INPROCESS 24

GRADUATE

INPROCESS 24 GAUD + GCPE

School of Architecture Summer 2017 - Spring 2018

GRADUATE

INPROCESS 24 GAUD + GCPE School of Architecture Summer 2017 - Spring 2018

INPROCESS is the yearly publication of student work from the Pratt Institute School of Architecture Editor: Wanlapa Koosakul Assistant Editor: Zhixian Song GCPE Archival Coordination: Carlos Rodriguez Estevez and Shingo Sekiya Undergraduate Archival Coordination: Chuck Driesler, Michele Runco, Kalam Lin Siu, Wina Wu, Beren Saraquse, Brandon Ryan

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 Frances Bronet, President, Pratt Institute (Starting Spring 2018) Bruce J. Gitlin, Chair to the Board of Trustees Kirk E. Pillow, Provost

Graduate Administration: David Erdman, GAUD Chair Alexandra Barker, Assitant GAUD Chair Erin Murphy, Geoffrey Olsen, 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: Rong Han

Deborah Mesa Molina, critic Olivia Vien, co-teacher Interior Cover: Mais Abuali

Jonas Coersmeier, critic Emilija Landsbergis, co-teacher The following hardware and software was used for this publication: 3 Apple Mac Pro 3 desktop computers 5 Apple iMac desktop computers 2 Canon EOS 6D camera Adobe Creative Suite CC Hewlett Packard Color LaserJet Enterprise M750 Hewlett Packard Color Laser Jet 6015dn and HP Color Jet CP5225 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 24 would like to extend a thank you to the Summer 2017 - Spring 2018 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 Wanlapa Koosakul, Chuck Driesler and Michele Runco who after many years of exceptional dedication to Archives and InProcess are graduating.

Foreword

005

Master of Science in Architecture

Semester 1 Semester 2 Thesis Semester 3

Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design

Semester 1 Semester 2 Culmination Projects Semester 3

Seminars

Mediums Core Electives International Programs Summer Programs

GRADUATE CENTER FOR PLANNING AND THE ENVIRONMENT

011 01 9 027 039 053 063 080 082 084 092 094 096 102 114 126 132

Foreword

140

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

142 143 144

PRATT MANHATTAN CENTER

Urban Placeman and Management Construction Management + Facility Management + Real Estate Practice Interdisciplinary Studios

LECTURES + EVENTS

Pratt Sessions + SOA Lectures Exhibitions Critiques

DIRECTED RESEARCH

Coursework Prior Directed Research

GAUD COMMUNITY K-12 RAD Havana

GCPE COMMUNITY

145 146 147 162 168 172 1 74 176 180 182

SAVI Pratt Center

186 189

Lecture Series Faculty

191 1 93

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 24th 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, benefitting 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 intensely progressive in its approach to design, emphasizing creativity and innovation at every level, from the form of buildings and cities to advanced technological systems in structures, sustainability and building performance.

Complementing design and technology is a critical theory curriculum that offers theoretical perspectives on a global scale and exposes students to the most advanced and important thinking in architecture and urban design today. The faculty are composed of designers, theorists and practicing architects and engineers, drawing upon the unparalleled intellectual and professional culture of New York City. In recent years, many of the GAUD faculty have initiated significant research projects within the school, particularly in the areas of computation and fabrication and outreach to communities, including the public schools of New York where GAUD faculty and students give design workshops to young students. In the last two years, a new publication Pratt Sessions documents public events featuring pairs of designers and theoreticians in conversation. At the core of the Master of Architecture program is the Integrative Design Studio where architects and engineers teach teams of students in a collaborative manner that directly reflects the structure of the best professional practices in architecture and engineering. The Master of Architecture program is in the midst of an eight year re-accreditation after the National Architectural Accreditation Board (NAAB) identified integrative design and community based programs as having national excellence. The M.S. programs in architecture and urban design offer students with a professional education the opportunity to expand their understanding of theory and to develop thesis projects based upon their own, unique research.

The programs in the GCPE and the Manhattan Center share these qualities of rigor and speculative research, together with a strong commitment to improving society through direct engagement with communities and neighborhood organizations The City and Regional Planning program has a long and distinguished history of directly assisting communities in their planning efforts particularly with respect to social and environmental justice. The Pratt Center grew out of these efforts and is now one the nation’s oldest and most celebrated university-based urban research centers. The 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. Last year the GCPE programs worked together once again and sent students to Havana to assess that city’s remarkable progress in preservation, social justice, sustainability and urban placemaking.

The three programs based in the Pratt Manhattan Campus are Facilities and Construction Management and Real Estate Practice and all of these programs are deeply involved with their professional communities. The Construction Management program, for example, combines internships with classroom education, as students develop relationships that serve them in the transition to employment after graduation.

On a personal note, this is my last year as Dean of the School of Architecture, so this will be my last forward to In Process. It has been a distinct pleasure to serve as dean, and one of those pleasures has been to write the last 22 forewords to this wonderful publication of student work. I would also like to thank all of the remarkable students, faculty and alumni I have met along the way, as they are the ones that make this school and institute such an extraordinary place to study and speculate on the future of buildings, places and cities.

Thomas Hanrahan, Dean

Graduate Architecture and Urban Design

CHAIR’S FOREWORD As an art and design institute 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.

Immersed in a design-rich environment, surrounded by leading designers and thinkers throughout the curriculum of each program, the students’ work collected in this 24th edition of In Process reflects the collective commitment and agility of the GAUD, its faculty and students to address issues related to contemporary architecture. There are two primary directed research emphases within the GAUD. One concerns the “post-digital,” and how architectural media and methods impact the “live-exeprience” of the things we design. The other emphasis examines densification and how it benefits and impacts the contexts within which we speculate. Both tracks of inquiry are rooted in a constellation of distinctly 21st century problems. Together these directed research emphases hit various “nerve endings” in the discipline and profession, challenging our students’ creative abilities while enriching their potential to be thought leaders of the future. 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.

PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS The 2017-2018 academic year documents the initial impacts of our revised curriculum across all three programs. In the Master of Architecture (M.Arch) program the Core studios have seen significant change. Bookending the core, the first semester shows a spectacular dexterity of methodological thinking and multi-media design. The fourth (and final) semester of the Core is highly integrative where building technology consultants work alongside design faculty and with students. In Spring 2018, a “Waste to Energy”/Recycling facility was used as a test case; a challenging somewhat controversial NIMBY problem raising questions about context, scale, architecture, infrastructure and land use. The projects collected here showcase the ways in which our students can re-think those contexts in which their buildings are sited (a total of five across the globe) in a contemporary modality that impacts land use, community and waste management.

The Advanced Directed Research design studios in the M.Arch program saw an array of focused, in-depth work spanning from Japan to Malaysia to Detroit and Stanton Island.

Among them was a studio that focused on subterranean recreational “pleasure grounds.”

Part of the “Studio of Experiments,” this studio sought to appropriate various infrastructural components (subways, cisterns, tunnels, shorelines) as possible sites for public engagement, using a variety of existing civil engineering and architectural construction techniques in unorthodox applications and resulting in some compellingly sublime and rusticated urban environments that suggest new forms of attentiveness, discovery and engagement throughout the city.

In Process 24 also documents the second year of our summer program in Havana where students continued to work with local educators and stakeholders developing speculative proposals for re-designing a strategic post-industrial site in the newly released harbor.

In Summer 2018 students exhibited work at Fabrica des Arte Cubano where hundreds of members of the local design and art community viewed the proposals and where the students took excursions outside of Havana to Mantanzas and Varadero.

The MS.Arch program (in its newly encapsulated format) saw intensive directed research.

Students and faculty developed inquiries into alternative methods of robotic construction and methods of visualization using augmented reality. They worked closely with curators at Art Omi in upstate New York to design an intervention for one of its outdoor galleries.

All of the work from the studio was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum on the occasion of Brooklyn Designs, where hundreds of designers from across the city came to see the students’ work. From the group of immensely creative culminating projects, one team (and project) was selected for development and construction. Using robotically manufactured, engineered, glow in the dark timber and situated at the base of the hill among thick natural grasses, the project (entitled “Carapace”) invites multiple ecologies to grow within and on top of the structure over time. It is an exciting example of how technical, human and animal ecologies can be synthesized and re-originated through a small scale, compact, architectural intervention.

The MS. Urban Design and Architecture program focused on hyper-dense housing for a series of sites in Western Brooklyn; near Pratt’s campus. Working with a number of stakeholders and analyzing the potentials for development in the borough and neighborhoods, students made proposals that formulated unconventional transit systems as well as (in some cases) anticipating and embracing the rising tides of this particular stretch of coastline. Working above and below ground, making use of existing infrastructural construction techniques, projects altered and re-worked the material, ecological and economic possibilities of their discrete areas of focus. Among the highlights was a proposal for an interwoven, elevated, bridge network interconnecting multiple buildings. Extending over the East River, the

project speculates upon newly forged connections and density linking downtown Brooklyn with the original coastline and river.

The event programming, exhibitions and publications throughout the GAUD continue to evolve and grow. For the second year, the Pratt Sessions saw unprecedented student attendance and brought together a formidable group of thinkers and designers to share their thoughts about our two areas of directed research with our students. A publication collecting the 2017 sessions has recently been released and (in Spring 2019) a book collecting the first two years of the Studio of Experiments will be released.

It is astonishing to see (in the mere two years since I was appointed) how ambitiously and intensively students and faculty have challenged themselves. This is not only evident in the design studios but also in the electives and public programs where equally compelling and engaging discussions and work are being actively developed. The following book is a testament to their efforts and hard work, and is reflective of our commitment to develop rigorous modes of inquiry through design, which we believe will have an impact on the future of practice and the discipline.

David C. Erdman, Graduate Chair

Graduate Architecture and Urban Design

CRITIC AT LARGE 2017-2018 Pritzker Prize Winner Thom Mayne In Fall 2017 I joined the GAUD as their first annual Critic at Large. The role involved working with students and faculty across all programs over two semesters to explore critical questions about the nature of graduate education and pedagogy in architectural education. It was a particularly ripe opportunity to work on the program with Pratt’s newly appointed Chairperson David Erdman and his faculty.

The GAUD is one of a few graduate programs that maintains a strong commitment to design excellence and experimentation while also maintaining a commitment to engage in various forms of intensified civic experience. Among the questions we examined together included the extent to which students can find a path between autonomous, personally expressive methodologies that have a strong historical presence in the curriculum and methodologies that lead to broader, more outwardly focused strategic thinking. In short, I was seeking ways to discuss how these future Architects might develop processes and methodologies that align their conceptual output with the pragmatic demands that will come as they put their educational experience to work.

Highlights of the year included the bookend studios of the Core Master of Architecture sequence where students began working on largely methodological problems and ended with a requirement to engage in very real 21st century cosmopolitan problem. The first studio pushed students to learn directly from the things they make; to postulate post-facto WHAT their work is doing over HOW they did it. The final Core Studio (known as the Integrative Studio) was equally compelling. Here students were asked to operate at the peak of civic engagement and to consider how to deploy the methods they had developed to a fairly complex constellation of contexts alongside a team of building technology consultants. Using a Waste to Energy/Recycling Facility as a test case, students in this studio were asked to span the gamut from highly localized impacts on the immediate community to understanding the broader impact of such a facility on land use across a metropolis - all with a high degree of technical precision.

Both MS Programs, in their newly oriented focuses, seek to address important questions about the nature of post graduate research in contemporary education. In particular, I found it compelling that they both deploy significant amounts of technology for design while maintaining their focus - both on the lived experience and on the intrinsic qualities of the things being proposed. This requires significant commitment that can only begin to be evident in the year-long structure.

The GAUD is among the top schools asking difficult questions regarding the nature of graduate and post-graduate education and one of the few schools that has the faculty to support those questions ranging from its stellar history theory faculty (Delanda/Kwinter/Ingraham) to its design faculty who represent top thinkers and practitioners in the region. In my time as Critic At Large I found the intensity of the students a pleasure and the culture of the GAUD (particularly in its public events like the Pratt Sessions) to be vibrant and healthy. In a time when graduate education could be acquired online and/ or might lead one away from architecture and design, it is exciting to see how schools and graduate programs like those found at Pratt are transforming and making architectural design necessary to engage the complex problems we face as a profession and a discipline.

Elise Hoff + Elham Goodarzi

Erich Schoenenberger, Critic | Danil Nagy, Co-teacher

Master of Architecture

The three-year M. Arch 1 program guides students through an interdisciplinary approach to architectural education to prepare students to become influential voices in the professional and academic realm of architecture and design. Students will develop a comprehensive intellectual understanding of the emergent contemporary culture in design and furthermore acquire the technical skills that place them at the forefront of the most innovative design practice.

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 in the fall semester. Tectonic conditions of structure and envelope are explored and interrogated related to programmatic potentialities. The studies are parlayed into a project contect and investigated as a small intervention into an urban New York City site. This year the studios designed interventions into Sara D. Roosevelt Public Park Space in the lower east side of Manhattan.

The intervations proposed speculative new urban play spaces tending to the needs of the surrounding residential communities.

The spring second semester studio looks at interiorities and itineraries of an institutional building. The program poses as the context and the topological condition of the interiority. Generative and representational techniques are further investigated and explored while the understanding of space and function become more specific. This year the program was an elementary school located in the dense urban setting of lower Manhattan. The projects sought to find new ways for institutional spaces to connect to the high-rise neighborhood context. In the fall of the second year, studios projects are exposed to further complexity and specificity. The design studio projects are exposed to concepts of environmental systems and material assemblies in both the studio work and the accompanying technology seminars. The project was a mixed-use and high-rise housing tower located in Downtown Brooklyn. The studios investigated the relationship between the site, its urban context, with the changing nature of residential living spaces 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 climate conditions to produce a project with a high degree of technical resolution both in project development and representation. 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.

Erich Schoenenberger, Coordinator

FACULTY Alexandra Barker Carlos Arnaiz Dylan Baker Rice Erich Schoenenberger Gisela Baurmann Henry Smith-Miller James Garrison Jason Vigneri-Beane

Kutan Ayata Maria Sieira Peter Macapia Philip Parker Stephanie Bayard Sulan Kotalan Theoharis David William Mac Donald

INTEGRATED BUILDING SYSTEMS FACULTY Ben Shepherd Bob Kearns Corey Wowk Cristobal Correa Kate Kulpa

Kristina Miele Paul Laroque Reid Freeman Stuart Bridgett

GAUD

CORE DESIGN STUDIO

Master of Architecture | First Semester

011

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Lower East Side Playscape Sara D. Roosevelt Park in Lower East Side, Manhattan This studio, the first of the MARCH core sequence, introduces principles of design through making and methodology. The digital revolution of the late 1990’s brought new fabrication software and tools to the discipline of architecture. Now that digital production and image making has become mainstream, a new wave of inquiry into the future direction of the discipline is working to bring a more diverse set of tools and processes of making together into dialogue. Our process is an iterative and recursive series of modeling and drawing assignments incorporating analog modeling techniques including casting and vacuum forming, digital modeling, drawing, photo documentation, and digital fabrication tools, including 3dprinting, laser cutting, and milling. We begin with the development of a physical object and void derived from casting negative and positive records of familiar objects. We mine these new composite objects for new formal and spatial qualities and alternate between physical and digital modes to develop multi-media outputs. We explore the potential of graphic patterns to create 2-1/2 dimensional conditions that reside somewhere between solid and void. In the second third of the semester, we continue to work between 2d and 3d modes. These combinatorial objects are manipulated through various processes to produce a speculative ground.

In the final third, the object and ground are reconsidered in the context of site and program. The project is a game space or playscape located in a section of the Sara Roosevelt Park in the Lower East Side.

Alexandra Barker, critic Olivia Vien, co-teacher a. Aditya Ashok Mokha b. Naomi Ng c. Michael Coppolo d. Samantha Lee Chan

a b

c b

d

Master of Architecture | First Semester

013

GAUD CORE DESIGN

High-Res/Low-Res Sara D. Roosevelt Park, New York, NY This studio section introduces the fundamentals of architectural design with an emphasis on an envelope’s role in both anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric aspects of architectural formation. We begin by dissecting, drawing and casting objects such as respirators in order to see how they integrate ergonomic and environmental factors, primitive and differential geometries, organs and atmospheres as well as production processes that involve rigid and flexible materials, surface components, insides, outsides, appendages and augmentations across variations in an industrially designed product line.From this opening study, we extract and project a set of operative principles for the making of digital and physical study models with on-going drawing exercises. For example, thinking about the industrial design of a multi-material study model may later influence the way one thinks about the making of a building through molding, casting, vacuum-forming, surface componentry, model-tectonics and machinic traces such as laser-cutter numbering and patterning from the vacuum-form bed. Or, exploring a proto-architectural model as if it is an industrially-designed object may later lead to the semiautonomy of an architectural object as the modeling process delivers formally, structurally and materially self-sufficient objects. While these objects have an orientation, they do not rely on a ground. At the same time, however, machinic traces from vacuum formers and CNC mills suggest a synthetic, automated or tectonic ground that might confuse the skin of a building with the surface of an anticipated site.As projects developed, a triple-principle emerged wherein proposals included high resolution interiors, low-resolution exteriors and machined sites that were CNC-mill-driven extensions of architectural formations into tooled landscapes. This partnership between compact, high/low resolution architectural surface-spaces and tooled extensions of them into low-relief landscapes created a framework within which students could explore the concept of formally programmed architecture in a partnership with informally programmed landscapes that supported the studio mandate for recreational activities happening within and across a small architectural proposal in a deliberately oversized public site.

Jason Vigneri-Beane, critic Frederic Bellaloum, co-teacher

a. Munirah Alreshoud b. Kevin Lo c. Jonathan Hamilton

a

b b

c

Master of Architecture | First Semester

015

GAUD CORE DESIGN

An Object of Relations Sara D. Roosevelt Park, New York Over the last few sequences of this studio, we continue to elaborate and develop logics of relations as objects of architectural analysis. This year we took on the problem of massing as an exploration of a geometry that has to be formed from abstract algorithmic procedures. The goal is to construct over a sequence of years, an architectural system that explores the fundamentals of architecture and their relation to each other. This requires a double agenda between engaging computational and technological elements and learning how to quickly manipulate and develop techniques for material combinatorial operations. These two basic operations usually generate a kind of conceptual friction and present a series of problems that we then engage through analysis and drawing.

This year we concentrated less this time on programmatic socio-political features and focused more on converting geometry into architectural specifics through a sequence of carefully defined operations around the integration of mass and membrane. Now it is a question of architecturalizing these features and seeing what properties can be brought into an architectural spatial grammar. What will count as architecture here and why? What are the minimum conditions? How do these operations form spatial propositions in architecture as opposed to merely geometric tautologies?

With this year’s studies, those operations had to find explicit footing in solids and membranes that went beyond the planar combinatorials that are used to find the object of analysis through planar connections. Along these lines two things became clear: on the one hand, the introduction of printing technology allowed us to extrude geometry in ways that connected but also transgressed conventional architectural definitions of structure and enclosure – the mass could operate both as structure and enclosure. On the other, the membrane was pushed beyond the planar geometry to include freeforming materials that produced formal organization that had no anchoring in the architectural system other than the criteria of material behavior and physics. This was seen as a compromise that was worth abandoning in favor of isolating and developing the massing-structure scheme.

Finally, with regards to the site, we tried to elaborate more interesting and credible conditions with respect to the architectural system but ultimately had to abandon some of the explorations as too sculptural and gestural.

Peter Macapia, critic Olivia Vien, co-teacher a. Nick Kabbani b. Madhurya Udayakumar c. Wankuan Yu d. Jiaming Zhang

a b

c d

b

Master of Architecture | First Semester

017

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Transient Objects Manhattan, NY Recognizing that we come to know objects in multiple ways; that ideas of an object and its independence and dependence with forms of engagement are contentious; and that we do not always follow a given path of understanding – from say the general to the specific or the other way around we approach our object with several strands. Similarly, we can recognize that the object in architecture is a perpetually fraught locus of attention at once caught up in processes of change as designed artifact and agent of mediation, while being an entity with apparent autonomy. That is we approach the object in a broad sense of revelry and perplexity in the anticipation that it may return these.

We are working with architecture’s multiple ways of moving around limits in drawing, fabrication, and modeling material change in the studio’s evolving project. The project re-draws the object within convention and with revised attitude – its actual position in space and in the drawing plane. The first phase of the project develops seven distinct ways into the object – measured line drawings, digital model, unfolded paper surfaces, active wire line apparatus, movement diagrams, alternative positions toward gravity, and light dispersion.

The studio works off of an industrially produced part that is at once integral with the body and systems of its host. The car headlight assembly provides a specimen with multiple active surfaces, explicit geometries, concrete relations between inside and out, multiple distinct versions of context, redefinition of the ‘corner’ as a transitional zone, lines of interior continuity, forms of containment and extension, and is a recognizable figure in the larger context of the vehicle.

The project works on producing and finding new objects with specific qualities through the compounding of excess found in the artifact. Proposals remap forms of play and spatial objects in a square field. Each addresses the specific material meeting of play, spatial organization, sensation, and gravity.

Philip Parker, critic Frederic Bellaloum, co-teacher

a. James Parker Wilson b. Aline Theodorakis c. Haoyuan Wang

a b

b b

c

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

019

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Integral Experiences Manhattan, NY INTEGRAL EXPERIENCES- is a studio based on the premise that an integrated model of education is necessary for the development of students and the surrounding community.

Architecture’s role is the creation of spaces for opportunity.

Designing and making places which seek multiple readings through program; material; mass; and experience- buildings that foster and create opportunities for learning. This is the aim of this semester long exploration to follow in the footsteps of eminent Art schools such as Black Mountain College, students will design a middle school for holistic education. Using the concept first introduced by John Dewey, each proposal will be an environment for learning that focuses on teaching through experiences. The middle school will be located in Lower Manhattan with a strong focus on the Arts, throughout the studio students will develop their own ideas of how architecture can foster learning by drawing on their own educational experiences. Iterative physical models, drawings, and material explorations will be the groundwork for students’ explorations into programmatic potentials of various spatial relationships; relationality through physical pairings explored at multiple scales. Resolution will not be sought of an integrated whole rather integration will be emphasized between constituent parts and program, examples are void/mass influences on teaching and circulation. The building and the school will become integral to the education of the children and people within. In addition to physical studies of space through design methodologies a strong emphasis will be placed on the theoretical framework of each student’s project. A strong understanding of design work, intent, and use are important to fully catalyze a project and exploratory work. The theoretical framework will build upon student’s experience in the first semester, with greater emphasis placed on intentionality in the process of design. Each design exercise will have an analytical portion where the purpose is to explain the project in the clearest manner possible. This will build in complexity as the project builds in formal intricacy. Throughout the course students will identify various architectural mechanisms as methods of transformation. Basic elements will become experience which will become program and finally individual experience.

These relationships can be nuanced or direct but will inform research into program, site, and mass. The ultimate aim is for each student to leave the course with a stronger sense of their individual design methodology and ability discuss relationships in terms of their design and the broader discipline of architecture.

Dylan Baker-Rice, critic Olivia Vien, co-teacher a a. Kevin Lo b. Naomi Ng

a b

b

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

021

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Informed Misuse Manhattan, NY In this studio students were introduced to the development of interiorities in architecture through the program of an elementary school. Our site was a slot of thin space in the context of the dense urban fabric of downtown Manhattan, our building much like a book that might slide into place on a bookshelf. As a result of this site, our architecture operations privileged the vertical cut over the horizontal, and our starting point for the project was the “foresection:” the drawing that precedes a proper building section. A great part of the pedagogic effort this semester had to do with the introduction of a complex program while maintaining the students’ formal manipulation knowledge gained the previous semester. To this end, the process of incorporation of program and form was designed using various tropes that kept the students going between 3D and 2D articulations and between physical and digital knowledge.

Our trope this semester was using a 3D scanner, the conventional tool used in the profession of architecture to measure existing conditions, but used in unconventional ways. As a starting point for the articulation of our foresections, we scanned objects and rooms. We brought these articulated skins into digital environments (the scanner makes continuous surfaces out of the concave and convex modulations it encounters in its gaze). We manipulated these digital artifacts (scaled them, combined them, varied the resolution), until we had a form that fit our general building massing requirements.

These digital artifacts where then materialized in folded and cast artifacts. Those artifacts were scanned again and manipulated in a digital environment. The process continued until a sufficiently honed foresection could be then worked into a proper building section. The foresections were also built into 3D digital artifacts that were cut into foreplans and those foreplans worked into proper architecture plans that included programmatic distribution.

This “misuse” of the 3D scanner technology was “informed” by architectural goals for the foresections and foreplans that were produced in each subsequent operation. Collage techniques were also used in 2D to assess the potential of program and form. Through the “informed misuse” methodology of the scanner technology, students rehearsed architectural relationships between the imagined (and imaged) supposed “building” and the representational techniques through which its articulation and materialization developed.

Maria Sieira, critic Olivia Vien, co-teacher a

a a

a. Haoyuan Wang

a

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

023

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Middle School Manhattan, NY The goal of the studio was to help each student attain the ability to conceive of architecture in a unique way, devoid of any dependence on preconception, or current trends. It was meant through questioning and research, to strengthen their creative process by which a meaningful work of architecture came into being, expressive at once of theoretical positions, technological exploration, programmatic invention and pragmatic concerns.

The studio was also meant to assist them in developing their own representational personality by exploring new methods of design development and communicating an idea to include digital investigations, hand and hybrid drawings, photography and physical models.

Precedent research, imaginative site analysis and 3D abstract architectonic explorations lead towards the redefinition and expansion of the given program. This methodology was meant to assist each student in conceiving of an IDEA of what a place of learning might be which explores the possibilities of an existing and complex condition.

To conclude, this semesters’ investigation of the subject and theme, was not just about the design of a public school. It was about designing an implant or graft into an evolving, dense mixed use urban condition, and whose architecture was ultimately defined not only by the given program but by the contrasting existing constructed environmental dynamics of the site. It was meant through critical thinking, questioning of the program, and a process of design, theirs‌ to strengthen their identity or if unsure of it, to help them define themselves as a person of ideas, and integrity capable through independent thought of generating a dynamic, comprehensively developed, realizable and meaningful work of architecture.

Theoharis David, critic Frederic Bellaloum, co-teacher

a. Mara Lookabaugh b. Wankuan Yu c. HsienTing Huang

a

b c

c

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

025

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Emergent Educational Scapes Manhattan, NY The project is conceived to challenge anachronistic architectural and planning ideas of process and production, which result in ‘singular’ unique design solutions ‘freeze framed’ in time. This new method and approach is to be understood, in contrast, to more normative design methodologies, which seek to rely on the use of icon, symbol, narrative, and re-presentation of ideas in architectural terms.

Our alternative polemic will be to ‘yield’ the architecture of an elementary school, with a new means using of generative, open-ended systemic design techniques as applied to designing progressive adaptive educational environments.

The school can be thought of as a responsive ‘hyper-network’ of evolving relationships of form, space and graduated programs, using an ‘evolutionary’ architecture.

This ‘Systemic Hybrid’ method allows for the investigation of incremental and aggregative processes and systems in volumetric relations of form, space, and time. The studio will focus on a synthetic design research into complex adaptive geometries, that will eventually yield the potential of ‘openended systemic hybrids’. The ‘systemic hybrid’ method leads to continually generative architectural solutions with the potential to respond to sponsored systemic change over time, via evolving variables [such as context, time, use, politics, economy, history, in other words culture at large]. The goal is to create an ‘adaptable’ and ‘anticipatory’ architecture. An architecture able to be altered with time, in time and by time.

An architecture with these traits and attributes is especially beneficial when it is deployed as an educational environment.

These generative and hybridic open-ended systems are based on notions of both architecture and landscape and understood as surface and volume. The intent is to derive a system of design, which, yields multiple solutions rather than a final conclusion. Indeed, an architecture that ‘affords’ a ‘continual emergence’ of form, space, and use over time.

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

William Mac Donald, critic Frederic Bellaloum Name, co-teacher a a. Mengna Li b. Ruoting Qiu

b a

a

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

027

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Housing Studio Downtown Brooklyn Our current technological regime is both intimate and social— we carry it in our pockets while it connects us to any and every one. The effect is that we live in a world, described by the philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, as “unprecedentedly spacious yet with an unprecedentedly modest circumspection.

This studio can be described as having been obsessed by the twin paradox of having a modest circumspection in an unprecedentedly spacious world.Do our buildings exacerbate or ameliorate this condition of volumetric blindness? What is the architectural proxy of our technological vastness and the optical equivalent of seeing the world in parts that might themselves be distortions?

Over the course of this semester we explored these epistemological questions by studying situations of compression, extension, congestion and solitude in the contemporary city. We developed work for a multi-family housing tower in Downtown Brooklyn that foregrounded the way in which physical structures foster the emergence of certain kinds of groupings both physical and imagined.

Our research focused on the mutuality between social clustering tendencies and the architectural frames that allow us to understand these assemblies as embodying particular characteristics. The classical delineation of a group and an identity has been the frame. Portraits are bound by a frame, still-lives are defined by the frame of their composition and context while cartographers speak of the frame as both the limit and inception of any map.

Each project this semester was as an essay on how architectural frames work in an architecture type such as housing so as to specify, create and support the emergence of new communities. The combined output of the studio amounted to a research assignment into the problematic of growth and verticality as it relates to the different scales of structures that define our urban environment.

Our discussions throughout the semester circulated around the topic of how specific frame geometries aggregate to enable a multiplicity of nested spaces and open up pockets of hitherto unseen space. Our collective goal was to encourage the articulation of a formal proposition relative to what makes a tower work and how it might be placed under pressure to describe the hybrid reciprocity of our digital age.

Carlos Arnaiz, critic Christina Ostermier, co-teacher a a. Kennedy Phillips b. Sarah Suarez

b a

a

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

029

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Residential Downtown Brooklyn “… Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.”

Paradigm for the third millennium, Tiffin, John; Nobuyoshi Terashima (2005) By 2050 there are going to be 2.5 billion more people living in cities, we therefore have to densify our cities rather than continue the urban sprawl. This raises the immediate questions: How do you create livability in a dense city? How can a vertical neighborhood work? These questions were the premise of this third semester mixed use studio. A downtown Brooklyn site, a neighborhood undergoing radical densification, set the stage for the project explorations.

The vertical organization, interior unit distribution and circulatory infrastructure of dense downtown urban tower building were subject to initial investigation in parallel to the formal exploration.

This studio section explored design ideas of dense urban tower form, expressions and materiality through the lens hyperreality. The studio questioned the normative monotonous curtain façade which is dominantly a mere reflection of the interior organization. The design process was initiated with a series experiments and the development of a proto-architectural object explored through various design mediums. Through a circular process transitioning between drawings, digital modeling, fabrication mediums, collages and photographic representation architectural form and aesthetic are established.

Erich Schonenberger, critic Joseph Giampietro, co-teacher

a. Elise Hoff b. Kenith Mak c. Haya Alnibari

a b

b c

c

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

031

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Shared Live-Work Hybrid Brooklyn The evolving demographics and life-styles in urban centers demand new modes of living. A recent turn in New York City and other urban centers have been to explore the potentials of what is called “Micro-Units” and shared accommodations.

Micro units are efficiently planned small (300 sqft) units for single occupancy. This push which is initiated by the Bloomberg administration and most welcomed by the private residential developers, resulted in the initiation of various pilot projects in the city. Another housing trend which is currently gaining traction put forward by the likes of We-Live/We-Work is shared or co-living for the young mobile work force. These new typologies of housing have arrived only with the rigor of efficiency and bear no disciplinary design/aesthetic agenda to advance architectural/cultural discourse. They aim to maximize the amount of transactions which can be fit in “some envelope”.

This very disjunction or tension between the necessity of efficiency in plan and potential independence of the envelope, was the the starting point of our efforts. The digital model is too easily accepted as the object containing all information of a project from which the rest of representational conventions are retrieved. One could argue that each form of representation can be developed autonomously and bear diverging agendas. In this light, we rejected a singular digital model defining “the essence” of the projects but rather worked through various modes of representations autonomously (physical, digital, 2D and 3D) at different scales to build the projects scene by scene.

The studio explored a Shared Live-Work Hybrid Tower project in Downtown Brooklyn, incorporating variations of micro units. The towers contained units for single/group of individuals and small families. It was left to individual students to determine and conceptualize the distribution and nature of common spaces, as well the work environments. New potentials of adjacencies were explored between and within units. New concepts of shared amenities, their distribution and spatial constructs within the body of the tower(s) were at our focus.

Kutan Ayata, critic Joseph Giampietro, co-teacher

a. Sandra Nataf b. Mor Segal c. Amir Mohebi Ashtiani

a a

b

c

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

033

GAUD CORE DESIGN

About Tallness Downtown Brooklyn The studio work this semester involved the study of the formal, cultural, and structural issues of tall buildings. As defined by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat in Chicago, “[a] tall building is not defined by its height or number of stories. The important criterion is whether or not the design is influenced by some aspect of ‘tallness.’ It is a building in which tallness strongly influences planning, design, construction, and use.” Using this definition as a starting point, we conceived the project in the context of the history of tall buildings and both the New York City and worldwide context of contemporary practice. Historically, structural requirements greatly determined the design of a tall building. Today, there is greater flexibility in the form tall buildings take because of the structural technology advances of recent years. For example, we looked at the spectacle-seeking buildings of twenty-first century Asia. We also looked at several housing towers in New York City including projects by Jean Nouvel, Enrique Norton, and Diller & Scofidio + Renfo.

Programmatically we researched current trends in urban housing and decided to take up the themed community concept, or housing towers that offer smaller private living quarters for greater affordability on the part of the resident and greater profit on the part of the developer (larger number of units to sell/rent), but then complements the slightly smaller private spaces with amenities in semi-private spaces (gyms, daycare facilities, storage rooms, bike racks, art studio space, game rooms, galleries, laundry facilities, swimming pools, conference rooms, etc.). This semi-public program also provided opportunities for interior architectural articulation.

We considered specifically our site, one requiring attention to the public plaza at the foot of the building, right at the heart of the civic center that is downtown Brooklyn. We used as a precedent for this the brilliant zoning negotiation of Mies’s Seagrams building and plaza. We speculated that with the necessity to connect to the subway below, the trend of multipurpose, lavish lobbies in housing projects, and the proliferation of interior, conditioned, public spaces, ours would be a multistory, three-dimensional “plaza.” Finally, we considered the presence of the tower artifact in the context of the cityscape.

Maria Sieira, critic Hannibal Newsom, co-teacher

a. Zhizhong Dang b. Aslihan Avci Aksap c. Colin DaPonte

a b

c

c

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

035

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Residential Tower Downtown Brooklyn The studio explored the design of alternative urban housing in relation to density and connectivity at different scales. By its nature and through economical pressure, collective housing often evolves into systemic and repetitive patterns. As world population grows and the environment degrades, the need for dense urban dwelling will expand along with the quest for individuality within a collective environment. Large collective housing have a very strict set of restrictions and requirements: structural, infrastructural, circulations, envelope‌ etc.

However, as needs and residents expand, so are the opportunities for diversity within the actual set up of the building and the dwelling itself. In recent years, with the development of Uber, food delivery and online socializing, the traditional residential program has been shifting to new opportunities. In the meantime, sport and social amenities in housing are increasingly popular.

From urban to domestic scale, the studio investigated infrastructural, programmatic and spatial vertical cores as well as the potential interstitial spaces and variations within regular patterns. Historically, the multiple housing types of New York City offers a fertile laboratory of exploration. And we studied varying typologies of collective housing and dwelling units. Concurrently, the excess of space within an economical and rational system afforded opportunities for design. Whether at the scale of the city, building or dwelling, the addition of the “unessential� or redundancies to a highly rational program created possibilities of chances, encounters and rethink individual and collective living patterns.

Stephanie Bayard, critic Christina Ostermier, co-teacher a a. Yanzhen Qiu b. Jiratt Khumkomgool

a a

b

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

037

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Residential High-rise in the Age of Disruption Downtown, Brooklyn This studio will design a residential high-rise within the conceptual context of “disruptive innovation”. The term was first coined by Clay Christensen in 1995 and has since become a popular way of describing current innovation. The uses, misuses and overuses of the term indicate that it is a source of inspiration for innovators in many different fields. We will start by discussing, examining and unfolding this term and its discursive path. Each student will be asked to create a conceptual framework for their residential tower based on these discussions and his/her resulting interpretation relevant to his/her design intentions.

Simultaneous with the theoretical inquiry, the studio will study typological precedents. These will be selected both from historically significant housing examples as well as current projects that demonstrate new ecological, social and technological approaches.

Informed by these two trajectories, students will develop their own attitudes and positions toward this project. The design techniques will include 3D modeling, working with scripts, and rendering (including in VUE). These techniques and tools will be part of the studio instructions and do not require previous skills.

The goal of the studio is to propose disruptively innovative high-rise designs that challenge the conventions of either one or more of these categories: Structure 1. material fabrication (including robotics, makerspaces, synthetic materials) 2. program 3. envelope 4. core 5. definition of residential unit (changing definition of family and “units” that are other than family) 6. relationship between work and live 7. relationship between building and site (building and city) 8. relationship between building and transport modes 9. relationship between building and biological systems other than human 10. relationship between low-cost and luxury (creative subsidizing, kickstarter, self-branding, bartering, etc)

Sulan Kotalan, critic Hannibal Newsom co-teacher a a. Anthony Mull b. Daniel Salvador

a b

b

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

039

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Incinerator + Museum St. Petersburg, Russia In this studio, we explore structural approaches, materiality, and environmental concerns in the context of the site, climate and program. We examine the way in which the formal and material development of a building can play a role in expressing spatial and phenomenal dynamics both within the project and between the project and its context.

The combination of an industrial program with a cultural one sets up a test case for a way in which densification in cities can propose ways in which the zoning districts within a city that are typically segregated can start to layer and overlap to create productive synergies and forge more integrated distribution networks. This dual program structure also sets up a particularly charged set of relationships between the two roles the building will play and the way in which these roles are expressed or concealed— The two programs have the potential to create conditions of contrast or separation in terms of structural, environmental, and material qualities.

Conversely, the material, structural and environmental systems may be designed to be relatively consistent across the two programs. Siting this project in St. Petersburg brings the set of relationships between the two programs into a physical and environmental context of extreme contrasts.

The building site is on a clear boundary line between the cultural district of the city and the active industrial district, which is known as a center for the aerospace industry, heavy machinery production, as well as electronics. Industrial production generates waste, as do the five million inhabitants.

The landfills of Russia currently occupy an area the size of Switzerland and continue to grow. St. Petersburg is the third largest city in Russia and one of the greatest polluters of the Baltic Region, with over 10 million cubic meters of solid waste produced annually. The biggest component of landfills in the St. Petersburg region is industrial sludge, and there have been initiatives to employ waste to energy incinerators to eliminate the transfer of sludge to landfills, where it can leak into the water supply as well as into the Baltic Sea. The proposed project would bring a sludge incinerator plant to the western edge directly adjacent to the industrial district at the mouth of the Neva River. The added program of a museum brings the cultural and industrial aspects of the site, and the city, together. The history of museums occupying former industrial buildings is a well-known one, the most famous examples being the Tate Modern in London, the Dia: Beacon in upstate New York, and the Caixa Forum in Madrid. The question this studio poses is how to approach the design of a building that could house those two programs concurrently.

Alexandra Barker, critic Christina Ostermier, co-teacher a. Kenith Mak + Wanlapa Koosakul b. Beste Aykut + Francisco Moreno c. Tal Firedland + Tim Leccese d. Brandon Wetzel + Mor Segal e. Hanyipeng Chen + Yintong Li

a

c

b

d

e

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

041

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Zabbaleen City Cairo, Egypt The Zabbaleen, a Coptic minority occupying a suburb of Cairo at the edge of the Mokattam Heights has made it their business and livelihood to collect, sort, reuse and recycle the garbage of Cairo. Completely self-organized and structure the Zabbaleen have formatted Zabbaleen City or “the Garbage City”.Over the last 40 years, the people of Garbage City have refined their collection and sorting methods, built their own labor-operated machines and created a system in which every man, child and woman works. The hand-sorting effort can be unhealthy, with many Zabaleen suffering from hepatitis as a consequence. But it is estimated that they collect 4,500 tons of trash daily and are able to recycle 85% of the refuse they collect — a statistic topping the best efforts of recyclers in the West.

The Studio brief proposed an Urban Incineration structure to manage and destroy the non-recyclable trash. This Waste to Energy facility is to be paired with a Market/Bazar infrastructure supporting the production and marketing of goods made from the reuse of recycled materials by the Zabbaleens.

The site is located at the edge of the Mokattam height and the Zabbaleen City alongside a road that is a major artery between the new upscale development and the center of Cairo. With this the building has the opportunity to serve as connective tissue between the Zabbaleen minority community and the “modern’” Cairo.

Erich Schoenenberger, critic Danil Nagy, co-teacher

a. Anthony Mull + Sandra Nataf b. Elise Hoff + Elham Goodarzi c. Amir Ashtiani + Catherine Wilmes

a

c

b

a

b

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

043

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Kraftwerk Powerhouse Berlin Berlin, Germany After the roaring 1920s, since the 1990s, Berlin’s nightlife and club culture have famously regained notoriety. Right after the fall of the wall ad-hoc sessions and accompanying events by vagabond clubs were communicated through highly styled flyers and word of mouth propaganda. “WMF, 90º, Tresor, E-Werk and Bunker” among others typically materialized in disused industrial buildings or those awaiting a new purpose in the transition years. Even today, the most notorious clubs such as “Berghain” and “Tresor” found their permanent locations in former industrial buildings after wandering in exile for multiple years. Proposing a club as secondary program to the incinerator came as a natural extension of its industrial nature. Design is an integral part of these clubs, their events and the self-expression of their patrons. Beyond their immediate use, the interiors and communication materials, as well as the -more or less outrageous- outfits of their patrons have played a substantial role in shaping popular culture and design sensibilities.

Densely urbanized areas face the fundamental design challenge to minimize traffic in and out of its centers. Trash and pollution management are no exception, and the city of Berlin, Germany has a traditionally used its abundant waterways for industrial transportation. Our studio picked up on this tradition, choosing a site that allows all deliveries via barges over the river Spree. The site, Kraftwerk Charlottenburg, is a landmarked 19th century industrial complex in the Western center of the German capital. It is located in an area characterized by a mix of residential, institutional and light industrial uses.

Kraftwerk Charlottenburg is a built monument bearing testimony to the pride for the newly acquired technology to generate electricity for the radically developing city. The entire complex is oriented toward the river Spree, along which barges delivered coal to feed the steam engines.

The city of Berlin has a well-developed trash management system with strategically positioned recycling stations throughout the city, and non-recyclable trash going to landfills that are precisely orgabized. As a consequence, the proposed incinerator will run on a minimum capacity. It will feed its excess heat into the already existing district heating system. By managing waste and distributing energy locally the new complex is a first-of materialization in the quest to provide multiple, locally distributed trash and energy treatment sites for densely urbanized regions.

Gisela Baurmann, critic Hannibal Newsom, co-teacher

a. Sarah Suarez + Sholeh Jafarinamin b. Leonardo Martinez + Roberto Casas c. Aslihan Avci Aksap + Colin DaPonte

a

b

a

c

a

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

045

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Fire and Water Venice, Italy Program: URBAN INCINERATOR + BOATHOUSE, A docking and dispatch facility for the Institute for Marine Science (ISMAR) currently stationed at the Arsenale Provide an enclosure for an Urban Incinerator facility. The enclosure may be designed to conceal, obscure, or otherwise visually mitigate the facility’s presence on the Lagoon; or it may advertise, celebrate or find resonance with existing, projected, or imaginary architectures of Venice.

ISMAR Boathouse: – the Boathouse will be a facility to house the vessels belonging to ISMAR’s research fleet. The six vessels below spend much of their time at sea, or at ISMAR’s other coastal research locations. Two berths must be provided, one for the larger vessels (a 160’ long by 40’ wide slip) and one for the smaller vessels (a 60’ long by 20’ wide slip). A dock of at least 160’ length and 30’ width with access to a warehouse is needed for loading and unloading research equipment and victuals. A control center with offices, and a command room overlooking the boathouses and dock is also necessary for communication with and coordination of the vessels.

Henry Smith-Miller, critic Danil Nagy, co-teacher

a. Haya Alnibari + Thomas Diorio b. Jiratt Khumkomgool + Yanzhen Qiu c. Nathania Wijaya + Tatiana Eletskaya

a b

b

c

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

047

GAUD CORE DESIGN

The Architectural Integration of Carbon Sequestration Technology

Los Angeles Technological culture has accelerated climate change, and some believe technological solutions must ameliorate it.

To that end comes the new and extremely controversial field of environmental engineering. You could say that we have always been environmental engineers but now we must be consciously and quickly using our ingenuity to affect environmental stability. One technology at the forefront of this effort is carbon sequestration. Viable, cost effective technology has been developed that can filter CO2 from the air and make it available to be consumed or converted into other materials. This machinery absorbs and sequestrates CO2 in biomass and other materials. These machines are modular, scalable devices that can make CO2 available for industrial use, beverage production, and to supplement agriculture. Here are some current companies producing these devices.

If carbon sequestration is to be effective it’s deployment must be widespread, and it must adaptable to the economic and planning needs of cities. This studio seeks to explore the integration of carbon removal technologies with urban programs. To take advantage of and demonstrate the utility of CO2 management it combines sequestration technology with public infrastructure, a craft brewery, and various garden programs. Brewing and plant growth consume CO2 and can profit from this adjacency. Surplus CO2 will be shipped to sequestration sites for storage or industrial use. The site is located in the rapidly developing industrial area of South Park in Los Angeles.

The studio also explores the integration and demonstration of primary engineering considerations including the physics of solar generated and mechanized air movement as well as energy consumption and balance.

James Garrison, critic Hannibal Newsom, co-teacher

a. Daniel Salvador + Wenze Chen b. Fanping Zhao + Shulan Kuang c. Byoungjae Kim + Nathan Bataille

a

b c

a

b

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

049

GAUD CORE DESIGN

Waste to Energy & Coral Research Center Rio de Janeiro This Comprehensive Studio, taught concurrently with the Integrated Building System seminar, emphasized the relationships between conceptual ideas and technical aspects of the studio projects. It 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 studio proposed to design a Waste to Energy Trash Incinerator combined with a Coral Research Center in Rio de Janeiro. The site located on the Guanabara Bay, near multiple museums and next to the aquarium offers a unique view and access to both road, tramway and boat.

In 2012, Rio closed down one of the largest landfills in the world, Gramacho Jardim. However, the Guanabara Bay is still extremely polluted and the construction of an incinerator, accessible by boat would allow to remediate both the trash treatment and the bay pollution. Concurrently, in 2017, scientists discovered a new coral reef, significantly different from the well-known coral reef models, expanding from French Guiana to Brazil.

Although the combination of a Coral Research Center with a Trash Incinerator seems like an odd condition at first, the studio investigated their possible affinities at multiple level: new researches found that specific corals can feed on some plastic, sponges can filter water and have special ability to withstand polluted habitats, the possibility of using or transforming some of the trash into coral reef structure, the juxtaposition of cause, effects and potential solution of consumption and pollution revealed to the public‌ etc. At last, the different scales and spaces of the two programs presented architectural, organizational and structural opportunities to design a technical, sustainable and educative project.

Stephanie Bayard, critic Christina Ostermier, co-teacher

a. Chase Kaars-Sypesteyn + Kennedy Phillips b. Richard Yeung + Sammie Wu

a a

b

b

Nai-Hua Chen

Deborah Mesa Molina, critic | Olivia Vien, Co-teacher

Master of Architecture

We live in a hyper visual culture where images dominate our means of communication, where we are without interruption exposed and immersed in an ever changing flow of visual stimulation. Our exposure to this uninterrupted flow of hyper imagery raises the question of our awareness of how images shape our understanding of the world around us, how images construct our understanding of our environment and what politics are being promoted through this theater of the spectacle. As images are being created no longer through familiar tools and apparatuses of seeing, but through digital algorithms able to construct new realities while increasingly void of meaning, the abundance of new and unfamiliar images promotes a progressively homogenized understanding of our environment.

As traditionally images were created by a select few, we are now in a world shaped where the exact opposite is true. Every single picture taken by anybody becomes a potential source for crowd sourced infinite image information where the world around us is shaped by a digital reconstitution of this environment. This studio explores different strategies of visual culture throughout history and will selectively construct an architecture tied into aspects of cultural preferences or conventions.

Students focus on alternative spatial strategies based on various historic references from the past and into a speculative future and construct an architecture hyper vigilant to those selected cultural precedents. The goal is for students to explore alternative ways of representation, experiment with different ways of seeing and to discover different ways of communicating architectural experiences. As we live in an era of permanent parallel and multiplicit strategies of seeing, including artificially constructed views, we need to advance our ability of spatial representation in sync with our permanent exposure to inescapable visual strategies. The single view, perspective, frame, lens, originator or spectator no longer matches our reality of the visual consumption of our environment. The goal is to radicalize strategies of representation and by doing so to radicalize strategies of space.

Thomas Leeser coordinator

FACULTY Bruce Mau Deborah Mesa Molina James Garrison Henry Smith-Miller Hina Jamelle Koray Duman Lindy Roy Meta Brunzema

Peter Macapia Philip Parker Sulan Kolatan William Mac Donald Thomas Leeser

CO-TEACHER Alexander Cornhill Alihan Oney Frederic Bellaloum Greg Mulholland Jeffrey Anderson Joseph Giampietro Mark Richards Matthew Fischer

Nathan Broughton Olivia Vien Pimnara Thunyathada Robert Cervellione

GAUD

DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIO

Master of Architecture | Fifth Semester

053

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

Culture comes to the Brooklyn Navy Yard Brooklyn As incubator for “Collective Urbanism”, a 21st Century development at the site of the former, now burgeoning, Brooklyn Navy Yard, a new Mediatheque and Campus will provide a landscape of public entertainment, outdoor filming and media screening areas, and production studios, all seen as the natural extension of the commercial film studios and small startups already present at the Yard. The Mediatheque’s program will invite growth-stage and innovative early-stage companies from around the world that are developing disruptive technologies that will shape the future of digital entertainment and media.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard has an infamous history, 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 Collective Urbanism kickstarted by the Mediatheque and its Campus? Can 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 Alexander Cornhill, co-teacher a a. Alican Taylan b. Viktoria Usui-Barbo

b

b

a

Master of Architecture | Fifth Semester

055

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

New Andy Warhol Museum Aoyama District, Tokyo “The idea is not to live forever; it is to create something that will.” Andy Warhol This studio will examine Eastern and Western pop art and its relation to the formulation of architecture by using digital techniques in an opportunistic fashion for the generation of growth and evaluation of patterns in the development of form.

Digital techniques allow us to deal with the full complexity of material systems that lead to effects that are greater than the sum of their parts.

Pop Art in the West emerged in the “early electronic age” as an ironic, self-examining, but enthusiastic look at the mass imagery of our post war consumerist society. Pop Art stood firmly at the cross roads of the elite avante-garde of the art world and the broader interests of popular culture and society at large. Pop Art borrows from the excess of signs and symbols that we are surrounded by and that emerged from mass media, advertising, and in more contemporary terms, the ubiquitous culture of social media.

In addition to the techniques of sampling, Pop Art relied on vibrant colors often different than the expected color palette of the subject and high contrasts. Through these techniques there is a flattening of the image and a focus on the figuration of the contours within the image.

The ability to study, research and investigate which artistic techniques are useful is key to formulating innovative systems for architecture. These innovations are accumulative and are subject to changes that shift in type and/ or in kind. In addition, the artistic technique’s usefulness is determined by their eventual formation that includes material, space, atmosphere, program and social interaction. The ability to identify spatial potentials in buildings and developing innovative formations provide a more nuanced and architecturally sophisticated understanding of form.

Hina Jamelle, critic Nathan Broughton, co-teacher

a. Yixin Xu b. Ayse Islikci c. Holly Wilson

a

b c

c

Master of Architecture | Fifth Semester

057

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

New Forms, Programs, and Technologies for Urgan Housing Detroit, Miami This is a combined research and design studio focused on the development of new forms, programs, and technologies for urban housing. We addressed conditions of urban resonance, affordability, multi-generational programming, automated fabrication, workforce support, environmental disruption, systems development and customization.

The vehicle for these investigations was the design of new housing models for Detroit. There may be no better demonstration of the consequences economic and technological disruption than Detroit - a collapsed mono economy, sprawling, and automobile obsessed city looking to reinvent itself. Much of it is fading into nature, it’s past destined to become a pentimento in the repentant future. In it there is the opportunity to re-imagine the city as ecologically balanced as well as socially and economically inclusive.

Detroit’s situation compels us to look beyond tired tropes, to gather our best ideas and imagine what tomorrows cities can become.

Architecture, throughout its history, and particularly since the advent of modernism, has responded to technological and social change through re-invention and evolution. Its relationship to technology is simultaneously as provocateur and symbiont. Today we are compelled by rapidly advancing automation, digitally generated geometry, and material science to reconsider the relationship between architecture and building production.

This studio focused on the development of new models for urban housing and industrialized construction to serve Detroit’s need for sustainable growth and a contemporary industrial base. We investigated models for workforce development through local manufacturing centers that draw from their surrounding communities. Detroit’s planning process is well underway and includes the re-development of several neighborhoods. It’s pre-collapse manufacturing infrastructure remains under-utilized and presents numerous locations for production facilities.

James Garrison, critic Frederic Bellaloum, co-teacher

a. Allison Lane b. Rong Han c. Nai-Hua Chen

a

b

c

Master of Architecture | Fifth Semester

059

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

China Town Library New York The studio’s research mandate was to rethink and redesign a venerable public institution - and to make it more accessible and culturally relevant. Specifically, we focused on the design of a library branch in Chinatown, Manhattan, in the broader context of contemporary information systems.In today’s world of overabundant information – it seems that finding a single right answer is no longer our primary quest. Depending on the context - there are often too many good answers to choose from. Instead - we need to develop productive trans-categorical ways to sort, bundle and recombine this abundance of information, and to make libraries into fertile grounds for the emergence of wild and wonderful cultural streams. We started by expanding the meaning of “context”, “program” and “users” through a non-reductive lens – collecting and indexing a broad spectrum of qualities and quantities - ranging from the banal to the extraordinary.

Going beyond a narrow analytical approach – the students developed processes of abstraction to filter and organize physical and virtual fragments, past and present – while designing “architectural apps” that allow library users to productively tap into these cultural resources.

Instead of designing the library on an empty site – the students were asked to creatively adapt the existing building fragments located on the corner of Howard, Lafayette and Centre Streets in Chinatown. Oddly enough, these include a 6-story FBI/CIA parking garage skeleton, and a fragment of an Art Deco gas station – right next to the Museum of the Chinese in America. Each student developed evocative narratives to redefine this context. In many instances, students included strange, opaque and sometimes crude architectural elements to challenge existing social organizations – and to expand the definition of what a library can be. For example, the project “Chinatown: The Leftover’s Feast” used a rescaled, rotated, and re-contextualized “ready-made” fragment of a typical Chinatown façade as a mnemonic device that compels a re-reading of the city – while offering something “familiar” that young and old library users can interact with. The “ONEPLUSTHREE” library integrated three specialized collections – including a compendium of outdated illustrated books – to expand knowledge. Wrapped in translucent construction tarp, this unique library branch looks and performs like a construction site – a symbol of the evolutionary capacity of libraries. Finally, “IMAGE’nation” – a combination of Cinematheque, film archive, new media playground, and tea house – advances Chinese culture by fostering an energized interplay of cultural myths, facts, and fiction.

Meta Brunzema, critic Greg Mulholland, co-teacher

a. Michael Lu b. Janice Kwok c. Nadine Oelschlager

a b

c b

c

Master of Architecture | Fifth Semester

061

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

New Forms of Urbanity and Nature Medini Iskandar 100 YC, Malaysia The studio’s focus was on developing hybrid systemic design approaches that emphasize both open-ended processes and particular evolutionary and a-serial design techniques for the development of 100 Year City in Medini Iskandar, Malaysia. This project’s intent was to set up new integrative relationships between infrastructure, institution, and landscape as a catalytic means to initiate the evolutionary processes of ‘growing a city while rebuilding its rainforest’.

Exploring new qualitative and gradated systems of combined categories that latently install trans-categorical programs as a means to inform a new discourse of form, space, program, ecology, and structure in architecture. The is an ongoing design research project. Excerpt from Invited Competition Statement below: ‘Malaysia Biennial 2017 100YC Medini The goal of the Malaysia Biennial 100YC is to showcase research on the inevitable growth of Medini, from greenfield to a nascent Central Business District (CBD) of the region that will complement Singapore. Imran Clyde, founder of the Malaysia Biennial and Executive Director for Nextdor Property Communications Sdn Bhd, also announced the appointment of Professor Tom Kovac of RMIT, as the Artistic Director (Curator) of the Malaysia Biennial, which will open to the general public in November 2017. Medini Iskandar Malaysia will be the Malaysia Biennial 100YC’s first destination partner, researching models for the vibrant Architecture and sustainable urban development of Medini, a new city of at least 350,000 people when it becomes fully developed in about 20 years.

The research proposes both visionary speculation and a clear demonstration through the pragmatic and situated application of creative architectural and urban practices, focusing particularly on four key urban catalysts: mobility, technology, commerce and knowledge. Ultimately, the goal will be for these international participants to endorse the potential of Medini to be a successful Central Business District within Iskandar Puteri through the development of a qualitative design-led architectural procurement framework for the ongoing commissioning of built works in Medini. The program includes exhibitions, workshops and online collaboration modules with leading international architecture schools, enabling global connectivity and collaboration between universities and research leaders, sharing urban and architecture outcomes under the directorship of many of the world’s innovative architects.

William Mac Donald, critic Robert Cervellione, co-teacher a. Alireza Kabiri b. Yuki He c. Inyoung Kim d. William Bodouva

a

b c

d

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

063

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

A temporary Cultural Institution for the Brooklyn Museum New York ‘If architecture is neither pure form nor solely determined by socioeconomic or functional constraints, the search for its definition must always expand to an urban dimension’ Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction We hold an idea of the city as an intense and diverse hub where innovation and civic participation are driven by chance encounters and cross-cultural collaboration. However, in 21st century cities, the line between public and private has been blurred by real estate incentives, public-private partnership, and increasing surveillance, transforming public space into an increasingly stratified (by class and race) ground. Added to the challenge is the digital public presence though which we are mentally detached from the physical public space. How can we capitalize on density and physical proximity of urban environments to establish new spaces for cultural and intellectual exchange?

During an unprecedented pressure for rapid urbanization, an urge to connect and belong to public space requires us to look at ‘architecture and the city’ in radically new ways. The studio will look at Bernard Tschumi’s seminal work ‘Architecture and Disjunction’ and writings on cities of 60s and 70s through the lenses of the new developments in 21st century public space.

If there is no direct relationship between space and its use, program and form, the studio will challenge the students to move away from the 20th century architecture’s preoccupation with the relationship between form and function and look at how architecture can activate context in 21st century cities.

What if an architectural brief called for a design of a social space, a space of ideation, a space for reconciliation, a space of difference, a space of isolation, a space for play? And how can we expand the vocabulary of architectural discourse and its operations in late capitalist, neo-liberal cities?

The studio will take the site as a space to design of a temporary cultural intervention. Looking at architect’s ability as a catalyst for social impact, students will develop a space for cultural and social exchange in the form of a temporary institution on the plaza. The use of a temporary cultural institution as an alternative and/or complementary model for existing Museum structure, the project will also open up a conversation for Brooklyn Museum as a cultural institution to re-evaluate/re-think it’s existing model.

Koray Duman, critic Matthew Fischer, co-teacher

a. Nadine Oelschlager b. Howard Tsu c. Shao Chieh Liu

a

a b

c

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

065

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

Architecture and Justice: Living Just Enough This studio is a platform for research in architecture and the city that examines the question of justice and in the shifting conflicts of the urban environment (delinquency, race, class, religion, policing, education, homelessness, immigration, etc.).

The type of investigation allowed us to pose the problem of typology, monumentality, and space with regard to the urban environment and explicitly takes issues with architectural formalisms predicated on spectacle. Rather than coalescing the public around the monumentality of the spectacle, which is an old sovereign theme, why not attempt a diffused spatial problematic through the function of listening that is internal to the structural functions of juridical procedure in the Western tradition? Justice is often seen as a distributive problem, as in who has access and under what conditions.

By this understanding there is a specific internal relation between architecture and the city and the problem of justice vis-Ă -vis spatialization. In order to filter this problem of spatialization through another medium, another spatial problem, we considered how each project might engage the problem of sound. That is, how would an architecture in this particular context emphasize listening?

Students developed research for designing a juridical facility, or a juridical space, which did not have to be a courthouse, but would provide a space of arbitration or administration in relation to a particular conflict in justice that was specific to a particular international urban context. To this extent our investigations, based on the students’ interests, were developed in international contexts and raised a number of questions about the different political environments, as well as cultural and social expectations. Students explored projects based on immigration law (Copenhagen and Turin), women’s rights and communities (Santo Domingo), justice in education (Charlottseville and Bogota), racial justice (Philadelphia), criminal law and the death sentence (Tapei).

In addition to visits to the New York State Supreme Court for Civil and Criminal Courts, the studio hosted a series of guestlectures by a civil rights attorney, an artist-activist working with post-incarceration rights, and a historian on colonialism and law. Together these lectures, open to the GAUD community, provide backgrounds on civil rights and the city, the criminalization of youth and the discourse on the social enemy with respect to the city, and the history of law as a spatial practice in Western society.

Peter Macapia, critic Mark Richards, co-teacher a a. Michael Lu b. Olivia Paonita

a b

b

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

067

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

New Museums Manhattan New Museums: Permeable, Transparent, Immersive, Mobile, Living From just instants after the very beginning of the rationalized, measured, realist image in perspective construction pathways were being opened to find other ways of engaging the world, to immerse, to dive into media and in the other direction to transcend its vast authority. Artists, naturalists, architects and inventors were forming other ways of producing affects and explicating the found and unseen world. The studio works with design media, architecture and the media of the museum to invent other hybridized forms of awareness.

Architecture is intertwined with this as a product of media, as active media, and a sometimes antagonist to its media. Even while forms of media’s use and abuse were multiplied the still dominant surface - the picture plane - remained and remains central to the contemporary media apparatus, and its correspondence with the multidimensional object.

The twentieth century produced multiple assaults on the plane’s authority to organize behaviors, to divide subjects and objects to set up the terms of evidence for events planned and already history. These acts on the power of a delimiting surface mark a desire not so much to see more clearly or to achieve transparency and the erasure of authority as to challenge media and the surface in particular to stutter, perplex, and engage the world in indeterminate ways.

The studio reworks the media apparatus found in contemporary art practices to produce other forms of perception, cognition and sense in architecture. It works on both the design media and the built architectural work. It works on the migration of concepts back and forth between media and the migration of media across different objects. It confronts the correlation between two-dimensional work and architecture with an avowed interest in novel spaces. Its explicit ambition is to stress architecture’s reliance on its own conventionalized set of media actions and to open other forms of awareness. It works toward invention through the crossing of found logics of practice, Museum of Natural History, New Museum, display and architecture.

Philip Parker, critic Alihan Oney, co-teacher a a. Inyoung Kim b. Sunah Choi

b b

a

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

069

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

Hacking an Iconic House Cap de Creus, Spain The proliferation of affordable production technologies, combined with notions of crowdsourcing and the Internet of things, has left the last decade awash with maker cultures that are disrupting traditional manufacturing industries. The studio is situated in this thriving context, and explores the idea of generating opportunities for architecture within it. Of the different kinds of maker cultures, it is hacking that we will focus on. We will use the term as an act of re-qualification and invention. In other words, we will be closer in spirit to Ikea hackers, everyday amateurs, rather than professional masterminds. Hacker spaces encourage shared cultures of production. Their ethos is based on sharing tools, space and knowledge, which allows individuals to design and produce things they could not on their own. Hacking inherently acknowledges history. Something has to be already there for hacking to be possible. Hacking into an existing icon of architecture provides new opportunities to consider history “live” and exploit its affinities to the present by hacking the new out of the old. There are 3 “hackable” objects in the generation of the design project: 01: The icon: Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. We will work with a 3D model of the project as the base material. Understanding the Villa Savoye as a paradigm of Modernism through hacking rather than analyzing will be one of the challenges. For Le Corbusier, the Villa Savoye served as a demonstration of his Five Points of Architecture. We will identify these in the model and discuss novel strategies to “hack the new out of the old” from these architectural elements. One particular focus will be on the attitudes toward situating the architectural object in relation to landscape (“the machine in the garden”, the rooftop terrace, the car access) then and now.

02: The minimal surface cell: Students will be provided with scripts to generate minimal surface cells. We will treat these as protoarchitectures that can be a-hacked, b-modified within the script or c-newly scripted, depending on each student’s intentions.

03: Your handmade object: Each student will be asked to generate new objects made by hand from day 1. These can have the quality of doodles, or be produced by hand using self-selected tools. The material will be plaster. The idea is to engage the material hands-on, create “without thinking”.

Sulan Kolatan, critic Robert Cervellione, co-teacher

a. Qiang Guo b. Zhenyu Wang c. Greg Sheward

a b

c c

c

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

071

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

Strange Animals An Architecture of Absence A genre of contemporary photography focuses on an architecture of incompleteness and the improbable, depicting states of spatial configurations which are obviously impossible, yet, while at the same time somewhat strangely believable. Many of these images have a seductiveness that this studio is trying to explore and exploit. If photographers can produce this powerful tension between the impossible and the real, created through improbable architectural constructs, the challenge for us as architects is to create spaces and environments that allow and provoke equally powerful experiences in the inhabitant, while the spaces are actually constructed in the real. What is often quite remarkable in these images, is not the exuberantly and speculative spatially complex structures that we architects tend to navigate to, but that these images operate on the familiar, even banal environments of the everyday. The point here is to speculate on the potential power of an architecture that does not solely rely on a spatial and formal complexity void of any possible cultural reference or meaning, but on an architecture that playfully or critically engages in possible new ideas of sozio-political, cultural and new urban contexts.

Thomas Leeser, critic Pimnara Thunyathada, co-teacher

a. Allison Lane b. Alireza Kabiri c. Tung Shen

a a

a

b

c

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

073

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

Experience Design for Healthcare Staten Island, New York Massive amounts of intellectual and political energy have been expended in our effort to deliver accessible healthcare to the American people. Sadly, we now rank as the nation that spends the most per person on healthcare delivery, while our outcomes lag dramatically other nations that spend significantly less. Most of our energy has gone into the ongoing conflict around how we pay for healthcare, with very little innovation and design applied to optimizing what we actually do and how we do it.

At the same time, what we are capable of doing is ever expanding. The list of potential interventions inexorably grows as we develop new science, technologies, treatments and medications, only making matters more complex and driving potential costs ever higher.

Can we design the “experience� of accessible and sustainable healthcare delivery, and specifically the delivery of health care to the poorest and most vulnerable Americans? We will apply our work from last year at Pratt, and think about the full sensory experience of healthcare delivery, with the mandate to reduce cost while improving the experience. We will explore new ways of thinking about increasing access, improving outcomes and reducing cost in order to imagine a sustainable healthcare future.

Bruce Mau, critic Joseph Giampietro, co-teacher

a. Yuqi He b. Allison Gorman c. Lalitphan Pongpornprot

a

b a a

c

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

075

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

Pleasure Grounds Mannahatta and Manhattan STUDIO OF EXPERIMENTS is both an experiment and a curated collection of experiments. In its content, pedagogy and curricular approach, it tests the limits between a conventional studio, a research studio and graduate thesis, and serves as a testing ground that seeks to cultivate different ways of teaching, thinking and designing. As part of Studio of Experiments, FORMWORKS: PLEASURE GROUNDS revisits the transformation process of Manhattan from wild nature to urbanized land, from Mannahatta to Manhattan, from “island of many hills” to flattened grid. In this journey, the enormous efforts and monumental actions that go into the massive exploitation of the land -digging, leveling, exploding, reclaiming, filling…- but that after have minor architectural manifestation in the urban reality serve as point of departure to explore ways in which Architecture can build alternative scenarios able to embody the intriguing collision between the infrastructural, the industrial, the artistic, the geological… opening paths for urban imagination.

The inexorable Manhattan grid serves as perfect laboratory, as “Site” for a collection of experimental ”Non-Sites” and Central Park as inevitable reference: an extraordinary oasis in the middle of the dense city, at once autonomous and ingeniously integrated with the city grid. Learning from this successful interference students will work in creating architectures as “pleasure grounds” within otherwise real estate driven realms, as counteractions to increasingly domesticated and segregated urban environments. Architectures that are more sublime than beautiful, more dialectic that idealistic, more dynamic than static and that bring greater level of consciousness on the construction and operation of the city.

And as a way to merge intention and intuition in the process of experimentation, the studio evolves through Action Design: thinking with hands and minds simultaneously, putting multiple senses at work. Through an iterative process of making like sketching, students explore the potential of improvisation as creative tool, progressively fixing certain variables and freeing others, encouraging productive discovery from their own experiments as a way of inspiration and evolution of the work. Media, in different forms, becomes an instrumental ally to the visions, beyond representation.

Deborah Mesa Molina, critic Olivia Vien, co-teacher

a. Yixin Xu b. Nai-Hua Chen c. Mesas’ studio models

a

a b

c

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

077

GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS

Nervous Geometries This studio explores the relationships between Neurology and Geometry. The human brain is intimately connected to the demands made on it to ‘intuit the environment for survival’. One could say the brain’s job is to ‘facilitate a dynamic pattern of interaction among brain, body and world.’ Nervous Geometries is an opportunity to do independent research, conduct experiments and develop physical prototypes to test ideas around the themes of neurology, geometry, sensation and environment. Our focus is threefold: produce a research document, develop a design proposal or prototype and test it in real-world situations or simulations. Readings and video viewings establish a common knowledge base across the studio acting as a springboard for individual experiments and projects.

Through self-directed research agendas based on the course themes, students developed new research methodologies for exploring and understanding neurological and geometric concepts and speculated on their impact on design, geometry, human coordination and navigation in space. A living research document exploring the topics of the course and including original drawings, theories, and speculations was produced. It incorporated novel methods of assessing the creative process and technologies for creating and simulating design objects.

1:1 scale prototypes capable of demonstrating the concepts and principles theorized or predicted in the research component were produced. These design prototypes were tested in real-world situations or simulations, providing quantitative and qualitative data to support or refute the design hypothesis.

Keywords: Stimulus, Synapse, Entoptics, Adaptation, Exaptation, Simulation, Prototyping, Experimentation, Sensation, Umwelt, Fitness, Neurobiology, The Reflex Arc, Tonustal, Sound, Motion, Emotion, Psychoactive, Neural Oscillators, Excitable Media, Synergies, Neuroplasticity, Coordination, Sensory Integration, Applied Research

Lindy Roy, critic Jeffrey Anderson, co-teacher

a. Reese Christensen b. Liyu Xue c. Viktoria Usui-Barbo

a

b c

a

Vruti Desai + Avinash Sharma Ariane Lourie-Harrison + Jason Vigneri-Beane and Kutan Ayata, critics Jeffrey Anderson and Brian Ringley, co-teachers

Master of Science in Architecture

If the future ushered in by the Anthropocene is characterized by environmental and existential uncertainty, then it also brings with it new potentials to be explored in the discipline of architecture, from the design of collectivities between human and nonhumans to the prototyping of spaces that intertwine virtual and physical constructions. Students were given the opportunity to make proposals for pavilions to be constructed at a well-known cultural institution - ArtOmi: Architecture - in upstate New York.

This unique project, to make a built contribution to Architecture Field 01, challenged students to design compelling and viable pavilions under the external curatorial theme Shelter and the internal research themes of new architectural media and architectural prototypes for the Anthropocene. Students tested ideas across four general themes: post-natural/strange ecologies, responsive/interactive architecture, architecture for altered perception, and alien/untimely objects. Because of the studio’s interest in live architectural media and proof-of-concept in architectural formats, this testing not only occurred within representational-media but also in physical-media frameworks of largescale to full-scale modeling and virtual-media frameworks of augmented reality and projection mapping.

The final studio within the MS ARCH sequence, this course allowed students to develop a culminating project based upon the previous two semester’s studio work. The studio emphasized contemporary and near future speculations into the design of project-based architectural visualization, architectural fabrication and/or hybrids between them. Outputs ranged from “undersized architecture” to “oversized products” and explored the disciplinary space between visualization and fabrication.

Studio work involved the development of ideas, advanced design, representational agility, visualization, model fabrication and full-scale prototyping. Partnerships were encouraged and advanced post-professional students were challenged to productively negotiate the bringing together of culminationresearch, contemporary discourse, resource management, budgeting, feedback from faculty, interfacing with GAUD partners, cutting edge design media and the question of positioning themselves in relation to near-future architectural media.

Jason Vigneri-Beane, coordinator

FACULTY Kutan Ayata Jonas Coersmeier Nathan Hume Thomas Leeser Ariane Lourie-Harrison

CO-TEACHER Jeffrey Anderson Danil Nagy Brian Ringley Pimnara Thunyuthada

Erich Schoenenberger Jason Vigneri-Beane

GAUD

DESIGN STUDIOS

Master of Science in Architecture | First Semester

081

GAUD DESIGN STUDIOS

Introduction to Media and Methods Skins, shells, bladders, insides, outsides, structures, landscapes, embeds, exbeds, articulations, bifurcations, involutions, ex-volutions, substrates, matrices, zonings: these formal and spatial phenomena describe new architectural propositions implanted into existing buildings and speculations on the coevolution of architectural embeds and hosts. The studio operates without an “official” sites or program. Rather it proposes a host of semi-autonomous proto-architectural objects that seek to establish portable architectural principles that are not bound to service-oriented bases of architecture.

This studio will offer a basis for developing design techniques and discursive terms for contemporary and near-future approaches to new architectural mediums. This basis will be explored through four design experiments and a disciplinary text that generally emphasize digital visualization and fabrication. Specifically, the experiments will emphasize digital modeling and animation, mesh painting with still and moving images, multi-material modeling with CNC-milling, vacuum-forming, 3D-printing and laser-cutting, rendering architecture as a building and as a product, compositing 3D-models and 2D-drawings, and dynamic modeling with structural optimization. Students finish the semester with the beginnings of an architectural “Project” to be mined and elaborated throughout the Fall studios research on visualization, fabrication and near-future architectural scenarios for architecture, media and context.

Jason Vigneri-Beane + Erich Schoenenberger + Nathan Hume, critics a. Aparna Sudhakar b. Yun Yao Lin c. Vruti Desai d. Yu Xiang Chen

a

b c

d

Master of Science in Architecture | Second Semester

083

GAUD DESIGN STUDIOS

Architectural Mediums Fabrication and Visualization Architectural mediums ascribe a design intelligence to the (building) material itself, the universal (fabrication) machine that acts upon it and to the mapping and projection (visualization) of spatial experience. The Fall studios establish two streams of directed research in architectural mediums: fabrication exploring the material traces of human-machine production and visualization projecting augmented and mixed realities onto material propositions.

The fabrication studio takes a material approach to the postdigital project in current architectural discourse. It encourages deep material explorations in search of organizational and aesthetic principles as well as the full participation of the machine in the design process.

Students participate in the manufacture of hybrid design objects through the use of industrial robotic arms (generic articulated machines into which designers must explicitly program intent) and robot-derivative fabrication processes such as casting and forming. These hybridizations are driven by electronic models with embedded material intelligence, augmenting and enhancing the intuition of the “cyborgdesigner� with computational opportunities such as multiobjective optimization and genetic algorithms.

The visualization studio proposes an architecture that is simultaneously physical, virtual and augmented. These three categories of mediated architecture establish new problems and potentials for architecture. Among the architectural conundrums to be tested are the limits of the physical, the expansiveness of the virtual and the diversity of augmented and mixed realities wherein students may propose any number of hybridizations from architecture and information to physical modeling and virtual modeling. The projects will be transitory in nature, unconventional in appearance and temporary in representation, demanding students to completely rethink the possibilities afforded through the mediums of video mapping and augmented reality.

Jonas Coersmeier + Thomas Leeser, critics Brian Ringley + Danil Nagy + Jeffrey Anderson + Pimnara Thunyuthada, Co-teachers a. Stephen Chang + Jeremy Cembrano + Xiji Xu b. Weining Zhong c. Sanam Javadi d. Emre Ozdemir

a

b c

d

Master of Science in Architecture | Third Semester Thesis

085

GAUD THESIS DESIGN STUDIOS

Nebula NYC Mediation, especially social media, has taken us over. The boundaries of the real and the digital world are blurred, which leads to a transformation of our perception of, Time, Self and Reality.

The glamour of the virtual worlds has attracted humans in a way that today you can say that almost everyone is a citizen of the virtual world. Nebula a representative of this blurred relationship we as humans have with the virtual world. Additionally, it demonstrates the borders between the real-self and virtual-self. The absence of the presence invites you to start a journey.

At the end of the journey, after you experience all the promising cavities and the false perceptions, when you end up standing in the core of the pavilion, all that you can see are the countless reflections of yourself blending with the blurred environment around you.

Sanam Javadi + Stephen Chang with Jason Vigneri-Beane + Kutan Ayata + Ariane Lourie-Harrison, critics Jeffrey Anderson + Brian Ringley, co-teachers

Master of Science in Architecture | Third Semester Thesis

087

GAUD THESIS DESIGN STUDIOS

Peek-A-Boo Another Scale of Nature OMI Art Center, New York This project is located in OMI International Arts Center. The 16’ x16’ envelope is from undersized architecture to oversized products. Simultaneously, I was thinking about the surrounding of the site and the natural environment in OMI, this object is designed for a human being size as a pavilion or a public furniture. Or it is also a huge artificial plant sculpture for the site. As my thesis argued, the project could be an architectural membrane example. First of all, this project is not only a container or a shelter but also a membrane in between the OMI ground landscape and the inside mico-landscape of the object, a membrane in between real and fictional, a membrane in between human and nonhuman. Also, it is a neo universe about how to define and experience a space.

Design Concept The conception of the design is to promote the sensibilities people used to observe nature in order to enforce people in this installation to rethink our position and the characteristics surrounding us in nature. The strategy is intended to create a membrane in between people and nature, which offers an augmented virtual nature. To fictionalize the design. It’s to control the limitation of humans’ visual access to approach this pavilion and to peek the internal environment from openings in various scale. Consequently, it raises people’s curiosity and enhances the spatial experience.

Nomadic Narrivetive/Nonlinear Peek-A-Boo The design follows the principle of human beings’ activities and the rules of nature. As a result, the form looks organic and natural but the various possibilities of human activities have been enbeded in this object. Meanwhile, the human nature drives people to explore more possibilities in it. Peek-A-Boo as the name of this project, that could play two roles. One is obviously to describe and introduce how to interact with this object in a humorous way. The other is to rethink the relationship between human beings and nature, that could be not an easy and relaxed topic like the name of the game. Also, as the game, we have to find an appropriate way and position to get along with nature.

Weining Zhong + Shanhu Jiang + Yun Yao Lin with Jason Vigneri-Beane + Kutan Ayata + Ariane Lourie-Harrison, critics Jeffrey Anderson + Brian Ringley, co-teacherc

Master of Science in Architecture | Third Semester Thesis

089

GAUD THESIS DESIGN STUDIOS

In-Organic Oasis OMI Art Center, New York

Heidy Bosques + Yuxiang Chen + Zonguan Wang with Jason Vigneri-Beane + Kutan Ayata + Ariane Lourie-Harrison, critics Jeffrey Anderson + Brian Ringley, co-teachers

Mais Abuali

Jonas Coersmeier, critic Emilija Landsbergis, co-teacher

DESIGN STUDIOS This culmination studio of the three semester MSAUD sequence, will guide students through a comprehensive urban design project. The specific project scope and agenda is based on the students’ individual design research. Working within the theme of Densification, each student has developed an advanced research topic in the structure of a thesis, incorporating the material and cultural contexts of urban conditions. It has been widely accepted that massive population increases can no longer be supported by sprawling cities. Cities must grow inward, not just for ecological sustainability, but for sociospatial and economic sustainability as well. The most urgent challenge for urban designers is to develop new models for densification.

The search for new forms of densification is driven as much by the urgent necessity to create space and resilient structures for habitation, as by the desire for density itself, an inherently urban condition. The pursuit of density is not merely a numbers’ game2, parametric routine to maximize floor area in the volumetric exploitation of the city. Density is an architectural quality that registers as spatial sensation through aesthetic categories.

We look for strategies of urban intervention that heighten this quality. We study models of densification that are invested in the autonomous reality of the city and all of its actors. We do not undermine urbanity by reducing the city to a network of relational characters. We look for aberrations in the urban context, autonomous spatial conditions and urban artifacts. Instead of devising a unified master plan, we design an architectural language of urbanity that produces density, elevates the urban experience and helps grow the city at its core.

The studio critically discusses the notion of context without relying on past conventions of contextualism. Urban interventions are assessed by the architectural and spatial quality they produce; they are not justified by sustaining the city’s current condition or its historical continuity.

Urbanization is a driver of the major challenges we face in society - everything from climate change to questions of health, pollution, disease. It is is a global phenomenon that is not tangible, exceeds all human scales and defies analytic comprehension. Urbanization is a phenomenon for which there is no central authority, where those seeking the solution to it are also creating it. As such we consider Urbanization what Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject” as this appropriation offers us a new ontological model for thinking about it, and ultimately for addressing it through design. Over the past half-century the impact of human activity on the earth’s atmosphere - global warming - has moved from predictable and measurable, to intensely and devastatingly palpable. During that time the environmental movement has shifted focus from educating about sustainability to promoting resilience and adaptation. In a new state of constant crisis and perpetual recovery from shocks and aftershocks, we can no longer preserve the “first natural” environment, but must adapt to a “new nature.” While considering the increasing frequency of environmental disasters and the growth in population density equally as effects of massive phenomena that defy natural or human categorization - hyper objects of the antropogene - we investigate and invent models of resilience that display two degrees of elasticity. These models aim at increasing the city’s capacity to simultaneously absorb internal and external pressures, caused by global warming and urbanization.

Jonas Coersmeier coordinator

FACULTY Stefan Al Jonas Coersmeier Ferda Kotalan

CO-TEACHER Emilija Landsbergis Olivia Vien

GAUD

Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design

Master of Science in Architecture + Urban Design | First Semester

093

GAUD DESIGN STUDIOS

New Modes of Dense Speculations on New Types for Urban Densification The scale and speed of urbanization and its transformative forces for metropolitan areas worldwide is unprecedented and expected to accelerate further in the future. New York City, based on its geographic and economic circumstances, has historically been a vital testing ground for different modes of urban densification. Manhattan’s high-rise typologies, sectional urban space along elevated infrastructure in Brooklyn, and social mega-complexes like Co-Op City in the Bronx, are some examples for urban densification models in New York. However, while these efforts provide us with an intriguing catalog of references, they are mostly too outdated to meet the complex challenges the city faces today.

Alternative modes of densification need to be tested and new typologies developed.

From all five boroughs, Brooklyn has undergone the most radical changes in recent years. Aside from rapid growth, Brooklyn has also developed a unique urban culture. This transformation with its many ramifications has generated challenges as well as new opportunities for urban densification.

This UD studio begins a 3-semester investigation into possible new forms of densification by “inverting”, re-imagining, and re-contextualizing existing urban types.

The densification of cities, New York in particular, has been accompanied by fictional accounts of how these strategies could potentially manifest themselves. In fact, these fictions have often provided a cultural image through which the politics of planning have been influenced. Movies such as Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” from 1929, the large scale infrastructural models of Norman Bel Geddes for the NY World Fair of 1939, or Buckminster Fuller’s eco-domes all had a significant realworld impact. Architectural fictions are a powerful tool to make and remake the realities we later inhabit. The imaginary and the abstract are therefore necessary protocols through which real change occurs.

In recent architectural discourse we see “fiction” often used as an operative term against reductive and categorical design methodologies under the guise of the “real”. The real, in these cases, is used as a bulwark to protect the status quo, without acknowledging the special interests driving it. As such all cities and all architecture is a fiction and thus subject to radical challenges. The projects in this studio operate under this premise and evoke urban change through fictionalizing models of densification.

Ferda Kolatan, critic

a. Andrea Monroig-Torres b. Yan Zhuang c. Mais Abu Ali

a b

c

a

Master of Science in Architecture + Urban Design | Second Semester

095

Performance Espectations:

New Modes of Dense Speculation on a New Hyper Dense City

300,000 m X 20,000 units

GAUD

Pratt Institute GAUD Urban Design Studio II_ Fall 2017 Instructor: Stefan Al_ Olivia Vien Andrea del Pilar Monroig Torres

DESIGN STUDIOS

1. Green Centre (Neighborhood Park) 15m per unit 2

As we evolve as humans, our technology keep changing and evolving through us. Our cities nowadays, are the reflex of the technology used to build them. The rules that establish the ways cities grow are the reflex of the mentality of those who design

2. Urban Pocket (District Park) 2

7m per unit

them. How is the new city going to reflex the way we live today, the technology that we use, the way we think...?

7,000 m X 500 units *For every Green Centre there are 20 Green Pockets

3. Private Terrace (Balcony) a) 700 sq ft = 5% (35 sq ft) minimum of

b) 1,200 sq ft = 10% (100 sq ft) minimum of surface area should be terrace (open

surface area should be terrace (open

space).

space).

space).

15 % sq 700

1.

In the new City, developed by mass customized technologies, the actual regulations that control how the city grow will become obsolete. Urban and Public spaces can be the elements that tie up the chaos of a city with no visible system.

Minecraft Pixels as Housing Units.

Urban / Public Spaces as regulators for city making.

c) 2,200 sq ft = 15% (330 sq ft) minimum of

surface area should be terrace (open

10 %

ft

0 sq 1,20

Private Space

Public Space

Private Space

Urban Interior

Urban Exterior

Urban Interior

Urban Interior

Urban Exterior

Urban Interior

15 %

ft

0 sq 2,20

2.

Private Space

ft

Urban Design 2 The City and Its Context

Semi- Public Space

Private Space

Urban Interior

Urban Exterior/

Urban Interior

Urban Interior

Urban Exterior/ Interior Courtyard

Urban Interior

Interior Courtyard Cities around the world face pressing challenges related to unprecedented urban population growth, constraints on environmental resources, and disruptions in the economy caused by rapid technological change. The discipline of urban design can play a major role to address these challenges by spatializing ways to drastically increase housing supply, optimize environmental sustainability, and capitalize on new urban-economic models that leverage technology. Increasing density and the compactness of cities can help absorb New Building New Building New Building urban migration, reduce environmental impact, and create There are three new Urban / Public spaces that are going to organized the new mass customized city. These public spaces are economic opportunities. However, few urban designers have categorized by its levels of public and private accessibility: yet created spatial models that relate to extreme density and 1. Green Centre (Neighborhood Park) 2. Green Pocket (District Park) 3. Private Terrace (Balcony) the contemporary economic, environmental, and social issues 3. affecting cities.

Private Space Public Space Private Space Private Space Semi- Public Space Private Space

New Building

New Building

This studio explored the qualitative dimensions of these challenges. Students investigated new urban models and spatial qualities that relate to increasing density, for instance through the creation of new urban “interiors� within a threedimensional network of vertical urbanism. They developed overall scenario plans within an existing DUMBO neighborhood, speculated on new urban spaces and lifestyles within the future high-density city, and used built form to address New Building New Building challenges including sea level rise, mass-customization and construction, and the demands of the sharing economy.

Open Space Urban Interior

Stefan Al, critic Olivia Vien, Co-teacher

Open Space Urban Interior

a. Andrea Monroig Torres b. Jose Gabriel Cano Jimenez c. Yan Zhuang

a

b a

c

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

097

GAUD CULMINATUIN DESIGN STUDIOS

The Urban Weave Dumbo, Brooklyn If we were to look at NYC in 2050, we would find that with the rising temperatures all around the globe and the rates of sea level rise in New York exceeding the global average, disasters like hurricane Sandy are going to be more frequent in the near and fast-approaching future. In 100 years, New York City will be sinking under 6 feet of water. More than 50,000 people will be displaced due to loss of land, demand for living and working spaces and pressures on mass transit will be on the rise. Flooded streets are not the only thing that is shaping the future NYC. Delivery robots will also be occupying the ground level; equipped with the technology to navigate the treacherous flood zone. Automated vehicles will be the only option to ride through the highways and the subway system will be facing major threats due to the effects of climate change. New means of transportation is going to find their way through the city like “sea bubbles” and “taxi drones”.

This change in the ground condition will have significant effects on the urban lifestyle and the way we occupy the city.

Another emerging phenomena is the Brooklyn Tech Triangle which is the heart of the entrepreneurial energy in three major areas in Brooklyn: DUMBO, Downtown Brooklyn and The Navy Yard. There is a growing demand of office space and a need to be close to data centers to maximize efficiency. Project Statement: My project tackles vertical habitation and the public realm in the hyper densifying city of tomorrow. Within this given context, my project examines the ground condition of future NYC and proposes a densification scenario that caters to the different needs of this urban corridor. Working with different urban typologies, my proposal suggests a series of super tall mixed-used connected towers both in-land and in the shallow waters of the East River.

The connections between the towers go beyond the sky bridge to become a performative sectional tissue. Further emphasizing the departure from the mere bridge to a new urban typology, these ‘horizontal connections’ become part of the existing urban fabric as urban blocks and horizontal towers. This urban weave spreads across the site and merges into the man-made tectonic landscape that is used at certain times depending on flooding situations. With different programmatic functions distributed in a mixed-use pattern, The Urban Weave recreates the typical neighborhoods of the past century’s sprawling cities into the vertical neighborhoods of the future city.

Maris Abu Ali with Jonas Coersmeier, critic Emilija Landsbergis, co-teacher

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

099

GAUD CULMINATUIN DESIGN STUDIOS

Urban Crafting Dumbo, Brooklyn As we evolve as humans, our technology keeps changing and evolving through us. Our cities nowadays are the reflex of the technology used to build them. The rules that establish the ways cities grow are the reflex of the mentality of those who design them. How is the new city going to reflect the way we live today, the technology that we use, the way we think...?

How would a new city, developed by mass customization techniques, grow? What new parameters would determine the way the city is design? Is it possible to have a city where the designer and city maker is every individual instead of a city department? Are we as designers and architects ready to hand the responsibility of placemaking to every individual and trust that we are developing the fundamental spatial relationships from video games such as Minecraft and The Sims?

If so, then we have to start thinking of the city in a different way. Now the regulations that once ruled the way the city was arranged are going to become obsolete as new technologies emerge and new means of manufacture are employed in city making. The urban and open spaces that once where the default in the city grid, now become an interrogative as the urban network is being rethought and redeveloped.

Now, new urban spaces emerge in the form of the new city.

Urban space that adapts to the need of the user the same way the new city adapts to the specific need of the place where is developed. In this new city, the level of densification is not going to be determined by the city itself but by the number of users “playing the game�, but the existence of urban and open spaces is never compromised only transform to the need of every culture and society as we come up with the new rules and parameters of city making.

Andrea Monroig Torres with Jonas Coersmeier, critic Emilija Landsbergis, co-teacher

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

101

GAUD CULMINATUIN DESIGN STUDIOS

Hyper-Density Dumbo, Brooklyn When Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in 2012, half of New York turned into darkness and thousands of New York residents were underwater. We need to reestablish our relationship with nature. In these extreme situations, new modes of urban design strategies urgently need to be explored. The thesis will manifest itself in DUMBO, located the Brooklyn waterfront. DUMBO is envisioned to be one of the most dense areas in New York City by 2050. Re-imagining what the city of New York is in 2050 would be to build upwards, especially, since an estimated half of the city could be underwater, the only way is to come up with cutting-edge flooding strategies; as when traffic is jammed, the only way is to make more connectivity.

The iceberg, is a contemporary design process of dealing with flooding, densification, and infrastructure issues in DUMBO, Brooklyn. I start with material casting, and use cooking foils, plaster, and pigment to create an urban fabric model. The material gives me ability and the cracking effects provide me topological logic. When material reacts with buildings, the cracking effect become fine, it then becomes thicker and thicker into the water edge. The iceberg islands start from small to large. The flooding islands in the front row are designed as a buffer zone to prevent flooding and rising water. The medium size islands and large islands are built for housing towers. A multi-leveled infrastructure platform is the connection between each island. The urban canyon voids allow light and air to penetrate into the underground culture centers.

Yan Zhuang with Jonas Coersmeier, critic Emilija Landsbergis, co-teacher

Student Name

Name, critic Name, Co-teacher

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 Hart Marlow Jason Vigneri-Beane Brian Ringley Danil Nagy Benjamin Martinson Hannibal Newsom Joseph Vidich

GAUD

ARCHITECTUREAL MEDIUMS

Master of Architecture | Architectural Mediums

105

GAUD ARCHITECTURAL MEDIUMS

Architectural Medium I Architectural Mediums 1 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 Robert Cervellione Brian Ringley, critics

a. Jonathan Hamilton, b. Bhargav Gandhi c. Zhixian Song d. Final review model image e. Alexis Dorko

a

d b

c

e

Master of Architecture | Architecture Mediums

107

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 Benjamin Martinson Hannibal Newson Robert Cervellione, critics

a. Naomi Ng b. Evelina Giedraityte c. Wankuan Yu d. Samantha Lee Chan e. Kevin Lo

a b

c d

e

Master of Architecture | Architectural Mediums

109

GAUD ARCHITECTURAL MEDIUMS

Architectural Mediums III Visualization Architectural Visualization explores the problems, opportunities and techniques surrounding the question of the virtual, the visual and their hybridization with the physical. The course attempts to develop architecturally fruitful aesthetics of mediation that include issues such as what machines see versus what humans see, how to move from the physical to the digital to the parametric to the dynamic, tectonic objects versus tectonic graphics and low/medium/high resolution in models, images and tooled objects. In addition to gaining exposure to photo-scanning spaces, parametric tools, dynamics tools, video composition, cnc-milling and augmented reality students get experience with designing time, interaction and the digital 1:1.

As an area of investigation the coursework uses that most ubiquitous of architectural assemblies: the window. Projects over the semester began with windows as framed portals for views into spaces elsewhere and end with platforms for transformation, projection and augmentation. Moving from scanning/milling/projecting (what the machine sees and what it makes) to iterating/activating/milling/projecting (parametric models and dynamic projections) to projecting/augmenting (videos, virtuals, triggers and toolings) and then, finally, the assembly of those individual projects into a collectively assembled exhibit with milled panels, and projected videos.

Danil Nagy Jason Vigneri-Beane, critics

a. Final Review b. Leonardo Matinez c. Anthony Mull d. Wanlapa Koosakul

a

c

b

c

d

Master of Architecture | Architectural Mediums

111

GAUD ARCHITECTURAL MEDIUMS

Architectural Medium III Communication Architectural Communications explores the means and methods of design, construction, and fabrication communication at the architectural scale. This course investigates the ways in which computation can be used to create, access, share, and manipulate information across various computational systems. Students seek to translate complex ideas and design intent in a comprehensible and precise set of drawing deliverables.

The project “Envelop� is an atrium space which has both conditions of interior and exterior facades. Its presented as a multitude of drawings, diagrams, models (both virtual and real) of a building chunk with a series of explanatory drawings and diagrams on communication protocols, model and data management strategies, building component sourcing, manufacturing, and installation processes.

Brian Ringley Robert Cervellione, critics

a. Wenze Chen b. Nathania Wijaya c. Francisco Moreno Gallegos

a a

b

c

a

Master of Architecture | Architectural Mediums

113

GAUD ARCHITECTURAL MEDIUMS

Architectural Medium III Fabrication Architectural Fabrication focuses on the research and development a comprehensive and novel 1:1 detail prototype through the close interrogation of existing architectural forms, materials and finishes. Rather than accepting the detail as a predetermined assemblage of standardized parts or products, students speculate on the spatial, programmatic, and social possibilities of customizable, parametric, and bespoke details in order to develop new understandings of part/whole relationships that derive their formal, compositional, and spatial principles from logics of material, fabrication, and assembly.

Students begin with learning the fundamentals of metal work by making a built-up steel section using basic metal parts and drawing their production methods. These skills are later utilized in the final detail proposal and produce a way of thinking about making and manufacturing. The final work for this course speculates on a finished intersection which the primary site of research for the class. The project proposes a reconceptualization of the way we explore materiality and fabrication.

Hart Marlow, Joe Vidich, critic

a. Joseph Colin DaPonte b. Elise Hoff c. Catherine Wilmes d. Jiratt Khumkomgool e. Sandra Nataf

a b

c d

e

Yixin Xu Phillip Parker, 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 Alihan Polat Carlos Arnaiz Cristobal Correa Erich Schoenenberger Ferda Kolatan Jonas Coersmeier

Kutan Ayata Maria Sieira Meta Brunzema Philip Parker Robert Cervellione

GAUD

ELECTIVE SEMINARS

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

Urban Topologies In mathematics, topology is concerned with the properties of spaces that are preserved under continuous deformations, such as stretching, crumpling and bending. This can be studied by considering a collection of subsets, called open sets, that satisfy certain properties, turning the given set into what is known as a topological space. Important topological properties include connectedness and compactness.

This course studied urban topology and its representation.

Various datasets were explored in regards to the spatial relationships of a range of subject areas; from the way built and natural conditions affect populations to the way populations in turn shape physical spaces. We focused on topics as they relate to urban geography: urban landscapes, urbanism, nature, artificial nature, technology, geopolitics, demographics, infrastructure, and ecology. Data is and has been collected and recorded throughout history, ranging from the physical to the virtual, from the measurable to the perceptual and the phenomenological. In recent years digital data harvesting has infiltrated virtually all aspects and behaviors of everyday life. Information of every kind is being recorded and surveyed through the use of digital tools instantly and continuously.

Where publicly accessible data-sets were the bases of the investigations, data representation was the key stage to begin a critical interrogation and speculation. Through a range of tools, the students analyzed and represented geographical information creating a research project that culminated in two- or three-dimensional graphical representation with the aim to visualize novel an provocative relations of urban spaces.

Erich Schoenenberger + Alihan Polat, critics

a. Juan Sebastian David Guzman, Yuqi He, Sawinya a Chavanich b. Maeleen Taylor, Greg Sheward c. Andrea Monroig Torres, Yong Min Lee, Yan Zhuang

b c

117

GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS

Extra-Ordinary- Explorations toward a Novel Aesthetic Homo Aestheticus is characterized by tendencies to recognize an extra-ordinary as opposed to an ordinary dimension to experience; to act deliberately in response to uncertainty rather than follow instinctive programs, to make important things (such as tools, weapons, and transitions) special by transforming them from ordinary to extra-ordinary.

Means of refinement or enhancement are as deeply engrained in human species as is the development of technology itself.

-Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus (1992) The Design-Finesse seminar explores aesthetic expressions produced by the combined effects of the mundane and the special in design. I call these combinatorial effects “hybridizations”, as they are characterized by an aesthetic of diversity and tension, rather than one of unity and harmony. In a twofold approach -theoretical/historical and practical- this seminar seeks to outline how hybrids, past and present, represent an important counter-culture to the more established narratives of western architectural aesthetics.

The history/theory component of the seminar offers the students a survey of select historical periods in which concepts of the mundane and the special have produced a particularly interesting architectural aesthetic. These periods include the Rococo with its penchant for hybridizing common motifs into highly elaborate conglomerates (Rocaille), and Art Nouveau with its ornamental application of iron toward architectural detail. Both these cases demonstrate a reversal from their preceding paradigms, where a pure (classical) and holistic architectural approach was privileged. This change of attitude is driven by cultural circumstances that bear a striking similarity to our own time in which we are witnessing a proliferation of hybrid aesthetics.

In the practical component of the seminar, the students design their own hybrid conglomerates based on a different topic each year. This year’s project was a collaboration with New York based artist Saks Afridi who is working on a large scale art installation called “Space Mosque”, which will be exhibited later this year. For this installation, which is based on a parafictional mythology, a series of hybridized, spatial objects were required. The students designed these objects by combining elements from the realms of technology and architecture, and added specific cultural references to Saks’ fictitious narrative. All of these hybrid conglomerates maintain a deliberately ambiguous aesthetic, which oscillates between qualities of the mundane and the special.

Ferda Kolatan, critic

a a. Ashtiani Kabiri b. Xiaoli Zhang

a

b

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

Plausible Futures Architecture as built form is a clumsy medium to speculate on the ‘now”. Architects always have to speculate on a future to situate architectural ideas, architectural reality. So is the speculation at the scale of the city, as one must consider the conditions of a distant future for the eventual city to take hold. How does one represent possible futures? The 20th Century rush to imagine Architectural Utopias for the modernizing populace generated significant disciplinary output in that regard, culminating in visionary projects for various optimistic futures. Especially 1960’s and 1970’s charged political atmosphere propelled these efforts along with the advances on the technological front. Future visions by Archigram, Superstudio, Metabolists and others are undeniable examples of the discipline’s canon; studied, beloved for providing examples of alternative modes of practice and representation.

These once visionary futures are now past; unbuilt, unrealized, these schemes remain as fantasies for a future which never arrived. Times have changed; politics evolved, technologies transformed our interactions and transactions. We, as a discipline still ponder about the future. With our enhanced tools of visualization and design, how do we represent the real, how do we represent plausible futures which avoid the traps of fantasy or automatically rendered reality?

Students, working as pairs, were asked to choose an issue that currently pressures and influences the development of the city/rural-scape today. The task then was to document the state and impact of these issues in the year 2039 and 2059, speculating on multiple outcomes for better or worse.

The two key questions pertain to plausibility as established through the representations and the aesthetics of estrangement in realism.

Kutan Ayata, critic

a a. Alireza Kabiri, Jayesh Jain b. Alican Taylan

a b

119

GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS

Design Intelligence: Performing Glass The Performing Glass seminars multiply the relations between design media and architecture, they specifically work on the meeting and exchange between the drawing plane as a site of architectural invention and glass as a material of communication and exchange. Glass as a refined modern technological building material has been extensively wrapped up in scientific discovery and art practices since the 15th century where its multiple qualities come into play. Rather than reducing the material to a singular trait – transparency – the seminar unpacks thickened histories of the material’s radical agency in scientific discovery, aesthetic practice, and the articulations of continuity and difference; it examines glass and transparency as key players in histories of modernity, its anxious embrace of atmosphere and optics and offers alternative roles for membranes in architecture.

The seminar interrogates the lineage of transparency through work on the migration of the concepts, of delay, deferment and estrangement between media and glass. It offers other avenues intersecting and intertwining with the dominant line of transparency to reimagine architecture’s agency in the production of material concepts. Projects and discussion move back and forth between design media with its logics of tracing, projection, cutting and forming and the performance of glass in architecture. The primary questions become - how does this material membrane perform as mediating surface and how does that performance influence architecture’s forms of conceptualization, drawing, modeling, and rendering? How does glass perform across multiple actions, when optics is not reduced to vision, or to unmediated sight but is understood as the movement of energy in its many forms.

What are architectural possibilities and consequences when diffraction, diffusion, and reflection are on equal standing with transparency?

The project is the production of a glass membrane – a mediating surface - that stutters and asymmetrically disrupts passages and communication between its sides. Projects build upon the roles of identity formation, suspended atmospheric and object reflection, and optical tactile multiplication. They work with the splitting and multiplying processes of glass to produce other forms of objects, their awareness and exchange.

Phillip Parker, critic

a. Yixin Xu b. Yufan Zhang c. Liyu Xue

a b

c

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

Scripting and Form Scripting and Form is multidisciplinary and highly collaborative. Through the semester students work at various scales, speeds, and modes to encourage innovation, investigation, and discovery. Working with various building scale systems such as envelope and structure student develop a complex, multi-material, composite forms that are the basis for complex building systems. Throughout the semester they develop a deep understanding of adaptive parametric systems and interoperability through a series of design-centric assignments. We will explore various techniques to create adaptive systems and gain the ability to deeply control the system and understand their effect on the design intent. Students also explore how parametric thinking can be applied to construction to create buildable systems.

The semester focused on designed materiality, which is the effect of hardware and software on the matter. We explore how multiple materials can be affected through various combinations of design specific intentions to create new methods of material transformations. Through experimentation, we explore how these new methods of making can only be truly achieved by looking at the entire process of design and not only in the final form. Designed materiality seeks to explore the design of the software and hardware used to engage the creation of the form and the material itself. Utilizing advanced fabrication (6-axis robotics), custom hardware, computation and scripting, and material research students engage in the act of making at all levels.

Robert Cervellione, critic

a a. Shao Chieh Liu, Rong Han b. Ludan Lai, Shangqing Yang

b a

121

GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS

History of Structural Artistry and Design The lecture series is set up to follow the development of structural form through a series of chronological examinations of traditional and non-traditional structural materials.

Traditional structural materials such as steel, concrete, wood and masonry will receive the majority of our focus, however we will also explore non-traditional materials such as glass, composites and fabrics. We will examine the role of each material’s influence on form in architecture through its unique reaction to applied forces. During our examination of the history of each material, we will discuss key figures in engineering who influenced our understanding of the intrinsic nature of each material and the technology that they employed to assist them. The class will be supplemented with readings from contemporary structural engineers that speak about design and the design process.

Structural Art refers to the expression of an understanding of structural form based on material property and structural necessity. This course is intended to give students a background in the history of structural design but further to offer an opportunity to interact directly with the materials to gain a more intimate understanding of their potential.

With this in mind, the course is divided into sessions devoted to lecture and experiment. In the experiment portion of each class, students will work directly with the structural materials and begin to develop an understanding of their inherent potential.

At the end of this course each student will have completed a booklet of work that will document the work that they have done during the semester.

Cristobal Correa, critic

a a. Yu Jie Liu b. Jason Vayanos

a b

a

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

Film Architecture Making Space with Moving Images This seminar is the first part of a five-part visual representation research project under the departmental category of “directed research.” Over the course of the next five years students in this seminar will investigate filmmaking as it relates to the initial premise “making space with moving images.” The research is meant to be cumulative, so that each seminar’s outcome is the starting point for each subsequent seminar. This first year we applied neurobiology research to the study of work by the following filmmakers: Denis, Kiarostami, Jonze, Linklater, Panahi, Jarmusch, and Soderbergh. The curated list of films gave students a filmic starting point that was broad in its geographic origin and deep in its critical value. All films were released globally and within the last ten years; students are asked to look at these films as both works of authorship and works resulting from a contemporary socio-cultural context, the very context on which, as architects, they will be called upon to act. One of the films, Unsane by Steven Soderbergh was released in New York during the semester and by incorporating it into this course we were able to address a number of contemporary concerns regarding the making and watching of films: How does the viewing of films in a theater as part of an audience differ from watching it individually with headphones? What does it mean that mainstream filmmakers like Soderbergh are using iPhone footage in major film releases? How does the emotional and psychological representation in this specific film intersect with filmic devices? After watching, discussing, and writing about these films, students set out to experiment with editing, the focus of the first year of this fivepart directed research project. Specifically, we studied how film editing controls time/space narration irrespective of the implied time/space of the shots. This was understood within the larger investigative umbrella of narrative architecture space—in other words, form that is ineluctably tied with program. We used editing tests as a means of gaining insight into how nonlinear editing tools can be put to use toward a time/space architecture. For example, our “Haiku films” exercise permitted the cannibalizing of individual shots into a new three-part narrative film in the style of a Haiku poem event.

Maira Sieira, critic

a. Mai Passara Tungvjitkul b. Amanda Lee c. Shulan Kuang

a

b c a

123

GAUD CORE ELECTIVE

Nanotectonica This course examines the relationship between ‘natural’ and ‘architectural’ systems in the context of emerging technologies. It is a design research seminar, which studies structures and organizations at multiple scales, and it utilizes contemporary design and fabrication techniques to engage in the production of architectural artifacts. 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. 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 systems at various scales. The search is not limited to the phenotypical expressions of such phenomena, 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.

This year the students’ original imaging work in the Electron Microscopy lab has sparked twelve stunning projects ranging in scale from architectural artifact to the city. Project “Skin City” proposes a future tattoo as part of an urban branding strategy and it engages in the contemporary culture of body identity. Skin City derives from a comparative analysis of urban fabrics and skin structures - dermatology as urban analysis - a grafting of lab grown humans cells. Project “Brooklyn Ice Berg” studies ice formations at sub visible scale, and imagines a fictional urban future for Brooklyn, New York.

Project “Bellmer Redux“ develops a roping-casting technique and produces a series of highly suggestive architectural bodies. Project “Artificial Synesthesia” derives from the study of Nano scale sensor cell formations a camouflage material system for anti-surveillance couture.

Jonas Coersmeier, critic

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

Urban Context Laboratory Urban Context Laboratory is a research and design seminar that examines new ways of city-building that minimize social, economic and spatial segregation. Specifically, students explore ways in which architecture and urban design can activate urban contexts in increasingly dense 21st-century cities, as they develop programmatic and formal complexity to conserve socio-cultural, economic and ecological resources.

A New York City site – Willets Point, Queens – was the laboratory for new ideas about adaptive re-use, density, infill, sustainable development, and conservation. We collaborated with a graduate urban planning studio as well as community, institutional and private-sector stakeholders.

Each student team designed a provocative urban fragment that operates at the intersection of architecture, urban design, new media, landscape architecture, and conservation.

Meta Brunzema, critic

a. Liyu Xue, Narahari Ajit Banavalikar, Vatsal Upadhyay, Sawinya Chavanich b. Janice Kwok, Nai-Hua Chen, Simon Priyhiv Arokianathan,Michael Lu, Aparna Sudhakar c. Andrew Bawtinhimer, Saudamini Shan, Le Li, Inyoung Kim, Avinash Arjun Sharma

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Talking About Beauty in Contemporary Architecture What is architectural beauty? How are we to talk about it?

What is it for and why do need it? Did the functionalist, the post-functionalist and then the eco-activist not eradicate such unessential discourse? Why does so much contemporary architecture seem predisposed towards the production of a wider gap between the appearance of things and their reality?

This seminar will trace the long and often oblique relationship between architecture and beauty by developing concepts regarding how we understand architectural objects in the world. The underlying argument being that we must talk about how architecture produces pleasure in order to be able to act as designers. Our knowledge of beauty is implicated in the terms we create to see and experience the world around us. Beauty requires ontological effort: WHAT IS A THING? We will explore the ways by which architecture has become implicated in the philosophical debate surrounding our ability to actualize a new world through design. We will read widely, crisscrossing the discursive landscape of metaphysics and aesthetic theory, to gain perspective on why beauty might be indispensable to a practice, such as architecture, which is based on the transformation of matter. We will debate the intricacies of how changes in the meaning of matter and its transformation might embody historical shifts in what we think architecture can do or say.

Carlos Arnaiz, critic

a. Nai-Hua Chen, Janice Kwok b. Reese Christensen, Sebastian David Guzman c. Yomna Dabat

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Student Cuba Program Name

Name,Erdman David critic Name, + Natalia Co-teacher Echeverri, critics

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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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Mott Haven - Port Morris

Historic Preservation Studio + Land Use and Urban Design Studio

The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment

GCPE FORWARD GCPE 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.

PROGRAMS 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 dedicated to an education that emphasizes practice over theory, participatory planning over top-down policy making, creativity over boilerplate, and advocacy over technocracy.

The 60-credit, Planning Accreditation Board-Certified MSCRP is one of four affiliated 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 methods, studio, and thesis. Electives can be taken from CRP’s broad range of courses, or from any of the other three GCPE programs: Historic Preservation, Sustainable Environmental Systems, and Urban Placemaking and Management, or from sister programs Construction Management and Facilities Management, and the new Real Estate Practice program.

Students have the option to specialize in one of six areas of focus: Community Development and Policy; Physical Planning; Placemaking and Transportation; Sustainability and Resilience; Preservation Planning; or Progressive Real Estate Practice.

Studio courses generally combine two or more of the concentrations of the program. 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.

Students work with real clients facing significant planning challenges, consistent with the CRP emphasis on participatory planning and equity issues. Past and current studios have taken students to work on plans for historic downtown Havana, Cuba; to collaborate with community stakeholders in Red Hook, Brooklyn on an equity-building, integrated flood protection system; and to create policy recommendations responding to the Jackson Heights, Queens community goal 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

Mott Haven, The Bronx Carlos Rodríguez Estévez

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 intensive year of core courses that provide a solid foundation, students are encouraged to develop their particular interests within a critical area of historic preservation.

Students will spend their second year on a thesis project and elective courses, within their chosen area of focus, in which we help them to develop their own passions and expertise 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 range of work that they are equipped to handle as they enter this transdisciplinary field.

In addition, students have the option to explore international studios and practice on offer from 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 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 valuesbased approach proposes that cultural issues 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 as a focus on the user and not just the object, bridging both space and time.

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

Arcosanti City Gambrill Foster

INTRODUCTION

The 47-credit Master of Science in Historic Preservation (HP), offered at Pratt’s School of Architecture at 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 solely on the preservation of the past, the program focuses on diverse strategies to manage change in the present. It is a truly forward-looking profession fueled by the possibility and the need to find creative solutions that protect cultural resources by ensuring their use and continuity through time.

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

Interdisciplinary exploration of urban environmental systems is rooted in a framework focused on social equity, environment, and economy. 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, supporting students to engage in applied research of sustainable urbanism with a focus on social and environmental justice. The 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, and 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 engaged 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 his or her graduate study experience.

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

Jaime Stein, Coordinator of Sustainable Environmental Systems

LEAP Isil AkgĂźl

The program is ideal for students with a professionally-oriented undergraduate education, professional degrees, or professional experience in architecture, engineering, environmental design, landscape design, urban planning, management, 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, non-profit, and private-sector settings. Students gain a broad theoretical knowledge of historical, political, and social frameworks within 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 suggested areas of focus, each corresponding to an area of employment for placemakers: • Community-Based Design • Parks, Open Space, and Green Infrastructure • Transportation and Main Street Management Graduates are equipped to effectively analyze, manage, and influence the complex process of public-realm design and management.

David Burney, Coordinator of Urban Placemaking and Management

The Junction

Koichiro Tomamura

INTRODUCTION

In the past 10-20 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.

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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.

38th Street, The Bronx Carlos Rodríguez Estévez

INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS

GCPE is the hub for the four aligned programs of City and Regional Planning, Sustainable Environmental Systems, Historic Preservation, and Urban Placemaking and Management. They all share a vision of urban sustainability, social justice, and 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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HEALTH

HISTORY Land Use and Urban Design Studio Mott Haven, The Bronx, NY The Spring 2018 Land Use and Urban Design Studio was comprised of thirty-three students from all of GCPE’s programs. The group was led by faculty members that have extensively practiced as cross-disciplinary professionals working in the fields of urban design, planning, preservation, and architecture. The client was South Bronx Unite (SBU), an environmental and community justice organization based in Mott Haven. Their work has addressed the negative impacts that developments have had on public health, as well as issues like waterfront access and neighborhood connectivity plans. As a tool for achieving their goals, they established a Community Land Trust in partnership with the Design Trust for Public Space.

The initial work of the studio was grounded in a multimethodological existing conditions analysis of the neighborhood. During this phase, the studio reached out to numerous community stakeholders and conducted interviews with business owners, members of the Community Board, local political leaders, real estate developers, and representatives of local community and activist organizations. Both street-intercept and shopper surveys were conducted, and also a workshop was done with local teens from Middle School 223 to understand what it means to be a kid in Mott Haven today. Extensive research was also done on the history of the South Bronx, which showed a history of self-determination. Cultural movements like salsa and hip-hop were born here, cultural institution blossomed, grassroots organizations created community gardens and repaired housing. Community planning has been part of Mott Haven for over 40 years.

This outreach process brought prior research findings to life, giving way to the trichotomous lens with which the studio approached the recommendations: of health, home and history. These themes address what were found to be Mott Haven’s most pressing issues, respectively: an ongoing public health crisis, vulnerability to displacement in a changing real estate market, and a history of systematic neglect and appropriation.

After presenting the results to the client, SBU invited the studio to share the findings with the community and presented them in a workshop, to start conversations about the current needs of the neighborhood, how past events have shaped the community, and how they envision Mott Haven.

Elliott Maltby, John Shapiro, Vicki Weiner, and Kevin Wolfe; professors

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Delta Cities Resilience Studio Staten Island North Shore, Staten Island, NY Staten Island extends from Howland Hook in the west to St. George in the east, bounded approximately by Forest Avenue to the south. The Staten Island North Shore NYRCR Recommendation Planning Area includes 11 neighborhoods: St. George, Tompkinsville, New Brighton, Randall Manor, West Brighton, Port Richmond, Elm Park, Mariners Harbor, Arlington, Port Ivory, and Howland Hook. The Planning Area includes an active Significant Maritime Industrial Area (SMIA) along its shoreline, whose future and relationship to the Community are key to resolving the Planning Area’s resiliency struggles.

The Planning Area contains just under 74,000 residents, with incomes that vary by neighborhood, but are collectively lower than Staten Island and NYC averages. It is comprised of a diverse population, comparatively younger than the rest of the borough, with a particularly large population of schoolage children (24,439 aged 3 to 24 years).

Each of its neighborhoods is unique in character, with actively engaged civic and community groups, many of which came to the aid of the North Shore during its recovery from Hurricane Sandy.

However, the Community’s needs are often underfunded and under-supported by NYC agencies. Republican political leanings, car-centric urban design, and maritime industrial links can make Staten Island appear more akin to New Jersey than New York, though the North Shore has a very different physical and social typology from the rest of the Island. It shares a layout and cultural diversity similar to NYC, but without the same level of connectivity and access. The North Shore is thus triply forgotten - by the Island it shares, by the City at large, and by its own waterfront industry.

A Recommendation Plan was formed through Pratt’s Fall 2017 Delta Cities Coastal Resilience Studio with a proposed budget of $5 million in GOSR CDBG-DR funds. Recognizing that this funding cannot solve all challenges, the Staten Island North Shore NYRCR Recommendation Committee has focused on projects that are sustainable, implementable, and replicable throughout the Community, hoping to build a foundation for long-term resilience to climate change impacts.

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Lab Analysis of Public Spaces Hillel Place, Brooklyn, NY The Fall 2017 Urban Placemaking and Management (UPM) Lab gained invaluable fundamental Placemaking skills when the students were challenged to study the proposed conversion of an existing street, Hillel Place, into a pedestrian-only plaza under the New York City Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) Plaza Program. The client was The Flatbush Junction Business Improvement District (BID).

Hillel Place is a small street just off Flatbush Junction in South East Brooklyn, bordered by the intersections of Flatbush Avenue and Nostrand Avenue. To understand the context of the project, students considered the surrounding neighborhoods within a ten minute walk from Hillel Place as their whole study area.

The core challenge for this project was to understand the varied range of languages, ethnicities, and user groups from the surrounding neighborhoods and subsequently provide recommendations to program and design a possible conversion into a NYC DOT-sponsored plaza. This DOT plaza project presented a great economic development opportunity for the BID, through potential increases in foot traffic and seating areas adjacent to the eateries along the site, as well as a great social connector space with very little public space. The project focused on the history of the area, the residents within a half mile of the site, and the potential for partnerships among community organizations and public agencies.

The placemaking process of this project gathered community input, which was done during the neighborhood’s annual “Taste the Junction” food festival, and with a series of focus groups and stakeholders interviews, which rendered a dual approach of short-term and long-term recommendations.

These included programming and design of the plaza itself, as well as broader proposals for traffic calming and other improvements in the adjacent streets. Recommendations were also made for ways to improve governance and community representation.

In the following semester, the class learned that the DOT decided to close the street to vehicular traffic on a one-year “interim” basis in order to allow the BID to program the space and assess the plaza proposal. Construction of a permanent plaza design is anticipated to begin after the interim period.

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Fundamentals of Planning: Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition Bronx, NY Fundamentals of Planning is the foundation course for the City and Regional Planning Program. As described in the syllabus, “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 applies theory to practice through a ‘mini-studio,’ where students work in small groups preparing a report for a real client on a current planning issue in the New York City region.”

The purpose of the Spring 2018 studio was to analyze the existing conditions in Bronx Community District 7 (CD7) and to explore and identify resources for building a Community Land Trust that would create and ensure long-term sustainability and affordability of housing and assets in the Northwest Bronx. The studio client was the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition (NWBCCC), which has been fighting for racial and economic justice in the Northwest Bronx since the early 1970s. In the year prior, NWBCCC was one of the nine community-based organizations that the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) chose to participate in the Community Land Trust Learning Exchange.

After conducting a SWOT analysis of existing conditions in CD7, the studio team developed recommendations around three objectives to meet the client’s concerns: to create and preserve affordable housing, to create economic development opportunities in the community, and to improve environmental conditions and quality of life. The final product of this studio was an action plan for affordable housing preservation and development in tandem with strategies for social, economic and environmental justice.

Ayse Yonder, Ph.D., Mercedes Narciso, Juan Camilo Osorio; Professors a a a Images of Students’ Work

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Historic Preservation and Heritage Documentation Studio Northwest Bronx, NY Heritage documentation is one of the core courses within the M.S. program in Historic Preservation. Working individually and in teams, students plan and carry out a historical and cultural resource documentation project focused on a specific New York City neighborhood with a local community organizer as a client. Students build on the skills they acquire in the program, while further developing their ability to read, document, and understand the urban landscape. To reinforce the interdisciplinary nature of historic preservation, the work parallels that of other GCPE program studios, and embraces multiple perspectives, addressing both the physical aspects of the area (architecture, infrastructure, open space) and its cultural aspects (history, demographics, socio-economics).

Working together in the field, in the classroom, and in the archives, students apply and expand their preservationist toolkit to construct a holistic understanding of a community’s character, historical development, and potential cultural and historical values.

The Spring 2018 studio group, in parallel with the City and Regional Planning Fundamentals in Planning studio, worked with the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition in the Bronx Community Board District 7 (Norwood, Bedford park, Kingsbridge Heights, Fordham Village).

Beth Bingham, Chris Neville; professors a a a Images of Students’ Work

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Land Use and Urban Design Studio: Willets Point, Queens, NY The Spring 2018 land use and urban design studio is an advanced interdisciplinary studio for second year students within the GCPE at Pratt Institute. Students proposed design and policy recommendations for the area of Willets Point, Queens. The Willets Point site is comprised of Citi Field (Mets Stadium), an auto-oriented industrial district, a plethora of parking, an unsuccessful waterfront promenade, subway, rail and bus yards, and the northern edge of Flushing MeadowsCorona Park. It has been the site of many proposals including those for a new stadium, a large shopping mall, thousands of housing units, and major transit and parking facilities. It’s also considered a controversial site given that much of the area is mapped as parkland, was formerly a coal dumping site and is still very polluted. Additionally, due to climate change, it will be regularly flooded and under water within 50 years.

Informed by community stakeholders, students prepared a comprehensive plan for the area with the needs of nearby communities and changing ecology as the paramount concerns. Students were encouraged to incorporate current and prospective best practices, while being realistic about development pressure and the need to accommodate regional facilities and short-term political priorities.

Students proposed a pedestrian-oriented residential community with more affordable housing than what has been proposed by the Mayor. The housing typology inlcudes moderately sized buildings wrapped around open space, doubling as rain gardens that link with channels to the bay.

Parkland now used for parking—and in the plan for housing and high school—is reallocated above parking and car rental facilities. The center pedestrian boulevard and Creekside trail further link the waterfront to the main part of Flushing Meadows – Corona Park. The public realm is interwoven with lushly designed open spaces, parkland, green infrastructure, and development intended to absorb and re-distribute fresh water flooding, future sea rise, flood surge, and even, under the worst-case climate change scenarios, high-tide intrusions of water.

While current developer and political proposals are accommodated, the plan thinks out 20 to 50 years to a time of sea rise and driverless vehicles, in a way that creates a new type of garden city, and with amenities that serve adjoining neighborhoods and park users, not just regional infrastructure.

John Shapiro, Quilian Riano; professors

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INTERNATIONAL COURSES AND STUDIOS The GCPE is responding to the challenges of the ‘global village’ with studios and courses that run partly or entirely abroad. They are as much about students learning global innovations and practices as about providing opportunities for students to study in foreign places. As respective examples: Pratt students have traveled to Tokyo to consider innovative approaches to transportation and placemaking; to Cuba to study with planners, designers, architects, and sociologists to create a comprehensive neighborhood plan; and to The Netherlands to study the intersections of heritage and resilience.

Within the GCPE we believe in equipping our students not only with the tools and knowledge to practice locally, but also the perspective and critical thinking skills to approach complex urban issues within the context of the environment, and equity and economic concerns, regardless of location. We better understand our own milieu with insights gathered from international travel and study.

Daniel Eizo Miyagusko

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Sustainable Development and Placemaking Studio in Los Sitios Havana, Cuba Havana presents an opportunity to study the full spectrum of GCPE interests, including opportunities and challenges in historic preservation, 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 conflict. Through a series of films, readings and talks, the course begins by examining the impact of the Cuban Revolution on the country’s urban planning policies, providing students with basic knowledge of contemporary Cuba. The course continues with a 10-day stay in Havana in which students 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.

For the Spring 2018 semester, students worked in intensive collaboration with professors and students of Havana’s architecture school in a study of the Los Sitios neighborhood in central Havana. All students and professors met for preliminary lectures, study, and discussion. Site visits were conducted within the neighborhood. Limited engagement with residents allowed for some understanding of the unique cultural heritage of the people in this neighborhood, as well as their objectives for the community. The students then split into smaller groups, each approaching the studio process with a focus topic of either housing, mobility, preservation or public space. These were researched further through inquiry, additional site visits, and referencing previous studies, to develop a vision to frame their recommendations for the site that would help strengthen their assets and assist with some of the daily challenges they face. The trip culminated in final presentations from each group.

These efforts continued for the students, who remained in contact with their counterparts in Havana. Once they returned from learning abroad, a final report was developed using the hands-on experience and focused study of the Los SItios neighborhood

Jill Hamberg, Ron Shiffman, David Burney; professors

a Sudents’ work b Carlos Rodríguez Estévez c Jay Skardis

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Course: Intersections of Heritage and Resilience Amsterdam and Rotterdam, Netherlands The Dutch are known as global leaders in both large and small-scale public projects for water management. For centuries they have honed the practice of living with water while preserving their built and cultural heritage. Thus, the Netherlands represents an ideal scenario for cultural and technical exchange opportunities at the intersections of preservation, heritage, and resilience.

Drawing upon the interdisciplinary concepts of heritage and coastal resilience, this joint global partnership abroad explored two exemplary case studies in the Netherlands, the cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the spring of 2018.

Taught by faculty from both the Sustainable Environmental Systems and Historic Preservation disciplines, students and faculty explored the nexus of preservation, heritage, and large-scale water management. Students from both programs worked together to examine and more fully understand the connection between heritage and climate change resilience. The students selected projects ranging from architectural to regional with site-specific explorations of both water management and preservation.

Jaime Stein, Nadya Nenadich, Ph.D.; professors

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Tokyo Planning and Urbanism Studio Tokyo, Japan In the summer of 2018, 12 students from the four programs within the GCPE participated in an overseas studio that included a lecture series at Pratt Manhattan and two weeks in Japan, where they visited Tokyo, Kyoto, Uji, Kanazawa, and Yokohama. The course introduced students to theory, spectacle and sensibility of Japanese design and urbanism. Three student groups were formed to research the social aspects, formal elements, and regulatory policies of Japanese public space. Once in Japan, students experienced and learned about Japanese planning and urbanism in partnership with Japanese academics, students, and professionals, where they engaged, participated, documented and analyzed ideas and observations. Upon return to New York, students compiled their studio work into three research reports.

The first group evaluated the efficacy of privately owned public spaces (POPS). In Japan, students conducted observational research on multiple POPS and evaluated these spaces through a matrix that considered literature from both Japanese context and Western planning ideals. Students examined the efficacy of Western metrics used for evaluating public spaces and found that Japanese POPS, are heavily influenced by Western urban design principles, but also that local context matters. In Japan, successful POPS are those that serve multiple purposes, and that peculiarities to Japanese POPS operate to welcome or deter certain uses and activities.

The second research group examined solid waste management and infrastructure in Japan. Students surveyed the overall views of people living in Japanese urban areas and learned about their attitudes towards waste, recycling and local waste management practices through locational observations. Findings indicated that 84 percent of respondents stated that Japan’s waste infrastructure system is sufficient and satisfactory, and that Japan’s public areas are considered clean. However, the research also presented that handling litter uses more resources than necessary and greater emphasis could be placed on reducing packaging to reduce waste.

The third group researched dynamic placemaking approaches in Japan through developing a case study of the special district of Kagurazaka. Through the analysis of streetscapes, site observations, interviews, and a formal questionnaire, students developed a dynamic placemaking toolkit used to evaluate the diurnal cycle and life of public spaces. Their findings conclude that Kagurazaka is a place where space-setting, human elements, and the effect of time collide together and contribute towards the dynamic vibrancy found in many places in Japan.

Jonathan Martin, Ph.D., Alexa Fabrega; Professors

a Daniel Eizo Miyagusko b Group photo c Daniel Eizo Miyagusko, Alex Dewitt, JiaYi Chen

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LECTURES + EVENTS

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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.

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Pratt Session + 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).

FALL 2017 PARTICIPANTS PS04 Debora Mesa/Antón García-Abril and Joshua Bolchover and John Lin (New Architectural Contexts) PS05 Neil Denari and Thomas Leeser (New Architectural Mediums) PS06 Steven Holl and Thom Mayne (New Architectural Contexts)

a. Pratt Session 06 b. Pratt Session 04 c. Pratt Session 05

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Pratt Session + SOA Lectures 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.

SPRING 2018 PARTICIPANTS PS07 Michael Maltzan and Gregg Pasquarelli (New Architectural Contexts) PS08 Jacqueline Bloom/ Florencia Pita and Kutan Ayata/ Michael Young (New Architectural Mediums) PS09 Elizabeth Diller and Sylvia Lavin (New Architectural Mediums)

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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.

The GAUD++ exhibition is not only a design build project, but also an exercise in curation and organizational strategies. The brief of the course is to design, fabricate, and curate the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design student exhibition.

2017-2018 EXHIBITIONS Havana Exhibition Pratt Shows Art OMI A celebration of the life of Pratt Professor Vito Acconci Exhibition Brooklyn Designs Brooklyn Musuem of Art

a. Pratt Show 2018 b. Art OMI Installation/Exhibition c. Vito Acconci Exhibition d. Cuba Exhibition 2018

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RESEARCH

Thom Mayne, Pritzker Prize-winning architect and founding principal at the interdisciplinary architectural firm Morphosis, has been appointed the first “Critic at Large” in Pratt Institute’s Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (GAUD) program within the School of Architecture spring 2017.

The Critic at Large position was created in spring 2017 to expand discourse across the GAUD curriculum and build connections between the pedagogical and professional aspects of the program. The position will be held by an accomplished educator and practitioner whose commitment to architectural design and its related fields is world-leading. It will be continued through the 2017-2018 year.

Together with the dean of the School of Architecture, GAUD chair and related faculty, the Critic at Large will work directly with students from each year and each program on their projects during several key days throughout the semester, assisting them with their projects and holding discussions about the architectural field and discipline. Discussions with students will help them to build and expand an awareness of issues such as the relevance and participation of architecture in addressing challenging problems.

Events surrounding the Critic at Large visits will range from intimate to public discussions and from lively debates to direct, instructive coaching.

Mayne, a 2005 Pritzker Prize winner, is a tenured professor in UCLA’s Department of Architecture and a founding member of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).

He is the founding principal of Morphosis, a firm known for its innovative and iconic designs and rigorous, collaborative research, whose work worldwide ranges in scale from residential, institutional, and civic buildings to large urban planning projects.

In association with his appointment, Mayne will give a lecture at Memorial Hall on the Institute’s Brooklyn campus on Thursday, April 13 at 6 PM. The lecture will reflect upon his work and career as an educator and architect. It will be free and open to the public.

LECTURES + EVENTS

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RESEARCH

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 2017 - 2018 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.

LECTURES + EVENTS

Critique at Large 2017-2018 Thom Mayne

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DIRECTED RESEARCH

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 extradisciplinary 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.

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.

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Directed Research Two broad initiatives guide individual faculty and program-led directed research: New Architectural Contexts — an area of research that explores the ways in which architecture activates context; a symptom of 21st century cities as they become increasingly more dense, as they grow inward and accumulate on top of themselves to conserve resources; cultural, economical, and ecological. Shifting the discourse on “architecture and the city” away from the semiological and away from quantitative performance-based design, the focus at the GAUD is understanding architectural context as that which is fundamentally premised on the design of urban qualities.

The reformulation of architectural praxes that results from this re-centering of context in the discipline is of equal interest. No longer the last step of municipal planning, this strain of investigation examines how architecture is situated as the “early prototype,” re-postulating codes and probing the potentials of a rapidly densifying city and/or its vacuous rural compliment. Demanding the intertwining of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, interior design, and conservation, and operating at a scale larger than a building yet smaller than the city, New Architectural Contexts pushes to an extreme concepts of architectural alteration and re-origination, challenging conventional notions of adaptive re-use, infill, development, and conservation.

New Architectural Mediums — an area of research that explores how architectural design can engage multiple senses via the media and mediums that interact with architecture. It centers on architecture as the design of “live experience,” engaging concepts of environmental graphics, material visualization, branding, and object design, among others. Spanning from the inclusion of hydrological, horticultural, luminous, and sonic media to speculating upon the use of media facades, sensory networks, graphics, cinema, op art, and robotics, this strain of research shifts its disciplinary focus from generative and/or representational aspects of architectural media (the processes that lead up to a piece of architecture), to the experiential and qualitative effects of highly mediated architectures.

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GAUD COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY

Graduate Architecture and Urban Design students and faculty actively participate in local and international communities in projects focused on K-12 education, community and environmental justice, and advancements in design, imaging, and fabrication technologies. Constituencies for these projects often span a range of generations as our education programs do; they may extend well into the realms of very concrete issues of the environment as imaging and development projects. They may engage a larger community of citizens and professionals in a global dialogue and collaboration on questions of water and contemporary modes of urbanization as part of our International programs. Collectively, the overlap and resonance of these varied constituencies contributes to a more active and integral participation of architecture in its many communities.

GAUD | GAUD Community

RAD K-12 The GAUD continues to mentor our architecture students in community service. This year they worked with middle school students on designing a “place to read and think,” a construction at the scale of built-in furniture, larger than a desk but smaller than a room, to be theoretically installed somewhere in their classroom or school. During the first three weeks discussions revolved around issues of program: How many people will be using the space? What are the visual fields you want to make viewable/hidden from within this space? What are the tactile qualities desirable in this space? What are the potential body positions possible in this space? What are the optimal light conditions inside the space? What is the presence of this construction as one approaches it? How is this construction sited in the larger, less private space around it?

These conversations in turn led to multiple physical models that allowed students to explore the tectonic aspects of the inhabitation narratives they construed in their imagination.

This exercise in turn, by virtue of the encounter between the imagined use and the physical construction itself, led to new discoveries and clarifications through the model making process itself. A vaulted cocoon made out of paper deformed in a way that later became a more articulated interior experience for the reader; a mishap with glue inspired an ornamental strategy; an exaggeration—my space is so tall it needs an elevator—led to discussions about the visceral experiences of the body relative to elevational differences.

The program culminated with a visit by the students and their teachers to the Pratt campus and a final presentation (by these talented eighth graders) of the projects in the School of Architecture.

Funder credit: Pratt’s Center K-12 programs are generously supported by the Con Edison Company of New York, Inc., Walter K. Hoerning Endowment Fund, New York State Council on the Arts, The Pinkerton Foundation, The Hearst Foundation, New York Building Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, Selz Foundation, Turrell Fund, The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of The New York Community Trust, The Irma Holland Wolstein Endowed Scholarship Fund, individual donors, and Pratt Institute.

Maria Sieira, RAD Faculty Advisor Aileen Wilson, RAD Faculty

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Thom Mayne Young Architects Graduate Architecture and Urban Design students and faculty actively participate in local and international communities in projects focused on K-12 education, community and environmental justice, and advancements in design, imaging, and fabrication technologies. Constituencies for these projects often span a range of generations as our education programs do; they may extend well into the realms of very concrete issues of the environment as imaging and development projects. They may engage a larger community of citizens and professionals in a global dialogue and collaboration on questions of water and contemporary modes of urbanization as part of our International programs. Collectively, the overlap and resonance of these varied constituencies contributes to a more active and integral participation of architecture in its many communities.

Critic Name, critic a a. K-12 Students presentation b. Thom Mayne with K-12 students

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Havana 2017 Cuba Interiority is a concept of increasing importance to architects in urban centers today. As populations increase, cities become denser, resources diminish, and economies sober, architects will need to confront new methods of space making. One could argue that the ‘topological city’ with its highly continuous, centrifugal qualities (and the economies and politics that drive these) is a rare and dying breed of the last century. In the not-so-distant future, cities like Havana will have to consider how to adapt and alter their existing structures to grow inward, to reconfigure their interior, and to design for the discontinuities and temporal layering of their urbanity.

In essence, this is a simultaneous interest in conserving the existing as much as it is reinvigorating future histories.

Through an immersive four-week program based in Havana and Miami, students became acquainted with issues of alteration and interiority relevant in emerging economies such as Havana and had the opportunity to engage with different stakeholders. The elective design-based seminar exposed students to the ideas and histories behind the site’s urbanity, geography, structure and hydrology through local excursions and lectures by Cuban architects, historians and professionals involved in government institutions. Additionally, students visited areas around Havana and Matanzas where they gained understanding of similar projects in Cuba at large.

Focusing on the Juan Manuel Diaz warehouse site along the former Havana port, students speculated on altering, densifying and interiorizing the existing post-industrial structures.

The intent was to postulate methods for “re-originating” the site, its existing buildings, its edges and its pier structures into a vital, composite local-urban and international tourist destination. Students experimented with photography as an instrument of design -- a way to draw out concepts and create relationships to the site both materially and spacially. In Miami, working in parallel with a University of Miami School of Architecture studio, students further developed ideas for the site through unique modeling methods and montages. Working in groups, they transformed and altered aggressively the building and the site to intensify its degree of interiority. The final results were exhibited and presented at the University of Miami.

David Erdman, critic Natalia Echeverri, co-teacher a a. Cuba site photograph group b. Tal Friedland

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Spatial Analysis + Visualization Initiative

GCPE COMMUNITY The mission of the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE) is to provide a professionally oriented education to a student body with diverse cultural, educational, and professional backgrounds. Using a multidisciplinary approach, GCPE teaches participatory practice as the best way to support and advocate for just, equitable communities.

Students graduate equipped with the knowledge of theory, technical capacity, collaborative skills, and radical critical thinking abilities necessary to plan for ethical, healthy, resilient and inclusive communities.

Plans created here are physical and highly responsive to social needs, with an emphasis on implementation and movement into the future—meaning that change feels tangible; local civic action is affirmed and re-energized. Pratt brings innovation to the framework of urban institutions working in partnership with community.

We believe that citizens, both individually and collectively, have the power to instigate change.

COMMUNITY

GCPE VALUES Our impact is felt at many scales—local, citywide, statewide, nationally, and even globally. But the GCPE values-based approach to planning, placemaking, preservation and sustainable environmental systems has impact on the paradigms we all use no matter what the scale. The GCPE curriculum prepares students to create plans, projects and policies that reinterpret the value of land in dialogue with communities—in order to establish an alternative to the notion of “highest-and-best use” determined solely on the basis of how much money can be made from it. The aim is not to demonize profit, but to learn how to balance the pursuit of profit through the dollar value of the land with community-defined approaches to value. Success is when place begins to more closely resemble a community’s own definition of what it should look like and how it should function.

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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 + Visualization Initiative a a. SAVI

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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’s 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 its 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 substantial responsibilities, which may range from conducting community interviews to producing GIS and zoning analyses.

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 while Pratt Center benefits greatly from the energy, 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 with 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 2017-2018 school year, Pratt Center funded six projects after a competitive selection cycle. A few of the selected projects from the School of Architecture included: Sonya Gimon, MS in Sustainable Environmental Systems, along with professors Simon Kates and Elliott Maltby, for their project reimagining the future of the Edgemere Landfill; Jen Becker, Professor in the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, & Michael Olson, Graduate Student in City and Regional Planning for their project exploring bulk energy solutions for businesses along Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn; Eve Barron, Chair of the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, leading a large team of nine faculty and students from the Planning department working with groups on the Lower East Side and Chinatown to advocate for low-cost housing in their neighborhoods..

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 will continue to encourage projects that have a tangible, positive impact on the City’s low- and moderate-income populations.

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Pratt School of Architecture | Faculty

Graduate Architecture and Urban Design David Erdman Chair Alexandra Barker Assistant Chair Stefan Al Visiting Associate Professor

GĂśkhan Kodalak Visiting Assistant Professor Carisima Koenig Visiting Assistant Professor Ferda Kolatan Visiting Assistant Professor Sulan Kolatan Adjunct Professor

Maria Sieira Adjunct Associate Professor Henry Smith-Miller Adjunct Professor with CCE Jeffrey Thompson Visiting Assistant Professor Pimnara Thunyathada Visiting Assistant Professor

Michael Flynn Adjunct Assistant Professor Michael Freedman-Schnapp Visiting Assistant Professor Neil Freeman Visiting Assistant Professor Adam Friedman Adjunct Associate Professor

Jeffrey Anderson Visiting Assistant Professor

Kathleen Kulpa Visiting Assistant Professor

Elizabeth Vaughan Visiting Assistant Professor

Mindy Fullilove Visiting Assistant Professor

Carlos Arnaiz Adjunct Assistant Professor

Emilija Landsbergis Visiting Assistant Professor

Joseph Vidich Visiting Assistant Professor

Moses Gates Visiting Assistant Professor

Kutan Ayata Adjunct Assistant Professor

Paul Laroque Visiting Assistant Professor

Olivia Vien Visiting Assistant Professor

Ben Gibberd Visiting Assistant Professor

Dylan Baker-Rice Visiting Professor

Thomas Leeser Adjunct Professor

Jason Vigneri-Beane Adjunct Associate Professor

Thomas Grassi Visiting Assistant Professor

Gisela Baurmann Visiting Assistant Professor

Peter Macapia Adjunct Associate Professor

Corey Wowk Visiting Assistant Professor

Ingrid Haftel Visiting Assistant Professor

StĂŠphanie Bayard Adjunct Assistant Professor

William MacDonald Professor

Frederic Bellaloum Visiting Assistant Professor

Radhi Majmudar Adjunct Associate Professor

Eve Baron GCPE Chair, Professor

Gabrielle Brainard Visiting Associate Professor

Hart Marlow Adjunct Assistant Professor

Lisa Ackerman Visiting Assistant Professor

Stuart Bridgett Visiting Assistant Professor

Benjamin Martinson Adjunct Assistant Professor

Rony Al-Jalkh Visiting Assistant Professor

Travers Broughton Visiting Assistant Professor

Bruce Mau Visiting Professor

Bridget Anderson Visiting Assistant Professor

Meta Brunzema Adjunct Associate Professor

Debora Mesa Molina Visiting Associate Professor

Caron Atlas Adjunct Assistant Professor

Robert Cervellione Adjunct Assistant Professor

Kristina Miele Visiting Assistant Professor

Edward Bautista Visiting Assistant Professor

Stephen Chu Visiting Associate Professor

Greg Mulholland Visiting Assistant Professor

Jenifer Becker Visiting Assistant Professor

Jonas Coersmeier Adjunct Associate Professor

Danil Nagy Visiting Assistant Professor

Bethany Bingham Visiting Assistant Professor

Christobal Correa Adjunct Associate Professor

Hannibal Newsom Visiting Assistant Professor

Michael Bobker Visiting Assistant Professor

Alexander Cornhill Visiting Assistant Professor

Signe Nielsen Adjunct Professor

Jessica Braden Visiting Associate Professor

Theoharis L. David Professor

Alihan Oney Visiting Assistant Professor

Esther Brunner Visiting Assistant Professor

Manuel De Landa Adjunct Professor

Christina Ostermier Visiting Assistant Professor

Koray Duman Visiting Assistant Professor

Philip Parker Adjunct Associate Professor

Michael Faciejew Visiting Assistant Professor

Shinjinee Pathak Visiting Assistant Professor

Matthew Fischer Visiting Assistant Professor

Soydan Polat Visiting Assistant Professor

James Garrison Adjunct Professor Joseph Giampietro Visiting Assistant Professor James Graham Visiting Assistant Professor Ariane Harrison Visiting Assistant Professor

Clelia Pozzi Visiting Assistant Professor Keyan Rahimzadeh Visiting Assistant Professor Mark Richards Visiting Assistant Professor Brian Ringley Visiting Assistant Professor

Catherine Ingraham Professor

Lindy Roy Visiting Associate Professor

Hina Jamelle Visiting Associate Professor

Erich Schoenenberger Adjunct Associate Professor

Anna Kats Visiting Assistant Professor

Paul Segal Adjunct Professor

Robert Kearns Visiting Assistant Professor

Benjamin Shepherd Adjunct Associate Professor

GCPE

David Burney Associate Professor Joan Byron Visiting Assistant Professor Darryl Cabbagestalk Visiting Assistant Professor Carol Clark Visiting Assistant Professor Bracken Craft Visiting Assistant Professor Paula Crespo Visiting Assistant Professor Ramon Cruz Visiting Assistant Professor Stephen Davies Visiting Assistant Professor Deshonay Dozier Visiting Assistant Professor Fathia Elmenghawi Visiting Assistant Professor Alexa Fabrega 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

Jonathan Marvel Visiting Assistant Professor

Lacey Tauber Visiting Assistant Professor

Claudia Mausner Visiting Assistant Professor

Patricia Voltolini Visiting Assistant Professor

Norman Mintz Visiting Associate Professor

Vicki Weiner Adjunct Associate Professor

Eliza Montgomery Visiting Assistant Professor

Don Weinreich Visiting Assistant Professor

Sadreddin Mostafavi Shahab Visiting Assistant Professor

Ben Wellington Visiting Assistant Professor

Gita Nandan Visiting Associate Professor

Aaron White Visiting Assistant Professor

Mercedes Narciso Adjunct Associate Professor

Kristen Wilke Visiting Assistant Professor

Marcel Negret Visiting Assistant Professor

Kevin Wolfe Visiting Assistant Professor

Nadya Nenadich Adjunct Associate Professor

Ayse Yonder Professor

Christopher Neville Visiting Assistant 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 Professor Mitchell Silver Visiting Assistant Professor Sebastian Toby Snyder Visiting Assistant Professor

Benjamin Margolis Visiting Assistant Professor

Chris Starkey Visiting Assistant Professor Jaime Stein Adjunct Associate Professor

Ariella Maron Visiting Assistant Professor

Ira Stern Visiting Assistant Professor

Michael Marrella Visiting Assistant Professor

Gelvin Stevenson Visiting Associate Professor

Jonathan Martin Professor

Samara Swanston Visiting Assistant Professor

Thomas Hanrahan Dean, Pratt School of Architecture