regional Planning, the M.S. in Sustainable Environmental Systems, the M.S. in Historic Preservation and the M.S. in Urban Placemaking Management. The M.S. in Facilities Management and the B.S. in Construction Management reside in the Manhattan Center, benefiting from the strong network of active professionals in their field. All of these programs have unique and important ways of approaching the making of cities and buildings, while sharing the spirit of creativity, collaboration and research that characterizes all of the students and faculty within the School of Architecture.

The work of the GAUD is progressive and experimental in its approach to design, emphasizing creativity and innovation at every level, from the form of buildings and cities to advanced technological systems in structures, sustainability and building performance. Complementing design and technology is a critical theory curriculum that offers global perspectives and introduces students to the most advanced and important thinking in architecture and urban design today. The faculty are composed of designers, theorists and practicing architects and engineers, drawing upon the unparalleled intellectual and professional culture of New York City. In recent years, many of the GAUD faculty have initiated significant research projects within the school, particularly in the areas of computation and fabrication and outreach to communities, including the public schools of New York where GAUD faculty and students give design workshops to young students. The students themselves manage both a community oriented research group entitled PrattsSide and the publication TARP, a theme-based journal of theory and design. At the core of the Master of Architecture program is the Integrative Design Studio where architects and engineers teach teams of students in a collaborative manner that directly reflects the best professional practices in architecture and building technology. The M.S. programs in architecture and urban design offer students with a professional education the opportunity to expand their understanding of design and theory and to develop thesis projects based upon their own, unique research.

The programs in the GCPE and the Manhattan Center share these qualities of rigor and speculative research, together with a strong commitment to improving social justice by direct engagement with communities and important professional organizations within respective disciplines. The City and Regional Planning program has a long and distinguished history of directly assisting communities in their planning efforts particularly with respect to social and environmental issues. The Pratt Center grew out of these efforts and is now one the nation’s oldest and most celebrated university-based urban research centers. The work of the Historic Preservation program demonstrates a similar commitment to professional and community engagement with internships and coursework oriented toward preservation planning and practice. The Sustainable Environmental Systems program has expanded its activities in recent years to include substantive research work on coastal cities and water infrastructure. The newest program in the GCPE is the Urban Placemaking Management program and is one of the first of its kind in this emerging area of urban studies. The GCPE programs have continued their collaboration on global projects and again sent students to Havana to assess that city’s remarkable progress in preservation, sustainability, artistic culture and urban placemaking. The two programs based in Manhattan are Facilities Management and Construction Management, and both of these programs are deeply involved with their professional communities. The Construction Management program has formed alliances with numerous construction companies and developed scholarship and internship programs, while the Facilities Management program has continued its development of global standards of excellence through its alliances with international universities that both visit and accommodate our students through study abroad workshops.

All of this work and more is represented in this edition of In Process, and like the twenty two editions before this one, it is a representation of each program’s mission and ideals.

This edition is also a recognition of the high quality of student and faculty work and their deep commitments to their discipline. Most of all, however, this book should be enjoyed as a celebration of another extraordinary year of accomplishments in all of our graduate programs in the School of Architecture.

Thomas Hanrahan, Dean

Graduate Architecture and Urban Design

CHAIR’S FOREWORD WELCOME This 23rd instantiation of In Process is the first in which I was appointed as the Chair of the GAUD. It comes on the heels of over a decade of rampant production and growth as a significant player in the landscape of graduate programs internationally. More specifically, the work in this issue artifacts ambient curricular changes we began to discuss throughout the year and in relationship to the history of our current programs and their future. It was an immensely productive year. Working closely with my esteemed faculty and students, we initiated changes while I also spent significant time listening and learning from my colleagues about the many attributes and assets of the GAUD; as a graduate program within a design institute that has distinct advantages for educating young architects in the 21st century.

INSTITUTIONAL VISION As an art and design institute (as opposed to a broad-based university), Pratt sees its mission as one where design and architecture are central to the formation of culture, our cities, and our increasingly threatened habitat. The three programs that comprise Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (GAUD) within the School of Architecture are actively extending that mission into the 21st century. We are passionate about design and are working to ensure that our graduates can actuate design thinking within a complex and evolving interdisciplinary and global set of concerns.

GAUD Immersed in a design-rich environment, surrounded by leading designers and thinkers throughout the curriculum of each program, the students’ work collected in this23rdedition of In Process reflects the collective commitment and agility of the GAUD, its faculty and students to address issues related to contemporary architecture, its future, its insularity, its disciplinarity, and its necessity to engage new audiences. Our goal is to enable students to ask questions of the discipline and the profession that neither constituency will ask, or that both constituencies are entirely unaware they should ask. More to the point, the three programs collected in this book showcase how our students are exposed to a balance of deep disciplinary understanding and cutting edge technical knowledge; allowing them to make those queries with adroit design precision and intense design ingenuity.

MASTER OF ARCHITECURE Among the highlights within the three-year M.Arch is the Integrative Studio; the final studio of the Core Curriculum. Reinforcing circular design methodologies that move between the variegated disciplines of architecture (landscape, facade, conservation) and engineering (ecological, structural, mechanical), which allow students to work alongside technology consultants from day one, the Studio serves as a benchmark nationally and internationally for “integrative design.” The Advanced Curriculum, comprised of studios and electives, allows students to work in a consortium of Directed Research projects initiated by faculty, where extra-disciplinary investigations and technologies are abound; ranging from robotics to prefabrication to visualization.

POST PROFESSIONAL (MSARCH + MSAUD) PROGRAMS In the one-year MS.Arch program, students continue to deepen their investigations into architectural mediums. Spanning the gamut between under-sized architecture and oversized product design, these students leave the GAUD with a unique understanding of computationally based visualization and fabrication that imbues them with extraordinary agility. The work here moves between product design and architecture, while speculating on emerging and contemporary types of design-based praxes.

The one-year MS Architecture and Urban Design (MSAUD) program extends its legacy as a program that envisions the future of cities, with a materialist aptitude and with an understanding that (as city populations increase and economies sober) densification is at once inevitable, desirable, and daunting. Making that future city habitable requires architectural design at an urban scale combined with a sensitive understanding of the increasingly mediated world through which we live and experience those environments.

Progressing from the regional scale to the scale of a block, the MS AUD program allows students to explore the future of urban design, and gain the skill of thinking between landscape, conservation, data-visualization, architecture and interior design necessary to engage issues that contemporary New York faces alongside its global counterparts.

David C. Erdman, Graduate Chair

Ludan Lai, Shangqing Yang + Sunah Choi Kutan Ayata, critic

Master of Architecture

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.

The core series comprises the first four semesters of the sixsemester program. The first year begins with investigations of material form and conventions of representation through physical and digital 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. The interventions proposed new ways to activate these underutilized spaces by proposing the insertion of a performance space as a way of activating the spaces.

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 on a corner site in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The projects sought to find new ways for institutional spaces to connect to the local neighborhood context.

In the fall of the second year, studios build in complexity and scale.

Concepts of environmental systems and material assemblies are introduced studio and further developed in the accompanying technology seminars. The project was a mixed-use housing complex located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that investigated the relationship between the site and the changing nature of urbanization in a neighborhood undergoing rapid densification.

In fourth semester students undertake the design of an integrative project, where they 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.

Alexandra Barker, Coordinator

FACULTY Alexandra Barker Erich Schoenenberger Theoharis David StĂŠphanie Bayard Peter Macapia Philip Parker Kutan Ayata

Carlos Arnaiz Jim Garrison Jonas Coersmeier Maria Sieira Gisela Baurmann Dylan Baker Rice

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

Paul LaRoque Bob Kearns Nick Koster Kate Kulpa

GAUD

CORE DESIGN STUDIO

Master of Architecture | First Semester

009

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Performance Space

Privately-Owned Public Space (POPS) sites in 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 diverse members of the urban community to enjoy public entertainment programs in locations that are often inaccessible to the general population despite their public status.

Alexandra Barker, critic

a. Chase Kaars-Sypesteyn b. Kenith Mak c. Shulan Kuang d. Sandra Nataf

a

b

b

d

c

d

c

Master of Architecture | First Semester

011

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Privately Owned Public (performing) Space Manhattan, NY This studio is an introduction to the fundamental concepts, processes, and skills required for first-year graduate architectural design. The students investigated conceptual and spatial relations through exercises abstracted from architectural context. They developed some modules and patterns based on the conceptual relationships of form and performance. The systemic aggregations were then deformed according to specific criteria. 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 (POPS) in Manhattan where students were asked to design a Performing Space 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.Â

StĂŠphanie Bayard, critic

a. Amir Ashtiani b. Amanda Lee c. Daniel Salvador

a b

c b c

a

Master of Architecture | First Semester

013

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Architectures of the Street Manhattan, NY The position of the horizontal zone in urban architecture requires often a blurring between the building particularly towers, and the logic of density and movement specific to cities. Our research this semester focused on the social political implications of an architecture that arrested and transformed that condition as a specific study which is neither site nor form but something between. Our point of departure was the problematic condition of the corporate plaza which students integrated in different forms into building conditions that reframed the street as an essential vertical diagram for the organization of program and space.

The research focused on two specific contemporary problems of the urban space which are the fluctuating sentiments of public space as well as the fluctuating political understanding of urban populations as essentially and necessarily heterogeneous. The studio thus placed high demands on the legibility of program as well as intensely researched urban conditions on an international level.

Projects included a women’s homeless shelter in Los Angeles; Museum of urban economic migrant ghosts in Shenzhen; a children’s refugee trauma treatment center in Paris; agent based housing experiments in Florida; Water rights in New Dehli high density informal settlements; a human trafficking rehabilitation center; an LGBQT center in Manhattan; an environmental ecology restoration project in New York, and a mixed-use housing and commercial infrastructure/architecture hybrid in Bremen.

d

a

b

b

c

d

c

Peter Macapia, critic

a. Mor Segal b. Jiratt Khumkomgool c. Yanzhen Qiu

a

c

b

a

c

Master of Architecture | First Semester

015

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Fundamental Agility Manhattan, NY The studio recognizes fundamentals as a material and operational exchange charged with producing a contemporary ground – ground in a very wide sense of the term. This ground is in the studio built from dynamic processes of change – where fluids break from their stable flows and rhythms and exhibit momentary and multiple organizations. It is built from the dynamics of multiple social bodies responding to one another and from the specifically sensed and tracked context of the territory. That is to say it works with the contradictory impulses of the city to afford new forms of exchange, ground and sensation as environments.

It is involved in the producing organizations of media, working with multiple logics and materials, paying attention to how things work, how they organize others, how they provide material opportunities for others, what they can do - more than what they are supposed to do. Here, fundamental is found in the agility of moving within multiple forceful terrains.

The studio develops multiple media strategies, logics and ambitions.

The projects form multiple intersections, alignments and misalignments among use, form and contexts; first as independent players and in propositions - navigating the tense field of ground as back ground support and as charged architectural moments.

Phillip Parker, critic

a. Haya Alnibari b. Fanping Zhao c. Sammie Wu d. Tal Friedland

a

c c

b

d

d

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

017

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Linkages//Donkey Organisms Brooklyn, NY For the affect is not a personal feeling . . . it is the effectuation of a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel. Who has not known the violence of these animal sequences, which uproot one from humanity, if only for an instant, making one scrape at one’s bread like a rodent or giving one the yellow eyes of a feline? A fearsome involution calling us toward unheard-of becomings.

—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus The studio set out to infuse the public middle school in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park with a community-oriented program to foster connections into and out of the school. Investigating the site’s urban fabric, demographic and existing programs, students develop their individual program enrichment to the middle school.

A series of thread model experiments - analogue computing devices – instigate the materialization and testing of principal spatial ideas in computational and physical models. They develop into “Design Fundamentals”, speculative architectural models that relate the individually drawn-up program and the studio-wide middle school program as exemplary interior spaces.

The Design Fundamentals, systemic in structure and spatial in their actualization, are complemented by studies for tone and texture, and collages to articulate affect, materiality and landscape relations.

The site, a brownstone neighborhood interspersed with municipal buildings recently welcomed the opening of Industry City, a hub of creative businesses and fabrication shops that establish emergent technologies, food and art venues in 6 large-scale former industrial buildings at the Brooklyn waterfront. It brings outside visitors and new attention to the dormant quarters of Sunset Park. Thus Industry City and the residential context both serve as a reservoir to expand on the given program interfacing the school with its surroundings.

Compounding the individualized programs on site, program affiliations, spatial hierarchies and site impact distinguish each design proposal.

Gisela Baurmann, critic

a. Kenith Mak b. Kennedy Phillips c. Yang Li

a b

a c

b

b

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

019

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Introduction and Methodology Sunset Park, Brooklyn This semester’s investigation of the Subject: A Middle School for Sunset Park Brooklyn and Theme: The City As An Environment for Learning, was not confined to the design of a NYC public school, It was about generating and situating an architectural concept as implant or graft into the fabric of a typical Brooklyn residential neighborhood thus redefining it while taking into account the neighborhood’s history, demographics and the dynamics of the extended subject site Our design investigation was meant through individual thinking, to question the given program and encourage the development of a personal process of design, to strengthen each student’s identity, to help them define themselves as individual authors of IDEAS and with design Integrity, capable of generating a dynamic, comprehensively developed, realizable and meaningful work of architecture.

The precedent research and site analysis were followed by 3D abstract architectonic explorations, which lead towards the redefinition and expansion of the given program. This methodology supported each student in generating a concept based on an IDEA of what an environment of learning could be within the context of an existing and evolving urban condition.

Theoharis David, critic

a. Amir Ashtiani b. Chase Kaars-Sypesteyn c. Jacob Myers d. Brandon Wetzel

a

b

b

b d

c

c

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

021

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Hybrid Transformations Sunset Park, Brooklyn Hybrid Transformations refers to paired mixings, distinct parts which work with one another to foster change of the whole by transforming the relational elements of buildings.

Students will identify various architectural mechanisms as potentials for transformations. Relationships will focus on the realities of materiality, structural tension, weight, thickness, and their corollary spatial resonances, seeking ambiguities as a means for multiple readings and relations between users and space. Relationships can be nuanced or direct but will form a theoretical framework to the research into program, site, and mass. Buildings will be open-ended, looking at how space can foster community, communication, civic engagement, innovation, and activity. Rather than continuing the lineage of the hermetic institution, projects will frame the school as the interface between the community and students. The semester will be broken into 4 distinct exercises progressing from site analysis to the detailed massing. The primary focus of the studio will be on material, method, site, and massing.

Key criteria for the projects are: Site & Ground / The school proposals focus on mid-rise typologies to accommodate learning. Proposals allow for student developed school programs which service both residents and students: i.e. auditorium is used by the community after school hours, a pool is part of the playground and open to the public in the summer, etc.

Volume Surface & Space / Volumetric proposals seek to create spatial ambiguities. Volume is constructed through surface models at an large scale. Each model is used to analyze a relational element- wall to floor; ceiling to structure; arch to vault, etc.

Massing & Void / Volumetric models explore the interstitial and void spaces with concrete casting studies. These exercises are designed to create relational and scalar strategies for moving the volumetric models both up and down in scale resulting in a comprehensive massing strategy.

Structure, Program, & Connectivity / Studies in mass and volume will give way to surface, structure, and core as ideas of circulation from the horizontal to the vertical organize program and space within the proposal.

Transformation of volume and structure zero in on how programs will shift in conjunction with massing to form ambiguous spaces. Final projects examine the architectural space of education as a primary element in catalyzing a transformative process.

Dylan Baker-Rice, critic a. Fanping Zhao b. Sandra Nataf c. Jiratt Khumkomgool

a

a

b

b

c

b

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

023

GAUD CORE DESIGN

School as organism Sunset Park, Brooklyn Our studio focused on the school as a time-dependent “organism.” We started by conceptualizing the school’s program as the activities that happen within it (instead of as a list of square footage requirements). The organism metaphor also served us well when our research showed that the teaching that takes place within schools specializes (like organ systems) and that the physical articulation of the school could be a response to this specialization.

Middle school is the beginning of the adolescent years when rollercoaster dopamine levels in their brains make these students hunger for intense experiences. Middle school curricula respond by providing electives that function as outlets for these obsessions. For example, a student that finds their identity and joy in a theater elective will have the self-confidence to excel in the usual academic subjects. In middle school the elective is less a training ground for future careers (although this is also the case at times) and more a source of intense focus that gives the pre-adolescent much needed grounding.

Usually teachers and students only have the props and furniture they bring to the given masonry walls to augment their teaching space, but in our studio’s work we brought the malleability to the interior and exterior walls of the building; we pushed this capacity to specialize into the architecture.

Students worked with form and program simultaneously to conceptualize schools that acquired specific identities and that reflected those identities in the articulated architecture.

Maria Sieira, critic

a a. Thomas Diorio b. Sarah Suarez

b

a b

a

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

025

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Looking for the Outside of a Home in the City Williamsburg, Brooklyn The Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg offered us an opportunity to think of communal space in an environment of increasingly publicness. New media expands the definition of the private transforming the domestic into a kind of dark mirror carrying versions of ourselves amidst a fluctuating reality of the collective. How can our urban housing offer new social totalities that reflect this partial, inconsistent and unsettling context?

The studio embarked on the problematic of designing for an unstable collective with the ambition that “architecture is not only everywhere,” as Hans Hollein once said,” but also perhaps filters everything.” The studios sought to rebuke the conventional market-driven narrative of affordability based on a paradigm of control and, instead, imagine different modalities of communal association that inspire a consciousness of isolation and inclusion through density. The students explored spatial operations that produce compact domestic assemblies out of specific situations of adjacencies. Our purpose was to establish an “in-house” lexicon of organizational possibilities that exceed the limits of existing housing types and, in so doing, lead to new forms of collectivity.

Design can be an experiment in civility through the construction of specific modes of enacting diversity and discretion.

The students embraced the idea that multi-family housing can support social difference by balancing the intensity of being together in large numbers with architectural strategies of relaxation, albeit formal, programmatic and technological.

The studio’s work is a testament to the fascinating epistemological excess that is home-for-many. A single house creates an inside while, paradoxically, a collection of homes creates manifold outsides that discloses our ideas of how we fit into a city. The studio explored the state of being-peripheral in urban housing so as to make one space related to several others in a networked architectural relationship of persistent exiled-belonging.

Carlos Arnaiz, critic

a. Mai Passara Tungvjitkul b. Olivia Paonita c. Rachael Hissom

a b

a c

a

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

027

GAUD CORE DESIGN

LoLux, Low Income / High Luxury Urban Housing Williamsburg, Brooklyn The urban housing stidio ‘LoLux’ simultaneously focuses on the two primary growth markets of New York City’s real estate: Luxury condominiums and affordable 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.

The studio encourages the discussion of socio-economic and political forces in urban housing and how they relate to architectural responsibilities and opportunities. The studio takes the hopeful position that architecture holds the potential for improving human coexistence.

The aim is to invent combinatory logics for luxury and lowincome housing. By synthesizing luxury condominiums with minimal apartments, students arrive at novel design proposals for a mixed urban housing development in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

In addition to the primary function of providing dwelling space, the new mixed-use development also provides space for communication, and the place for casual, formal, and coincidental encounters. The studio promotes a mix of minimal and luxury apartments to speculate on how these communication attributes can be heightened in this specific location and cultural setting. The new project will enable interactions, reactions, and promote a new kind of urban encounter.

To optimize the use of space and spatial sequencing, students will get a comprehensive introduction into primary considerations of various housing typologies in an urban setting.

Urban communication is combined with the idea of exposure, seeing and being seen, interacting and meeting. A new form of living and housing emerges.

The studio operates on various scales, simultaneously preparing a) a position towards the site in its urban, cultural, ecological and economic context b) a particular programmatic profile and organizational model for a new building type c) a radical intervention into an existing building fabric employing advanced spatial, structural and tectonic models.

Jonas Coersmeier, critic

a. Alireza Kabiri b. Xiaoli Zhang c. Maeleen Taylor

a

c

b

b a

b

Master of Architecture Third Semester

029

GAUD CORE DESIGN

There goes the Neighborhood Williamsburg, Brooklyn As the most desirable of contemporary urban life styles in New York continue to gravitate toward hybrid urban conditions a number of conflicts arise. The Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn exemplifies this trend with its low scale and diverse mix of commercial and art venues.

However such neighborhoods are subject to overwhelming gentrification that threatens to divide our culture and undermine the qualities that make our cities vital and attractive.

This studio sought to explore new relationships between mixed incomes and mixed commercial programs to create a mutually supportive physical and social context.

Problems of affordability, stability, identity, and access are explored though the architectural lens. The primary components of this investigation were a combination of housing types, communal spaces, high value retail and maker spaces.

Cost and return calculations were preformed to legitimate and justify the potential for an internal, project specific subsidy. Manufactured housing solutions were explored to increase the efficiency and value of affordable housing production.

James Garrison, critic

a. Allison Gorman b. Tung Shen c. Nadine Oeslchlager

a b b

a c

a

b

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

031

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Ueber-Real Williamsburg, Brooklyn The beginning of this studio was staged within the rang of impressions prompted by whimsical vernacular architectural detail and sleek ultra-modern glass towers. A classic movie and a curious exhibition started the formal investigations: In Playtime, Tati’s character, M. Hulot, and a group of American tourists attempt to navigate a futuristic Paris constructed of straight lines, modernist glass and steel high-rise buildings, multi-lane roadways, and cold, artificial furnishings. In this environment, only the irrepressible nonconformity of human nature and an occasional appreciation for the good old days breathe life into an otherwise sterile urban lifestyle. Modern industrial technologies, accepted as necessary by society, are represented by Tati as obstructions to daily life and an interference to natural human interaction.

387 houses by Peter Fritz: 387 little building models made by Peter Fritz in the 1950s an 1960s where discovered by artist Oliver Croy. Not much is known about the author, an Austrian insurance clerk who carefully constructed and depicted the cardboard pieces. The models were not made out of existing architectures but rather were inventions of the author who recombined details of buildings he must have crossed in his hometown. The collection describes a vivid sample of regional Austrian architecture where both the everyday and the vernacular find their dignity. Fritz’s aim looks encyclopedic, a will to replicate every typology he could have imagined: the bank, the gas station, the farm-house, as well as family houses and fire stations are only some of the actors in the recreation of a sort of imaginary, yet very plausible, town.

Through a rigorous and detailed investigation on selective existing building detail the Students developed a series of partial building objects. Through iterations of editing, modifying, meticulous modeling and decisive redeployment students compiled building forms which in return were interrogated visa vie the semester program further modified.

The studios 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. Nai Hua Chen b. Viktoria Usui-Barbo c. Yuki He

a b c

a c a

b

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

033

GAUD CORE DESIGN

STUDIO

Gamers, Botanists, and Fabricators Williamsburg, Brooklyn

MAIN LOBBY OUTDOOR GYM

Architecture students collaborated with filmmakers in Professor Sasha Sumner’s class and documented urban life (that work can be found in Sasha Sumner’s Vimeo page). They went on to use film as a tool to research their site. The time spent making the film was the main goal of the assignment (as a result students spent an enormous amount of time around the site and other NYC urban environments), but some interesting visual work also resulted.

HALL PARKOUR GYM

FLOOR PLAN +0’

SCALE : 1/16” = 1’-0”

The studio project is servant to two masters: housing and a mixed-use program. The 1/4” scale section that the students were asked to produce was my way of getting the students to address both the potential and the problematics of this dual focus project. Each student was asked to develop a specific inhabitant for their project (a botanist, a gamer, a zen buddhist, a cook, a fabricator, an extreme sportsperson, an introvert, a musician). The character brought specificity to their housing studies and inspired their mixed-use program.

The character-inhabitant also determines how the micro apartments and accompanying semi public spaces supporting the micro apartments are developed. The specificity of the inhabitant, the character each student developed, brings a laboratory component to the studio. The collection of investigations into how blatantly exaggerated domestic programs can push (often quite literally) the envelope of housing architecture gives the future architects a tool box of “potential starts;” the idea here is that the projects put forth at the end of the semester are both specific solutions to the site and program as well as thoughtful provocations of how we might think about housing.

The studio responded to the 2016 zoning revisions in NYC. This was the first time zoning was revised since 1968. Largely the rewrites aim to improve the articulation of the street faces by relaxing zoning envelope mandates, by forgiving the parking requirement in certain zones accessible to public transit, and by replacing height allowances with floor allowances.

Students were asked to consider their project a significant addition to the urban context and to depict their proposal in a physical model and in a materially-explicit exterior rendering.

Maria Sieira, critic

a. Gregory Sheward b. Reese Christensen c. Sanghoon Seo

a b

c c

b

b

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

035

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Fictitious Assemblies New Orlean, Louisiana Historically, especially through modernism to date, the discipline of architecture vested significant faith in presumed “essence of materiality and systems”. There is a broadly accepted and unquestioned ethics regarding the truthfulness of material expressions, systems exposure, structural honesty.

For example; exposing the structure and its system is good, concealing and making it unclear is bad; dropped ceiling is bad because it would hide the essence of the architecture; the machined timber should reflect the essence of the tree it has been severed from, so on so forth. It is a rather strange obsession to practice, as any potential architectural effect is subject to the litmus test of “truthiness ethics”. Evaluating such ethics has become general means of assessing projects in terms of their presumed reality, as though our only access to real is through non-fictional determinacy of a presumed essence.

What we call essence, at the end is nothing more than an abstract cultural construct. What is left out in this approach is the deeper potential for an open-ended aesthetic inquiry which considers other qualities of the architectural object.

If we claim for a moment that any essence can be fictionalized through material, form and all aspects of assembly, the potential of architectural exploration can open new aesthetic directions.

The problem of a theater at this juncture is an interesting one, its material reality and aesthetics cannot be bracketed within a singular character. A theater building inherently has multiple characters, kind of a kin to a geodes, a precious interior isolated and protected by the crust of the envelope. On one hand, there is the performance hall, the holy site of the acoustician, where the behavior of sonic waves are channeled, restrained, redirected to create high-performance sound effects for the audience. This aesthetic contemplation is of course not limited to listening only as visual and tactile qualities complement the sonic distribution of the sensible. The interior of the hall is the place where the absolute integration of all systems take hold to generate a distinct architectural character, disengaged from the realities of the outside world. The exterior on the other hand deals with completely different set of concerns, urbanity of the context, ground, social interaction, transition to the hall and of course appearance; architecture as the background of reality, architecture at its most typical mode.

This inherent duality, shifts in character, transition and collision of binary aesthetics and their fictitious qualities were the focal point of this studio’s explorations.

Kutan Ayata critic a. Reese Christensen, Janice Kwok + Liyu Xue a b. Olivia Paonita, Howard Tsu + Viktoria b Usui-Barbo c. Sunah Choi, Ludan Lai + Shangqing Yang c

b

a

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

037

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Concert Hall Stockholm, Sweden As the culminating studio in the core sequence, this course is fundamentally about incorporating the structural, environmental and material development of a project into the development of the design of a building. We explore the qualities of structural and surface materiality in the context of the site, climate and program. We examine the way in which the material development of the project can play a role in expressing spatial and phenomenal dynamics both within the project and between the project and its context.

A theater program sets up a particularly charged set of relationships between inside and outside that can be characterized by the degree to which they create conditions of contrast, separation, and environmental regulation. Spaces are primarily organized as a series of nested relationships that typically consist of increasing degrees of environmental control (visual, acoustical, climatic) as one moves from the envelope of the building into the interior of the theater. This program is also about the drama of the physical circulation sequence in its ability to navigate inside and across these nested conditions. In our studio will explore this charged set of internal and external relationships and explore ways in which visual sightlines and physical connections set up alignments or contrasting conditions.

Siting this project in Stockholm brings the set of relationships of the theater into a physical and environmental context that presents its own set of interesting contrasts. While the latitude of the site produces extreme degrees of variation in the conditions of daylighting throughout the year, the proximity to water keeps the air temperature in a more standard temperate seasonal range. Our studio also investigates the response of a building to this unusual environmental context through the conceptual and technical development of the project.

Alexandra Barker, critic a. Yomna Abu Dabat, Alexandria Gill + Loyra Nunez a b. Nai Hua Chen, Michael Lu + Yuwei Wu b c. William Boudova, Allison Lane + Maeleen c Taylor

b

a

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

039

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Concert Hall Barcelona, Spain This CAP studio taught concurrently with the Integrated Building Systems seminar, proposed to design a Concert Hall in Barcelona and develop close relationships between conceptual ideas and technical aspects of the projects. The tight relationship between the two classes gave students the opportunity to engage multiple facets of a programmatically complex building, from the primary structural system to the finish materials, fully developing the project to the level of architectural detailing.

The spatial nature of the concert hall emphasizes programmatically on introspective conditions of the auditorium, placing the spectator in an inward looking space disconnected from the outside world. Concurrently, additional programs, such as rehearsal rooms or foyer, presented themselves as a lively public spaces, allowing an intimate relationship between performers and audience.

Students investigated precedents concert hall as well as conceptual and cultural drivers such as music instruments, performance clothing, musical notation systems and other related elements. Most music instrument shapes derives from acoustical properties and relies on human interaction.

But others connects to the environment to produce sounds.

We also addresed technical challenges including long-span structural systems and local construction methods, to design a contextually integrated solution. The site located near the Park Guell, designed bu AnotnĂŹ Gaudi, with its expansive view to the city also became a driver for the project. Emphasis was placed on the language of structural expression drawing from conceptual origins of the project.

StĂŠphanie Bayard, critic a. Shao-Chieh Liu, Rong Han + Zhenyu Wang b. Swinya Chavanich, Tong Shen + Xiaoli Zhang c. Marlon Davis, Sera Ghadaki + Rachael Hissom

a

c

b

b

c

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

041

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Concert Hall Berlin, Germany Our site is the Cultural Forum in Berlin, Germany. The Cultural Forum (“Kuturforum”) is an urban assembly of museums, libraries and concert halls in the center of the German captial. It is located just west of the former Berlin Wall, near the large buildings of Potsdamer Platz, and between the southern Tiergarten park and the Landwehr canal. The project site is in the center of the Cultural Forum and it has two prominent architectural neighbors, Mies van der Rohe’s National Gallery and Hans Sharoun’s Philharmonie.

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

In the studio we consider the urban intervention as a decisive act of architecture, and we promote the new performance space as a proactive participant in the changing city -ecology, fabric and form. Our urban apporach to context has emancipated itself from the regime of the network and the relational doctrine of 20C contextualism. This approach does not assume that any urban intervention is justified by sustaining the city’s current condition or its historical continuity, but It welcomes the arrival of an architectural prodigy.

We are invested in the full integration of architectural design and structural engineering as we focus on the fundamental relation between structure, form and organization. We think about architectural form in terms of structure systems, and we understand structures in terms of the multiplicity of architectural requirements and desires.

We start with the study of structural system taxonomies and engage in a critical discussion of the implicit biases of various categorization systems. The theoretical part is followed by physical model explorations of one specific structure system, which we study with respect to its intrinsic formal opportunities. In a swift move towards design production we generate speculative physical models, in order to internalize the structural principals and to test and invent beyond the given categories. Physical model making is a primary means of design production in the studio.

Jonas Coersmeier, critic a. Alireza Kabiri, Lalitphan Pongpornprot + Mai Passara Tungvijitkul b. Jisi Chen, Alican Taylan, Sanghoon Seo +Joseph Young

a

a

b a

b

b

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

043

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Sense and Sensibility Hudson, New York The focus of the studio was to explore how intellectual and sensory experience can be created and magnified by conceptual and tectonic integration. Architectural expression was derived from the relationship of structure, environment, and acoustics. Form, enclosure, systems and structure were considered together as well the understanding of materials and construction. A desire for multivalent integration guided the design process. The chosen site was along the Hudson River in Hudson, NY. It is located where the town meets the river in the context of an underutilized manufacturing area.

The site is acoustically compromised by the adjacent railway tracks and will need to be situated and developed in recognition of that. Hudson and its surrounding area are culturally active and possesses a strong arts scene. As with many such cultural programs the intent is to reinforce the growth and trajectory of the town and the region.

James Garrison, critic a. Isidora Concha, Nadine Oelschlager + Holly Wilson b. Allison Gorman, Jamie Niver + Alexandra Vanderburgh c. Qiang Guo, Kathleen Klein + Le Liu

a b

a c b

c

Jose Abreu

Jason Vigneri-Beane, critic

Master of Architecture

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.

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. As part of the GAUD Program’s Directed Research initiative, the Studio of Experiments – three specialized studios – engaged partners outside of Pratt in order to expose students to external discussion that would enrich their understandings of new architectural contexts and new architectural mediums.

Themes explored in the option studios this year included: consumer culture and new forms of live media; landscapes and megastructures; tectonic expression and ecological adaptation; techno-social change and architectural entrepreneurialism; creative destruction and trans-disciplinary design-thinking; urban agency and self-organization; architecture and elegance; near-future scenarios and computational design; post-humanism and cyborg ecologies; rethinking zones of urban production; urban to rural trajectories; envelope, branding and identity; and sensorial experimentation.

Jason Vigneri-Beane, Coordinator

FACULTY Vito Acconci Joshua Bolchover Meta Brunzema Hina Jamelle Sulan Kolatan Thomas Leeser John Lin Peter Macapia Bruce Mau

Philip Parker Marc Simmons Henry Smith-Miller Jason Vigneri-Beane Nanako Umemoto

GAUD

DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

Master of Architecture | Fifth Semester

047

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

Architectures In and Out of the Mind This studio explored feedback loops among desire, architectural constructs and the collapse of those constructs into media. Students were challenged to explore the boundaries of architecture as a discipline by incorporating alternative disciplines and their attendant media into the normative territory of architecture, problematizing it, infiltrating it, uprooting it and taking nothing for granted. Projects broke architecture down to its most atomic levels in order to reassemble it in new and alien yet eerily familiar ways. Color, form, organic material, inorganic material, simulation, dust, air, noise, light, information and other architectural inputs were extracted, explored, intensified and recombined into alternatives to and augmentations of architecture that simultaneously displace and re-form it. What emerged between this displacement and re-formation are architectures that are both embodied and disembodied, physical and virtual, solid and atmospheric, out in the world and somewhere in the mind. Students produced installations, soundscapes, films, atmospheres, environments, inflatables, texts and constructs of the mind from diverse points of view by way of exploring the moving targets of an architecture borne of disciplinary cross-pollination.

Vito Acconci, critic

a. Youngeun Jung b. Frederic Bellaloum c. Shijin Ma

a

a

b

c

c

Master of Architecture | Fifth Semester

049

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

The Abundance Studio: Thrive Global The Bronx, NY The Abundance Studio develops data-driven design methods for reinventing urban institutions at the nexus of social, political, ecological and spatial interplay. 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.

Our design is a mixed-use, mixed-income building in one of the hottest rezoning areas in New York City. The site at Cromwell Avenue and 167th street in the Bronx is included in Mayor DeBlasio’s “Jerome Avenue Neighborhood Zoning Plan” which is currently undergoing a contentious public review, dominated by fear of gentrification and displacement.

We want to contribute to this important debate by designing more engaging and equitable evolutionary scenarios.

We ask: what is wellness? What does wellness mean in the Bronx – a borough where the median household income is $26,934, roughly half the citywide median of $52,223? How can architecture and urban design play a role in reducing social inequities, and soften the boundaries between different cultures, ethnicities and economic classes?

A flurry of recent NY Times articles indicates that “wellness” has become one of the hottest cultural trends. Indeed - sleep, slowness, mindfulness, vulnerability and imperfection…have become the antidotes to our hyper-efficient, restless, stressed neo-liberal culture. Right now, the wellness industry is growing exponentially – potentially contributing 10 billion dollars to the national economy by 2018.

To seize the potential of these developments – and to explore programmatic synergies, we designed a 50,000-100,000 SF mixed-use building with affordable and market-rate housing, laundry and health clinic services as well as Arianna Huffington’s new “Thrive Global” “live-work-play” headquarters - a media, technology and e-commerce company with offices, wellness, education and cultural amenities.

Our projects explore the “Abundance” paradigm by using abstraction, play, narrative, and various computational indexation mechanisms to create new architectural/social relationships and to challenge notions of a pre-conceived social order.

Meta Brunzema, critic

a. Elena Smirnova b. Takuya Toyama c. Shi-Yein Lau

a b

b

b c

a

Master of Architecture | Fifth Semester

051

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

Elegant Formations Huailai, 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 will examine some 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 predetermined 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 in Huailai, China. Each student will determine and refine the particular program for a Winery during the course of the semester. The goals for each student is to deal with a range of familiar architectural issues- how to turn a corner, how to add to an existing building, vertical circulation, landscape 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.

The intended result of the studio is a project exhibiting innovative architectural organizations between program, space, structure and materials that combine to develop an innovative building formation contributing to the development of architecture in China.

Hina Jamelle critic

a a. Patricia Abella + Hyerim Lee b. Maraike Crom + Valerie Hill

b

b

Master of Architecture | Fifth Semester

053

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

The Schindler Global Award Competition Sao Paolo, Brazil “The way that we’ve defined the competition helps students to get insight into the largest problems inherent to urbanization, for example, those of mobility and inequality, pollution and environment. I think that the consideration of these problems as direct inputs to urban design schemes will become increasingly important.” Kees Christiaanse The site was located in a neighborhood in the heart of São Paulo, centered on the CEAGESP wholesale market. It is slated for future relocation, allowing a large area to become free for urban design-based interventions to impact all scales, from the local to the regional.

Research on the site and Sao Paulo Make sure that the research you reference filters into your design project as formal strategy.

Algorithmic pattern design What is the nature of the masterplan you have generated with them? Describe formal qualities of new pathways, fluid, complex, multiples scales; new densities and scales; new relationship to the river and new topography. Explain how these formal qualities enhance urban life (including humans, flora and fauna, the environment) on the site. How do they help relieve congestion? How do they allow for the accommodation of flooding from the river?

Multi-Modal Transport Hub What are the modes of transportation in your design? Why did you choose this combination of modes? How do you think it will help the transportation problem on the site?

Nature-Architecture Urban scale: How does your project reflect a post-humanist relationship between architecture and nature? Your proposal combines synthetically made nature with new transportation modalities. How do you envision this will work? What are the benefits to nature? What are the benefits to transportation?

Material scale: You have researched materials, plants and colors. Identify them in your project. Explain how you are working with a material palette that combines the natural with the synthetic.

Sulan Kolatan, critic

a a. Arif Javed b. Daniel Longoria

b

b

b

a

Master of Architecture | Fifth Semester

055

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

Speculations on the Future of Shopping Manhattan, New York Koolhaas argues in his Harvard Guide to Shopping that “shopping is one of the last remaining forms of public activity, having replaced every aspect of urban life. Town centers, suburbs, streets airports train stations, museums, hospitals, schools, the Internet and even the military” as well as prisons “are shaped by the mechanisms and spaces of shopping”.

The aggressive advance and infiltration of shopping in our daily lives, in the physical or virtual realm, has made it one of the primary modes “by which we experience the city”. Victor Gruen is credited as the inventor of the American suburban shopping mall, a Viennese architect and, what is quite interesting, a socialist, as he saw the mall as primarily a public and social space.

He envisioned the mall as having the potential to re-centralize suburban sprawl. His plans were for large state-owned indoor public spaces for assembly and markets. It was a modernist and socialist vision for the re-founding of American public life.

His social malls were to become the templates and modules for urbanity itself - from the scale of the neighborhood to the scale of the town, the city and ultimately the metropolis.

What allowed the shopping mall to take over the urban environment architecturally are the technologies that became available in the mid-20th century and one can say that no invention has had the same importance for shopping as the escalator. As opposed to the elevator, which is limited in terms of the numbers it can transport between different floors and which based on its very mechanism insists on division, the escalator accommodates and combines any flow, constant uninterrupted movement creates continuous transitions between one level and another. Maximizing circulation maximizes sales. Nothing is more fundamental to the survival of shopping than a steady flow of customers and goods.

For architects, what is left to critique, to address, to question or to imagine and create when faced with the possibility of rethinking the culture of shopping?

Thomas Leeser,, critic

a. Luis Carbonell b. Lisa DeJoseph c. Pimnara Thunyathada

a

c

b

a

b

Master of Architecture | Fifth Semester

057

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

Cultural Institutional Mixed Use Developent Brooklyn Navy Yards, New York To produce implementable design proposals for the Brooklyn Navy Yards. The site has a rich and varied history, rooted in maritime traditions and legally designated as the only industrial site as-of-right in New York City.

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 recently elected progressive administration of Mayor DiBlasio has made the creation of affordable housing and workspace central to its restorative agenda.

With emphasis on envisioning new models of collective living, learning and working – Collective Urbanism – that is economically accessible for current and future residents – students will speculate through large-scale or small-scale interventions that may enable new forms of energy production, public policy, engineering, transportation or other drivers to create new platforms for advanced urbanism.

Precedent The studio will begin with an examination of global models for collective urbanism. What defines “urban”? What defines a “territory” or a “landscape”? What, if any, are the latent environmental, economic, or social values of these imperatives?

How can living, learning, and working intersect with industry and making?

Site: Physical Domain – the Brooklyn Navy Yard (BNY) Wallabout Cove, currently the Brooklyn Navy Yard has an infamous history, and will be the studio’s site. 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.

Henry Smith-Miller, critic

a a. Yingyu Huang b. Michael Chambers

b

b

Master of Architecture | Fifth Semester

059

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

Cyborg Ecologies Marine Park Salt Marsh, Brooklyn, NY This studio explored the question of how far one could push architecture into near-future scenarios that are driven by non-anthropocentric agents such as animals, atmospheres and machines. In these scenarios architecture might be seen as a spatial, technical, material and ecological complex formed around the activities of animals, machines and, occasionally, humans. While these complexes can be driven by varied, specialized and localized events such as feeding, flying, nesting, launching, docking and downloading they can also be conditioned by global and temporal events such as atmospheric change, tidal flows, migratory patterns, information harvesting and telecommunications networking. What is more, the enfolding of non-anthropocentric others into an architectural hybrid leads, inevitably, to an architecture that has a composite identity and an indeterminacy with regard to what kind of territory it intends to occupy. It traverses land, water and air and, in doing so, must continually diversify itself in spatial formations, material logics and structural adaptations. It would be an architecture of mixed identities, automated activities, gradualness and abruptness, envelopes, exoskeletons, bladders, biomes, inputs, outputs, zones, sectors, logistic, mechanicals and life-support systems.

While exploring these issues in an architectural project the studio also engaged questions of simulation, representation and world-building. Airflow modeling, structural analysis and GIS data were technical influences on projects while also offering opportunities for credible formulation, testing, evaluating and developing proposals. What is more, a composited architecture suggested a composited approach to representation and the studio aspired to compositing models with graphics, graphics with models, technical information with pictorial visualization as well as geotechnical abstractions with concrete and material fields. Projects engaged a variety of digital media while also developing modeling hybrids comprised of milled, laser-cut, 3D-printed and vacuum-formed components. It was critical for projects to explore constructed representational logics as opposed to mere output.

Jason Vigneri-Beane, critic

a. Jose Abreu b. Alihan Oney c. Egan Kobayashi

a

a c

b

b

a

Master of Architecture | Fifth Semester

061

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

Tokyo Olympic Park Tokyo, Japan The studio sets up a retroactive scenario, designing an Olympic Park in Tokyo with respect to its post-Olympic inhabitation, the afterlife of a short-term event with far-reaching consequences for the city.

The Olympic hangover was a common fixture of 20th century urban history. It confronted new infrastructures, large-scale athletic venues, and public facilities suddenly drained of their economic and cultural value. With the development never going quite according to plan, it inevitably spawned periods of civic introspection and reevaluation. Reflecting on the Olympic Village as a new civic territory, on the future use of the Stadium, on scaling down transportation systems, or on kicking the tourism habit, these moments crystallized the cities’ urban futures. They paralleled existing patterns of growth, and revealed their infrastructural consequences. Sprawl in Mexico City, urban satellites in Atlanta, and internal development in Barcelona were accelerated and made apparent during the Olympics, only being reconsidered and evaluated after the fact.

A notion of sustainable frameworks for urban regeneration has formed the basis of bids since Sydney’s, though the proposals have widely diverged in practice. Tokyo’s plan for the 2020 Olympics follows suit, calling to retrofit existing venues and integrate new construction with plans for the city at large.

Forming a compelling notion of what the future Park could be, the project will investigate the potentials latent in the adaptation of Olympic programming, confronting the challenge of facilitating a transition from present to future uses in strict architectural terms. This transformation entails diverse issues of formal legibility, fitness, accommodation, and affordance in conjunction with concerns of materiality, ecological change, and infrastructural systems. Seizing the historical capacity of Olympic planning to reveal preexisting tendencies as well as the more recent bids’ efforts to enact deliberate urban agendas, the project suggests that the built form of the Park can prefigure future patterns of development. Overall, it hopes to exploit the concentration of difference inherent to an overprogrammed site, extending its various possibilities into a definite proposal. It remains invested in the initial Olympic role, but asks what this infrastructure can mean to the city, to the local inhabitants, and for the site after its symbolic appeal has worn off.

Nanako Umemoto, critics

a. Jose Gutierrez b. Suzanne Agbayani c. Yasmine Zahlan d. Spring Wu

a

b c

d a

d

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

063

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

MoPo: MUSEUM OF POST-NATURAL HISTORY Central Park, New York The site is located in Central Park along the 79th Street Transverse to the South. The site area of 1000ft x 500 ft is in excess of the ground floor footprint of the building. Students are free to identify the exact area of the building ground floor within this given rectangle. The existence of the Museum of Natural History New York allows the new museum to play off the humanist museum type and program.

The Museum of Post-Natural History shall be a place of culture, geology, and technology, where biological actors like humans, animals, and plants share a life-world with other post-natural actors.

“In a hybrid ecology our environment converges with technology so that biological actors like humans, animals and plants share a life-world with machines, networks and increasingly also genetically altered organisms and other post-natural actors.

A hybrid ecology is a thought vehicle which enables us to expand our concept of the environment, to re-evaluate our idea of an external nature and to rethink our relationship to the world.

As we humans drive this process of hybridization we are part of the biological and technological.”

The above, slightly modified quote from Hybrid Matters, a Nordic art and science network, succinctly outlines the larger context of our (academic and professional) lives.

What does it mean to be an architect in these times of hybrid ecologies?

This is a question to be explored through the work.

As hybrid ecologies produce inherently “wicked” problems, our goal is not to arrive at a definitive conclusion, but rather to work on gaining a deeper understanding of what is turning into an increasingly complex matter of concern, as Latour might say.

Our current (default) situation contains an overwhelming number of bad hybrid ecologies where the convergence of technology and biology is generating too many undesirable effects.

Sulan Kotalan, critic

a a. Atefeh Zand b. Dustin Heim

b a

b

b

b

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

065

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

Architectures of the Street The position of the horizontal zone in urban architecture requires often a blurring between the building particularly towers, and the logic of density and movement specific to cities. Our research this semester focused on the social political implications of an architecture that arrested and transformed that condition as a specific study which is neither site nor form but something between. Our point of departure was the problematic condition of the corporate plaza which students integrated in different forms into building conditions that reframed the street as an essential vertical diagram for the organization of program and space. The research focused on two specific contemporary problems of the urban space which are the fluctuating sentiments of public space as well as the fluctuating political understanding of urban populations as essentially and necessarily heterogeneous.

The studio thus placed high demands on the legibility of program as well as intensely researched urban conditions on an international level. Projects included a women’s homeless shelter in Los Angeles; Museum of urban economic migrant ghosts in Shenzhen; a children’s refugee trauma treatment center in Paris; agent based housing experiments in Florida; Water rights in New Dehli high density informal settlements; a human trafficking rehabilitation center; an LGBQT center in Manhattan; an environmental ecology restoration project in New York, and a mixed-use housing and commercial infrastructure/architecture hybrid in Bremen.

Peter Macapia, critic

a. Annie Paz + Fernando Taveras b. Maraike Crom c. Jeffrey Gaudet

a

b a

b

c

a

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

067

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

Museum of Natural Media History New York A thematic question – what is produced when the natural history museum is less of a repository, a public container of rarefied objects and more of an extension, transformation, play on the scientific apparatus that underpin its evolution.

The studio works on the intertwined histories of architecture, media, and scientific apparatus to produce alternative forms of display and immersion.

What does the museum become when it is exposed to its material subject – in the river as living and to a hyperbolic version of display and immersive electronic display, also living, in the city. How do these sites effect architecture and in what ways does architecture alter the sites to provoke other forms of access and participation with them? What mutations and inventions are brought forward?

Two sites in New York City – the Hudson River at fortysecond street and the large video screen - half acre of active vertical information display - in Time’s Square provide a pair of distinct urban and aquatic contexts. The two sites provide concrete references for speculatively developing architecture, nature, urbanity, and media into new sensibilities.

Philip Parker, critic

a. Takuya Toyama b. Alihan Oney c. Ok Bun Lee

a

a c

b

a

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

069

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

The Greening of Red Hook A Maritime Sciences Institute, Brooklyn Waterfront In many ways similar, and, also, dis-similar to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Red Hook also enjoys and continues to enjoy an infamous history, and will be the studio’s site.

The Peninsula is located at the confluence of the Greater New York Bay and the East River. Its agrarian topography joins a nautical domain.

Technological advances in materials science, fabrication and testing lead civilization and the development of its tools to unknown and unanticipated realms. How will innovation and technology figure in the creation of a new architectural form?

Directed Research: “Can and how might computational design tools serve as a litmus for understanding culture(s) and shaping of its (their) architectures, and if so, how might these tools be critically employed in the development of an architectural proposition?”

Henry Smith-Miller, critic

a. Yujie Liu a. Erick Maldonado b. Elena Smirnova

a

a

b

c b

c

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

071

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

Rural Urban Ecology Guangdong and Guangxi Province, China Rural Urban Framework began as a journey to a project site in a rural village near the border of Guangdong and Guangxi Province in 2006. The eight-hour drive commenced northward up through the Pearl River Delta taking us through a cross-section of distinct urban concentrations and indeterminate amalgamations of built fabric and farmland, before arrival at our rural destination. The journey revealed a landscape that was in a state of collisions, paradoxes, abandonment, synergies and contestation. Above all, it was a landscape in transition: simultaneously half-built and halfdestroyed, containing fragments of memories, traces of populations and anticipatory of its possible future.

Our research and design work is situated in this dynamic hinterland that encapsulates the exchange between rural and urban processes. These relationships can be described as an ecology with multiple inputs, outputs, and feedback loops. Waste, nutrients, capital and labor operate in a complex network of interactions. Stability and equilibrium can quickly shift into more volatile relationships with potentially harmful results: the degradation of landscapes; pollution of water systems; or the closure of industries. As shifts occur, spaces are altered and the ground marked.

Over time, spatial products become obsolete, remain, evolve, or new types originate. These observations were documented and pieced together in the form of a seamless photographic panorama. The panorama tells a story of the changes taking place within the territory. It is a constructed depiction of an intensive ruralurban territory, and operates as documentation, analysis, and site.

The experiment of the studio was to test this methodology using Manhattan as a site of departure. Manhattan is both the image and idea of the urban. However a journey out to its periphery and beyond reveals the hidden dynamics and underlying relationships that exist within a complex urban-rural ecology. Four trajectories originating from Central Park brought to light four unique stories. One revealed the energy landscapes that provide power to the city including coal fields, nuclear facilities and embedded substations within the city fabric. Another, the infrastructure of escaping the city for leisure, weekends and vacations and their emptiness during the off-season. The third, a position on ecolandscapes indicating the imaging and branding of “greenwash� on real estate development. And the fourth, an investigation on the impoverished fringe of the city incorporating scarred landscapes, dereliction and post- industrial abandonment. These four journeys compress space, creating new fictional relationships and adjacencies. They reveal a compelling narrative providing an insight into the question: Where is the rural in an urban world?

Joshua Bolchover + John Lin, critics

a. Michael Chambers b. Patrick Gehling c. Matt Fischer

a b a

a

b c

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

073

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

Design for the Senses Cooper Hewitt, Manhattan We have allowed two of our sensory domains – sight and sound – to dominate our imagination. So, when it comes to the culture of design, and in particular, experience design, we create and produce almost exclusively for those two sense. The competitive advantage of experience design is that it has the bandwidth of reality – it is fully immersive and the visitors body and mind are alive and available for full engagement of all the sense. (Notice we do not use the term “viewer”, which would only reinforce our cultural bias.) However, we do not have an existing creative process for the integration and synthesis of design for all the senses.

We have an opportunity to research and design an immersive installation for an exhibition on “design for the sense” that will be curated by Ellen Lupton, at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in 2018.

Our challenge will be to research the most advanced work in the art and science of design experience that demonstrates the synthesis of all the sense.

What we are exploring is the invention of a new medium – five senses experience design. It fells much like the early days of the invention of television. We need to explore, experiment and invent new formats and combinations of sensory and narrative engagement.As a though starter, here is a quotation from Petere Diamandis, founder of the X-Prize, from his conversation with Stephen Gold from IBM Watson “All five human senses (yes, including taste, smell, and touch) will become part of the normal computing experience.

AI’s will begin to sense and use all five senses. ‘The sense of touch, smell, and hearing will become prominent in the use of AI, explained Stephen Gold from IBM Watson. “It will begin to process all that additional incremental information” When applied to our computing experience, we will engage in a much more intuitive and natural ecosystem that appeals to all of our senses.” – Peter Diamandis We will start with a review of the Moholy-Nagy Future Present Show. In it, the curators produced an exhibition room that Moholy-Nagy designed, called Room of the Present. It was designed but never realized, as a new level of aesthetic experience (albeit still mostly limited to the visual.) It is absolutely stunning. Our challenge to our students will be to design a contemporary fivesenses experience that is even more powerful. We will collaborate sessions with Ellen Lupton and the curators from Cooper Hewitt in the design and execution of this experience.

Bruce Mau, critic

a a. Suzanne Agbayani + Dillon Sirimongkhon b. Youngeun Jung + Frederic Bellaloum

a

b

b

b

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

075

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

Dusk ‘til Dawn Downtown, Brooklyn The studio explores the phenomenological experience of the dusk ‘til dawn manifestation of architectural form, space and surface through artificial illumination and its requisite technological design and curation.

The design process accounts for site specificity, brand specific student-initiated architectural form and language interpretation and design, and evolves through a series of physical models and filmic representations of the proposed design as experience over a 24 hour cycle.

The studio implicitly engages questions of human desire and ego, sensorial stimulation and engagement, consumer seduction through enhanced brand identification and visual / virtual communication and experience and the pleasure of iterative object appreciation, trial, fit and acquisition – and the associated emotional fulfillment (or lack thereof).

The project is articulated through design proposals for multi-level retail located on four separate sites in downtown Brooklyn. The studio is charged with creating programmatic innovation that will creatively enhance brand identity as well as challenge the conventional consumer experience.

Marc Simmons, critic

a a. Yasmine Zahlan b. Adam Chernick

b

a b a

a

a

Pietro Franceschini

Jason Vigneri-Beane, Critic

Master Science in Architecture

The three-semester Master of Science, Architecture Program is an investigative, rigorous, and progressive environment for experimentation and research into advanced architectural design-research 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. Some of these studios and courses have looked 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; scenario-planning and near-future thinking; multi-dimensional agency in architecture and urbanism; globalization, ecology and far-from-equilibrium thinking.

The program questions the multitude of assumptions that lie behind the architectural conventions of program, site, and design methodology in order to create new design processes, strategies, technologies, and conceptions of architecture in a period of rapid change. What is more, the MS ARCH program believes in a strong methodological component to architectural innovation and seeks to provide such a component to students in a variety of ways. The program brings a diverse and international group of students into many provocative discussions and operations currently evolving in the discipline and practice of architecture.

This year’s thesis sequence developed speculative projects for near-future architectural scenarios. This sense of speculative realism (as opposed to sensationalized futuring) provided a framework for collective research to be mined and expanded in the formulation of thesis projects that might ultimately propose architectural structures that are evolved, differentiated and inflective of future-potential conditions. In thesis research students were asked to formulate relational constructs among programmatic invention, radical ecology, post-humanism and global urbanization as well as speculations on architectural production, technology and graphics. In addition, the international make-up of the student body was cultivated to encourage diverse forms of urban thinking that might uproot and transform even the most iconic of cities such as New York. Within this framework, students constructed scenario-based approaches to project formulation that targeted identifiably emergent techno-socio-cultural phenomena, giving rise to potentially innovative architectural proposals and explorations of evolving design methodology.

The development of architectural innovation through “pre-responsive� projects intended to explore unknowns and uncertainties while positioning design-research in relation to complexity, dynamics, connectivity, infrastructural change, ecological intensification, spatial transformation, programmatic speculation, advanced materiality, parametric logics, rapid techno-social change, and the creative destruction of architectural norms at multiple scales.

Jason Vigneri-Beane, coordinator

FACULTY Thomas Leeser William MacDonald Philip Parker Jason Vigneri-Beane

GAUD

DESIGN STUDIOS

Master of Science in Architecture | Third Semester Thesis

079

GAUD THESIS DESIGN STUDIOS

Urban Prosthesis NYC What is a prosthesis? The full definition is an artificial device to replace or enhance a missing or impaired part of the body.

A prosthesis is used to assist a patient to replace a lacking part of their body. A patient’s prosthetics should be designed and assembled according to their appearance and functional needs.

Nature can be viewed in the same way as such a patient. Nowadays, although humans have created advanced technology, we have also destroyed the nature around us. At the moment, huge climate change is inevitable. What can we do? People have begun to utilize technology to learn from animals found in The wild, and use many of their adaptive abilities to inspire new technology. These new technologies have the potential to help humanity coexist better with nature. Our urban environments create many problems for the environment, and such hybrid technologies can help us improve efficiency in managing urban infrastructure in a time of climate change.

By looking at the current problems facing the NYC MTA, this thesis will make a number of proposals of how design can look to Nature to create far more efficient systems.

In the next 20 yearsA.D. 2040 The climate change hits the New York city again. The subway system cannot be used anymore. Humans only can use the ground area .

A.D. 2042 These animal-shaped prosthesis is repairing our city. The flooded level is reducing.

A.D. 2045 The underground parts gradually restore to be original situation. People can use these areas again. On the ground parts, these animal-shaped prostheses still keep maintenance for our city.

A.D. 2050 Because of these terminal prosthesis, the city is repaired.

The original function of the terminal is not existed. The new prosthesis continuously keeps balance between human and nature.

Tzu-Yi Lei with Jason Vigneri-Beane + Thomas Leeser , critics

Master of Science in Architecture | Third Semester Thesis

081

GAUD THESIS DESIGN STUDIOS

Data Sink: Non-Anthropocentric Memoirs New York City

The following drawings show a huge infrastructure made of three submerged machines functioning as data center, connected by an underwater floating tunnel located south of Manhattan. The choice of designing a data center was driven by its emblematic role as contemporary bunker in a century where digital information is going to be, even more one of the main tools of power.

Pietro Franceschini with Jason Vigneri-Beane + Thomas Leeser, critics

Master of Science in Architecture | Third Semester Thesis

083

GAUD THESIS DESIGN STUDIOS

Living [The] Architecture Contemporary society has an additional level of interaction apart from the physical space, the virtual level. We shift from one to another unconsciously, and do not dwell on the dynamic boundary. This project addresses the functionalities and new patterns of behavior that can emerge from the architecturalization of that boundary.

The instances that overlap between the virtual and physical universes cause the emergence of a sensitive space. A space that is able to sense and interpret the external and internal signals and use them in order to modify shape, color, texture and properties. That boundary can provide the perfect environment for “living architecture” to alter its own behavior by establishing a fluid communication with the user. In such scenario, we can start imagining an architecture that instead of being produced for its inhabitants, it is produced by its inhabitants.

We have expanded ourselves enormously, our virtual life is as important for us as our physical reality. In the virtual universe, we work, we learn, we exchange information and goods, we interact with family, friends and colleagues, we build new relationships. Sometimes we spend most of our time building this virtual world around us. By acknowledging that boundary between physical and virtual enhances the experience of living in both universes simultaneously. This project explores the possibilities of the boundary between physical and digital realities and the potential of architecture as a form of critique.

The Project consists of four different characters. The first one, the Amphitheater establishes the Multiuser Condition in which complementary realities depend on one another to create a new context. Virtual architecture is used to create a new and expanded architecture. Physical and virtual realities synthesize into a new medium of human experience. The greenhouses represent the role tha digital reality plays on our life. They synthesize nature’s colors, movement and sound into digital information, using media as a way of enhancing the experience. The greenhouses are the perfect representation of overlapping physical nature into digital nature in order to create a new hybrid nature. In order to mix the concepts of time and place to create a combined new context, the project includes the kiosks. This character allows the interconnection of services and facilities, expand the field of influence of small markets and reshape the concept of local, introducing a new dimension to the folkloric aspect of the city.

Patricia Abella with Jason Vigneri-Beane + Thomas Leeser, critics

Sabarish Bp + Sahil Dagli Ferda Kolatan, Critic

DESIGN STUDIOS The Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (GAUD) program at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture is a progressive design environment for advanced architectural research located in Brooklyn, New York, arguably the epicenter of cultural and architectural development in New York City. The programs within the GAUD engage in live cultural debate and speculation via integrative architectural production and Directed Research. They capitalize on the assets of our esteemed faculty and enmesh design research, theory, architectural media, and technological investigations in a manner that fosters “circular” thinking and methodologies. To this end, Pratt Institute’s GAUD seeks to develop a high level of disciplinary precision, adroit technical ability, and a deep understanding of architecture and urban design that allows students to engage questions and challenges which both the profession and discipline are facing now and in the future.

More than half of the world’s population is now living in cities.

This marks a tipping point in global urbanization. According to World Health Organization data, 70 percent of the world population will live in cities by 2050. These alarming numbers of further human migration to urban centers inevitably raises the question of how the densification and expansion of current and new cities are designed. The ongoing developing of urban space will affect 70 percent of civilization. A new ecology guiding the future growth of urban centers must be adapted to face the oncoming challenges through a multitude of aspects.

Intensive and ambitious in its scope, the program is structured along a series of three autonomous speculative urban design studio projects that are a successive series of investigations and address various scales. Each studio semester has a specific focus that builds on the previous semester studio and is supplemented by advanced seminar topics in histories of urban design, urban planning and zoning policies, GIS, and digital design technologies. Each of the first two semester studio project contribute a research aspect towards a larger vision that is culminated in the third semester project. While every semester sets the narrative at a different time in the future, the speculative narrative is staged in daunting future realities with the aim to invoke new design strategies and address future conditions through urban design interventions.

Erich Schoenenberger, Coordinator

FACULTY Kutan Ayata Ferda Kolatan Erich Schoenenberger

GAUD

Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design

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

087

GAUD CULMINATION DESIGN STUDIOS

Co-Existence Rikers Island, NY Rikers island a former prison facility being shutdown due to various social issues and a property of 400acres located amidst a densely developed boroughs which builds up much more of value to make use off, creating a oppurtunity to be a new frontier for development and could be the becon of the city with the Lga airport of close proximity. on a visionary ground the new york city has been battling in finding the balance in use of energy resources and controlling its use of fossil based energy progressing towards renewable energy sources the spur of the idea if this development could be a co-existence of infrastructure and habitat where the infrastructure contributing to a bigger picture of producing algae based bi products deriving from the potentials of the site and its surroundings and at the same time the development could locally feed the devouring development of lga airport expansion, recreation, housing and other habitable developments.

The design intent of the project looked at catalyzing issues to urban manifestations where the increasing air traffic of the airport governed the development of linear landforms to reduce noise pollution and create a opportunity to lineage recreational and functional activities between the berms such that the planar surfaces between them are articulated to create more built program space avoiding vertical development keeping the height in restriction, the existing buildings opportunistic for newer development or to host the infrastructural needs of the island and bio fuel facility, the facades of the buildings host the algae bio reactors tubes redundantly wrapped for the algae to absorb sunlight and process the fuel at the same time creates a visual surreal experience of being lost in the mechanical forest the merge of technical use, program manifestation and the urban impact creates a whole new experience of co-existence of infrastructure and habitable opportunities. hence creating an opportunity for the rise of new urbanism development of rikers island and serves as the beacon of the city for the visitors entering the city.

Sabarish Parthasarathy with Erich Schoenenberger, critic

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

089

GAUD CULMINATION DESIGN STUDIOS

Rehabilitating Rikers Rikers Island, NY Rehabilitating Rikers is a urban scale jail complex project based on the reality that NYC government decided to close the Rikers Island in 2017. According to local news, the soil on Rikers Island is toxic because it was made of landfill back in 1920s and it damages many officials and inmates health for years.

The project introduces a new type of jail system in a near future, base on the white paper published by NYC government in 2017, a jail with less top-down control, less separation and partition. With new technology, inmates can feel like living in a general house but still under facility’s observation.

To have people back to the island, considering NYC government have fudged the toxic issue, the new RikersIsland will be sealed by concrete slab.

The jail complex is driven by two qualities that is different from a jail use to be: vegetation open space and building density. The imprisonment is a gradual changing process with the period and the density. The more imprisonment inmate process, they could live with much more space and vegetation and the location is also much more away form the La Guardia Airport and closer to Manhattan.

Shih Hsin Chou with Erich Schoenenberger, critic

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

091

GAUD CULMINATION DESIGN STUDIOS

Residential Waterscapes Randall’s Island, New York The idea of the project was to gather the idea of landscape as infrastructure and a tool for new types of urban organization.

Landscape has the ability to redraw the limits of architecture and territory, integrating architectural space, urban space and rural space into an integrated spatial system. In this context, the idea was to propose a new method of urban growth and colonization capable to tackle the problems of providing food and energy in a more populated world.

Urban growth and more population normally implies a bigger spend of resources as a need to maintain a larger infrastructure and a larger population. More people and more urbanized land mean cost. But what if a “unit” more of city means, at the same time that more people, more resources instead of less? In order to accomplish this, we need to change the organization scheme of the city into a productive one, selfsufficient and able to set a new.

The idea was to set a new urban organization based on the idea of a new productive urban ecosystem. In order to accomplish this, a site was chosen: Randall’s Island. And a new logic, as well, as a strategy: grey water from the new residential units to be included would be used to fill water ponds. These ponds would work as phytoremediation facilities, where marine species and water plants clean the already used water. Several ponds are considered in order to create different stages of cleansing, allowing the species to be relocated in different ponds to alternate the cleansing effort. The excess marine would be used as food or commercial resource for the new inhabitants and the excess plants as biomass for the electric generators of the island. The treated water goes back to the city grid, while ocean water gets filtered and desalinated to be included in the new grid.

To do this, an artificial topography is set in order to use the height difference to separate the ponds and the different stages. To contain the water, several dam structures are used to separate infill and water areas. The dams are used to allocate the program: residential use in the top of the dam, commercial at each “pond street level”, and industrial in the bottom. In addition, some of these areas separated by the dams are used for urban agriculture, which along the aquaponics facilities set dams, are fed with water from the ponds. The entire pond system is used as well for recreational purposes.

Enzo Cordova Rivano with Erich Schoenenberger, critic

Wanlapa Koosakul

Jason Vigneri-Beane, critic

Master of Architecture

Architectural Mediums approaches contemporary media through the study of design mediums and the technical craft associated with them. The exploration of tool and craft influences the means by which we create new methods for speculating on the representation of architecture. By merging design mediums like art, drawing, photography, textiles and sculpture representation expands into other design fields and diversifies the way we explore architecture.

The Mediums curriculum creates a mixed discourse between software, representation theory and physical and digital craft. It begins with the Summer Primers which build foundational skills related to the craft of making and understanding multimedia.

Mediums 1 and Mediums 2 expand on the network of tools introduced in the Primer, and require the application and merging of different mediums research to create new forms of architectural representations.

Employing advanced concepts, Mediums 3 allows students to focus within the subjects of Architectural Fabrication, Architectural Visualization or Architectural Communication.

These subjects, coupled with previous mediums training allow students to nimbly work across diverse platforms as they enter the 5th and 6th Semester Advanced Curriculum and studios.

Hart Marlow, Coordinator

FACULTY Robert Cervellione Christopher Kroner Hannibel Newsom Hart Marlow Benjamin Martinson Bridget Rice Brian Ringley Jason Vigneri-Beane

GAUD

ARCHITECTURAL MEDIUMS

Master of Architecture | Architectural Mediums

095

GAUD ARCHITECTURAL MEDIUMS

Architectural Mediums I Architectural Mediums I emphasizes the integrated use of drawing and modeling as a representational component of architectural communication. Students were introduced to architectural representation by investigating a small mundane household appliance and its ability to be redesigned into a new appliance typology. The objects were first disassembled and the parts were meticulously arranged based on the scale, detail and color of the individual parts. Assembly scenes were created by staging new part associations and using photography as the medium for manipulation and discovery of new associations.

Based on these discoveries, students proposed new design configurations that changed the part-to-whole relationship, exterior and interior assembly section languages; and color blending of the original appliance object . The work culminated in a class collection of physical prototypes that surveyed the digital craft and new assembly typologies.

Hart Marlow, Bridget Rice, Benjamin Martinson, Hannibal Newsom, critics

a. Amir Ashtiani b. Zhizhong Deng c. Wanlapa Koosakul d. Student Models e. Tim Leccese

a c

b

d

e

Master of Architecture | Architectural Mediums

097

GAUD ARCHITECTURAL MEDIUMS

Architectural Mediums II Architectural Mediums 2 introduces students to advanced methods of architectural modeling, drawing and visual communication. The focus of the course emphasized the multimedia methods of crafting an cinematic environment by incorporating an “Architectural and Temporal Narrative�.

These scenes included one architecturally significant building in New York City: AT&T Long Lines, MedLife, Lever House and The Seagram Building. Utilizing their architectural qualities and urban surroundings, students produced narratives to guide the modification of these scenes by deploying a series of advanced imaging techniques.

These Architectural Narrative scenes later became the basis of a time-based Temporal Narrative where students focused on animated architectural lighting and its implementation within an urban fabric. Moving into the dimension of time across a dense urban city, lighting became a medium for new modes of architectural visualization.

Hart Marlow, Ben Martinson, Chris Kroner, Robert Cervellione + Jason Vigneri-Beane, critics

a. Mor Segal b. Shahad Alsudais c. Kenith Mak d. Thomas Diorio e. Jacob Myers f. Tim Leccese

a c

b

d e

f

Maria Aurora Bonomi Durer Bacchetti Brian Ringley, critic

Graduate Architecture + Urban Design

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 discourses and production.

FACULTY Kutan Ayata Alexandra Barker Robert Cervellione Jonas Coersmeier Ferda Kolatan Hart Marlow

Florencia Pita Alihan Polat Brian Ringley Maria Sieira Jeffrey Taras

GAUD

ELECTIVE SEMINARS

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

Familiar Form This course investigates the lineage of ready-mades (object trouve) as a body of research that originated in the artworld and has permeated to architecture. Indeed, instead of investigating architecture’s earlier forays into historical familiarity, the 80’s, we dwell onto contemporary notions of familiar figures and their versatile maneuvers of digital geometries. The class begins by looking at Thomas Chippendale’s furniture drawings and David Hockney’s photo collage, Chair, which both take two very familiar objects and flatten them by means of the medium of representation: drawing and photography.

In this course we look at objects with delineated volumes and convert them to flat panels. These panels aim at maintaining the allure of the familiar forms and their sense of volumetric mass by producing a texture relief (CNC milling and vacuum forming). These ‘flat’ models will oscillate between the realm of representation and object making

Florencia Pita, critic

a. Yasmine Zahlan b. Fernando Taveras c. Patricia Abella

a

a b c

101

GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS

Critical Geography + Techniques of Representation This course investigates geography, a broad field that explores how spatial relationships affect a range of subject areas, from the way physical built and natural conditions affect populations to the way populations in turn shape physical spaces.

We focus on the following topics as they relate to geography: landscape, urbanism, biology, technology, geopolitics, infrastructure, and ecology. Geographers conduct qualitative and quantitative research on existing spatial conditions that range from the physical to the virtual and from the measurable to the perceptual, or phenomeno logical and conduct research across a wide range of subject areas to understand the relationship between their spatial and textual research and to further the interdisciplinary engagement around the topic of space.

The other aspect of geography that is a driving topic of this course will be to develop an understanding of and to employ tools and techniques that are particular to geospatial mapping that are used to analyze and represent geographical information. These tools are implemented in a semester-long research project that culminates in a graphical document and a three-dimensional mapping project that employs a mix of digital fabrication techniques and mediums. Qualitative and quantitative data gathering and documenting techniques and software are explored and implemented in developing the project.

Alexandra Barker + Alihan Polat, critics

a. Sabarish BP, Sahil Dagli + Sayali Pawar b. Jose Abreu, Youngeun Jung + TianYu Yang c. Ok Bun Lee, Shijin Ma + Yujie Lu

a b c

b

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

Material Articulations in Architecture + Design Finesse The objective of this seminar is twofold: First, “excessive” material articulations in architecture areexamined though theoretical discourse and historical precedent. Second, the students design physicalprototypes, which reflect their research and engage disciplinary qualities such as ornament, material, texture and color, in a new light.

This spring semester focused on architecture’s current shift towards a renewed interest in object-hood. The emergence of new media in the 1990’s had largely privileged an ethic that viewed design as the conceptual and formal expression of computational processes. The early enthusiasm in the digital, fueled by the search for novelty, began to dissolve as the results became increasingly predictable, iterative, and incremental. The original premise of a new techno-cultural paradigm appeared to be yet another failed utopia. The reoccurrence of object as a cultural term, at least partly, can be understood as a reaction to the earlier discourse of networks, surfaces, and flows. With this term ideas such as wholeness, interiority, and difference have come back into the current debate.

For their models the students examined historical architectural plans and began to estrange them from their original scale and context. This partial erasure of recognizable disciplinary signifiers produced what we call “ambiguous objects with architectural qualities”. Echoes of the original precedents still inform the final projects, but they have now lost their authority and are forced to enter into new kinds of relations. The interplay between drawing and object, figure and color, scale and geometry, all generate various types of tensions, giving each object an allusive character.

Ferda Kolatan, critic

a a. Yasmine Zahlan b. Pietro Francheschini + Eren Yapici

a b

103

GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS

Theory + Practice of Architectural Representation This course gives students an overview of the practical and theoretical aspect of architectural visual representation from the 1980s to the present. Students examine how a variety of media is incorporated into representations of design and in particular how computer media is uded in contemporary architectural practice. Students experiment with multiple digital mediums such as drawing, 3D modeling, photography, rendering and image manipulation to explorecrafted methods of representational strategies specific to the content of their project agendas. Realism as a speculative and aesthetic representational arguement is at the center if the course’s inquiries. Lectures introduce students to various tendencies of realism in a number of art fields to prepare the groundwork for the semester long design/representation project.

Students will explore future scenarios of urbanism through digitally constructed images, culminating in a “photography” exhibition at the end of the semester.

Kutan Ayata, critic

a. Egan Kobayashi + Tim Hao Li b. Dustin Heim + Marie Jacobson c. Patrick Gehling + Arif Javed

a b c

c

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. Erick Maldonado b.Jeffrey Gaudet c. Spring Wu

a

a b c

105

GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS

Nanotectonica 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. Arif Javed b. Alireza Kabiri c. Alican Taylan d. Atefeh Zand

a b c

d

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

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. Xiaoli Zhang

a

107

GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS

Architecture + Film This seminar instrumentalized film in the pursuit of architecture. The seminar began with exercises in the documentation of spaces (form) and activities (program) through photographic sequences. These later became storyboards for short films.

We looked at some work in the history of film that is specifically relevant to our subject of study, making space with moving images: the early documentation of the Lumière brothers versus the fantasy of Méliès, the early editing brio of Soviet Cinema, the deep focus of Citizen Kane, the roomlike shots of Ozu, and the breeziness of Godard’s 1960s films.

We looked at 20th and 21st filmmakers as diverse as Altman, Lynch, Wenders, Soderbergh, Potter and Sofia Coppola. Our goal was to understand how these filmmakers were reconfiguring contemporary socio-cultural conditions on the screen, the very conditions architects will be called upon to build in.

The final weeks of the course were dedicated to honing drafts of short films conceived and shot by the architecture students. Some discoveries and rules of thumb (the 180 degree rule, for example), were understood but sometimes perverted.

Students were building spatial narratives, but not necessarily cogent stories. Some of the most adventurous filmmakers today are testing our easy understanding of film space and are making us work at making sense of discontinuities. The premise of this final filmmaking exercise was for students to employ as much perspicacity in the making of film space as they already do in the making of architecture space.

Maria Sieira, critic

a. Janice Kwok b. Liyu Xue c. Patrick Gehling

a b c

c

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

Automation for Architectural Manufacturing Advancements in additive manufacturing have provided new ways of thinking about systems of making in architecture, but have largely evolved from technology intended for the fabrication of small objects utilizing layer-based printing methods adapted from, among other established technologies, inkjet printing and CNC machining. Such methods pose challenges for the scaling-up of additive manufacturing for architectural elements, particularly with respect to production time and material utilization. The research pursued in this course will seek to develop new systems of additive manufacturing in order to improve upon existing methods of production for freeform surfaces within high-variation architectural systems.

What’s proposed is a novel method for the fabrication of highly varied, complex freeform surfaces through an additive approach of continuous ribbon extrusions of light-cured, fiber-reinforced resin, made possible and controlled by industrial robotic arms.

Throughout the semester, the students will develop a critical understanding of the difference between a Design-for-Manufacturing (DFM) workflow, in which the design constraints and opportunities of a particular manufacturing methodology are factored into upstream design considerations, and “designed manufacturing,� in which the designers collaborate with manufacturers to invent new methods of architectural production more immediately in service to the design vision and unencumbered by the limitations of traditional means of fabrication. The result will be two parallel course tracks, both beginning with a series of robotic motion studies using simple light drawings but diverging into a DFM and a designed manufacturing workflow, respectively. Using the same shell structure pavilion design, the former group will develop a basic taxonomy of robotic ribbon printing tactics, culminating in an application of robotic additive manufacturing to a prior studio project. The latter will propose, simulate, and prototype a mass-customized architectural assembly, using K-means clustering and genetic optimization algorithms to control costly end-of-arm tooling variation.

Brian Ringley, critic

a. Greg Sheward b. Rong Han c. Daniel Longoria

a

b c

109

GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS

Computer Aided Construction The convergence of upstream design parameters with downstream manufacturing control, as evidenced by parametric design models capable of authoring machine code and driving machine operations, presents numerous opportunities for architectural project delivery improvement and innovation.

These opportunities can be exploited through academic instruction by integrating new models for the instruction of digital fabrication, specifically Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) machining, into architectural education. With the increasingly intuitive nature of CAD/CAM platform development brought about by the nascent cultures of visual programming (Grasshopper, Dynamo, Flux), dynamically typed scripting languages (Python and DesignScript), and, more recently, democratized cloud computing (Autodesk 360, Amazon Web Services), the applicability and opportunity of precision toolpathing within a freeform parametric modeling environment ought to be re-evaluated.

To this end, a graduate seminar on the topic of “computeraided construction” has been developed to include new computational models that aim to enhance a design-formanufacturing workflow with the integration of downstream fabrication constraints/opportunities into the upstream design parameters of a parametric model. In order to exploit a manufacturing process with computational thinking, the properties of the material being manipulated must be analyzed and synthesized into the parameters and algorithms of the parametric model. As such, this course is also concerned with uncovering the “embedded material intelligence” of materials. This embedded material intelligence allows for the exploitation of a material’s inherent performative capacity by means of CNC machine operations driven by a materialcognizant parametric model, capable of accurately simulating physical material results through parallel models (such as a three-dimensional model driving a 2D sheet layout for CNC machining via unrolling algorithms or a two-dimensional pattern driving a 3D material simulation through a physics engine) and achieving material performance solely through the manipulations of the analytical thresholds at which performance modes are substituted with one another.

Brian Ringley, critic

a a. Dustin Heim b. Yingyu Huang

b

a

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 a. Tzu-Ti Lei b. Patrick Gehling

b a

111

GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS

Scripting + Form: Peridermis 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 draftings – 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 to create wholly new forms of order based on programmatic rules.

Parametric systems and forms will explore the use of digital technique and fabrication. The seminar is centered around the idea of additive manufactured tensile membrane structures. We will explore the idea of skin on all forms, building, animal, natural and artificial. Through the use of parametric and computation techniques, a series of patterned membrane systems will be created, pelted, and fabricated. The seminar will explore formal ordering systems derived from both synthetic and natural systems as well as connectivity logics at the formal and material level.

Using the 6-axis robot to host a custom built laser and 3d print resin students will manifest their design in large-scale fabrication projects culminating in a show in the spring. The software will be primarily Maya, Dynamo, and Robot Studio with some basic grasshopper.

Robert Cervellione, critic a. Yingyu Huang, Yilo Miao, Manushi Jain + Ran Bao b. Arif Javed, Alihan Oney + Brad Li c. Garrett Lord, Ghaflan Abadi + Erick Maldonado

a b c

a

Cuba Program

David Erdman + Natalia Echeverri, critic

Master of Architecture

While the Graduate and Urban Design program benefits enormously from its Brooklyn 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 international experience. In order to give a more robust architectural, urban, and cultural experience to students in this period of globalization the GAUD program offers full-immersion study abroad opportunities in Rome and Havana. 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.

PROGRAM COORDINATORS + FACULTY David Erdman Natalia Echeverri Mark Rakatansky

GAUD

INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS

GAUD | International Programs

115

GAUD IN TERNATIONAL PROGRAMS

Cuba Havana The Summer program in Havana and Miami gives students at the GAUD (and/or equivalent M.Arch programs internationally) an opportunity to engage Directed Research at the GAUD through a three credit, design oriented, Architecture elective.

The course centers on New Architectural Contexts and tests models of architectural alteration, densfication, and conservation through speculating on key sites in Havana. Students work directly with city officials, scholars, and various stakeholders from both Havana and Miami developing skills in computer modeling and photo-realistic architectural speculation.

The first half of the course is excursion oriented and based in Havana. The second half is production oriented and based in studios at the University of Miami School of Architecture, where a parallel course is being taught. Students interested in additional credit may be eligible for an independent study upon confirmation by the instructor.

David Erdman + Natalia Echeverri, critic a. Kenith Mak + Haya Alnibari + Tal Friedland + Maria Del Solar b. Chase Kaars Spypesteen + Chanel Miller+ Chak Hang (Richard) Yeung+ Rita Liu c. Work progression

a+b

a

c

a

a

GAUD | International Programs

117

GAUD IN TERNATIONAL PROGRAMS

RECOMBINANT ROME Rome The Summer program in Rome gives students at the GAUD (and/or equivalent M.Arch programs internationally) an opportunity to engage Directed Research at the GAUD through a three credit Architecture elective. Studying an extraordinary multi-media range of architecture, painting, and sculpture from the most ancient to the most recent times in Rome, Florence, Mantua, Vicenza, and Venice, students will learn contemporary generative methods of analysis and design. The program surveys different periods each week, and combines excursions with creative production in the Trastevere Pratt GAUD studios.

The course focuses on the diverse ways digital visualization can be a crucial new lens of perception and communication— exploring how 2-D visualization, 3-D modeling, animation and augmented reality techniques can move beyond merely documenting a building to provide new forms of critical agency.

Participants chose a building that intrigues them from any time period to puzzle through its modes and operations. Formal techniques are utilized to draw forth questions of cultural and social meaning, and questions of meaning are utilized to draw forth questions of form — developing corroborating methods to cross-reference the building’s architectural, cultural, political, and social positions.

Mark Rakatansky, critic

a a. Fanping Zhao b. Lalitphan Pongpornprot

a b

b

Immersion Studio Photo

The Summer Programs at the Department of Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (GAUD) in the School of Architecture are an opportunity for entering students and prospective students to prepare themselves for the pursuit of a First Professional Master of Architecture. Three programs, two for admitted incoming M.Arch students and the third open to all students (incoming and/or with an interest in a career in Architecture).

Overlapping with the GAUD Post Professional degree’s summer semester, the courses are complemented with an array of lectures, events, and exhibitions that further enrich each student’s understanding of architecture discourse within the GAUD, as well as regionally and nationally. The programs are taught by GAUD faculty and supported by the School of Continuing and Professional Studies.

Hart Marlow, Coordinator

FACULTY Hart Marlow Brian Ringley Joseph Giampietro Olivia Vien Frederic Bellaloum

GAUD

SUMMER PROGRAMS

GAUD Summer programs

121

GAUD SUMMER PROGRAMS

Immersion Studio Brooklyn, New York The Immersion Studio is an architectural fundamentals course, is taught by the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design faculty, and is geared toward professionals and students interested in attending graduate architecture school.

Taught as a series of studio sessions, lectures, and technical workshops, the studio introduced students to a series of design approaches to conceptualize architectural investigations using the most current techniques in visualization and methods of fabrication.

Olivia Vien, critic

a. Angela Crisostomo b. Lydia Shulz c. Mark Ribaudo d. Vanessa Will

a b c

b b

a

d

GAUD | Primer 1 Studio

123

GAUD SUMMER PROGRAMS

Primer I Architectural Mediums Primer 1 is an intensive studio workshop that investigated the study of figure and relief to propose a site and mass hybrid. To begin the research on relief and figure, students were introduced to ancient egyptian sculptures and paintings which communicate both craft of relief and figural hybrids. Using these examples students developed a similar understanding of technique and the suggestion of form on a series of representational exercises. The work explored a wide range of computational processes and methods of drawing including the final output of extracting cut sections and exposing three dimensional interiority and exteriority as physical models.

Hart Marlow + Olivia Vien, critics

a. Kevin Lo b. Alexis Dorko c. Matthew Mitchell

a

b

c

c

b

b

a

GAUD | Primer 2 Studio

125

GAUD SUMMER PROGRAMS

Primer II

Architectural Mediums Primer 2 is a intensive studio workshop that researched Denis Diderot’s Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts. This encyclopedia was one of the first mainly visual publications to communicate information to the general public providing knowledge that was not available previously before the time of the Enlightenment.

Organized as both plates (pages meant for only images) and corresponding text, the document yields an incredible set of drawings that include both exploded assemblies of scientific devices, processes and methods of craft communicated through detailed scene, as well as sectional cuts that expose new relationships and spatial understanding.

This workshop proposed a parallel document to Diderot’s Encyclopedia that visually documents new urban objects and scenes which hybridized the Sciences, Arts and Crafts from the Enlightenment with contemporary urban problems and technologies. Students published this new encyclopedia as a set of plates that visually speculate on the future development of urban objects in New York City.

Hart Marlow + Brian Ringley, critics

a. Catherine Wilmes b. Minjung Lee c. Elise Hoff d. Wenze Chen

c

a b

a

d

a

Mott Haven - Port Morris

Historic Preservation Studio + Land Use and Urban Design Studio

The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment

GCPE FORWARD 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.

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.

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.

Through internships, partnerships, studios, and directed research, students have ample opportunity to work on real-world and realtime 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.

PROGRAM COORDINATORS 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

CITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING Since its inception over 50 years ago, the City and Regional Planning Program (CRP) has remained true to its emphasis on combining an education that emphasizes practice over theory, participatory planning over top-down policy making, creativity over boilerplate, and advocacy over technocracy.

The 60-credit MS in City and Regional Planning is one of four affitliated programs within Pratt’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE), and 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 practice, equity, 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 progam.

Studio courses generally combine two or more of the concentrations of the Program: community development, environmental planning and policy, preservation planning, urban placemaking and transportation, 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 equitybuilding, 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

Alternative Spaces in Tokyo Tokyo Planning and Urbanism

The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment

The program 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 them 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 practica on offer from the other programs. A required internship in the field of historic preservation rounds out the program and ensures that students leave Pratt with relevant “real world” work experience as well as a network of professionals in preservation.

The Historic Preservation program resides within the Graduate Center for Planning & the Environment in the School of Architecture. GCPE’s mission is to create and sustain a learning community of students, faculty, and alumni that is characterized by innovative professional practice and that emphasizes planning and preservation approaches rooted in the principles of sustainability, equity and public participation. The program takes on a values-based approach to historic preservation. This means that rather than just looking at preservation through a curatorial lens, it recognizes the need to take on a more holistic approach to preservation. The values-based approach proposes that cultural issue are critical to the understanding and the conservation of the built environment. Moreover, it establishes that social memory is a critical aspect of dealing with historical value because it can help bridge spaces and times by focusing on the users and not just the object.

Arcosanti City

Material Conservation class

Nadya Nenadich, Ph.D., Coordinator of Historic Preservation

INTRODUCTION INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS

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 protects cultural resources by ensuring their use and continuity through time.

129 33 GCPE

HISTORIC PRESERVATION

The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment

SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS Pratt Institute’s graduate degree in urban sustainability, Sustainable Environmental Systems, is a 40-credit Master of Science with a curriculum focused on the integration of environmental design, policy, and science within cities.

Our interdisciplinary exploration of urban environmental systems is rooted in a “triple bottom line” approach, giving equal importance to the environment, economy, and social equity.

Our faculty members are leading practitioners and scholars in sustainability and urban studies. Their practice-oriented approach to teaching offers intellectual rigor and professional know-how. Our faculty support students to engage in applied research of sustainable urbanism with a focus on social and environmental justice.

Furthermore, our practice-based approach consistently allows for 80% of students within the SES program to gain professional experience in the form of internships, fellowships and/or employment within their area of interest during their studies.

These opportunities come from our extensive partnership network of civic and community-based organizations, nonprofits, architectural, planning and engineering firms, and City agencies.

It is within these sectors that the majority of our graduates find employment after graduation.

Our ideal student candidates are designers, researchers, urbanists, advocates, scientists, and entrepreneurs, passionate about becoming interdisciplinary, problem- solving professionals in the emerging and rapidly growing sectors of systems thinking, climate-change adaptation and mitigation.

Our student body is diverse in both educational and professional backgrounds. Students trained in design, as well as social and environmental sciences, are all enaged by our interdisciplinary approach; each able to uniquely build upon their backgrounds while collectively gaining new insight into resilient and sustainable systems for urban environments. Both the curriculum and the Graduate Center’s collaborative model offer immense flexibility and diversity in areas of academic focus, allowing each student to uniquely tailor their graduate study experience.

In addition to the in depth study areas of City Planning, Urban Placemaking, Historic Preservation, and Facilities Management, the SES program delivers extensive academic and professional experience in sustainable design, green infrastructure, and environmental justice.

Lastly, study at Pratt Institute, one of the nation’s top art and design schools in the great borough of Brooklyn, allows for a truly interdisciplinary experience within one of New York City’s most dynamic neighborhoods.

Jaime Stein, Coordinator of Sustainable Environmental Systems

Sustainable Communities Capstone by Adriana Lancheros

The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment

The program is ideal for students with professionally oriented undergraduate education, professional degrees, or professional experience in architecture, engineering, environmental, 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. 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 theo-retical 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 gain further 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 skill-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 Infrastructure; Economics; Planning and Policy; and Management. The program offers flexibility to students 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.

The Junction

Lab, Analysis of Public Spaces

David Burney, Coordinator of Urban Placemaking and Management

INTRODUCTION

In the past 10–12 years there has been a paradigm shift in thinking about planning and urban design, from a primary focus on buildings to a focus on the spaces between buildings —“public space.” Rather than allowing these spaces to be formed as an afterthought of building design, Placemaking sees the creation of successful public spaces as the starting point, which in turn dictates the siting and design of other components of the urban fabric. Placemaking approaches public space from a people perspective —based on community needs and programming. It incorporates a wide variety of professional and technical skills such as community building, economics, sustainability, management, urban design, and landscape design.

“Placemakers” need to understand the role that each of these disciplines plays in creating and maintaining successful public spaces and be able to manage the process of placemaking. Case studies of successful public spaces demonstrate the importance of placemaking in supporting successful communities and in the livability and health of a city.

131 GCPE

URBAN PLACEMAKING AND MANAGEMENT

The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment 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.

CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT Like business management, Construction Management is the planning, coordinating, and building of a project from conception to completion. The Construction Manager’s raw materials are often a vacant piece of land, a set of construction drawings in digital or hand copy, and a project manual. Construction Management students learn all aspects of the profession from assembling a virtual factory for construction; contending with numerous local, state, and federal regulations; and coordinating skilled and unskilled craftspeople, unions, contractors, subcontractors, architects, engineers, planners, consultants, and the owner/developer.

FACILITIES MANAGEMENT The Facilities Management program prepares students to assume leadership roles in managing an organization’s built environment, either as internal employees or as external service providers and consultants. The program equips students with the competencies to effectively manage a facility throughout its life cycle: They can direct planning, design, and construction activities and ensure that they meet the corporate needs for operations, maintenance, and services functions. They promote that the organization’s concern for a fiscal and social responsibility and environment sustainable practices as reflected in how the organization’s facility assets are operated, maintained, and serviced.

REAL ESTATE PRACTICE The goal of Pratt’s MS in Real Estate Practice program is to develop students with the capacity to practice the business of real estate with a focus on public/private partnership, as well as housing and urban development, with a commitment to achieving The Three E’s of sustainability—economy, equity, and environment. A key objective is to educate graduate students as real estate practitioners with the core skills to secure professional employment in the field of real estate business.

Regina Ford Cahill, Chair of Construction Management, Facilities Management and Real Estate Practice

The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment

Our studio practice is based on the belief that urban problems are complex and cannot be solved by looking through a single lens; therefore, we take an interdisciplinary approach to urban inquiry. Studio courses generally combine two or more of the concentrations of the Program: community development, sustainability and resilience, placemaking and transportation, 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 Cypress Hills in Brooklyn to design new affordable housing and open space according to a community-led plan; work on plans for culturallybased community economic resilience in the South Bronx; to collaborate on a sustainability and preservation planning framework for a neighborhood in Havana, Cuba; to envision a future for the North Shore of Staten Island that is resilient, maritime-based, responsive to community needs, and guided by shared governance; and to help a Brooklyn BID create an integrated vision for a new public space in multiethnic, multi-racial Flatbush. GCPE studios offer a unique opportunity for students to make a difference as they complete a first-rate education.

INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS

GCPE is a hub of four aligned programs: City and Regional Planning, Sustainable Environmental Systems, Historic Preservation, and Urban Placemaking and Management with a shared vision of urban sustainability, social justice, and shared values defined by the “triple bottom line” of environment, equity, and the economy. Advanced studios bring together students from all four programs for interdisciplinary teamwork, focusing on hands-on learning within the context of real-life planning challenges on behalf of a client, usually a community-based organization or a city agency.

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INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS

GRADUATE CENTER FOR PLANNING AND THE ENVIRONMENT | Interdisciplinary Studios

Fundamentals Studio Jackson Heights, Queens, 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; professors a

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135 GCPE INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS

Delta Cities Resilience Studio 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 worked 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 explored the challenges faced by people who live in this community and focused 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 looked 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 came 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 others, 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.

Jamie Stein, Gita Nandan, Thomas Jost, Zehra Kuz; professors a a a. Images of Students’ Work

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GRADUATE CENTER FOR PLANNING AND THE ENVIRONMENT | Interdisciplinary Studios

Lab Analysis of Public Spaces Fort Greene Park, 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; professors a

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137 GCPE INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS

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, Vicky Weiner, John Shapiro; professors a a a. Images of Students’ Work

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GRADUATE CENTER FOR PLANNING AND THE ENVIRONMENT | Interdisciplinary Studios

139 GCPE INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS

Fundamentals Studio: El Puente Southside Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY Fundamentals is the foundation course for study in the Pratt Institute’s City Planning Program. It offers a broad overview of planning practice today within its political context, illustrating the range of roles that planners play in government, non-profit and private sectors. Special attention is given to community-based and participatory planning and planning for sustainable communities. The class applied theory to practice through a “mini-studio,” with students working in small groups, preparing reports for a real client on a current planning issue in the New York City region.

The client for the semester of Spring 2016 was El Puente, a human rights organization that promotes environmental awareness and justice in the Southside of Williamsburg.

They have asked the students to explore existing conditions in this area with a focus on the open space system and climate justice opportunities, including four priority parks, to promote the overal goals of the Green Light District initiative.

The resulting recommendations emerged from a collaborative effort to address the disproportionate lack of open space in the Southside, and the economic challenges this community faces, as initially identified by the client. The magnitude of El Puente’s sustained efforts is a testament to the power of collective community resiliency, and the members of this studio have appreciated the opportunity to join in this important conversation.

Ayse Yonder, Mercedes Narciso, Juan Camilo Osorio; professors a

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GRADUATE CENTER FOR PLANNING AND THE ENVIRONMENT | Interdisciplinary Studios

141 GCPE

The Spring 2017 Land Use and Urban Design Studio examined the community of East New York, Brooklyn in the context of its recent large-scale rezoning that allows for increased residential development. As the first of up to 15 neighborhoods to be rezoned under Mayor DeBlasio’s Housing New York program, developers must meet a requirement to make 20 to 25% of new units affordable in return for the increased allowance in housing density. Despite significant community opposition, the City Council approved the rezoning in April 2016 and has since then passed similar rezonings in Far Rockaway and East Harlem.

By framing East New York’s post-rezoning challenges and opportunities as ones for accommodating growth and development while preventing the displacement of existing residents and businesses, the studio kicked off with a basic question: “Now what?” Students from Pratt’s city and regional planning; sustainable environmental systems; and placemaking programs collaborated with the leadership of local non-profit Cypress Hill Local Development Corporation and the Coalition for Community Advancement, who were the studio’s clients.

After conducting an existing conditions analysis and a scenario planning exercise, student teams created site-specific proposals for public realm improvements to the commercial corridors of Atlantic Avenue and Fulton Streets; a plan for Arlington Village, a 7-acre low-density housing complex that will potentially be redeveloped into a high-density mixed-use site; and an infill affordable housing strategy for small lots in the neighborhood.

Following the conclusion of the studio, students further contributed to community dialogue and participatory planning in East New York by contributing to the Coalition for Community Advancement’s 2017 “Community Assembly,” which brought together community leaders and neighborhood residents for updates and next steps following the rezoning. For this day-long workshop, students from the studio created and facilitated a participatory urban design exercise that sparked conversation and ideas about the future of the Arlington Village site.

Paula Crespo and Michael Haggerty; professors a. Infill affordable housing strategy b. Scenario planning exercise c. Public realm strategy d. Participatory design exercise

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INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS

Land Use and Urban Design Studio Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation and the Coalition for Community Advancement

GRADUATE CENTER FOR PLANNING AND THE ENVIRONMENT| Interdisciplinary Studios

143 GCPE INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS

Green Infrastructure Studio: Brooklyn Pubic Library. Branching Out The studio investigated how green infrastructure can offer design based solutions to address storm water management.

This year studetns worked with the Brooklyn Public Library [BPL] as our primary client. Design, policy issues, best practices, experimental alternatives, maintenance strategies, and community engagement will be investigated, and articulated through the design work.

The work of the class will be grounded in foundational research by two SES Green Infrastructure Fellows and initial metrics and analysis by students in Paul Mankiewicz’s Environmental Management : Water Quality course. students examined at the following Libraries that had been identified as possible sites for green infrastructure: New Lots Library, Brownsville Library, New Utrecht Library, and to a lesser degree Windsor Terrace. The final deliverables included a presentation to the client, Alex Mikszewski, and other Brooklyn Public Library staff as well as a jury of specialists.

Elliot Maltby, Gita Nandan; professors

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The 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 Tokyo to consider innovative approaches to transportation and placemaking; and with Cuban planners, designers, architects, and sociologists to create a comprehensive neighborhood plan for Vedado, Havana.

The current list of international courses includes: • Havana, Cuba: Preservation and Adaptation • Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Climate Adaptation Strategies, • Tokyo, Japan: Alternative Spaces in Tokyo. Plannign and Urbanism Within the GCPE we believe in equipping our students with not only the tools and knowledge to practice locally, but also the perspective and critical thinking skills to approach complex urban issues within the context of local environment, equity and economic concerns regardless of location. We better understand our own milieu with insights gathered from international travel and study.

145 GCPE Havana presents an opportunity to study the full spectrum of GCPE interests, including opportunities and challenges in historic preservation (where the experience of the historic center leads by example), environmental issues, transportation, energy and the equity and economy of the future of the city. This course introduces students to the history, governance and planning policies of Cuba and examines the future of sustainable urban planning in Havana as Cuban-American relations emerge from the past decades of hostility. Through a series of films, readings and talks, the course will begin by examining the impact of the Cuban Revolution on the country’s urban planning policies, providing the student with basic knowledge of contemporary Cuba. The course includes a week in Havana where students will tour Havana; visit major cultural institutions; learn about Old Havana’s unique preservation-led planning policies; meet with Cuban planners, architects and economists; and develop an understanding of planning issues in Havana.

After the class returned from learning abroad, they developed a vision together to frame their recommendations for the site. “El Vedado pa’ la gente” (Vedado for the People) summarizes the vision to prioritize the people of the neighborhood, in order to help strengthen their assets and assist with some of the daily challenges they face.

Just as the Office of the Historian in the historical core of Havana has proven that local heritage can be preserved as an economic asset for a city, Vedado could also become a point of reference to the city of Havana, and to cities around the world. We believe that Vedado has the makings of a model neighborhood, it has an opportunity to leapfrog many of the problems that we see in most American cities and become an example to which we can look for inspiration.

Jill Hamberg, Ron Shiffman, David Burney; professors a. 23 y L, El Vedado. Carlos Rodríguez Estévez b. Solutions for storm-mitigation and traffic. c. Vision for the Neighborhood d. Pedestrianized corners. Shingo Sekiya

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INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS

Sustainable Development and Placemaking in El Vedado Havana, Cuba

GRADUATE CENTER FOR PLANNING AND THE ENVIRONMENT | International Courses

Catalytic Communities Rio de Janeiro / NYC Facing growing populations, aging and outdated infrastructure, inequitable investment and development, and the threat of climate change, global metropolises such as New York City and Rio de Janeiro are facing urgent environmental crises. How can local governments leverage all of their resources towards improved and efficient transportation infrastructure, as pursued by Rio as part of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics projects? What policies, designs, and organizational models can provide healthy water and sanitation systems for underserved populations, as promoted through NYC DEP’s Green Infrastructure Plan?

What motivates community leaders and social movements to implement local grassroots food and waste solutions, such as community gardens and urban farms in neighborhoods such as East New York and Vidigal favela? How can people and communities confronting disparate infrastructure deficits exchange potential solutions that meaningfully contribute to each city’s development, and how can these plans provide flexibility to thrive through future challenges posed by climate change? Pratt GCPE students gathered with Brazilian counterparts for a weeklong workshop to examine existing urban infrastructure in Rio de Janeiro and New York, and ways in which governments and citizens can work to produce functioning, healthy, thriving, inclusive 21st century urban systems.

The week-long meeting brought together students from Pratt and Brazilian activists, planners, government officials, residents, engineers and journalists working and collaborating with our host organization in Rio de Janeiro, the media and research NGO Catalytic Communities (www. catcomm.org). Goals for the course and workshop include the understanding of social, political, environmental, technical and economic factors that cause infrastructure deficit and inequity in each city; the examination of the international character of the challenges faced daily by populations underserved by urban systems; the analysis of sustainable infrastructure planning, implementation, and advocacy in each city; and the investigation of flexible and resilient models for future urban systems development based on the group’s research.

Leonel Ponce; professor

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a. Cable Car, Alemao b. Constructing a Plaza, Favela Verde c. Environmental Education, Favela Verde d. Alemao

147 GCPE INTERNATIONAL COURSES

Tokyo Planning and Urbanism Tokyo, Japan This cross-disciplinary course introduces students to the spectacle of Japanese urbanism. The course includes seven pre-departure seminars and a two-week immersive study tour in Japan in partnership with urban planning programs at various Japanese universities. Students are exposed to Japanese contemporary culture and participate in shared-learning opportunities facilitated through coordinated activities with Japanese professors, professionals and students. Student activities range from lectures/seminars hosted by Japanese professors, joint urbanism workshops involving Japanese and American students, walking tours of areas of key historical and urban importance in Tokyo, Sendai, Kobe, Yokohama and Kyoto, and short planning field exercises that ask Japanese and American students to work collaboratively on specific urban problems. The main deliverable for this course is a research report on a particular (student selected) aspect of Japanese urbanism. For this, students are asked to participate as keen observers of Japan’s urban, natural and built environment, document a variety of planning and architectural urban and spatial/social, regulatory conditions (including urban design), and express their own ideas, thoughts and observations on cultural/social/regulatory differences between the US and Japanese planning, sustainability, and urban design.

The sixth offering of this course in summer 2017 included students from City & Regional Planning, Urban Placemaking & Management, and Graduate Architecture & Urban Design.

For their research project, students adopted the concept of “Alternative Spaces” in the urban milieu and considered train stations as public spaces of massive pedestrian flow and use.

Urban conditions were studied around three important train stations in Tokyo: Sangubashi Station, Shimbashi Station and Tokyo Station. Students were particularly curious to explore the physical form (design) and programming (activity) that happens in these areas, with a focus on the connections, transitions and interactions of the stations’ interior spaces to the exterior’s public realm, including sidewalks/streets and any immediate surrounding public spaces (e.g. parks, shrines, temples, etc.). Their research produced a range of important observations and analyses regarding (1) The Experiences and Impressions of User’s in Tokyo’s Public Spaces; (2) Physical Form: Spatial Behavior & Imagery; (3) Analysis of Thresholds: Physical, Social & Economic Transitions; (4) Public Space Programming to Activate Social Interaction: Empirical Ideas in Japanese Placemaking; and (5) The Supporting Role Food Plays in Public Space in Japan.

Jonathan Martin, Professor Alexa Fabrega, Assistant Professor a. Fushimi Inari, Kyoto. Mark Freeker b. Shin Okubo workshop. Shingo Sekiya c. Shimbashi Station. Kim Robledo González d. Workshop day. María Teresa Ruiz Cárdenas

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LECTURES + EVENTS

RESEARCH

Public events and activities in Graduate Architecture and Urban Design are held in Higgins Hall Center Auditorium and the Robert and Hazel Segal Gallery. The center building—designed by Steven Holl and opened in 2005—hosts the school’s multimedia facilities as well as large bright open studios for the graduate program. School-wide lectures, symposia, and conferences bring a diverse set of architects, theorists, and practitioners from related fields to show and discuss their work in open an forum. The Segal Gallery hosts annual shows, special events, exhibitions of contemporary work, and historical scholarship.

GAUD | Lectures + Events

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RESEARCH LECTURES + EVENTS

Critiques In design studio critiques, GAUD faculty and invited outside evaluators, enthusiasts, and practitioners look beyond the evaluation process to create engaging moments of open debate and discourse about student projects and the studio proposition.

CRITIC AT LARGE In an effort to expand the discourse across the GAUD and to interconnect our collective pedagogy with the cutting edge of the profession, the “Critic at Large” position was formed in 2017.The purpose of the position is to enlist an accomplished educator and practitioner whose commitment to architectural design and its related praxes is world-leading.

The Critic at Large together with the Dean, the GAUD Chair and related faculty, during several key days throughout the semester, works directly with students from each year and from each program on their projects. The discussions are intended to build and expand an awareness of architecture, its insularity, its disciplinarity, its relevance to participate in challenging problems and its need to invent new audiences.

Spanning an entire day and ranging from intimate to public discussions, from vivid debates to instructive coaching, the event(s) surrounding the Critic at Large visits reflect the efforts of the GAUD (within the School of Architecture) to prod and explore the value of contemporary graduate education; directly with the students and over their work.

Spring 2017 – Pritzker Prize Winner Thom Mayne Fall 2017 – Pritzker Prize Winner Thom Mayne Spring 2018 - Pritzker Prize Winner Thom Mayne

a. 5th Semester Reviews b. SOE Review at Cooper Hewitt c. The Mayne Event

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GAUD | Lectures + Events

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RESEARCH LECTURES + EVENTS

Pratt Sessions + SOA Lectures The Pratt Sessions are a new format of lecture—organized by the GAUD Chair and the Dean as part of the School of Architecture’s lecture series—aiming to encourage student participation in a discussion-oriented format. Seen as a “distributed symposium,” each session brings together two participants; one regionally based and one non-regionally based.

Participants will frame their work (or a portion of it) around a disciplinary subject or provocation in short, non-standard lecture presentations.

Pratt Sessions explores and examines how “mediums” can be defined, re-defined, and understood within the realm of architectural design (subject one: Architectural Mediums) or how “contexts” can be defined, re-defined, and understood within the realm of architectural design (subject two: Architectural Contexts).

Each Pratt Session will commence with an introduction by Chair David Erdman, followed by participant presentations, discussion, and Q+A. Afterward the participants and the faculty will join students for an informal (beer and hot dog) reception in the gallery. The ensemble of sessions will be collected and published in an annual book; the first edition to be released Fall 2018. An archive of the lectures can also be found online at: www.pratt.edu/gaudvideos.

a. Pratt Sessions- Saitowitz + Hawkinson b. Norman Kelley c. Audience d. Pratt Sessions Reception e. Peter Eisenman f. Thom Mayne g. Pratt Sessions- Kwinter + Mau h. Cristobal Correa

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RESEARCH LECTURES + EVENTS

Exhibitions The Higgins Hall gallery regularly plays host to exhibitions produced by GAUD faculty and students, including the annual GAUD++ exhibition, a design-build collaboration between faculty and students that not only displays graduate work but also serves as an exercise in curation, organizational strategies, and innovative fabrication techniques.

a. MS Arch Summer Exhibition b. Accepted Students Day Exhibition c. Pratt Show 2017

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Autodesk Research

Rovert Cervellione, Critic

DIRECTED RESEARCH

The GAUD is committed to pushing the limits of contemporary design thinking. GAUD DR is architecturally specific, design-oriented, and has a high degree of disciplinary precision; sufficient to engage audiences and disciplines outside of architecture. In the culminating semesters of all three GAUD programs (M.Arch, MS.Arch, and MS.AUD), in our international programs (Rome and Havana), and following several semesters of integrative disciplinarily focused learning, these design studios and elective seminars are engaged in pertinent research at the cutting-edge and near future of both disciplinary and professional praxes. The array of courses is fundamentally extra-disciplinary in character and overseen by a stellar ensemble of full-time and visiting design and theory faculty.

RESEARCH

Directed Research (DR) involves a wide spectrum of courses and instructors in the Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (GAUD) department. It is a term to characterize the latent overtones of the work we are doing with students as well as to focus and direct our future efforts toward enhancing discourse, knowledge exchange, and a deep understanding of how architects and design can impact our profession and discipline.

The DR initiative is first and foremost an effort to integrate design research across the curricula of all three programs in an appropriate and distinguishable manner specific to the assets and characteristics of the GAUD and Pratt Institute. It is also an effort to characterize existing faculty driven research projects.

GAUD | Directed Research

GAUD 159

RESEARCH

Coursework

M. ARCH ARCH-805 Directed Research Studios Studio Of Experiments MS ARCH UD 803.01 Summer Design Studio: Urban Design Arch 902 Fall Design Studio for MS.Arch Arch 903 Spring Thesis Design Studio ARCH 803 Summer Design Studio: Vertical Option MS AUD UD-902 Design Studio 2 UD 902 Fall Design Studio 2 for UD UD 903 Spring Design Studio UD Culmination Project ELECTIVES ARCH 853C.01 History of Structural Desgin ARCH 851E.01 Critical Geography +Techniques of Representation ARCH 857A.01 Mass Customization in Architecture ARCH 851D.01/.02 Nature and Design ARCH 859FP.01 Science of the Environment ARCH 859D.01 Housing in Berlin/NewYork ARCH 711C.01 Computer Media: Scripting and Form ARCH 712A.01 Computer Media: Digital Fabrication ARCH 711A.01 Computer Media: Parametric Systems and Form ARCH 771AP.01 Computer Media: Industrial Robotic Automation ARCH 764.01 Business and Architecture UD 981B.02 Urban Open Space Design & Planning ARCH 855C.01 Architecture and Culture: What is Posthumanism?

ARCH 850C.01 Talking About Beauty in Architecture ARCH 851B.01 Algorithmus Conflictus ARCH 851A.01 Architecture in Film ARCH 859B.01 Architecture and Society ARCH 853B.01 - .02 Plasticity in Architecture ARCH 850A.01 - .02 Material Articulation in Architecture ARCH 855DP.01 100 Years of Architectural Thought UD 991.01 Urban Design and Implementation: Case Studies ARCH 859FP.01 - .02 The Science of the Enviroment: ARCH 712A.01 Computer Media: Digital Fabrication ARCH 712B.01 Computer Media: Computer Aided Construction ARCH 771AP.01 Computer Media: Automation ARCH 716A.01 Theory of Architectural Representation ARCH 9601-9603.01 Internship ARCH 765P.01 Architecture and Entrepreneurship ARCH 719AP.01 Form Fitting \ARCH 720AP.01 Nanotectonica ARCH 715BP.01 Familiar Form

GAUD

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GAUD 161

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Prior Directed Research

ECoDe Agent Structure Hunter Douglas DILE: Design of Innovative Learning Environments NEAR: Network for Emerging Architectural Research Bending The Rules Bent Out of Shape BIOmetric Mastaba Tower Space DuPont

2nd Year Students at the Brooklyn School of Inquiry

COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY

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. 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 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.

Graduate | Community

RAD K-12 [Rising Architects + Designers] 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. Nesciusam id quo quamet laci adi simil inum quae ipsandi tecti

Jonas Coersmeier

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COMMUNITY

Exchanging Contexts Students in their second semester studio visited middle schools in New York City as part of their studio curriculum.

The principals and teachers were kind to let us visit some of the main programmatic spaces of the schools (auditorium, gymnasium, playground, cafeteria, library, science room, art room, etc.). The highlight of our visit however was, as always, the workshop in the classroom with the seventh graders.

NYC middle school students are conversant in what spatial qualities contribute to good learning spaces. Architecture students and middle school students started a discussion about the library, probably one of the most malleable and misunderstood spaces of the contemporary middle school.

Humanities, English Language Arts, Social Studies, Science Labs and Art Studios often have books related to each specific subject within the classroom—so what then is the role of the library? Often the library becomes a media room, and this presents an architectural problem, since reading on the page and reading on the screen require different lighting conditions.

Workshops included some hands-on work. Graduate and middle school students found some common ground in how they learned: both submit their school work via keyboard and screen. The experience we have at our laptops is a metaphorical cocoon, our focus entirely on what is on the screen to the exclusion of the physical room surrounding us. What is the architectural complement to this? Would a physical cocoon augment the learning experience? Is it better to have visual connections to other students in the room to promote collaboration? These and other considerations were jumping-off points that the architecture students brought back to studio.

Nesciusam id quo quamet laci adi simil inum quae ipsandi tecti

Maria Sieira,

a. GAUD student Wanlapa Koosakul b. GAUD students Mor Segal + Tal Friedland c. GAUD students Brandon Wetzel + Tim Leccese d. Haya Alnibari

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Graduate | Community

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COMMUNITY

Delta Cities The South Bronx is a vibrant but underserved and underresourced, low-income community, which is at risk of significant climate change impacts. Many of the challenges faced by the South Bronx are playing out across New York City and are mirrored in other parts of the nation. These complex challenges will not be solved by a silver bullet, but by collaborative effort and by the continual evaluation and adaptation of strategies to meet an ever changing environment.

Currently, there are no city mandated emergency preparedness plans specific to the South Bronx. This studio developed three strategies to prepare the community for emergencies that focus on digital communication networks, protecting and investing in critical infrastructure, and building social resilience through hands-on skills training and classroom education. The proposals and recommendations which emerged from this studio intended to work in tandem with existing projects and plans in the South Bronx. It is our hope that this report will help South Bronx Community Resilience Agenda build off the existing social capital of the South Bronx to ensure that this community is provided with the tools to thrive long into the future.

Preparing for disaster is an immediate need, which goes hand in hand with the long-term goal of protecting the coastline from flooding. Surrounded by The Bronx, East and Harlem rivers, our area of study the South Bronx Significant Maritime Industrial Area (SMIA) is vulnerable to both sea level rise and storm surge. In addition, this area hosts valuable critical infrastructure, including the Hunts Point Distribution Center, a wastewater treatment plant, a ConED power plant, and fourteen waste transfer stations—all of which could pose risks to the safety of the immediate community, and potentially to New York City at large, if compromised. We envision the South Bronx SMIA as the pilot for a city-wide Resilient Maritime Industrial Area (RMIA) program. RMIAs will prioritize coastal resilience and industrial retention in addition to serving as the first line of defense for adjacent communities. The governing body of the RMIA will include representatives from New York City agencies, local businesses, and community organizations, who will allocate funding for the construction and maintenance of coastal protection infrastructure.

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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Pratt Center 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 an important role in many of the Center’s urban planning and policy projects. They are given substantive responsibilities, which may range from conducting community interviews, to producing GIS and zoning analyses, to developing schematic drawings of NYC neighborhoods, and . The relationship is mutually beneficial -Pratt Center interns have the opportunity to engage in vital projects and witness community-based planning and design in action whilePratt Center benefits greatly from theenergy, enthusiasm and fresh perspectives of the Institute’s young scholars.

Adam Friedman, Director of Pratt Center

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Taconic Fellowship The Taconic Fellowship, which is managed by Pratt Center, was launched in 2013 thanks to the generous support of the Taconic Foundation. The Fellowship provides financial awards to student and faculty teams from Pratt Institute for projects that align with Pratt Center’s urban planning and policy work in support of sustainable and equitable community development. The Taconic Fellowship connects Pratt’s diverse disciplines to community development work while supporting the Institute’s commitment to collaboration, interdisciplinary projects, and service learning.

In the 2016-2017 school year, Pratt Center funded six projects after a competitive selection cycle. Fellowship recipients included: Aileen Wilson, Director of the Center for Art and Design Education K-12 Center & Kate Selden, Graduate Student in City and Regional Planning for their project introducing urban planning to students in K-12th grade; Gita Nandan, Visiting Associate Professor for the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment & Renae Widdison, Graduate Student in City and Regional Planning for their project researching the development of a skate park that doubles as a storm water management system and creates an active space for youth in Red Hook; Adriana Beltrani, Graduate Student in City and Regional Planning & Jamie Stein, Adjunct Associate Professor in the Grad Center for Planning for their project soliciting community input for future development of available land in the South Bronx.

Pratt Center is proud to support innovative projects such as these that connect the wealth of knowledge and expertise of Pratt Institute students and faculty to local New York City communities. . We hope to continue to encourage projects that have a tangible, positive impact on the City’s low and moderate-income populations.

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a. First Year Studio b. Second Year Studio c. Third Year Studio d. Metal Shop e. Laser Cutter Shop f. 3D Print Shop

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Pratt School of Architecture | Faculty

Graduate Architecture and Urban Design David Erdman Chair Philip Parker Assistant Chair Alexandra Barker Assistant Chair (summer 2017) Vito Acconci Adjunct Associate Professor Nicholas Agneta Adjunct Associate Professor Gilland Akos Visiting Assistant Professor Jonathan James Alexander Adjunct Assistant Professor Adrien Allred Adjunct Assistant Professor Ramon Carlos Arnaiz Adjunct Assistant Professor Kutan Ayata Adjunct Assistant Professor Stuart Christopher Bridgett Visiting Assistant Professor Dylan Baker Rice Visiting Professor Elizabeth Barry Adjunct Associate Professor Gisela Baurmann Visiting Assistant Professor StĂŠphanie Bayard Adjunct Assistant Professor Cole Belmont Visiting Assistant Professor Karen Brandt Visiting Professor Joshua Bolchover Visiting Professor Meta Brunzema Adjunct Associate Professor Robert Cervellione Visiting Instructor Steven Chang Adjunct Assistant Professor Jonas Coersmeier Adjunct Associate Professor Christobal Correa Adjunct Associate Professor Theoharis L. David Professor Manuel De Landa Adjunct Professor Giuliano Fiorenzoli Professor Matthew Flannery Adjunct Assistant Professor Michelle Fowler Visiting Assistant Professor Frances Fox Visiting Assistant Professor Deborah Gans Professor James Garrison Adjunct Associate Professor Erik Ghenoiu

Adjunct Associate Professor James Graham Visiting Assistant Professor Matthew Herman Visiting Assistant Professor Catherine Ingraham Professor

Bridget Rice Visiting Assistant Professor Richard Scherr Adjunct Professor Erich Schoenenberger Adjunct Assistant Professor Paul Segal Adjunct Professor

Paula Crespo Visiting Assistant Professor Ramon Cruz Visiting Assistant Professor Stephen Davies Visiting Assistant Professor Deshonay Dozier Visiting Assistant Professor

Hina Jamelle Visiting Assistant Professor

Benjamin Shepherd Adjunct Associate Professor

Bobby Johnston Adjunct Assistant Professor

Maria Sieira Adjunct Assistant Instructor

Fathia Elmenghawi Visiting Assistant Professor

Robert Kearns Visiting Assistant Professor

Marc Simmons Visiting Professor

Alexa Fabrega Visiting Assistant Professor

Carisima Koenig Visiting Instructor

Henry Smith-Miller Adjunct Professor

Michael Flynn Adjunct Assistant Professor

M. Ferda Kolatan Visiting Assistant Professor

Nathaniel Stanton Adjunct Associate Professor

Michael Freedman-Schnapp Visiting Assistant Professor

A. Sulan Kolatan Adjunct Professor

Michael Szivos Visiting Assistant Professor

Neil Freeman Visiting Assistant Professor

Craig Konyk Adjunct Associate Professor

Jeffrey Taras Visiting Instructor

Adam Friedman Adjunct Associate Professor

Christopher Kroner Adjunct Associate Professor

Meredith Tenhoor Adjunct Assistant Professor

Mindy Fullilove Visiting Assistant Professor

Kathleen Kulpa Visiting Assistant Professor

Scot Teti Visiting Assistant Professor

Sameer Kumar Adjunct Assistant Professor

Maria Ludovica Tramontin Adjunct Assistant Professor

Paul Laroque Visiting Assistant Professor

Nanako Umemoto Adjunct Professor

Wilfried Laufs Adjunct Associate Professor

Jason Vigneri-Beane Adjunct Associate Professor

Thomas Leeser Adjunct Professor

GCPE

Carla Leitao Adjunct Assistant Professor

Eve Baron GCPE Chair, Professor

John Chun Han Lin Visiting Assistant Professor

Lisa Ackerman Visiting Assistant Professor

John Lobell Professor

Rony Al-Jalkh Visiting Assistant Professor

Peter Macapia Adjunct Assistant Professor

Bridget Anderson Visiting Assistant Professor

Radhi Majmuder Adjunct Assistant Professor

Caron Atlas Adjunct Assistant Professor

Elliott Maltby Adjunct Associate Professor

Edward Bautista Visiting Assistant Professor

Hart Marlow Visiting Assistant Professor

Jenifer Becker Visiting Assistant Professor

Diana Martinez Visiting Assistant Professor

Bethany Bingham Visiting Assistant Professor

Benjamin Martinson Visiting Instructor

Michael Bobker Visiting Assistant Professor

Bruce Mau Visiting Professor

Jessica Braden Visiting Associate Professor

William MacDonald Professor

Esther Brunner Visiting Assistant Professor

Signe Nielsen Adjunct Professor Hannibal Newsom Visiting Assistant Professor Brian Ringley Visiting Assistant Professor Florencia Pita Visiting Professor Alihan Polat Visiting Assistant Professor

David Burney Associate Professor Joan Byron Visiting Assistant Professor Darryl Cabbagestalk Visiting Assistant Professor Carol Clark Visiting Assistant Professor Bracken Craft Visiting Assistant Professor

Moses Gates Visiting Assistant Professor Ben Gibberd Visiting Assistant Professor Thomas Grassi Visiting Assistant Professor Ingrid Haftel Visiting Assistant Professor Jill Hamberg Visiting Assistant Professor Stephen Hammer Visiting Associate Professor Eva Hanhardt Visiting Assistant Professor William Hart Visiting Assistant Professor Clara Irazabal Visiting Assistant Professor Georges Jacquemart Adjunct Assistant Professor Laura Jay Visiting Assistant Professor Preston Johnson Visiting Assistant Professor Thomas Jost Visiting Assistant Professor David Kallick Visiting Assistant Professor Simon Kates Visiting Assistant Professor Edward Kaufman Visiting Associate Professor Gillian Kaye Visiting Assistant Professor Abdullah Khawarzad Visiting Assistant Professor Rajesh Kottamasu Visiting Assistant Professor Robert Lane Visiting Assistant Professor

Frank Lang Visiting Assistant Professor Setha Low Visiting Assistant Professor Paul Mankiewicz Visiting Associate Professor Benjamin Margolis Visiting Assistant Professor Ariella Maron Visiting Assistant Professor Michael Marrella Visiting Assistant Professor Jonathan Martin Professor Jonathan Marvel Visiting Assistant Professor Claudia Mausner Visiting Assistant Professor Norman Mintz Visiting Associate Professor Eliza Montgomery Visiting Assistant Professor Sadreddin Mostafavi Shahab Visiting Assistant Professor Gita Nandan Visiting Associate Professor Mercedes Narciso Adjunct Associate Professor Marcel Negret Visiting Assistant Professor Nadya Nenadich Adjunct Associate Professor Christopher Neville Visiting Assistant Professor

Professor Mitchell Silver Visiting Assistant Professor Sebastian Toby Snyder Visiting Assistant Professor Chris Starkey Visiting Assistant Professor Jaime Stein Adjunct Associate Professor Ira Stern Visiting Assistant Professor Gelvin Stevenson Visiting Associate Professor Samara Swanston Visiting Assistant Professor Lacey Tauber Visiting Assistant Professor Patricia Voltolini Visiting Assistant Professor Vicki Weiner Adjunct Associate Professor Don Weinreich Visiting Assistant Professor Ben Wellington Visiting Assistant Professor Aaron White Visiting Assistant Professor Kristen Wilke Visiting Assistant Professor Kevin Wolfe Visiting Assistant Professor Ayse Yonder Professor

Suzanne Nienaber Visiting Assistant Professor Larisalena Ortiz Visiting Assistant Professor Juan Camilo Osorio Adjunct Assistant Professor Lauren Peters Visiting Assistant Professor Laura Phillips Visiting Assistant Professor Leonel Ponce Visiting Assistant Professor Theodore Prudon Adjunct Professor Marci Reaven-Tanis Visiting Assistant Professor Evgeniya Reshetnyak Visiting Assistant Professor Quilian Riano Visiting Assistant Professor Damon Rich Visiting Assistant Professor Steven Romalewski Visiting Assistant Professor Sarah Serpas Visiting Assistant Professor Carolyn Shafer Visiting Assistant Professor John Shapiro

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