GRADUATE
INPROCESS 25
GAUD + GCPE School of Architecture Summer 2018 - Spring 2019
GRADUATE
INPROCESS 25 GAUD + GCPE School of Architecture Summer 2018 - Spring 2019
INPROCESS
is the yearly publication of student work from the Pratt Institute School of Architecture Editor: Zhixian Song Assistant Editor: Edisson Cabrera GCPE Archival Coordination: Carlos Rodriguez Estevez, Haley Balcanoff, and Margaret Gaby Undergraduate Archival Coordination: Kalam Lin Siu, Wina Wu, Beren Saraquse, Rachel Pendelton, Marley Olson, Brian Ching
Pratt Institute School of Architecture Administration: Thomas Hanrahan, Dean Harriet Harriss, Dean (Starting Fall 2019) Kurt Everhart, Manager of Academic Affairs Pamela Gill, Director of Budget and Administration
Pratt Institute Administration: Frances Bronet, President, Pratt Institute Bruce J.Gitlin, Chair to the Board of Trustees Kirk E. Pillow, Provost
Graduate Administration: David Erdman, GAUD Chair Alexandra Barker, Assistant GAUD Chair Erin Murphy, Associate Manager of Admissions Geoffrey Olsen, Assistant to the Chair
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 Vicki Weiner, Coordinator of Historic Preservation Leonel Lima-Ponce, 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: Sandra Nataf David Erdman + Hart Marlow , critics Interior Cover: Amir Mohebi Ashtiani Karel Klein, critic Ramon Pena, co-teacher
The following hardware and software was used for this publication: 3 Apple Mac Pro 3 desktop computers 5 Apple iMac desktop computers Canon EOS 6D camera Adobe Creative Suite CC Hewlett Packard Color LaserJet Enterprise M750 Hewlett Packard Color Laser Jet 6015dn Netgear ReadyNAS Duo 500gb network drive Western Digital 4TB network drive Type Set to font families Interstate and Gotham Printed in Canada
The student staff of InProcess 25 would like to extend a thank you to the Summer 2018 - Spring 2019 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, Harriet Harriss, David Erdman and Alexandra Barker for their invaluable input and guidance. And finally, we would like to say farewell to Zhixian Song and Kalam Lin Siu who after many years of exceptional dedication to Archives and InProcess are graduating.
GRADUATE ARCHITECTURE + URBAN DESIGN Foreword
GAUD
TABLE OF CONTENTS 005
GCPE
Master of Architecture
011 02 3 035 045 059 069
Design Studios Semester 1 Semester 2 Thesis Semester 3
085 087 089
Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design
Design Studios Semester 1 Semester 2 Culmination Projects Semester 3
Seminars
Mediums Core Electives International Programs Summer Programs
GRADUATE CENTER FOR PLANNING AND THE ENVIRONMENT Foreword
Master of Science in City and Regional Planning Master of Science in Historic Preservation Master of Science in Urban Environmental Systems Management
PRATT MANHATTAN CENTER
Urban Placeman and MKanagement Construction Management + Facility Management + Real Estate Practice Interdisciplinary Studios
LECTURES + EVENTS
Lectures Symposiums and Workshops Exhibitions Critiques
DIRECTED RESEARCH Coursework Prior Directed Research
GAUD COMMUNITY
K-12 RAD Thom Mayne Young Architecture Fellowship Art OMI Wallabout Brooklyn
GCPE COMMUNITY
097 099 101 1 07 119 137 147 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 179 187 189 193 197 199 202 203 205 207
SAVI Pratt Center
211 213
Lecture Series Faculty
215 216
COMMUNITY
Master of Science in Architecture
RESEARCH
Core Design Studios Semester ‘1 Semester 2 Semester 3 Semester 4 Directed Research Studios Semester 5 Semester 6
Pratt School of Architecture
DEAN’S FOREWORD Welcome to the 25th Edition of Graduate In Process: the Pratt Institute, School of Architecture, annual design project palimpsest, configured as a means to celebrate, educate, tantalize, and inspire. At the time of writing some 12 months after this work was produced, the CoViD-19 global pandemic has forced a serious reappraisal of the processes and outputs we have come to take for granted within our school, and of the characteristics of the changing professional context we are preparing students for. Although this publication features the work of the 2018-19 cohort, it has been interesting to observe that the energy, activity, and productivity that characterizes the work of the graduate programs at Pratt has persisted despite the current constraints. While this publication focuses upon the work of the Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (GAUD) Department students, the graduate suite of programs at Pratt School of Architecture extends across eight graduate programs and one linked undergraduate program under three departments - the Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (GAUD), the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE) and the Pratt Manhattan Center. In total, there are over 450 enrolled students actively engaged in learning about every aspect of the built environment: offering an encompassing array of construction specialisms across a range of regions and contexts. Under the leadership of Chairperson David Erdman and Assistant Chair Alexandra Barker, the GAUD’s three programs include the accredited Master of Architecture program which is overseen by a team of coordinators: Assoc. Prof. Erich Schoenenberger (M.Arch Core Studios), Prof. Thomas Leeser (M.Arch Advanced Studios), Prof. Catherine Ingraham (History-Theory), Asst. Prof. Hart Marlow (Architectural Mediums) and Prof. Cristobal Correa (Building Technology). The M.S. in Architecture and the M.S. in Architecture and Urban Design are both coordinated by Assoc. Prof. Ariane Lourie-Harrison. Under the leadership of Chairperson Eve Baron, who also coordinates the accredited M.S. in City and Regional Planning, the M.S. in Sustainable Environmental Systems, coordinated by Professor Leonel Ponce, the M.S. in Historic Preservation, coordinated by Professor Vicki Weiner and the M.S. in Urban Placemaking Management, coordinated by Professor David Burney, comprises the GCPE suite of programs. At the Pratt Manhattan Center, the M.S. degrees in Real Estate Practice and in Facilities Management along with the Associate and Baccalaureate programs in Construction Management all are coordinated by the Chairperson, Regina Ford Cahill. Acknowledging the talent and dedication of faculty is easily overlooked in publications featuring student work, yet none of it would be possible without such a remarkable team whose pioneering pedagogies underpin all forms of production across all programs. The work of the GAUD sampled in this publication offers a lens through which many of the critical issues of our time are scrutinized through the proxy of spatial production. The design professors teaching across GAUD are drawn from a diverse range of theorists, researchers, designers, and professional practitioners, resulting in an alchemic infusion of contrasting and often contested practical and philosophical approaches. Notions of what constitutes analog, digital, and post-digital production are explored and in some instances, extruded into emergent ontological outcomes, and what characterizes ‘media’ (from the Latin, ‘middle layer’) is tested by the litmus of lived experience. Elsewhere, growing demand for densification drives a systems-thinking approach to spatial outcomes and evidences the ability of architecture to envision utopian desires and dystopian warnings. At the core of the Master in Architecture program is the Integrative Design Studio that offers architects and engineers an opportunity to work collaboratively as proto-professionals, reflecting the realities of construction industry relationships. The M.S. programs in architecture and in architecture and urban design support students committed to transforming their existing teaching and/or professional career through one of two primary lines of “directed research” inquiry. Similarly, the programs in the GCPE and Manhattan Center share the same focus upon independent research, emerging from a long-standing, historical commitment to social and environmental justice that emerged from these departments in the 1960s. Places Journal and also the Pratt Center grew out of these efforts, the latter of which is now celebrated as one of the most important university-based urban research centers in the United States. Under the umbrella of the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, four urban-supporting graduate programs operate as an interdisciplinary hub. Within the M.S. Sustainable Environmental Systems Program, coastal cities and water infrastructure research continue alongside the emergence of disaster-response and resilience work grounded in environmental justice. The Urban Placemaking and Management Program continues its work at the intersection of public space, democracy, design, and management, generating outcomes that inform policy as much as professional practice, headed by Professor David Burney, who also chairs SOA’s new Housing Consortium. The M.S. in Historic Preservation combines internships and classroom-based learning to ensure a facilitated transition to employment after graduation. The MS in City and Regional Planning trains students to enter the profession as skillful practitioners and advocates of equity, sustainable development, and social change at the community, city, and regional scale. The Pratt Manhattan Center’s four programs, M.S. in Facilities Management, A.A.S. and B.P.S. in Construction Management program, and the M.S. Real Estate Practice recognize the importance and value of internshipbased professional learning, ensuring the skills students acquire are both relevant and ready to deploy. All programs work closely with our industry partners who regularly enhance the academic experience while cementing professional networks.
Finally, while this publication has long been successful in providing a compelling visual compendium of the remarkable outputs of our 2018-19 GAUD students, we are mindful of the fact that the launch coincides with a particularly difficult time in our history. However, if I have learned anything about the talent and tenacity that distinguishes our students since my deanship began eight months ago, it’s that we are historically and exceptionally well placed to produce work that resonates beyond the context in which it is produced. While we are now focused upon developing pioneering efforts to embrace and even champion the online environments demanded of pandemic-pedagogy, our school has sustained painful losses within our faculty: former student and registered architect, Sandro A. Carrasco, Professor Bill Menking, Professor Lou Goodman, and former faculty member, Michael Sorkin. This publication is dedicated to them. Dr. Harriet Harriss Dean School of Architecture
Graduate Architecture and Urban Design
CHAIR’S FOREWORD 2018-2019 Academic Year As an art and design institute, Pratt sees its mission as one where design, art 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 architecture 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 and surrounded by leading designers and thinkers throughout the curriculum of each program, the students’ work collected in this 25th 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-experience” 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 2018-2019 academic year documents the second year of our revised curriculum and is beginning to bear witness to its potentials. In the Master of Architecture (M.Arch) program the Core studios are part of an increasingly integrative suite of courses. Bookending the core, the first and fourth semesters showcase its transformative capacities. The spectacular dexterity of methodological thinking, multi-media design and intense model making expands traditional concepts of object and ground in semester one. The fourth (and final) semester of the Core is where building technology consultants work alongside design faculty and with students. In Spring 2019 students and faculty continued to examine issues of land use and zero waste through a “Waste to Energy”/Recycling facility. A challenging and somewhat controversial NIMBY problem raising questions about context, scale, architecture and infrastructure, the projects were (this year and for the first time) located in NYC. Schemes engage issues of the Anthropocene, seeking to find ways in which we can live with, on top of, around, and beside waste, no longer exiling it to remote, out-of-sight locations. Two comparative sites were studied as a way to test the waters and begin exploring these issues within the complex, contemporary socio-political landscape and contested histories of waste in NYC; a coastal site in Brooklyn and a dense site in midtown Manhattan. The Advanced Directed Research design studios in the M.Arch program showcased some of the emerging strengths of our revised curriculum. Students graduating in 2019 underwent the early stages of curricular adjustments and in many cases found opportunities to explore its assets. This graduating class set a benchmark in the M.Arch program. There is an array of focused, in-depth work spanning from Brooklyn to Spain to Malaysia examining a range of emerging subjects from the use of artificial intelligence and the exigencies of visual culture to shared living and human/animal co-habitation in the subtropical jungle. The Studio of Experiments, three small, collaborative, faculty-student research groups available to select M.Arch students in their final semester looked (this year) at differing concepts of density across three different scales and three different cities: Santiago Chile, New York City (Long Island) and Hong Kong. Students traveled to each location and met with various stakeholders of their sites as well as with government and industry leaders who are actively shaping policy surrounding the issues each group examined. From the molecular examinations of mass timber to considerations of how addition and alteration projects can alter public housing estates to investigations that propose using an entire island, its inhabitants and their individual homes as a power plant to subsidize a city, the studios, students and faculty speculate on prescient issues of the environment and galvanize those lines of inquiry to challenging the ways in which we habituate and form community within these specific propositions, sites and very different cities. The MS.Arch program sharpened its focus this year looking specifically at how to design oversized architectural products. The year-long studio examined the design and construction of prefabricated building cores that can be inserted into existing buildings exploring the ways in which those cores can “crack” open and alter the rituals, habits and circuitry of the original building. 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 and 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 2018-2019 Stan Allen SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT It is often said that student work today looks the same, regardless of the teaching institution. In the 1970’s and 80’s for example, work from the Architectural Association, from SCI-Arc, Cooper Union or Princeton was instantly recognizable, bearing the formal imprint of charismatic teachers or a shared predilection for particular drawing or modeling techniques. News traveled slowly, through journals and books, and students were influenced by the work they saw around them on drawing boards in studio or pinned up at reviews. Somewhat later, in the mid-1990’s at Columbia’s GSAPP, the early availability of design software and innovative teaching methods produced a brief moment of highly distinctive work. But today, students all over the world get their information from the same websites and social media streams, and they work from the same software platforms. As someone who regularly reviews portfolios from a wide range of schools, I can attest to the homogenizing effect of this new global architectural culture. That is why it is refreshing to be able to say the Graduate Program at Pratt institute has been able (against the odds) to carve out a distinctive niche in today’s global landscape of architectural pedagogy. In my experience, this is based on four interrelated areas of focus that have emerged in the curriculum. In the first instance, Pratt takes full advantage of its privileged location in a major metropolis. Studios are often set in local neighborhoods such as the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and the School benefits from the collective urban innovations that are taking place, in some instances, right under their nose. The Graduate Program actively engages the resources of the city – from planning officials to developers – to offer the students valuable ‘real-world’ experience. Second, and closely related to this, is a commitment to engage the new realities of the workplace – both the design technologies that are now available to the students (from scripting to time-based media), as well as the gig economy and the complex ways it is changing our cities. There is also – with some notable exceptions – a prevailing tendency in the student work to curvilinearity and formal complexity. Many of the current Pratt faculty have connections back to Columbia in the 1990’s, either as students or faculty, and the long shadow of those debates around digital design techniques still marks the student work at Pratt today. Finally, and for me most promising, are a number of studios that make the technologies of the image thematic to design studios. This marks a major shift from a design culture that looks to drawing as its primary point of departure to a new reality that begins and ends in digital image production, with its capacities for endless revision and simultaneous, multiple fields of reference. New in that it takes advantage of contemporary software and scripting, it is also deeply embedded in architecture’s disciplinary legacy. It is a new way of seeing as much as it is dependent on new technologies. Schools are a delicate ecology; they are steered more than led, the product of chance as much as intention. Nor is this to say that the student work at Pratt is monolithic. But as John McEnroe once said: “the more I practice the luckier I get.” Something similar is happening at Pratt’s Graduate Program today; as much as a physical place, it is also an emerging school of thought. Stan Allen served as the Critic at Large for the 2019-2020 Academic Year. He is the George Dutton Professor of Architecture at Princeton University and the Principal of Stan Allen Architect.
Sophia Kountakis + Sonya Feinstein Dylan Baker-Rice, Critic
Master of Architecture GAUD
CORE DESIGN STUDIO
The three-year M. Arch 1 program guides students through an interdisciplinary approach to architectural education and prepares students to become influential voices in the professional and academic realm of architecture. Students are developing a comprehensive understanding of the emergent contemporary culture in design and furthermore acquire the technical skills that places them at the forefront of the most innovative design practices. The core series comprises the first four semesters of the six semester M. Arch 1 program. The first year fall semester begins with investigations of material form and conventions of representation through physical and digital manipulations. Tectonic conditions of assembly and enclosure are explored and interrogated in relation to aesthetic and potentialities of use. The studies are parlayed into a project context and investigated as a small intervention into an urban New York City site. This year, the studios designed interventions on Sara D. Roosevelt Public Park in the lower east side of Manhattan. The interventions 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 investigated and explored while the understanding of space and function become more specific. This year the program was a middle school located in the new frontier neighborhood of Red Hook in Brooklyn. The school project called for an architectural proposal positioning a contemporary institutional building within the fabric of urban neighborhood context and to foster solutions for a contemporary learning environment. In the fall of the second year, semester three, studios projects are exposed to further complexity and specificity. The projects are required to incorporate concepts of environmental systems and material assemblies in both the studio work and the accompanying technology seminars. The assigned project called for a mixed-use high-rise housing tower located in Downtown Brooklyn. The studios investigated the relationship between the urban context of the site with the changing nature of residential living spaces in a neighborhood undergoing rapid densification. In fourth semester students are tasked with the design of a highly integrative Project. Groups of students are working through all aspects of architectural design to develop a proposal for a moderately complex project delivering a high degree of resolution in project design development, technical resolution and representation. The course is taught concurrently with the Integrated Building Systems seminar (IBS), a culminating course in the technology sequence. Instructors in the disciplines of structural, mechanical, environmental/landscape and facade engineering are imbedded in the design course and advise students alongside the design studio instructors. The students are offered the opportunity to develop a collaborative approach across disciplines and thus create architectural design of highest resolution and in-depth design.
Erich Schoenenberger, Coordinator
FACULTY Carlos Arnaiz Kutan Ayata Dylan Baker-Rice Alexandra Barker Gisela Baurmann Stephanie Bayard Ryan Brooke Thomas Theoharis David James Garrison
Sulan Kotalan Peter Macapia William MacDonald Phillip Parker Erich Schoenenberger Maria Sieira Henry Smith-Miller Danielle Williems
INTEGRATED BUILDING SYSTEMS FACULTY Stuart Bridgett Cristobal Correa Reid Freeman Bob Kearns Kate Kulpa
Paul Laroque Kristina Miele Ben Shepherd Corey Wowk
Master of Architecture | First Semester
011
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Field in Folly Sara D. Roosevelt Park, Lower East Side Manhattan Field in Folly- is a studio which works against preconceptions, that a building and an experience must resolve into a cohesive and discernable whole. Play is not relegated to a singular act, it is a transformative action enacted by humans and all creatures. Play is a relational action which integrates people with an environment, it is the reading of the city as a field of possible interactions breaking down subject object dichotomies with infinite possibilities. The design of a piece of architecture for play is the design of a building which must serve myriad users and encompass multiple readings and relations with the city. For the semester students will engage this question of ‘what constitutes a building, and what constitutes play’ through a series of design exercises to create a pavilion and a park. Play will be understood both as the intended use of the structure and as a method for exploration during the design process. The studio and formal design process are intended to be loose fit, were productive design methods of casting, cutting, molding, and gluing will produce varied architectures and approaches to habitable space. Experimentation through multiples, will allow for productive dialogue into form making and disciplinary ideas of design. Hybridized structures will offer various ideas of how to engage with urban environments and create space through solid and void. The studio will explore play through 3 core design exercises with parallel research and drawing and cultural research. 1. Volume- Negation and Addition: The first design exercise explored how positive and negative spaces can be created through additive and subtractive procedures. Primitive volumes were cast with iterative studies exploring spatial and void adjacencies. Students constructed abstract massings, analyzing their spatial qualities and potentialities for usable space through multiple drawings. Emphasis was placed on material, method, and compositional sequencing. 2. Liminal Space- Line and Strata: The second design exercise built on the first as students designed lattice structures that expand upon previous massings not as solids but as lines, networks, and structures. The aim is to produce a different kind of space which develops from the first exercise but is different in type and in its conception of space and continuities. Scalar relationships and multiples were also explored using drawings as a tool for analysis and representation. 3. Hybridity & Site: For the last exercise students designed their final massings by combining the prior elements into hybrid structures of solid/void; liminal/ground. Siting took place and drawings culminated in sections and plans which reveal program and relationships with the surrounding environment. Hybrid structures for final models were cast and constructed into their landscape. Dylan Baker-RIce, critic Loyra Nunez, co-teacher a a. Sai Leng b. Defu Kong
a b
b
Master of Architecture | First Semester
013
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Lower East Side Playscape Sara D. Roosevelt Park, 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, lasercutting, 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. Figures, forms and textures produced through the diversity of materials and tools in the initial studies were developed into indoor and outdoor recreational environments.
Alexandra Barker critic Olivia Vien, Co-teacher a. William Vandenburgh b. Edisson Cabrera c. Soh Hee Oh d. Alsharif Khaled Nahas e. Michael Centeno
a c
b
d d
e
Master of Architecture | First Semester
015
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Collage Logic Lower East Side Playscape The approach for the studio hinges on a primary understanding of the technique of collage to provide an overall logic for engaging in multiple ways of reading and modes of representation, ultimately to be synthesized as a composite assemblage. As a process of fragmentation, suture, deformation and defamiliarization capable of yielding a new visual coherence, collage suggests the possibilities for re-interpretation and re-combination to reveal latent potentialities. Furthermore, the premise of collage resists a habitual reading or preconceived deployment of the conventions of representation, encouraging instead that these manipulations can be calibrated to specific and multivalent effect. Stemming form this collage-logic, the studio investigates the nature of form in relationship to a simultaneous interplay of multiple properties, including haptic, visual, material, geometric, surficial, volumetric, and spatial. Starting with “found objects� vessels, interpreted as formal and material primitives in a sense, students work iteratively across multiple modes of 2d and 3d production in order to distill a set of specific qualities of materiality, contour, detail, texture, and mass/shape. These qualities get isolated, extended, augmented, honed, and ultimately recombined into a new hybridized composite. Neither an outright abandonment of the initial found object nor a derivative recasting of it, the newly authored composites instead of aim for a calculated departure from the primitive. As artifacts from a process of engaged and careful reinterpretation, the resulting composite objects present the opportunity to be understood as the product of seeing, editing, curating and speculating, more so than reflexive form -making. For the second half of the semester, initial outcomes are subject to further development and are read in increasingly architectural terms of tectonics, space, and program- first in relation to a sectional ground and physical site boundary, then in response to contextual site and programmatic inputs. Ultimately positioned as speculative proposals for activation as a Lower East Side playscape, projects conclude by exploring a more resolved set of habitable spaces, material effects and experience narratives.
Ryan Brooke Thomas, critic Frederic Bellaloum, Co-teacher a a. Hangiao Chen b. Benjamin Smithers
a a
b
Master of Architecture | First Semester
017
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Site of Infinite Return Sara D. Roosevelt Park, Lower East Side Manhattan Over the last few sequences of this studio, we continue to elaborate and develop logics of relations and architecture as a medium of relations by focusing on the relationships established within architectural categories and between them. Each year the studio tries to resolve an area that has previously remained ambiguous. The goal is to construct a system that explores the fundamentals of architecture and their relation to each other while also requiring explicit spatial effects and articulations of connection between one category (such as structure) and another (such as enclosure). This requires a double agenda between computational and manual material combinatorial operations. These operations generate a kind of conceptual friction and present a series of problems that we then engage through analysis in “drawing,” in particular sectional analyses. At the same time, we engage new ways of using 3D printing not to generate a geometric object so much as test spatial sections that identify a range of connection points and spatial features. Methodologically, this is not a process studio but rather concentrates on converting geometry into architectural specifics through a sequence of carefully defined operations around the integration of mass and membrane by focusing on spatial operations using algorithmic, dynamic digital functions, and material logics. Students develop the early work through algorithms that generate networks that are then spatialized and materialized into a geometry. The system begins again with a combinatorial module that is then folded and spatially deployed through another algorithm that uses cellular automata to connect “this to that.” Now it is a question of architecturalizing these features and seeing what properties can be brought into an architectural spatial grammar beyond that of form. 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? Thus, the technique are meant as ways of tuning one’s analytical ability such that the results of design are a series of clear experiments and questions rather than a linear path toward a particular result.
Peter Macapia, critic Olivia Vien, co-teacher
a. Jack Weinfeld b. Ko-Fong Hsia c. Runxue Guo
a
b b
c
Master of Architecture | First Semester
019
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Playscape:ReCasting Sara D. Roosevelt Park, Lower East Side Manhattan Entering at the beginning, into ongoing waves of ongoing material processes, fabrication technologies, and intensely variable properties of contemporary objects we start with tracking the material evidence. In this the material evidence is in the industrial produced geometrically precise, reinvention of the object’s corner, its meeting of multiple orientations, faces, materials and geometries. This is a search not so much to find ultimate sources or causes but to experiment with the transform specific material residue, to follow out of its speculative conclusions. What are the available material, spatial, tectonic logics embedded in the contemporary artifact? And how is it demonstrating specific spatial design intelligence? What variations are produced in the acts of transformational tracing - of remapping properties and qualities? Trances are formed as material casts, assembled for their continuities and differences in flexible configurations. The project provokes insight into the reassembly of the possibility space of variable spline based objects, each reconfigures the roles of lines of continuity and breakage. Concepts of play as a program by Roger Callois - mimicry, change, competition and vertigo - are actively pursued in both the formation of spaces and objects architecturally and in their proposed uses. Projects aim to find and form material flexibility, transparency, opacity, tensile and compressive abilities towards expressive architectural possibilities. The studio continues the project of unpacking and reusing the embedded material intelligence of industrially produced artifacts.
Philip Parker, critic Frederic Bellaloum, co-teacher a. Otto Padgett Chan b. Joseph Jurasinski c. Xiaoqian Feng d. Kathleen Gerard e. Glenn de Guzman
a b
c d
e
Master of Architecture | First Semester
021
GAUD CORE DESIGN
An Inconvenient Object The Bowery, Manhattan Students in this first semester studio worked on the relationship between “object” (an abstraction of building) and “ground” an (abstraction of site). We began with the assembly of an object through the opportunistic “corruption” of fractions of quotidian objects. The directive for the initial operations was to put together an “inconvenient object,” one that would not sit easily on any ground, and one that would later be able to generate its own ground in the process of reconciliation to a more or less horizontal surface. Multiple versions of this inconvenient object were made, alternating between digital and physical operations. At the one third point in the semester, we came to a “good stopping point” and introduced the object into a ground that was generated by the same digital geometry that had generated the object. Because of its inconvenience, the object generated disturbances in the ground. We discussed this relationship between object and ground as a kind of dance—is it tango, an almost mirroring affinity, but one that is incredibly charged, precisely because of this affinity? Is it square dancing, abstraction by repetition and with subtle shifts in formal articulation? Is it swing, acrobatic in a way that at times threatens to disengage but that it gloriously comes together in the end? Whatever the relationship, the ground had to be understood as hollow urban ground; speculative sections were generated to explore this hollow ground. Finally, the speculative work was honed into planimetric and sectional studies. Students were given a minimal program of a “play space,” sited in the context of an existing public park. The methodology in this studio, as that in many first semester studios in architecture programs, was one of defamiliarization. By making the object/future building “inconvenient” to draw, model, position in the ground, slice into plans and sections for the distribution of program and circulation, etc., students had to look at space abstractly first, and had to “see” architecture in their speculative work, rather defaulting to the simple representation of spaces they already knew. It is a misnomer to say that we teach students how to make. A more precise description of what we do is to say that we teach them how to see.
Maria Sieira, critic Loyra Nunez, co-teacher a a. Di Meng b. Itandehui Gomez
a b
a
Master of Architecture | Second Semester
023
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Maritime Middle School Red Hook Brooklyn The goal of the studio was to help each student to 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 will come into being, expressive at once of theoretical positions, technological exploration, programmatic invention and pragmatic concerns. The studio was also meant to assist each student in developing their own representational personality by exploring new design development tools and processes thus communicating a concept evolved from an idea to include inventive 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 is meant to assist each student in conceiving of an IDEA of what a place of learning might be while exploiting possibilities of existing complex conditions. These semesters’ investigations of the subject and theme were more than just about the design of a public school. They were about how a work of architecture can serve socio educational needs of students the real client, who is in a state of transition and self discovery. and which was ultimately determined by more than the given program and site, It was meant through individual critical thinking, the redefining of the program, and a process of design, theirs, to reinforce their identity, supporting them to define the student 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. Joseph Jurasinski b. Natalie Salk c. Zhen Bai d. Gina Rustami
a b
a
c
d
Master of Architecture | Second Semester
025
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Interiorities & Itineraries Martitime Middle School in Red Hook, Brooklyn NY This design studio addresses a specific site through its interior. It emphasizes the related conceptual and material impacts of this “inside out” approach. Circulation and its material and spatial qualities are explored through the design of a small building that responds to a detailed ensemble of architectural programs and the multiple contexts of a local institution. The studio will work with a variety of communitybased organizations for the purposes of knowledge exchange, allowing students to intimately understand the activities housed in their design proposals. Coordinated in parallel with Architectural Mediums II and Structures II, contemporary structural and representational techniques are explored within the studio introducting students to basic ideas of integration and comprehensive design. The 640-seat school would take over two industrial buildings and a vacant lot on Delavan Street (21-31 Delavan). The school is to be a feeder to Governor’s Island’s New York Harbor School. The school on the 60,000 square-foot lot would have an indoor pool, a facility to build a boat inside and focus on preparing students for jobs in the maritime industry. Middle school classroom setups are fluid and have an evolved learning environment over elementary schools. Classrooms and other spaces are in transition during a school day accommodating various classes, student cohorts and course setups. The below program outline is to be understood as a guideline. Students are asked to investigate learning environments, interrogate spaces and the relationship thereof in their respective projects. Types of spaces may be investigated formally and in their organizational relations to achieve proposed learning environments.
James Garrison, critic Loyra Nunez, co-teacher a a. Hanqiao Chen b. Sasika Goonawardana
a a
b
Master of Architecture | Second Semester
027
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Emergent Educational_Scape Red Hook, Brooklyn Our inquiry in to the Middle School program in Red Hook, Brooklyn is to approach the school as an ‘operational infrastructure for education and community service’ rather than an anachronistic understanding of the middle school as an architectural representation of public institution. This emphasis on operational and organizational aspects of education allows the studio to participate fully in the need and desire for adaptable spaces and open ended systems interplay in education. The middle school is seen as a ‘re-writable surface for the process of education’, an ‘emergent educational field as contoured landscape’. Providing for dynamical and combinative modes of time based programming, promoted by gradient variations of ‘attitudinal qualitative cultures’ of forms, spaces, and scales. The middle school is seen as a ‘social condenser’ of the community enhanced and augmented by athletic, performance, and theatre arts programs allowing access to the school and the neighborhood, during and beyond the school day. The school program was seen as an opportunity to investigate the ‘classroom of the 21st century’. This ‘classroom’ is seen as a distributed, networked space. In this scenario the classroom is ‘flipped’. Lectures, ‘imparting knowledge’, are recorded and viewed on-line at home while ‘class time’ is converted into project based education, tutorial format, and coaching teaching methods that provide opportunity for the ‘mastery of the material’. These methods emphasize qualities of mobility, cooperation, and collaborative techniques. These techniques re-focus this participatory teaching process across large group, mid-size group, and small group, and individual learning in a feedback, and reverse feedback educational system. A system which bases its forms of learning on discourse and debate within the school spaces. In this participatory format students are encouraged to discuss, extend, link or challenge their classmates and faculty on topics in school spaces that encourage their interaction.
William Macdonald, critic Frederic Bellaloum, co-teacher
a. Kunrong Li b. Aishwarya Hoizal
a
a
a
a
b
Master of Architecture | Second Semester
029
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Educational Infrastructure Martitime Middle School in Red Hook, Brooklyn NY The 2nd semester studio of the Master of Architecture Core sequence marks the beginning of increased complex methodological and interdisciplinary “integrative thinking� in the Master of Architecture curriculum. Students undertake their first sited building design using a public middle school in Red Hook as their focal point. The relationship between lot area of the site to the itinerary of the school calls for a dense urban building mass. With this condition as the outset, this studio took urban deification as a critical design tactic. Students reproduction plans from wide ranges of drawings with distinct poche conditions and generated new drawing configurations through a collage process. Using these drawings as the bases for new and novel planar or sectional organizations the students investigated in narrating circulatory ideas through these drawings. Looking at the drawings in both planar and sectional projections the two-dimensional drawing collages further were interrogated as three dimensional compositions. Going forward, the students took the opportunity to intensively explore a range of learning environments that challenge the conventional classroom, hallway, gathering space that comprises institutional buildings and edited these learning environment ideas into the three dimensional composition. Educational infrastructure are opportunities for spatial compositions and matrix’ to form conditions for learning grounds of various typology, scale, density and materiality while also creating an identity for a specific cohort of students.
Erich Schoenenberger, critic Joseph Giampietro, co-teacher
a. Michael Centeno b. Maria Cecilia Concepcion c. Sai Leng
a
b a
c
Master of Architecture | Second Semester
031
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Plumbing the Surface Red Hook, Brooklyn We started with a “secret object” (inspired by the Blue Man Group), that was assembled at various scales in 3D space. These assemblies were evaluated for interiority potential by drawing horizontal and vertical cuts. A few of these arrangements were tested as physical models in three materialities: massing models in laser cut layers, vacuum forming sectional arrangements, and 3D printing solidvoid configurations. The physical models were photographed and evaluated for tectonic potential. Precedents of schools were studied and students were asked to choose a “programmatic anchor,” some activity in the school that they thought deserved most attention and that could be used as a guiding principle for the architectural development of their project. This concluded the work of the first month. In the second month of the studio the site was introduced. Students visited, photographed, and documented the site. We also met with the planning studio led by John Shapiro that was also working in Red Hook. From that conversation, we adjusted our program according to some specific conditions in the neighborhood and we put greater emphasis on contending with flooding. The ground floor was made into an adaptable floor, and we prioritized the formal development of the roof (where people often end up when there’s a flood). Once the site was introduced we developed “foreplans” and “foresections,” the drawings that precede plans and sections, speculated on the arrangements of the program, and determined the elevations of each floor. We also resolved the major masses of the building in three dimensions, a process that involved slicing the building in horizontal “drawers” of spatial arrangements. Once plans were resolved, we put those horizontal slices together again and resolved the project in 3D for the sections. Tweens love non-standard surfaces to lean on, perch on, huddle under, cocoon into, and generally misuse as they desperately try to find comfort for their in-process bodies. As we honed the materiality and spatiality of the building we kept two things in mind: 1) intensify the articulation of the programmatic “anchor” chosen for each project; 2) maintain the formal playfulness middle school students seek while resolving for horizontal and vertical circulation. Finally, a skin was designed to wrap around the building like a “playful armor.” This school is both an interior wonderland for the development of the students’ (and teachers’) imagination, a neighborhood icon that is massive enough to hold its own in the context of warehouses and that presents its main face to the adjacent park, and a beacon and place or refuge when (no longer “if”), Red Hook floods. Maria Sieira, critic Loyra Nuñez, co-teacher a. William Vandenburgh b. Runxue Guo c. Edison Cabrera d. Shabika Vidhya Sekhar
a
b c
d
Master of Architecture | Second Semester
033
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Interiorities & Itineraries Martitime Middle School in Red Hook, Brooklyn NY Conceptual framework: ‘Ontological Formations’ perceives the architectural production as part of a larger, self-organizing, material process. While engaging in the production of Ontologicalarchitectural axioms through the generative capacities of algorithmic / diagrammatic logics, our primary focus will be the relationship between time, machine learning and architecture. Finding the constitutive difference between the two in time, and iteration more so than in form. Ontological Formation is an investigation in the processes of becoming, and as such, it fuses the territories of material and computation into a unified phase space. Ontological methodology: The studio will be individual projects. The methodology consists of three feedback layers: the material composites, generative digital models and large-scale physical models. The concept of intelligent or multi-formed materials will be explored with a series of material/computational/electronic composites . The generative digital models should be a method of exploration testing the limits of the generative diagram in order to make specific spaces of learning. The large-scale physical model component will be used as a different method of exploring, experimenting, generating architectural forms with great detail. The studio thesis will venture into an investigation that is extremely sensitive to existing models of self-organization in material, cognition and physical computational systems. With the deployment of non-linear computational design methodologies this studio seeks explore new singularities in the extended territory of contemporary architectural production. Our studio will start with reconsidering the the space of learning and will re-examine and re-conceptualize a new type of learning in relationship to the typology of the Middle School. While engaging in the production of ontological architectural axioms through the generative capacities of algorithms, one focus will be the relationship between computation and learning.
Danielle Williems, critic Joseph Giampietro, co-teacher
a. Benjamin Smithers b. Bianca Hernandez c. Jack Weinfeld
a
a b
c
Master of Architecture | Third Semester
035
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Intimate Clouds: Looking for the Social in Brooklyn’s Vertical Sphere Downtown Brooklyn Labeled the fastest growing urban district in America, Downtown Brooklyn is a perfect proxy for where American urbanism might be heading. High-rise luxury condos filled with short-term leases rising amidst an outdoor retail street that balances outlet stores, luxury flagships and sicount retailers catering to minorities might be the doppelganger for the post-digital city. Out studio started with the problematic of a technological regime that 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.” Over the course of this semester we explored the question of whether a tower in the city ameliorates or exacerbates the twin paradox of having a modest circumspection in an unprecedentedly spacious world by studying situations of compression, extension, congestion and solitude in a tower in downtown Brooklyn. Our hypothesis being that there, in fact, exists a relationship between the imagined space of our cyber communities and the physical space of our cities. We studied the formal amalgams that make these urban phenomena possible by investing both the district and the tower. Our research focused on the mutuality between clustering tendencies and the architectural technoogies that enable these assemblies to emerge.
Carlos Arnaiz, critic Christine Ostermie, co-teacher
a. Brett Rappaport b. James Parker Wilson c. Naomi Ng
a b
b a
c
Master of Architecture | Third Semester
037
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Shared Live-Work Hybrid Downtown, 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 spring board 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 varying agendas. In this light, we rejected a singular digital model defining “the essence” of the project but rather worked through various modes of representations (physical, digital, 2D and 3D) at different scales to build the projects scene by scene as episodic assemblies. The studio explored a Shared Live-Work Hybrid Tower project in Downtown Brooklyn, incorporating variations of micro units. The Tower incorporated units for single/group of individuals and small families. It was up to the 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 rigorously investigated.
Kutan Ayata, critic Joseph Giampietro, co-teacher
a. Khue Trinh b. Mara Lookabaugh c. Sophia Kountakis
a
a b
c
Master of Architecture | Third Semester
039
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Hybrid High Rise Downtown Brooklyn The studio explores the design of alternative urban living realm and the relocation of public space with relation to density and connectivity at various scales. With an urban densification and increased competition for land, cities become more vertical and skyscrapers have an efficient way to expand ground spaces. Simultaneously, the need for dense urban dwelling increases along with the quest for individuality within a collective context. New typologies and programs such as Live/Work allow new investigation of the section and circulation mechanism to produce a new type of tower and the integration of public spaces at different scales. Organization, scale as well as envelope challenge the systemic and repetitive patterns often associated with high rise housing. The site located downtown Brooklyn has seen an explosion of new high rise and diverse programs. From urban to domestic scale, we investigated infrstructural, programmatic and spatial vertical cores as well as the potential interstitial spaces and variations within regular patterns. Located simultaneously at the scale of the city, building or dwelling, the reassignment of public spaces in a highly rational program offers possible redundancies and opportunities to rethink individual and collective living patterns.
Stephanie Bayard, critic Christina Ostermier, co-teacher
a. Sonya Feinstein b. David Niven c. Aditya Ashok Mokha
a
a b
c
Master of Architecture | Third Semester
041
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Brooklyn Mash-Up Downtown, Brooklyn To be sure, we need history. But we need it in a manner different from the way in which the spoilt idler in the garden of knowledge uses it, no matter how elegant he may look down on our coarse and graceless needs and distresses. That is, we need it for life and action, not for a comfortable turning away from life and action or merely for glossing over the egotistical life and the cowardly bad act. We wish to use history only insofar as it serves living. Friedrich Nietzsche “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life”, Untimely Meditations, 1874 Typological Mash-up This studio will use the notion of housing precedent not merely as a reference but as mash-up data for the design. The vast accumulation of available 2D and 3D digital material of “seminal” architectural housing projects and its open source availability will serve as a library of parts from which students will select “base material” to create their original project designs. They will be entirely free in the degree and manner in which this existing material is manifested in the project. The first session of the semester will include viewing and discussing a sampling of recent short-films and music videos that have been generated by using different mash-up techniques. Site Mash-up We will examine the site as a physical object that is open to manipulation but contains specific resistances. Students will be asked to make models and drawings of the site mashing geology, biology, infrastructure and architecture. Programmatic Mash-up The joint studio brief requires the combination of different types of housing units with “amenities” and an office contingent. Similar to the type and site mash-ups, the intention here is to help students develop a differentiated understanding of mash-up strategies as they pertain to a sensitive reading of contemporary lifestyles.
Sulan Kolatan, critic Arif Javed + Irem Gabbaroglu, co-teacher a a. Dian Luo b. Bhargav Gandhi
b a
b
Master of Architecture | Third Semester
043
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Denser Brooklyn Downtown, Brooklyn “The average population density of the U.S. is 87 people per square mile. The average population density of metropolitan areas (MSA) is 283 people per square mile; in New York City, the population density is 27,012 people per square mile.� By 2050, 89% of the U.S. population and 68% of the world population is projected to live in urban areas. It is an inevitable reality that cities have to densify rather than continue the urban sprawl. This raises immediate questions: How do you create livability in a dense city? How can a denser more vertical neighborhood work? These queries are the premise of the third semester mixed use studio. A downtown Brooklyn site in 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. A series of formal experiments and the development of a proto-architectural object explored through various design mediums initiated the design process. Through a circular process transitioning between drawings, digital modeling, fabrication mediums, collages and photographic representation the students derived form and material aesthetic of the tower structures. In establishing an internal matrix of circulation, living units and mixed use spaces the form was further interrogated and edited. Through the interior organization and scale the exterior aesthetic and material compositions were negotiated with the aim to comprehend both the interior spaces at a residential scale as well as the visual integration of a large vertical structure within a dense urban condition.
Erich Schoenenberger, critic Joseph Giampietro, co-teacher
a. Zhixian Song b. Haoyuan Wang c. Brandon Sanchez
a b
b c
a
c
Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester
045
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Unthought Known Studio Dumbo Waterfront, Brooklyn In this Waste-to-Energy-Recycling Center studio, we first discussed “unthought knowns�, a term coined by psychologist Christopher Bollas, which refers to things that we know at some deep level but remains inaccessible to our conscious thought. As New Yorkers, we have acquired patterns of living which are predicated on achieving and/or maintaining a constant state of comfort. In order to maintain out comfort, there are architectural, mechanical, and structural systems that serve out acoustic, material, and thermal desires. In conventional architectural manifestations, these systems are often buried under ground and hidden between the walls. As such, this studio thinks about the ways in which a new architecture can lay bare -make visible- the principles that often go unthought, and therefore allow them to be known through the design of a WERC facility.
Daisy Ames, critic a. Munirah AlReshoud + Madhurya Uday b. Dominic Fiallo + Brett Rappapor c. Mengna Li + Xiaoyi Zhang d. Irene Turlan + Dimitrios Zoulis + Dian Luo
a
b c
d
Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester
047
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Incinerator + Natatorium Manhattan New York generates 14 million tons of garbage per year, or 12,000 tons per day. Most is sent to landfills out of state. A 2009 study shows that burning waste is greener than landfills and generates more energy. Localizing waste management reduces pollution and cost from regional transportation networks. Layering public programs onto infrastructural programs increases awareness of waste issues, creates a public amenity, and anticipates the increased densification of the city, where scarcity of ground-level space will prompt public spaces to continue to stratify. Out studio proposes locating a waste-to-energy, recycling, and public pool facility in lower Manhattan in a flood zone site. The projects propose a new elevated ground that extends the new public layer produced by the High Line. The projects focus on incorporating subnatures such as gas, dirt, and debris, and the idea that architecture produces external ecological conditions. As the culminating studio in the core sequence, this course is fundamentally about integrating the technical, aesthetic and conceptual aspects of a project into a comprehensive, developed design proposal. 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 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 buildings will play and the way in which these roles are expressed or concealed Public pools and baths have been part of the New York City recreational landscape since the late 1800s, when state legislature was passed requiring public bathing facilities in cities of 50,000 people or more. Coupling these facilities with waste to energy allows the heat byproduct to be utilized in regulating the temperature of the water environments.
Alexandra Barker, critic
a. Jonathan Hamilton + Samantha Lee b. Jose Castaneda + Brandon Sanchez + Hsien Ting Huang c. Zhixian Song + Jiaming Zhang
a b
a a
c
Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester
049
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Powerhouse Village Manhattan, NY Site A fully operational UPS building occupies the site at the intersection of Houston and Washington Streets in Manhattan’s Soho district. In an effort to expand on existing built constructions, the studio proposes to retain the existent structure and employ it as the “site proper” for the new design proposal. together with the neighboring urban fabric and programs the structural and tectonic identity of the building is examined and serves as a resource against which the new massing and organizational strategies for the incineration and bathing programs are developed. Tectonic Merger A series of exercises extract tectonic elements of vastly different scales off of facades, infrastructural entities and design objects from the on-site building and around it, and follow their transformation into carefully crafted models. In a series of iterative transformations and “Tectonic Hybrid” is documented, examined and arrayed to generate a catalogue of geometric elements. This catalogue establishes design elements that relate the proposal to the extant building, while allowing to formulate an individual design language in volume and geometry. Program The intimacy of bathing gets confronted with the infrastructural necessities of a trash incinerator - a sharp juxtaposition of scale, privacy and affect. Each project adds elements of publicly accessible programs to the bathing and incinerator facilities. The large volumes needed for the incineration process are being mitigated through experiencefocused scales and line ups to draw the eye not exclusively with bulk, but with a series of gestures to unfold towards the neighborhood. The site’s industrial past will live on in the incinerator, its need for access and waste - a new infrastructural bastion in a vividly gentrifying neighborhood. Yet urbanity and city life will begin to flourish in purposefully crafted niches of accessible scale.
Gisela Baurmann, critic
a. Alyson Stein + Khue Trinh b. Mara Lookabaugh + Evelina Giedraityte c. Nabil Farhat + Leana Kalot + Christopher LI
a a
b c
a
Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester
051
GAUD CORE DESIGN
WERC (Waste to Energy Recycling Center) + Natatorium Brooklyn, NY The Integrated Design Studio, taught concurrently with the Integrated Building System course, emphasized the relationship between conceptual ideas and technical aspects of the projects through the integration of building systems ranging from the primary structural system to the finish materials, fully developing each project down to the level of architectural detailing. Students designed a small WERC combined with a natatorium in the Dumbo neighborhood in Brooklyn, a site that challenged the urban integration of the solutions proposed for a rapidly evolving part of the city. Currently New York City trash is shipped to landfills in different states, but this solution is not a viable long-term solution. The incineration of urban trash is a more sustainable alternative as it avoids the transportation of trash to distant locations, while producing energy that can be used at the site. The construction of an urban incinerator became an opportunity to integrate infrastructure within the city as well as exposing the reality of trash and recyling. The juxtaposition of a waste incinerator with a natatorium trash and cleanliness, filth and hygiene, hidden and exposed, industrial and healthy - is paradoxical, offering the possibility to investigate the uncanny characters of those two programs and their combination. The resulting hybridation allowed the study the adjacency of the production and transformation of trash, the ephemeral and the perpetual, as well as merging of the different users inherent to a community pool. The studio approached the analysis of permanent cycles, along with the production of cycles and their anomalies, as a conceptual tool to redefine the notion of spectacle not as sumnple a scene, but as an unusual phenomenon of the built environment.
Stephanie Bayard, critic
a. Alexis Dorko + Aditya Ashok Mokha b. Kevin Lo + Ruoting Qiu c. Allison Barker + Aline Theodorakis
a a
a b
c
Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester
053
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Balneum in Aerem (Bathing in the Air) - Urban Infrastructure & Leisure Manhattan, NY The questions asked for this studio is how can infrastructure be brought into the life of the city; how can its vitality be celebrated? Imbued with its own beauty, logics of structure, flows, orders, and tectonics. Instrastructure is necessary and therefore should be given place and space in the urban environment just as food, light and buildings are. Given its vitality the project for the semester is to design a new type of hybridized infrastructure which offers both its function and ablities for other forms of meeting, play, recreation, and education. The studio will design infrastructure for disposing of waste and converting it to energy and for recreation in the form of a communual thermal bathe. Infrastructure will create a new kind of infrastructure.
Dylan Baker-Rice, critic
a a. Sonya Feinstein + Sophia Koutakis b. Shamika Khare + Ayca Sert
a a
a
b
Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester
055
GAUD CORE DESIGN
Intergrated Studio - “Dirty to Clean” Brooklyn, NY At the studio’s collective project site on the Brooklyn Waterfront at DUMBO, project a replacement facility for the existing coal fired energy power plant with its lethal and toxic PCB contaminated eletrical distribution field with a waste recycling facility in a waterfront park that generates clean energy from local refuse. A secondary program will be the Natatorium, a community social space for leisure and sport. Consider the site as a possible extension of Brooklyn Bridge Park Development - examine the distribution of uses in the existing plan and project a future/ past park for the place. Consider nature of DUMBO, its dense volumns and narrow streets and alleys with an extensive frontage on the East River. Consider the environmental conditions present; solar exposures, winds and water, tides and current, the falling section of Jay and other streets leading to the water’s edge. Consider the environmental conditions present; solar exposures, winds and water, tides and current, the falling section of Jay and other streets leading to the water’s edge. Consider the history of the place; one of technological evolution, invention and obsolescence.
Henry Smith-Miller, critic
a. Bhargav Gandhi + Wankuan Yu b. Lucas Evan + James Wilson + Teng Cai c. Yining Du + Haoyuan Wang d. Nick Kabbani + David Niven
a b
b c
d
Sandra Nataf
David Erdman, critic | Hart Marlow, co-teacher
Master of Architecture
Year 03 offers students an opportunity to work closely with faculty through Directed Research electives and design studios to develop their individual project, and understanding of architecture and its multiplicity of related praxes. Students select most of their courses in this year and holistically chart their individual path according their Directed Research interests. Subjects and course offerings throughout this year may change annually with the goal of exposing students to a wide array of leading regional, national, and international designers and thinkers. Thomas Leeser Coordinator
FACULTY Benjamin Aranda Michael Bell David Erdman Karal Klein Sulan Kolatan Thomas Lesser
Jing Liu Peter Macapia William MacDonald Philip Parker Henry Smith-Miller
CO-TEACHER Jeffrey Anderson Joaquin Bonafiez Kevin Lamyuktseung Hart Marlow
Eric Nevala-Lee Ramon Pena Alican Taylan Kaysey Thomas
GAUD
DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIO
Master of Architecture | Fifth Semester
059
GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS
Cyborg Misprision Architecture Through the Eyes of Machine Brooklyn Navy Yards Though some are panicking that AI is eventually going to replace human judgment, the more likely scenario is that human judgement will simply be altered and modified by the presence of AI “partners.” Partners, perhaps, because the technology currently classified as AI does not comfortably fit our ideas of what a tool is. Because AI technologies seek to simulate our own capabilities, to say that AI is nothing but a tool would imply that we are also nothing but a tool. So, counter to this idea of AI being just a new kind of tool would have to be the premise that Ai is like us and therefore, potential collaborators. This studio is taking the gamble that a new kind of formalism might emerge from the incorporation of machine vision and machine learning. Using a new class of AI software for combining and seamlessly blending images ( convolutional neural networks), the studio will experiment with developing new architectural compositions and expressions that appear through an automated process of “seeing.” The underlying assumption of the studio is that architecture projects are inadequate when understood as mere applied research. The challenge of the architecture project is to engage and develope an architectural discourse. The value of an architecture project is determinded solely by its position within the larger conversation. Therefore, the problem of the studio is not one of figuring out how to make AI technology useful for designing buildings ( tool making), but instead, one of developing the discourse of how architecture’s recent fascination with theories of estrangement might be modified or reconsidered relative to new technologies of machine vision and machine learning. The studio will attempt to use the convolutional neural network (CNN) in multiple ways in the development of the architecture project. Although we wil begin the semester by becoming expert collaborators with this AI script, developing the images from which the studio will proceed from, we will constantly look for new wand unexpected opportunities for further collaboration as the semester progresses. Our initial CNN work will be developing images of architectural skins. Within the topic of the architectural skin is a difficult problem of simultaneously thinking about both representation and performance. The edge of the architectural object is the site of the facade (face) but is also the limit condition that largely determines architecture’s artificial environments. This difficult convergence of representation and performance in the design of the architectural skin will be the test bed of whatever novel formalism might emerge from the study of AI technologies in the studio. The program of the studio will be a blend of industrial and domestic programs. Karel Klein, critic Ramon Pena, co-teacher
a. Amir Mohebi Ashtiani b. Brandon Wetzel c. Elham Goodarzi
a b
c
a
Master of Architecture | Fifth Semester
061
GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS
Seeing Double or How to Understand the World with your Eyes closed 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. Increasingly void of meaning, the abundance of images promotes a progressively homogenized understanding of our environment. This studio will explore different strategies of visual culture throughout history and will selectively construct an architecture tied into aspects of cultural preferences or conventions. Students will focus on alternative Spatial strategies based on various historic references and will 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, 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 Lesser, critic Alican Taylan, co-teacher a a. Catherine Wilmes b. Mor Segal
a b
a
Master of Architecture | Fifth Semester
063
GAUD CORE DESIGN
House II 66 Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn This Pratt GAUD studio continues an ongoing exploration into the future of the House. The House today is conceptually destabilized under the increasing stresses of contemporary society – pressures of economy, identity, belonging, convenience. The challenge to imagine the domestic space of the future, is the challenge to reclaim the house from these outside forces. Where previously we investigated the House specifically through stresses between the individual and the collective – questions of privacy and community, for this iteration we look inward at the stresses between the individual and herself. In this moment, destabilized by unprecedented mobility, rituals of domesticity are outpaced by the quick smoothness of convenience and routine. This studio seeks to reclaim the self within this new reality by exploring alternative modes of domesticity – spaces of meaningful contradictions and productive ambiguities. The primary means of exploration are the close reading of 12 precedent projects - houses which introduce alternate narratives of domesticity. These are precedents which resist smoothness and complicate the routine, from Kazuo Shinohara’s Repeating Crevice House to the Villa Arpel in Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle. In addition to a thorough reading and documentation of the plans, sections, and spaces, students investigate the historical, cultural and technological contexts in which the works were formulated. From this study, students develop a lineage from which to design their own proposals. The site is a triangular lot on Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn – a triangular wedge site bounded by residential neighborhoods and the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. With the precedent house as historical context, the students propose a future domestic space framed by explorations in structures, atmospheres, and rituals.
Jing Liu, critic Kevin Lamyuktseung, co-teacher a. Wanlapa Koosakul b. Nathania Wijaya c. Elise Hoff d. Shulan Kuang
a b
c c
d
Master of Architecture | Fifth Semester
065
GAUD CORE DESIGN
CHIMERAs and their Transformations Medini, Malaysaia This new design research studio entitled, Urboretum 3 (Urban /Arboretum): Chimera 2 (Systemic Hybrids) explores the mutually beneficial interplays between urban, architectural, vegetal, agricultural, and aquatic cultures, in order, to test their associative capacities to establish their emergent co-generative agency. We are seeking concomitant and dynamically re-combinative advantage produced by these related agencies, and their mixed constituent elements. The objective is to propose new concepts of the urban/vegetal/ aquatic as continuously negotiated territory producing transformationally robust and resilient environments. The studio is investigating new formulations to interrogate the concept of ‘Forest City’. We propose an both an interpretation and involution of abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier’s pursuit, to both “look at the city as if it were a forest”, and inversely, our contribution, to look at the forest as if it were the city. The site for our speculative investigations is Medini on the Malaysian (‘Fringe’-like Southern Coasts) Peninsulas near Singapore (the split ‘Bi-Focal’ developed Island). We have elected to participate and use the competition project brief written by RMIT as the basis for our inquiry. Programmatically, the RMIT focuses development on Healthcare, Financial Services, Creative Design Industry, and Cultural Tourism can mix or in our case dynamically RE-mix with the current situation and circumstance. Our particular perspective on the competition brief is to propose how ideas of ‘growing an Chimerical city’ can reciprocally ‘build the rainforest’. Urboretum 3 Chimera 2, links to the (planned) super hi-speed Mag-Lev train from Kuala Lumpur to the west and the regional trains of Malaysia on its east. Cutting the travel time between Kuala Lumpor / Singapore to less than 3 hours. The, previously proposed floating monorail, MLurbH (Air, Land, and Sea) infrastructural system is comprised of a network of multi-modal transportation centers which in Urboretum 2 proposal linked student projects that integrated multi modal transportation systems with cultural institutions such as museums, research science centers. This ‘aqueduct-like’ structure levitates over the forest tree canopy, introducing the opportunity to develop an open-ended evolutionary notion of a ‘hover city’. These infrastructure / institution hubs are intended to be permanent catalysts for new urban and arboretum development.
William Macdonald, critic Arif Javed, co-teacher
a. Nathan Bataille b. Minjung Lee c. Kennedy Philips
a
b
b
a
c
Master of Architecture | Fifth Semester
067
GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS
Terra Icognita New York When Roman mapmakers drew a land area that no one had yet explored, they often labeled it “Terra Icognita” - that is, “Unknown Territory” - and the term continued to be used for centuries afterward. When Columbus and his successors first crossed the Atlantic, they entered upon terra incognita, a land that came to be called the “New World”. But the term is just as useful for mental and other explorations, in our case the realms of Architecture. Heinrich Harrer wrote in his “Seven years in Tibet” : “It is certainly a good thing that we did not know what lay before us. Had we had even a faint idea of it, we would certainly have turned back. We were setting out into terra incognita, marked only by blank spaces on the maps, magnetized by the ambition of the explorer. Using the Brooklyn Navy Yard and its associated East River waterfront, once known as “Wallabout Bay” as the site of our investigations, our program will include research of idealized realized and un-realized communities (human and non-human settlements), issues of mobilization and mass production (pre-fabrication and CNC production), architectures shaped by envitonment (extreme climates and off-earth), and issues of design methodology and representation.
Henry Smith-Miller, critic Alexander Cornhill, co-teacher
a. Wenze Chen b. Sandra Nataf c. Beste Aykut
a b
c c
c
Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester
069
GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS
Cross-Laminated Density Santiago, Chile Cross-Laminated Density explores a building type uniquely possible in the urban environments of Chile but applicable to other cities globally: the mass timber building. Chile is a leader in mass timber production, a constriction type that uses new growth forests to create large-scale timber components. Also referred to as Cross-Laminated Timer (CLT), the material is prized for its low-carbon footprint by the use of a renewable resource. The studio explored CLT’s scalar properties and imagined its vast potential to architecture. Students researched spatial techniques that guided issues such as assembly, connection, modularity, and proliferation of large-scale timber components. These explorations were deployed along sites in Santiago, testing how hyperdensity with mass timber can be achieved through a variety of use cases: from infill condition to free-standing medium-rise buildings to infrastructure. Chile with its burgeoning CLT industry is a fertile model for how other cities can explored cross-laminated density in the future. Santiago has been experiencing a steep population growth due to immigration, causing burst of growth. However, the speed of construction has exposed a lack of regulations and quality of life for the incoming population. The studio proposed models of development using CLT as a sustainable method of construction to curb the uncontrolled growth and envision a new hyperdensity for the city. The process started with the development of scaleless experiments, the “loose lattice”; a system exploring connectivity and a looseness to absorb change. As the next step, students “force fit” these scaleless studies with program and into a site. Having the constrains of the program and an academic understanding of site, the students went on the field trip to verify/defy their assumptions and discover new potentials. Returning with field knowledge and local feedback they generated a “tight fit” experiment that was their final project. These experiments had embedded in them detailed information about joints, modularity and proliferation, but with a built-in “looseness” to incorporate program and adjust to the site conditions.
Benjamin Aranda, critic Joaquin Bonafiez, co-teacher a a. Wenze Chen b. Haya Alnibari c. Nathan Bataile
a b
c
Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester
071
GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS
Ecstatic Weather- Encrypted City Long Island This studio explored architectural scenarios for housing and work on Long Island in the yearr 2030. Each student proposed architecture for an imminent future on Long Island not a future that was far off, utopian, or extraordinary, but one that took into account the era of ubiquitous data exchange and fast emerging paradigm of renewable energy in buildings and mobility which is on the cusp of overtaking everyday life. The architectures proposed in this studio were relatively small-scale but imagined deeply interconnected economic, infrastructural, and social models on the island. While Long Island’s current urbanization encapsulates a half-century of new technologies and ways of living, every aspect of this scenario is currently under threat of revision as housing stocks age and architectural prototypes embodies on the island become outdated. If the suburban matrix of home, retail, and workspaces endemic to Long Island’s urbanization further collapses into home/work and E-commerce, domestic spaces, workspaces, and retail spaces have begun to architecturally dissolve. Will workspaces become more private if not quasi-autonomous? Does work become less reliant on place and the geographic locations that historically drove industry? Does housing continoues to tether itself to industry and large cities? Given these questions, our studio focused on creating updated architectural prototypes that forecast the future redevelopment of Long Island. Four scenarios were proposed: a future in which many forms of work have become obsolete and Long Islanders increasingly rely on virtual forms of interconnection, productivity, and entertainment; a future in which transit, work, and domesticity have blurred together in a fully on-demand economy; a future in which community is formed through coupling with a local energy and resource management grid; and a future in which residnets build defenses around their homes to witness rather than flee from the imminent destructive effects of climate change on the island.
Michael Bell, critic Jeffrey Anderson, co-teacher a. Beste Aykut b. Thomas Diorio c. Colin DaPonte d. Timothy Leccese
a b
c c
d
Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester
073
GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS
Space Object: Speculations on Urban Interiority Hong Kong Density is the way a number of major global cities (like Hong Kong) are addressing issues of the environment. Questions of that future dense city’s inhabitability are where design and architecture play a role in issues of climate change. Interiority is a quality of density and concept of increasing importance to architects in urban centers today. In the not-so-distant future, cities will have to consider (if they are not already) how to adapt and alter existing structures, how to grow inward and to reconfigure their interior. This studio investigated the concept of “Space Objects:” Intensely cohesive urban void-spaces that are not (necessarily) inside a building enclosure. Students worked at multiple scales and within the context of the highly concentrated urbanism of Hong Kong and its public housing estates. The focus of the studio was to “Alter” existing estates and (through the development of space objects) “Re-Originate” the identity and urban vitality of the site(s). The studio was modeling-intensive and photographically oriented. Students traveled to Hong Kong where visits to public housing estates, to related projects, and a series of workshops and exchanges occurred with HKU faculty and where students interfaced with various public housing authority senior staff members and stakeholders.
David Erdman, critic Hart Marlow, co-teacher
a. Kenith Mak b. Anthony Mull c. Mor Segal
a a
b b
c
Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester
075
GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS
The Barcelona Pavilion Reloaded Cap De Creus, Costa Brava, Spain The studio will take the presence of the remix as a productive opportunity to “reload” The Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe with the intent to make it into new work. Specifically, we will hone in on what is called the “reflective remix” – the creative reinterpretation of single-source material often with quite significant departure from the original. Remix Traditionally, architects have used typological precedents for inspiration. Due to both copyright as well as prevalent social consensus literal copying was seen as illegal and unethical. The situation, both legally and ethically, is changing as we move toward so-called configurable cultures. These kinds of creative cultures are based on the notion of remix, and are driven as much by changing social attitudes as by digital technologies (3D archiving, open source, copy-paste…). The studio will use a reflective remix mode –a term used to describe the creative reinterpretation of single-source material often with quite significant departure from the original. Picturesque Our goal is to take Constant’s speculation regarding the “repressed role of The Picturesque” in the Barcelona Pavilion to the next step. Specifically, we will focus on two issues: First, we will hack into the formal implications of intense irregularity, roughness and complexity as defining qualities of the picturesque. Second, we will remix the picturesque relation between human and nature, one of ambivalence between immersion and distance, in a contemporary manner. Fractal Geometry is closely linked to formal language. Just as Euclidean geometry has exceedingly defined the language of Modernist architecture, fractal geometry defines natural objects with remarkable consistency. Fractal objects invariably appear rough, irregular and discontinuous. Mandelbrot distinguishes between two ways of approaching fractals: as poetry or prose. The studio will take care to consider the boundaries between these two porous to allow for the possibility of both.
Sulan Kolatan, critic Robert Cervellione, co-teacher a a. Amir Mohebi Ashtiani b. Elham Goodarzi
a a
b
Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester
077
GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS
Quasi-Movement or Hold Your Pose while I Take a Picture Movement is one of the two main features of Baroque architecture according to Heinrich Wolfflin. As buildings are static and usually bigger than us, we see them move very slowly as we walk around them. But the way we design them also affects our perception of movement. While during the high-renaissance, regularity and harmony were virtues, the Baroque, being full of paradoxes, introduced movement in composition. Starting with facadism, this interest in movement slowly led to bending plans and dynamic tectonic agencies. Following the first semester studio that was about static vision, we are interested this semester in motion. But just a tiny bit of it. We look at the introduction of movement in static compositions. To do that, lenticular prints appears as a medium of choice. Static as objects, they reveal movement as one moves around them.
Thomas Leeser, critic Alican Taylan, co-teacher a. Aslihan Avci Aksap b. Minjung Lee c. Nathania Wijaya d. Chase Kaars-Sypesteyn e. Elise Hoff
a b
c c
d
e
Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester
079
GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS
Living Just Enough (for the City): Architecture, Law, and Space This studio is a platform for research in architecture and the city that examines justice 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 reorganize the architecture as a spatial problematic through the function of listening that is internal to the structural functions of juridical procedure in the Western tradition while exposing it to multiple non-Western concepts of rights and jurisprudence. Justice, like architectural programs, is a problem of distribution, as in, who has access to what and under what conditions. In order to filter this problem, we considered how architecture might engage the problem of sound rather than spectacle: how would an architecture in this particular context emphasize listening and how might sound relate the building to the city as a question of listening to the city? Students developed independent research for designing a juridical facility that was specific to a particular international or urban context, while collaborating on methods of research around discourse in politics, law, and the space of the city by asking, what does the city look like through the lenses of law? This year students explored projects based on Women’s Rights (Santo Domingo, DR), military and police tribunals in Iguala, Mexico, Juvenile Justice (Manila, Philippines); Eminent Domain (International); Universal Healthcare (Bangkok, Thailand), Community Justice Center (Los Angeles, CA), Legal Pluralism and Indigenous Rights (Winnipeg, Canada), Education and Law (Southern Provinces, Malaysia), Education Rights for Informal Settlements (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), The Right to Protest (Paris, France), Law and Mental Health Care(Tokyo, Japan), and the Trandition from British Colonial Law to Mainland Chinese Law in Hong Kong. In addition to attending a U.S., Supreme Court hearing on Flowers v. Mississippi, which centered on the question of race and the status impartial juries, the studio hosted a panel on immigration lawy and the city titled Dialogues on Justice: Borders, Boundaries, and Immigration in conjunction with the Department of Humanities and Media Studies and the probono legal firm Rapid Defense Network.
Peter Macapia, critic Eric Nevala-Lee, co-teacher a. Yihan Wang b. Kennedy Philips c. Zhizhong Deng d. Yihan Wang
a
b c
d
Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester
081
GAUD DIRECTED RESEARCH STUDIOS
SPEED: Museum & Time Machines The imperatives hurry up and slow down run through everyday events; speed, its regulation, pursuit, and negation acts as a motive force in modern life, media and architecture. These material dynamics in architecture are not confined to the movements of human traffic but are seen as forms of material change, resonance, and sympathies with wildly different aligned and mis-aligned, in-sync and out-ofsync event objects. A museum program performs as a time machine shifting the speeds of exposure, decay, and consumption of artifacts and locating them in accelerated or slowed scenarios; specifically, the natural history museum and the museum of contemporary art provide us with distinct attitudes of objects, ecologies, and temporalities. A brief history of speed in architecture and modern times would begin prior to the mechanically induced exhilaration in the futurists’ car becoming expression, loss of control and fear; and move on to rapid assembly line production of industrial objects; to the airplane’s velocity affording areal points of view, free navigation and global shrinkage; to glass’s variation of light’s speed, and on to the contemporary computational speed of digital communications, animation, and machine learning. It would extend toward the slowness of cooking at absolute zero and toward warp drive travel, across the range of human action in communications and competition, war and romance and into processes of accelerated global change. We could propose that the twentieth century saw its prevailing human measure change from the speed of the horse to the speed of light. But our situation is more thick than one measure, our current era is consistently fraught with conflicts and coincidence of its multiple speeds, multiple material changes occurring at wildly divergent perceptible and concealed speeds. The architectural proposals research the multiple speeds of concrete experiments in material instances, trajectories of change and their coincidence. Projects join specific biological, geological, machinic versions of speed and propose additions to the New Museum and the American Museum of Natural History, they speculate on the material, qualitative and social events of acceleration.
Philip Parker, critic Kaysey Thomas, co-teacher
a. Catherine Wilmes b. Francisco Moreno Gallegos c. Tal Friedland
a
b b
c
Yunling Xie, Hanyang Zhou, Xiaoyu Bai Ariane Lourie Harrison, critic
Master of Science in Architecture
The directed research conducted in the MS ARCH program addresses the reformulation of Architectural Mediums: an area of research that explores how architectural design can engage multiple senses via the media and mediums that interact with the built environment. The program centers on architecture as the design of “live experience,” engaging concepts and design methods ranging from architecture to object design, robotics, branding, material visualization, and environmental graphics. The three-term post-professional MSARCH program guides studetns through a comprehensive architectural project, which culminates in large-scale model for an architectural design. The Spring 2019 studio represents culminating directed research studio: sections were taught by Ariane Lourie Harrison and Nathan Hume with co-teachers Jeffrey Anderson and Brian Ringley. This studio work developed design foundations established in the Fall 2018 term with emphases on fabrication, aught by Jonas Coersmeier with Brian Ringley as a co-teacher, and by Micm McConnel with Jeffrey Anderson as a co-teacher. Students initiated their design research in the summer of 2018 with fabrication intensive studios taught by Nathan Hume, Jason Vignieri-Beane and Erich Schoenenberger. During the 2018-19 session, the MS ARCH program developed its programmatic focus from a new studio partner: the innovative co-working and real estate firm, WeWork. One of WeWork’s recent acquisitions at 14th street and 7th Avenue, located near Pratt’s Manhattan campus, served as the test-site for speculative architectural interventions for the workspace. The projects interrogate co-working culture, the ethos of the open floor plate, and the fluid timeframs of live-work. The issue of contemporary office space in the city and the accretion of lifestyle programs in the architecture is a disciplinary problem, yet one that is vulnerable to the cliches of shiny happy workers in spaces patinaed with a veneer of hipster creatives. What we observe is that rather than installing themselves on sunny daylit open workspaces, WeWorkers jostle for the use of private phoneboths, recalling the importance of private space. Several themes emerge: 1. the interiority of the amenity-rich office prompts the concomitant internalization of “nature” as a synthetic wilderness; 2. novel aesthetic effects that we could relate to a technological sublime are created by allying robotic fabrication and waste recycling into novel construction materials; and 3. the public nature of hot-desking and open floorplates heighten the appeal of spaces that have visual privacy, sonic insulation, and wellness-oriented materialities including plants, water and enriched oxygen. The directed research books produced by our MS ARCH program graduates collectively and individually demonstrate the variety and richness of architectural mediums and live experiences in response to the ethos and individually demonstrate the variety and richness of architectural mediums and live experiences in response to the ethos and aesthetics of the contemporary workspace. Ariane Lourie Harrison, Coordinator
FACULTY Jonas Coersmier Ariane Lourie Harrison Nate Hume
Mick Mcconnel Erich Scheonenberger Jason Vigneri-Beane
CO-TEACHER Jeffrey Anderson
Brian Ringley
GAUD
DESIGN STUDIO
Master of Science in Architecture | First Semester
085
GAUD DESIGN STUDIOS
Introduction to Media and Methods This is the first of three sequential studios. The course introduces incoming post-professional students to a selective yet vital range of digital, physcial and graphic media through a series of architectural design exercises and speculations. A serie of sequential, short projects allow students to become familiar with different media-driven design approaches rangign from a focus on architectural fabrication to architectural visualization. The course intends to expose students to the design methods and discourses surrounding architectural mediums as well as introduce them to the representational logics of innovation in contemporary architecture.
Nate Hume, critic Erich Schonenberger, critic Jason Vigneri-Beane, critic a. Prithvi Goel b. Wen Chun Wang c. Kaiwen Tang d. Yu Chun Chen
a
b c
d
Master of Science in Architecture | Second Semester
Exquisite Corpses - Architectural Bodies The studio takes a material approach to the post-digital project in current architectural discourse. It ascribes design intelligence to both, the (building) material itself and the universal (fabrication) machine that acts upon it- the robot. The studio encourages deep material explorations in search of organizational and aesthetic principles; and it encourages the full participation of the machine in the design process. Robots here are not reduced to mere manufacturing laborers, but they, along with the their evolving drivers and routines, are invited to enter into a ‘creative’ dialogue with the human and material. The studio will allow for moments of poetic immersion into this relationship, choreographing a dance between the exquisite architectural artifact and its living human and robotic creators. For the most part however, the studio will be dancing through vast technical resistances in the puruit of architectural design research and innovation. Conceptually the studio takes a non-anthropocentric approach and suggests that we can fully move from the digital project only by dissolving the deep-seated idea that human-machine-material interactions are always hierarchical. Exquisite Corpse is a method of collaborative art production invented by the surrealists in the early 20th century. In a sequential routine each participant adds to an assembly of either words or images and contributes to an unpredictable composite. This chance-based operation was of particular interest to surrealists as it disrupts the conscious mind’s attachment to order. We find in the method’s unpredictability a unique potential to bridge the alleged divide between two design methods, Generative Design and Compositional Design. Since the advent of algorithmic routines in the design process, architectural effects of the generative method have been widely privileged over compositional qualities, and the two have been considered incompatible. Compositional qualities have been associated with a higher degree of direct, top down engagement by the designer, operating at the level of phenotypical expression, while generative qualities have been seen as the result of operations at the scripted substrate, the genotype of the design engine. Exquisite Corpses - Architectural Bodies aims at disrupting these categories by engaging the universal machine, not in some parametric optimization routines, but in an act of bold architectural composition.
Jonas Coersmeir, critic Brian Ringley,co-teacher a a. Mingyu Park + Hyojin Seok
a
087
GAUD DESIGN STUDIO
Testing Mediums and Methods The second of three studios, this course allows students an opportunity to choose a series of methods and media, articulating an area of focus and testing for their design research. The studio emphasizes the disciplinary aspects of architectural mediums, their design methods and innovative outputs that can range from proto-architectures to project proposals. As the middle studio in the MSARCH studio sequence, this course acts as both an extension of the design research begun in Design studio 1 and a transition to potential applications that will culminate in Design Studio 3. Therefore, it will begin by deepening selected avenues of disciplinary design research and pivot toward possible applications in prototypes and proto-architectures. The course offers options to focus on advanced design methods of architectural visualization and architectural fabrication ( or those in between) through a full semester trajectory from research to design. This studio will develop principles and possibilities around architectural mediums, architectural design mediums and their cross-catalytic relationships. In this case, the studio will present students with the question of the physical, the virtual and the augmented, By exploring these three categories of mediated architecture, students will be exposed to the problems and potentials of the confusions, collapses and creative capacities around an architecture that is simultaneously physical, virtual and augmented. Among the architectural conundrums to be tested are the limits of the physical, the expansiveness of the virtual and the diversity of the argumented wherein students may explore hybridications from architecture and live media to physical modeling and virtual modeling. What is more, student will be able to explore the multiple identities and semi-autonomy of an architecture that is simultaneously integrated and disintegrated as well as architectures of time and their complex and differential rates of change. Students will build on the media experiments of the summer design studio with some physicality yet far advance on the electronic media aspects of the question of architectural mediums. In addition, students will have an opportunity to test these ideas and operations in a fullyfledged near-future architectural proposal with discourse, form, space, context, program and, as a catalyst, virtual media that wholly or partially comprises the proposal itself.
Mick Mcconnel, critic Jeffrey Anderson, co-teacher
a. Ana Lucia Villanueva Meza b. Prithvi Goel c. Nishtha Kakadia
a b
c
Master of Science in Architecture | Third Semester
089
GAUD THESIS DESIGN STUDIO
Hyper-Dencified Workpods Manhattan, New York Sharing space and densification become one of the major issues for present day since workspace has continuously developed to get efficiency and optimization. We push this situation to more density of office space and exaggerate this compressed workplace. By reconfiguration of the existing building in Manhattan, we develop the capsule or pod space for working. As our era enters the Anthropocene and Cloud data storage system world, we need to redefine our idea and relationship with nature. In our project, we guess there are lots of heat from computers and servers. By using that, we can create a new type of artifice. This allows us to get a change to rethink the relationship between workplace and environmental device. To do so, our first strategy is by cutting out existing floors to develop space for the rock and surround artificially controlled environment plates which are a restricted area for people. Second, the plumbing system combines with the capsule to give out heat which can in turn help to create an environment for the desert by connecting the plates. More than 600 customized capsules give nature a lot of space in the building, and we can finally create an opportunity to share our thoughts about the future of the global environment by making a system to work with nature. Evolution of the rock forms a physical structure around the nature occupied territory exploring the need in providing space for the nature to grow, while the inside of the rock being packed with capsules of work stations.
Mingyu Park and Niyas Moidu with Nathan Hume
Master of Science in Architecture | Third Semester
091
GAUD THESIS DESIGN STUDIOS
Reworking WeWork Manhattan, New York In partnership with WeWork, the MS Arch program is proposing a multi-scalar intervention into a new WeWork building located at 154 West 14th Street next to Pratt Manhattan and located above a subway hub at a dense and active intersection of the city. The studio builds on and contributes to WeWork’s data-rich environment by producing new architectural systems and products at a scale large enough to test and speculate on their perceptual and experiential effects. WeWork’s culture of data collection is significant in the Anthropocene period, a new geological age in which human activity is acknowledged as the most powerful evolutionary force. If architecture is no longer the province of humans only, but can today engage non-humans – from animals to machines – then we must confront how little we know about the nonhumans in our midst. Yet today sensors and endoscopic cameras give us views literally into these nonhuman worlds, and research allying with machines, especially using machinelearning systems, can produce important new data sets on non human life. Can we harness WeWork’s data collection culture to develop new programs for architecture?
Hanyang Zhou, Yunling Xie and Xiaoyu Bai with Ariane Lourie Harrison
Master of Science in Architecture | Third Semester
093
GAUD THESIS DESIGN STUDIOS
Urban Geode Manhattan, New York In partnership with WeWork, the MS Arch program is proposing a multi-scalar intervention into a new WeWork building located at 154 West 14th Street next to Pratt Manhattan and located above a subway hub at a dense and active intersection of the city. The studio builds on and contributes to WeWork’s data-rich environment by producing new architectural systems and products at a scale large enough to test and speculate on their perceptual and experiential effects. This project comments on the naturalization of the workplace (office-park, corporate campus) and suggests that the wilderness within the office is constructed from a mix of materialities: concrete and digital. The darkness is intentional based on the interest in the older imaginations of New York City in film noir, Gotham comics and in the idea that something as ancient as bedrock could link the contemporary office space to the urban community. The Cast concrete outer shell retains the mood and darkness of these urban moments, the geode brings the shadow or darkness of these older aspects of NYC into the bright wework office space. In addition to producing a kind of transience of perception, this doubled digital screen offers way-finding where sensors glow in the outer walls along the ramp and controllers in the trench around the inner screen create a glowing boundary. The different sets of date can be experience through spaces where the dot matrix is experienced while using the ramp and the point cloud projections is perceived through the floor above. Then, the Urban Geode proposes two materialities in tension: in concrete an artificial archaic, an artificial bedrock, and in the digital screen a repository of digital presences, the digital ghosts.
Anushree Patel + Siramon Suvichanvorasin with Ariane Lourie Harrison
Collective
Jonas Coersmeier, critic
DESIGN STUDIO
GAUD
Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design
What is Urban Design? Urban Design, perhaps the most ambiguous of all design disciplines, covers a spectrum of issues that are be too broad to be framed disciplinarily. The field of Urban Design encompasses architecture, landscape and city planning, as well as aspects of policy making and real estate development. It is concerned with architectural form in the urban context, the relationship between buildings, infrastructures, the spaces within and the comprehensive urban fabric they define. These aspects are often understood as mere spatio-material expressions of the city’s actual substrate of cultural, social, economic and political conditions, which expands the field well into the arena of the humanities. At Pratt GAUD we take the position that Urban Design is primarily a Design discipline and distinct from fields exclusively concerned with the socio-political and economic forces of the city. Design creates cultural content that engages various stakeholders and stimulates the public discourse. It is in this way that Urban Design serves the community and informs policy makers, developers, and other interest groups, yet it does not derive legitimacy by borrowing their respective narratives. It is concerned with the architectural qualities of urbanity itself. The design material presented here is produced by a diverse, international group of young designers, and it is meant to provoke discussion. While the work is highly speculative, and in some cases embedded in fictional scenarios, it is invested in very real and pressing matters of our time, such as Urbanization, Densification, and the rise in sea level caused by Global Warming. Urbanization
Urbanization is vast. It will add 2.5 billion people to the urban population by the middle of the century, when two-thirds of the global population will live in cities1. The number of megacities -metropolitan areas with a population of more than ten million - has more than doubled over the last two decades and New York City, the largest in the United States, is our living laboratory. Urbanization is a driver of the major challenges we face in society - everything from global warming to questions of health, pollution and disease. It is a global phenomenon that is not tangible, exceeds all human scales and defies analytic comprehension.
Global Warming
Over the past half-century global warming – the result of human activity on Earth’s surface –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, 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.
Densification
It is well known that massive population increases can no longer be supported by sprawling cities. If current trends in population density continue, by 2030 the global urban land cover will triple, inducing severe global biodiversity and vegetation carbon losses2. Cities must grow inward, not just for ecological sustainability, but for socio-spatial 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 the volumetric exploitation of the city3. 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.
Jonas Coersmeier, coordinator
FACULTY
CO-TEACHER
Jonas Coersmeier Ferda Kotalan Oliver Schaper
Emilija Landsbergis
Master of Science in Architecture + Urban Design | First Semester
097
GAUD DESIGN STUDIO
A City in a Building Speculations on New Urban Types in the Era of Densification
The inaugural UD studio “A City in a Building” takes on the problem of densification through experimental and speculative means. This studio does not operate on an actual site or address a specific program. Rather, the focus lies on the generation of new urban types through techniques of collaging, layering, extrusion, subtraction, and sectioning. The resulting architectural objects will look mostly “inward” rather than “outward”. As such, the goal is not to think urbanism through external connectivity or contextual relations, but rather through a rigorous and radical inversion of the city’s qualities into a single volume. The compression of city in building has a long tradition in representational schemes of New York. What appears to be a fictional account best suited for cartoons, movies, and other imaginary narratives, has in fact significantly (in)formed our collective ideas of what constitutes a “modern” city. Fictions 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 real-world impact. Architectural fictions are thus a powerful tool to make and remake the realities we actually inhabit. The imaginary and the abstract are necessary protocols through which reality minifests itself. Student began their project by carefully selecting plans of existing buildings, infrastructure, and city portions. In this phase a deeper disciplinary understanding of existing types (urban & architectural) is developed. By drawing and collaging these plans in new ways, the students created typological hybrids, which blend together elements from diverse scales and organizational potentialities and developed further into 3D. In a final phase, these urban objects assume material perforamances (color, texture, etc.) and are being evaluated in regards to their asthetic qualities.
Ferda Kolatan, critic
a a. Riya Sinha b. Nikhil Shama
a
b
Master of Science in Architecture + Urban Design | Second Semester
099
GAUD DESIGN STUDIO
The City and Its Context Cities worldwide face pressing challenges related to unprecedented urban population growth, constraints on environmental resources and disruptions caused by rapid technological change and increasingly unpredictable climate patterns. Density and the compactness of cities, balanced with regional carrying capacity, can help absorb urban migration, reduce environmental impact, and create economic opportunities. This studio explores the qualitative dimensions and interconnectedness of these challenges. It aims to investigate new urban models and a spatial syntax around the idea of joinery between urban components in new and existing settings and at a scale somewhere between buildings, blocks and neighborhoods, that support increasing density in existing cities. Students explore what it means to work contextually, create contemporary programs, urban “Interiors”, and a masterplan using a Brooklyn neighborhood as an urbanism laboratory. The studio’s central question is about the future form of cities and the parameters that drive urban design in a world in which disciplinary boundaries are shifting and where design will be associated with much more than the creation of space to include the ideation, creation, and maintenance of the complex systems underlying our contemporary economy and society.
Oliver Schaper, critic Emilija Landsbergis, co-teacher
a. Nikhil Sharma b. Harsh Anil Shah c. Yifei Li
a
b c
c
Master of Science in Architecture + Urban Design | Third Semester Culmination Project
101
GAUD CULMINATION DESIGN STUDIOS
A Scenario: Verticality in Urban Individuation Navy Yard, Brooklyn “There is an opposition between the self-centered monism of substantialist thought and the bipolarity of the hylomorphic scheme. But the two opposed ways share something in common: in both cases, there is the assumption that we can discover a principle of individuation that exists prior to individuation itself that can explain, produce and direct individuation. From the already constituted and given individual they strive to reconstruct the conditions of its existence.” The Genesis of the Individual Gilbert Simondon Certain Priciples guide urbanization in a global situation. While general principles couldn’t meet every local condition without any adaption. Thus local areas enjoy genuine freedom to adapt into diverse urban individuals and tell themselves different from each other when it comes to various local conditions. For any metropolis, there is a common pursuit for maximum density, while it sill couldn’t outgrow its territories limitlessly. Veryticality becomes a top choice for urban development. This project develops one speculative urban individual discussing certain situations when the guiding principles of urbanization adjusts to form a hyper densified community. Material experimentation and fabrication is worked throughout the whole project. Tranlsation between the physical and digital model is the primary method of design process in order to learn from emergent material and tectonic effects. The larger project proposal, which is based on multiple kinds of urban individuation-rather than urban ‘masterplan’- gets localized and contextualized through the models’ material effects.
Yifei Li with Jonas Coersmeier, critic Emilija Landsbergis, co-teacher
Master of Science in Architecture + Urban Design | Third Semester Culmination Project
103
GAUD CULMINATION DESIGN STUDIOS
Urban Probe: Archipelago Brooklyn Navy Yards Archipelago tests a form of urbanism that works towards restructuring density at the edge in vulnerable urban assemblages like New York. The volumes formed by symbiotic bonds between programs and resiliency conceive the neighborhood as engineered landforms expressed in the anatomy of city parts. The Urban Probe tests a piece of this territorial constellation, contextualizing within the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The strategy disassembles the planar rigidity of the grid into an assembly of vertical building blocks or joints. Material Intelligence provides a logic of blurred edges and volumns suggesting a mixed-use strategy of the Urban Joinery. The joints form a spinal network of functions and infrastructure that sustain the needs of the future. The weave is the circulatory connective fabric that conforms to the heterogeneous stacking. The periodic stepping forms circulatory amphitheaters in the framework of vertical manufacturing spaces, residences, and office spaces. The open seams and cavities push public interface vertically offering multilevel podiums and atrium spaces that internalizes parts of the tower. The tectonic of an industrial apparatus aggressively erodes the volumes transforming a negotiation. The probes are rooted in the ground, responding to resiliency in the formation of landformds with shared infrastructure. Water treatment chambers supply and generate energy networking implying a new shared networkd that transforms the neighborhood. The replicable model of a naunced mixeduse development envisions testing radical ways of forming relationships with the context beyond the ground plane.
Harsh Shah with Jonas Coersmeier, critic Emilija Landsbergis, co-teacher
Master of Science in Architecture + Urban Design | Third Semester Culmination Project
105
GAUD CULMINATION DESIGN STUDIOS
Urban Straits Brooklyn Navy Yards The project takes on the theme of resilience in a dense urban context and speculates on the future of waterfront cities by blurring the boundaries between the natural water ecosystems and the hardware of the city, by creating a ‘new kind of nature’ to deal with the ever-evolving problem of global warming and rapid urbanisation. The project highlights the idea of a collective memory of the water as a philosophy for the creation of a constructed floodable edge to the future scenario of sea-level rise. Water is a major factor driving the aesthetic of both the city and the building. The city has embraced the flood from its edges and makes water both a horizontal and vertical driver formulating the need for a new kind of ‘natural’ one that seeps into its constructed sub-terrain and grows steadily upwards. The edge takes on the values of collective memory a philosophy dealing with a culture of remembering nature of being closer to it and creating scenarios where constructed wetlands interplay with drainage systems and recreational parks that establish human activity, while blurring the coundary between the natural and synthetic ecosystems. The city’s land use and demographics which was once solely controlled at a planar the scale is now further iterated in sectional qualities as commercial sectors are planned vertically along corridors of transit and vertical connectivity had taken over the way people commute into a series of the vertical public to semi-public transitions. The sub-terrain which was once mysterious tunnel systems of subways has opened into avenues of commuter pathways and place of everchanging commerce at the edge of the city. The people no longer fear the dark rising flood, the city embraces it and a peculiar hybrid has emerged weaving an aesthetic correlating both technology and ecology.
Sindhura Vanamamlai with Jonas Coersmeier, critic Emilija Landsbergis, co-teacher
Architectural Mediums I Exhibition
Master of Architecture GAUD
ARCHITECTURAL MEDIUMS 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 architecture is explored.
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. Medium 1 and Medium 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 concept, Mediums 3 allows students to focus on 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 Advance Curriculum and Studies. Hart Marlow, coordinator
FACULTY Robert Cervellione Joseph Giampietro Hart Marlow Ben Martinson
Christina Ostermier Danil Nagy Brian Ringley Olivia Vien
Master of Architecture | Architectural Mediums
109
GAUD ARCHITECTURAL MEDIUMS
Architectural Mediums I Architectural Mediums 1 emphasizes the integrated use of drawing and modeling as a representational component of architectural communication. Students are introduced to architectural representation through photographing and analyzing entry thresholds in Brooklyn. Using the existing photos students propose a new threshold which develops as a series of sectional drawings. These drawings investigate a new architectural language by mixing features, textures, and coloration. As these projects develop students are asked to create orthographic drawings as a method to further explore the evolution of the threshold’s sectional depth. The final work is exhibited as a collection of thresholds shown as white physical models with corresponding composite drawing. The collection emphasizes the new architectural features produced by working between drawing and modeling processes.
Robert Cervellione Joseph Giampietro Hart Marlow Brian Ringley Olivia Vien, critics
a. Sirinya Wutthilaohaphan b. Alsharif Khaled Nahas c. Soh Hee Oh
a
b b
c
Master of Architecture | Architectural Mediums
111
GAUD ARCHITECTURAL MEDIUMS
Architectural Mediums II Architectural Mediums 2 introduces students to advanced methods of architectural modeling, drawing and visual communication. The course project investigates “Architectural Interiorities� which are developed through the reorganization of existing interior space and circulation types as a means of altering spatial perception through rendering and isometric representation students capture the provocative or formal effects of each environment. Students use interior 3D scanned portions of Higgins Hall as their spatial precedent. By analyzing each existing scan students document, model and diagram unique architectural features and circulation. Through manipulation of the 3D models, the work proposes new formal arrangements and circulation methods which alter the perceived space, movement and directionality. Each project proposes an architectural intervention based on the feedback of the formal and circulation strategy.
Robert Cervellione Joseph Giampietro Hart Marlow Ben Martinson Olivia Vien, critics
a. Alsharif Khaled Nahas b. Di Meng c. Sai Leng d. Luz Wallace
a
b c
d
Master of Architecture | Architectural Mediums
113
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, CNCmilling and augmented reality students get experience with designing time, interaction and the digital 1:1. As an area of investigation, the coursework uses the 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). Finally, the assembly of these individual projects develop into a collectively assembled exhibit with milled panels, and projected videos.
Danil Nagy, Olivia Vien, critics a. Zhixian Song b. Munirah AlReshoud c. Sonya Feinstein d. Alexis Dorko
a b
c d
a
Master of Architecture | Architectural Mediums
115
GAUD ARCHITECTURAL MEDIUMS
Architectural Mediums 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. It’s 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.
Robert Cervellione, Brian Ringley, critics
a. HsienTing Huang b. Bhargav Gandhi c. Madhurya Udayakumar
a
b b
c
Master of Architecture | Architectural Mediums
117
GAUD ARCHITECTURAL MEDIUMS
Architectural Mediums III Fabrication Architectural Fabrication focuses on the research and development of 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. This is done 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 metalwork 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 is the primary site of research for the class. The project proposes a reconceptualization of the way materiality and fabrication is explored.
Hart Marlow, Joseph Vidich, critics
a. Brett Rappaport b. Lucas Evans c. Brandon Sanchez
a
a
b b
c
Joseph Colin DaPonte + Sandra Naraf Kutan Ayata, 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 system, 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 Carlos Arnaiz Kutan Ayata Meta Brunzema Brennan Buck Robert Cervellione Jonas Coersmeir
Cristobal Correa Sulan Kolatan Signe Neilsen Philip Parker Maria Sieira
GAUD
ELECTIVE SEMINARS
M.Arch + M.S Arch + UD | Core Elective
Urban Design Theory This Course is an in-depth investigation into urban design theory focused on a wide range of approaches to urban design, using both historical and contemporary examples. Interiority is a concept of increasing importance to architects in urban centers today. As populations increases, cities become denser, resources diminish, and economies sober, architects will need to confront new methods of space making. One could argue that the ‘Typological 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 no-so-distant future, cities 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.
David Erdman, critic
a a. Kathy Li + Sindhura Vanamamlai b. Ana Villanueva Meza + Scott Duillet c. Hanyang Zhou+ Yunling Xie
b c
121
GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS
The Challenge of Complexity New York Public Library (NYPL) This class addresses the issue of technical drivers in the resolution of a formally and progammatically complex architectural project. It will focus on looking at the way these different drivers can influence and enrich these projects. The class will focus on advanced concepts and techniques of analysis and visualization in the development of responses to environmental, physical, materials science and fabrication inputs. The class is organized around a specific tightly defined design problem to be worked on over the course of the semester. Each week a different aspect of the design problem will be discussed with a lecture that will include looking at precedents followed by individual work on the students design. The lecture and workshop will also occasionally include guests from the design and fabrication fields. Students will use advanced software and tools to study issues that impact their design project. The specific project to be developed is a cover to one of the internal courtyards at the New York Public Library main branch on 5th Avenue. The new space will be used for public assembly. The courtyard cover must provide water and weather tightness to the courtyard space. The structure of the cover can be supported on the perimeter buildings as well as by interior structure. The courtyard structure must clear the upper levels of the building. Information on the existing building will be provided by historical drawings of the original structure. Climatically the space will be serviced from mechanical equipment inside the building, however the courtyard envelope must achieve a comfort level to be defined in the program. The courtyard cover must be provided with adequate drainage and systems for cleaning. For reference loading the Courtyards shall accommodate 30psf of snow loading and 20 psf of access livee loading. No elements may protrude from the existing building roof line.
Cristobal Correa, critic
a. Wenze Chen + Yihan Wang b. Tal Friedland + Beste Aykut c. Wanlapa Koosakul + Nathania Wijaya
a b
c
M.Arch + M.S Arch + UD | Core Elective
Challenging the Boundaries of Structurak Engineering Innovation Architects and structural engineers are face significant challenges in the 21st century as architectural projects have grown larger and more complex, materials and technologies have become more specialized and advanced, and the world’s cities have developed in size and density. As a result, use of sustainable materials and innovative technologies as well as the collaborative partnerships of architects and structural engineers has gained prominence. On a planet with finite natural resources and an ever growing built environment, architects and engineers of the future must consider the environmental, economci, and social sustainability of structural design and materials, as they innovate and create. Many of the major works of the early twenty-fisrt century would have been difficult to build or even conceive without the use of innovation, sustainability, and technology. This course is the exploration of the use of innovative engineering materials, technology and processes with a sustainable and holistic intention. It gives the student the ability to udnerstand, contextualize, and analyze new materials, design, and systems.
Radhi Majmudar, critic
a
a a
a. Niyas Moidu Mullerikan diyil
123
GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS
Adaption and Mitigation Adaptation and Mitigation course examines the fundamentals of vulnerability to and impacts from climate change within coastal or riverine urban areas and explroes the principles of adaptation and mitigation to develop a suite of resiliency strategies. This course examines sites typologies from the holistic perspective of social, economic, political and environmental dimensions of sustainability and resilience in urban areas. The course is organized in 4 parts. Students are asked to select a site of interest and apply their skills and knowledge to use design as an agency for change to physically describe contructed and natural respponses to climate change vulnerabilities. Selected sites need to exhibit a level of risk and then to identify an adaptive or mitigating premise as defined in Part 3. Part 1 is an overview of the physical risks of climate change on urban areas including threats to coastlines, urban rivers and estuaries, buildings, local economies, natural resourses and human health and well-being. Part 2 delves deeper using case studies and field trips to illustrate site-specific adaptive responses to coastal and inland flooding and sea level rise. Part 3 asks students to explore physical strategies that address a) build it back better, b) resist and harden, c) retain floodwater using green infrastructure, d) restore and enhance productive natural system, and e) retreat mechanisms. During Part 4 students will present speculative or actionable written and graphic analysis diagrams (transects) and visualizations of their directed research. The transect becomes the tool to express topographic vulnerability and constructed or ecological interventions to mitigate the site-specific risk.
Signe Neilsen, critic
a a. Sandra Nataf
a
M.Arch + M.S Arch + UD | Core Elective
Urban Topologies In mathematics, typology is concerned with the properties of spaces that are preserved under continuous deformations, such as stretching, crumpling and bending. This can be studies 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 studies 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, Jonathan Pichot,critic a. Shulan Kuang + Jiratt Khumkomgool + Yanzhen Qiu b. Joseph Colin DaPonte + Leonardo Martinez + Tim Leccese
a
b b
125
GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS
Wicked Urbanism This course equips students with tools and strategies to address “wickedness” in design - a catergory of issues increasingly defining our times. The premise for the course is that architects ought to be fluent in addessing such dilemmas. After all, they are deeply embedded in contexts rich in quintessentially “wicked problems” : design on one hand, and the city, on the other. What makes a problem wicked? Conflicting interests, complexity, the absence of a clear definition and the lack of a conclusive “right” solution are among the critical factors, while previous generations have treated concerns with these qualities as outliers, current generations are discovering their growing pervasiveness. The course will regard the notion of the “wicked problem”, not as a hopeless pickle, but rather as an opportunity to see design and urban issues from an openminded point of view albeit with a dash of post-humanist theory.
Sulan Kolatan, critic
a a. Minjung Lee b. Mansoo Han
b
b
M.Arch + M.S Arch + UD | Core Elective
Voracious Vernacular Students in the advanced graduate architecture seminar “Voracious Vernacular� researched a non-urban issue of socio-cultural or socio-political import and then devised a visually striking and viscerally engaging way to communicate it. Topics covered in the course include poor access to healthcare in rural Africa, the blended mixture of Chinese and American culture, the for-profit accumulation of garbage and the exodus of population in rural China, the house typology of central Mexico that is a hybrid of house and silo, the availability of water in farming areas, the ecological consequences of environmental policies or lack thereof, and the true count of hurricane victims in Puerto Rico. All these issues are represented as installations. Partially funded by the Pratt Institute Graduate Student Engagement Fund and The Black Alumni of Pratt.
Maria Sieira, critic
a a. Charlie Muzeka b. Qin Zhang c. Aslihan Avci
b c
127
GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS
Glass in Structures: Beyond Transparency Architects and engineers have always been inspired to use glass in highly inventive designs and constructions. However, many of our assumptions about the properties of glass are no longer strictly valid, as structural performance, optical quality, and thermodynamic control can now be transformed by modern technology and manufacturing processes. Glass is a singular term for a material that has an infinitely divergent set of physical attributes, demanding new systems of construction detailing, and close collaboration between architects and structural engineers. This seminar allows the student to understand material glass as it relates to the principles of fundamental structural behavior in building structures. In addition to a comprehensive survey of the physical attributes of glass as a building material and guest lectures by experts in the field, students will explore the insights and experience gained from recently built projects that make innovative use of material glass.
Radhi Majmudar, critic
a a a. Kennedy Phillips
a
M.Arch + M.S Arch + UD | Core Elective
Architecture and Society “Architecture and Society� is a seminar that investigates the relationships between space, social activism and environment in america. The course focuses on the civil rights and environmental movements from the 20th century to the present- and examines their unique social, cultural and political context. This seminar also sets out to frame the history of advocacy and grassroots architecture and planning- and how it has shaped structures of community participation, civic engagement and environmental justice. We will contextualize key historical moments, and examine the work of socially and environmentally engaged architects and urban designers. This seminar also examines systems thinking and resilience ecology - which had their origins in complexity theory, management theory, ecology and the biological sciences in the 20th century. We will critically examine the history and theory of this evolving body of thought - and how it has affected architectural design, urbanism and environmental stewardship.
Meta Brunzema, critic
a a. Final Exhibition b. Student work
b b b
129
GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS
Scripting and Form Scripting and Form explores the concept of designed materiality which is the effect of hardware and software on matter. We will explore how multiple materials can be effected through various combinations of design specific intentions to create new methods of material transformations. Through experimentation, we will 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 materialiy will 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 will engage in the act of making at all levels. The seminar is centered around new methods of designing with a novel manufacturing process and material, and its effect on the built environment.
Robert Cervellione, critic
a a. Tal Friedland + Francisco Moreno Gallegos
a
M.Arch + M.S Arch + UD | Core Elective
Nanotectonica Nanotectonica examines the relationship between natural and architectural systems in the context of emerging technologies. It is design reserach 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 thirteen students conducted original imaging work on the Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) lab at the Structural Biology Center, New York. The SEM analysis has sparked thirteen stunning design projects ranging in scale from architectural artifacts to the city. One project, the ‘Nanotectonica Corner’ is currently on display at Higgins Hall.
Jonas Coersmeier, critic
a. Daniel Salvador + Kenith Mak b. Francisco Gallegos + Leornado Martinez c. Tatiana Eletskaya
a
b c
131
GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS
Architecture and Illusion This seminar examines the history and contemporary implications of the synthesis achieved during the Baroque period of architectural and representational space through a contemporary lens. Trompe l’oeil is quite literally a thin skin of illusion painted over architectural surfaces. As a technology, it is incredibly fragile compared to contemporary immersive formats like video, film and VR. It can seem little more than an outdated gimmick, a curiosity in the history of western art. But as the first fully realized attempt to integrated representational and physical space, Trompe l’oeil poses a set of problems that are more relevant now than they might appear. The course has two parallel components, the first dedicated to a close reading of the hisotry of representational space, from the development of Perspective in Italy, to the oblique system for describing depth developed in Japanese and Chinese painting, to the modernist interest in axonometry. The second component is a series of image projection assignments, beginning with case studies of particular works of architectural illusion. Students developed a precise understadning of the physical and representational geometry of their given case study, and then manipulated that geometry to produce multiple alternative spaces rather than a single ideal. Working in pairs, students then developed an illusionary object that integrates physical and virtual form and space.
Brennan Buck, critic
a. Anthony Mull + Brandon Wetzel b. Francisco Moreno Gallegos c. Amir Mohebi Ashtiani + Elham Goodarzi
a b
c
M.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 around the World. The task then was to document the state and impact of these issues in the year 2040 and 2060, 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 within the conventions of constructed images.
Kutan Ayata, critic
a. Sholeh Jafarinamin + Sarah Suarez d. Mor Segal + Anthony Mull c. Sandra Nataf + Colin DaPonte d. Amir Mohebi Ashitani + Elham Goodarzi
a
b c d
133
GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS
Design Intelligence: Performing Glass The Performing Glass seminar explores the excess capacity of glass as a built and virtual medium in architecture in design action. Previous projects have concentrated on glass informing architectural and scientific apparatus in intertwined histories where the technologies of connection across separation and isolation were crucial to both in their early modern formations. The bell jar, vacuum tube and the inventions of the environmental spaces of the greenhouse and conservatory are very rough instances of the migration of material use from one scale into the other. Later, transparency and a collapsing distance of glass and modern optics is refound in aesthetic projects of indeterminacy and simultaneity in the 20th century that are crucial to logics of layering and stratification in building and design media. In this seminar alternative roles of optics to transform the speed and direction of light is taken in projects to produce, intertwined, fractured, and collapsing objects in glass where, for instance transparency and reflection are operating in the same frame; appearances are multiplied and joined at conflicted scales; and where subtle shifts in the optical performance produce environmental delays and accelerations. The individual projects’ variations work with optical performance as an explicit material fabrication where glass, light, geometry are put into active play with one another to produce alternatives to the transparent clarity, translucent impressionism and ambiguity toward multiple, fluid, and diffracted misalignments. They propose fragments as the optical membrane, building envelope and design technique become distinct from material transparency.
Phillip Parker, critic
a a. Nick Kabbani b. Niyas Moidu
b
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M.Arch + M.S Arch + UD | Core Elective
Let’s Talk Beauty: On Contemporary Architectural Aesthetics This seminar will reflect on architectural beauty by pairing eight contemporary architects with a major philosophical concept from aesthetic theory. We will learn to talk about beauty in architecture today and in so doing wrestle with the ideas associated with the beautiful, the contemporary and the particular way in which architecture transforms matter into a means of understating our world. Eight contemporary architects will be paired with eight philosophical concepts: PERFECTION, TRUTH, MULTIPLICITY, EXCESS, ABSTRACTION, MEDIATION, MODULATION AND SUBLIMCATION. Each concept represents a distinct outlook on how our perceptual standards have changed and what these changes say about our current aesthetic regime. We will study the different ways by which each architect produces emotional reactions associated with the beautiful such as pleasure, wonder and empathy. These feelings represent specific attitudes about how history has changed us and how those changes have transformed our ability to think and see the world. This is a philosophy seminar for designers. We will wrestle with aesthetics in order to shed light on the things we make and prove why the beautiful is indispensable to a practice, such as architecture, which is based on the reorganization of the world. Architectural design actualizes new worlds, literal and imaginary. The beautiful says something about us. But what? This seminar will argue that talking about why a building is beaultiful illuminates the ways in which our built environment prompts new ways of seeing and thinking.
Carlos Arnaiz, critic
a a. Leonardo Martinez b. Wanlapa Koosakul
b
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GAUD ELECTIVE SEMINARS
Architecture in Film: Strategies in Contemporary Cinema This seminar introduces students to the scholarship in architecture and film as they examine the optical and analytical devices of narrative film as they examine the optical and analytical devices of narrative films within the context of architecture theory. Students study film as if it were architecture- making space with movign iamges and architecture as if it were film- playing up the time and psyche components of architecture. Architecture theory at its best enables, not just the entry of other fields into its own discourse, but the possibility of architectural readings that augment or even resist critical and operational mdoes in those other disciplines. This is second year in 5-year directed research project structured around a specific question within the scholarship of film in the architecture discipline: How does framing making spaces? Can framing invent a space? How do this questions regarding visually feed into contemporary discourses in architecture about image and space? Students will approach this work in three steps: 1) Read and discuss assigned readings about contemporary visually involving moving images; 2)produce a short film in which aspects of framing are theoretically explored; 3)Write a reflection on the visual work produced and how it informs the making of space with moving images.
Maria Sieira,critic
a. Byoungjae Kim b. Shien Ming Wu c. Mansu Han
a b c
a
Hong Kong Travel Studion David Erdman + Hart Marlow, critics
Master of Architecture
Density is the way a number of major global cities (like Hong Kong) are addressing issues of the environment. Questions of that future dense city’s inhabitability are where design and architecture play a role in issues of climate change. Interiority is a quality of density and concept of increasing importance to architects in urban centers today. In the not-so-distant future, cities will have to consider (if they are not already) how to adapt and alter existing structures, how to grow inward and to reconfigure their interior. This studio investigated the concept of “Space Objects:” Intensely cohesive urban void-spaces that are not (necessarily) inside a building enclosure. Students worked at multiple scales and within the context of the highly concentrated urbanism of Hong Kong and its public housing estates. The focus of the studio was to “Alter” existing estates and (through the development of space objects) “Re-Originate” the identity and urban vitality of the site(s). The studio was modeling-intensive and photographically oriented. Students traveled to Hong Kong where visits to public housing estates, to related projects, and a series of workshops and exchanges occurred with HKU faculty and where students interfaced with various public housing authority senior staff members and stakeholders.
FACULTY Benjamin Aranda Alexandra Barker Joaquin Bonifaz Natalia Echeverri David Erdman
Hart Marlow Mark Rakatansky Ivan Vaun Lorenzo Vigotti
GAUD
INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS
GAUD| International Programs
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GAUD INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS
Altered Estates Speculations on the Urban Interiority of Havana 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.
Alexandra Barker David Erdman Natalia Echeverri, critics
a. Jonathan Hamilton b. Huang Wang
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GAUD| International Programs
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GAUD INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS
Recombinant Rome Studying an extraordinary range of architecture, sculpture, and painting from the most ancient to the most recent times in Rome, Florence, Mantua, Vicenza, and Venice, students learn contemporary generative methods of design that draw upon these various artistic modes. The program proposes that you can see perceive all works and times as contemporary with your own engagements, looking beyond their media and period styles to the aesthetic principles, modes, and techniques they perform. The course surveyed different periods each week, and combined excursions with creative production in Trastevere Pratt GAUD studios. One of the best ways to understand these trans-historical works today is to take the very digital tools we use in our design practices to explore, analyze, and represent the forms of relational performance in these objects. Class projects are developed as digital case-studies related to techniques in the student’s own work that they seek to evolve. We investigate the diverse ways digital visualization can be a crucial new lends of perception and communication – exploring how modeling, animation, argumented reality, and other visualization techniques can move beyond merely documenting a building to provide new forms of critical analysis. Participants may chose any building – from any time period – that intrigues them or bothers them enough that they want 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 Lorenzo Vigotti, critic
a. field trip images b. Ziyi Cui c. Lixuan Qiao
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GAUD| International Programs
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GAUD INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS
Space Object: Hong Kong Spring Travel Studio 2019 Hong Kong has the densest urban area on the planet and is the only city currently operating at emissions and consumption levels (targeted by the Paris Accord for over 100 global cities by 2026) today. This performance is solely due to the city’s concentrated density and the fact that its inhabitants live on only 1/3 of the landmass of the city-state; a constraint that is driven by finance, politics and desire. With population rises in its future and escalating costs of living, affordable housing and available land are in short supply. The studio centered its interest in this conundrum by looking to harvest density and its assets not only as a possible model for Hong Kong’s future but as could be applicable and pertinent to other global cities who share the interests of those outlined in the Paris Accord. Over a ten day period students traveled to Hong Kong where they visited public housing estates, related projects, participated in a series of review-workshops with HKU students and faculty and during which times students interfaced with various Public Housing Authority staff members and stakeholders. The semester-long studio investigated the concept of “space objects:” intensely cohesive urban void-spaces that are not (necessarily) inside a building enclosure. Students studied the unique, highly concentrated urbanism of Hong Kong and its public housing estates. The focus of the studio was to “alter” existing block types (and estates at large) re-working the ground around tower-blocks, placing additions atop tower-blocks and using the graphics of existing facades as a launching poitns of inquiry. Four seperated estates in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories (all of which were similar “Harmony” block-types; the most prevalent and ripe for alteration) were taken as the case-studies for design research. The studio was modeling intensive and photographically oriented.
David Erdman, critic Hart Marlow, co-teacher a
a a
a. Excursion Images
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GAUD| International Program
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Cross-Laminated Density: Santiago Spring Travel Studio 2019 Cross-Laminated Density explored a building type uniquely possible in the urban environment of Chile but applicable to other cities globally: the mass timber building. Chile is a world leader in mass timber production, a construction type that uses new growth forests to create large-scale timber components of buildings including structure and envelope. Also referred to a Cross-Laminated Timber (CTL), the material is prized for its low-carbon footprint by the use of a renewable resource, trees. It is also used to create immense prefabricated building components only limited in size by their transport. Over ten days students visited Santiago- a unique context and an industry thought leader in the mass timber could impact other cities and concepts of density in the future. In Santiago students studied sites for making their proposals, toured Mass Timber project-sites and participated in series of review-workshops with students and faculty from UDD. Throughtout the semester the studio explored CLT’s scalar porperties and imagined its vast potential to architecture. Students researched spatial techniques that guided issues of assembly, connection, modularity and the proliferation of these large-scale timber components. Using physical modelprototypes made of wood, students texted how hyperdensity in massive timber can be achieved through a varierty of use cases: from infill conditions to free-standing mediumrise buildings to the scale of infrastructural interventions.
Benjamin Aranda, critic Joaquin Bonifaz, Co-teacher a a. Excursion images
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Student Name
Name, critic Name, Co-teacher
COMMUNITY
Hart Marlow Brian Ringley Joseph Giampietro Olivia Vien Frederic Bellaloum Emilija Landsbergis
RESEARCH
FACULTY
PSPD
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 complimented with an array of lectures, events, and exhibitions that further enrich student’s understanding of architecture discourse within the GAUD, regionally and nationally. The programs are taught by GAUD faculty and supported by the School of Continuing and Professional Studies.
GAUD
SUMMER PROGRAMS
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GAUD SUMMER PROGRAMS
Immersion Studio The Immersion Studio, is an architectural fundamentals course, is taught by the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design faculty, and is geared toward professionals and students interested in attending graduate architecture school. Taught as a series of studio sessions, lectures, and technical workshops, the studio introduced students to a series of design approaches to conceptualize architectural investigations using the most current techniques in visualization and methods of fabrication.
Olivia Vein, critic
a. Alex Maksymora b. Jenna Kessaram c. Jessica Labarbera d. Kevin Gessner
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GAUD | Summer Programs
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GAUD SUMMER PROGRAMS
Primer I Architectural Mediums Primer 1 is an intensive 2-week 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 are introduced to ancient Egyptian sculptures and paintings which communicate both craft of relief and figural hybrids. Using these examples, students develop a similar understanding of technique and the suggestiong of orm on a series of representational exercises. The work explore 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 physcial models.
Hart Marlow, Olivia Vien, Emilija Landsbergis, critics
a. Ricardo Palacio b. Student Work c. Maria Cecilia Concepcion d. Sirinya Wutthilaohaphan
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GAUD | Primer II Studio
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GAUD SUMMER PROGRAMS
Primer II Architectural Mediums Primer 2 is an intensive 2-week studio workshop that explores the mixing of physical and digital media to produce quasi-media artifacts. Course projects use methods which produce Hi-Fi/Low-Fi - manipulation of low and high-quality reproduction of physical objects; Image Composites - combining photography, rendering and photogrammetry; and Physical Scenes - fabricated scenery for still photography. The final work is exhibited as a tryptic for each student project. Each image in the tryptic worked to undermine the perception of the viewer to dilute the understanding of how images are made.
Hart Marlow, Joseph Giampietro, Frederic Bellaloum, critics
a. Dimitrios Zoulis b. Brett Rappaport c. Brandon Sanchez
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Move About Myrtle event
Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership
The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment
GCPE FORWARD 155
GCPE
The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE) is a unique alliance of four graduate-level programs with shared values placed on urban sustainability and community participation, defined by commitments to a just transition. Each of the four masters programs – City and Regional Planning, Historic Preservation, Sustainable Environmental Systems, and Urban Placemaking and Management – maintains its degree requirements and research expertise. However, GCPE students may take courses from any of the four programs to explore cross-disciplinary interests. The result is that students themselves are empowered to create a unique and multifaceted degree specialization. Eighty percent of GCPE students accept an internship or fellowship during their program, often through one of the close alliances GCPE maintains with community-based organizations and municipal agencies. On-campus partnerships with the Pratt Center for Community Development, which works to develop innovative strategies toward an equitable and sustainable NYC; and the Spatial Analysis and Visualization Initiative (SAVI), a Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-centered research hub that uses mapping, data, and design to understand urban communities; also provide GCPE students with educational and professional networking opportunities outside the classroom. Another distinct element of GCPE masters programs is experientially-based, interdisciplinary studio coursework. Studios emphasize teamwork and integrative thinking as methods of acquiring professional skills. Each studio typically involves a real client and culminates in a professional-quality proposal that is evaluated by an array of distinguished practitioners and community leaders. Studios emphasize applied research and students often see an immediate impact on public policy and community action as a result of their collaboration. Through internships, partnerships, studios, and coursework, GCPE programs give students ample opportunity to apply their skills to real-world issues. Most GCPE courses are designed to allow students time during the day for internships, fellowships, and full- or part-time jobs whenever possible. Additionally, GCPE students have access to courses in the Construction Management, Facilities Management, and Real Estate Practice programs at the Pratt Manhattan Campus. City and Regional Planning students can earn a dual Master of Science / Juris Doctor from the Brooklyn Law School. Lastly, study at Pratt Institute, one of the nation’s top art and design schools in the great Borough of Brooklyn, allows for a truly interdisciplinary experience within one of New York City’s most dynamic neighborhoods. As you look through the following pages, you will read about our vision for educating the next generation of urban leaders. If that resonates with you, I hope you’ll consider joining the GCPE community!
PROGRAM COORDINATORS Eve L. Baron, Ph.D., Chair of the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment and Academic Coordinator of City and Regional Planning Vicki Weiner Academic Coordinator of Historic Preservation Leonel Lima Ponce Academic Coordinator of Sustainable Environmental Systems David Burney, Academic Coordinator of Urban Placemaking and Management
The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment
CITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING Since its inception 60 years ago, the City and Regional Planning Program (CRP) has remained dedicated to an education that emphasizes practice over theory, participatory planning over topdown policy making, creativity and innovation 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, social justice, 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, including transportation planning, social planning, sustainable zoning, or GIS; 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 customize coursework, with active support from advisors, to suit their professional and academic aspirations. 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, and always serve community-based organizations in their planning-related work. 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 Far Rockaway, Queens on a climate-change responsive, equity- and resilience-building comprehensive plan; 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., Eve L.of Chair Baron, the Graduate Ph.D., Center for Planning and the Chair of the Graduate Environment and Academic CenterCoordinator for Planningofand City the and Environment and Coordinator Regional Planning of City and Regional Planning
138th Street, The Bronx Carlos Rodríguez Estévez
The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment
Our unique program builds the skills students need to save the places people care about. The scholars and practitioners that make up our faculty view historic preservation as a forward-looking profession fueled by the need to find creative solutions that protect communities’ historic, architectural and cultural resources. We offer students a solid grounding in historic preservation theory, tools, and practices, building their skills to research, analyze and assess historic architecture and other heritage assets of communities. Advanced students engage in real-time heritage conservation projects, working with community stakeholders to address the challenges posed by social inequality, climate change, and in today’s growing economy, the unintended consequences of gentrification. Pratt HP courses take full advantage of the robust heritage conservation professional network found in New York City. Nearly every course engages in outside-the-classroom activities: visits to architecture and conservation firms, tours of historic New York City neighborhoods, meetings with community-based and citywide preservation organizations, site visits to buildings undergoing conservation, and practical demonstrations at design workshops and laboratories. In addition, students learn to use local archival collections through on-site tutorials with curators, conservators and librarians. Pratt preservation students come from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, and many are returning to school from successful careers in related fields. We offer generous scholarships as well as course credit for professional work, which greatly reduces the cost of tuition. In addition, for professionals who wish to continue working full or part-time, we offer evening courses and can tailor course sequencing to accommodate a busy work schedule. We’re very proud that our program has successfully prepared students for leadership in addressing the complexities of preserving heritage through sustainable, holistic, integrated approaches. Pratt’s Historic Preservation Alumni hold distinguished positions in New York City, across the country and globally. From serving at the helm of citywide civic organizations to directing State and municipal preservation agencies, our Pratt HP graduates are much in demand, and through their professional work are making important, innovative contributions to the preservation field.
Arcosanti City Gambril Foster
Vicki Weiner Academic Coordinator, Historic Preservation
INTRODUCTION
The 47-credit Master of Science in Historic Preservation (HP) prepares students for leadership within a continuously changing preservation context. The program is part of Pratt’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE), an interdisciplinary department within the Institute’s School of Architecture. In addition to preservation, the School offers students a comprehensive education in a range of allied fields: architecture, urban design, city and regional planning, sustainability planning, and urban place-making. Our approach to graduate study builds on these adjacencies to allow students to establish an interdisciplinary professional network of peers, practitioners, and future employers.
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HISTORIC PRESERVATION
The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment
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 their 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.
Leonel Lima Ponce Acting Academic Coordinator Eve L. Baron, Ph.D., in Sustainable Environmental Systems Chair of the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment and Coordinator of City and Regional Planning
LEAP Isil Akgül
The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment
The program is ideal for students with a professionallyoriented 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 privatesector 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 studiobased 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.
The Junction
Lab, Analysis of Public Spaces
David Burney, Academic Coordinator of Urban Placemaking and Management
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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URBAN PLACEMAKING AND MANAGEMENT
The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment offers linkages to the undergraduate Construction Management program and the graduate programs of Facilities Management and Real Estate Practice. All three are offered 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 digital or hand drawn construction drawings, 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. Also, they promote an organization’s concern for fiscal and social responsibility, and environmentally sustainable practices are 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 assist Brooklyn-based community development groups in addressing racial wealth and income gaps through innovative programs and multisectoral approaches. GCPE studios offer a unique opportunity for students to make a difference as they complete a first-rate education.
Made in Bed-Stuy
Sustainable Communities Studio
INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS
The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (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 commitments to just transitions. Advanced studios bring together students from all four programs for interdisciplinary teamwork, focusing on hands-on learning within the context of real-life planning challenges on behalf of a client, usually a community-based organization or a city agency.
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INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS
GRADUATE CENTER FOR PLANNING AND THE ENVIRONMENT | Interdisciplinary Studios
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GCPE INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS
Preservation-Planning Studio Wallabout, Brooklyn, NY The Wallabout neighborhood runs along either side of the BQE highway, between the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Myrtle Avenue. It is marked by a mix of healthy industry, loft buildings that lend themselves to housing and office conversions, high traffic volumes, intense noise and air pollution from the elevated highway, and a history as a working class community. Of the 20,000 residents in the area, half live in what was once called Fort Greene Houses— at the time of its construction and still the largest public housing site in the nation. The studio ran in much the way a professional office approaches a large-scale project. Students apply analysis and synthesis skills; practice oral, graphic, and written communication skills; and participate as effective members of a professional urbanism team. The client was the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership. The resulting plan was inspired by the Circular Economy concept—seeking to break down physical, social, and economic barriers. Specific ideas include a public pedestrian way connecting, north-south, the Navy Yard, public housing, two parks, and major institutions; green infrastructure for the BQE; a zoning approach that saves industry while promoting new, more job intensive uses; historic preservation incentives for the loft buildings; and cross-harbor freight to forestall the failure of the highway when (as expected) there is a giant increase in freight traffic thanks to the likes of Amazon deliveries and population growth. The client and one of its original founding board members embraced the plan as keying up a potential expansionist role to meet more community needs, particularly those addressing economic, social and environmental justice associated with the public housing. Key to this: Every recommendation was accompanied by a recommendation for participatory planning and community design.
John Shapiro, Ward Dennis, Sadrah Shahab; Professors a. Funk Under the BQE Event. MABP b. BQE Under Construction, 1959. Brooklynpix.com c. Images of Students’ Work
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GRADUATE CENTER FOR PLANNING AND THE ENVIRONMENT | Interdisciplinary Studios
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GCPE INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS
Delta Cities Coastal Resilience Studio Newtown Creek, Brooklyn, NY This studio aimed to look in-depth at the issues facing coastal communities, through an exploration of the SMIA (Significant Maritime Industrial Area) located along the edges of Newtown Creek, specifically the English Kills area located at the south of the creek, with Evergreen Exchange as the client. Through the semester students were tasked with surveys, interviews, gathering data, and analyzing existing conditions. By working individually and in groups, students decided on goals for the neighborhood and its residents: a Net Positive Industrial Neighborhood in 2100. The teams centered their proposals around a vision for the year 2100: to create a net positive industrial metabolism that utilizes climate mitigation and adaptation design and strategies to improve the human and ecological health. The urban industrial metabolism is a framework for industrial neighborhoods where each component of the system serves a purpose to achieve the goal of a net positive, resilient, dynamic, thriving industrial community by applying the concept of a circular economy. To achieve this vision the recommendations were divided into 3 cycles: The first cycle focused on strengthening and fostering new relationships while improving the health of the environment. The teams recommended building a coalition among English Kills businesses, where businesses build relationships, align goals, and think strategically about how to collectively share resources and can economically prosper together, taking the first step in creating a circular economy. In the second cycle, English Kills is an eco-industrial park, where businesses cooperate with each other and the local community to reduce waste and pollution, efficiently share resources such as information, materials, water, energy, infrastructure, and natural resources, and help achieve sustainable development, with the intention of increasing economic gains and improving environmental quality. By the third cycle in 2080, English Kills is run on 100% renewable energy, has net positive greenhouse gas emissions, has an effective stormwater mitigation system, and businesses are a model for economic collaboration and environmental responsibility.
Gita Nandan, Tom Jost, Zehra Kruz; Professors.
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GRADUATE CENTER FOR PLANNING AND THE ENVIRONMENT | Interdisciplinary Studios
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GCPE INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS
Urban Placemaking & Management Lab Johnny Hartman Square, New York, NY Johnny Hartman Square is a small, triangular traffic island in West Harlem in the historic neighborhood of Hamilton Heights. The purpose of this placemaking studio was to evaluate the neighborhood through the lens of this public place in the hopes of transforming it into a vibrant community resource. The studio work consisted of an analysis of the existing site and the surrounding characteristics of the neighborhood, community and stakeholder engagement through surveys, interviews, and focus groups, goal-setting for the new public space based on this community outreach, and finally, recommendations for the design, programming, management, maintenance, and governance of the place. This work took into consideration the potential gentrification of the community and how a revitalized public space can inadvertently contribute to displacement. The community outreach process ultimately drove goals and recommendations for the place, ensuring that the vision for the place is born by the community, managed by the community, and ultimately used and cherished by the community. This plaza project is a part of the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Plaza Program, which provides funding and support for new plaza renovations that will be managed and maintained by a community organization, in this case, the Brotherhood Sister Sol. This will be a unique place that is managed by a youth development organization who aims to cultivate a sense of agency and responsibility within young, often disenfranchised youth of color. The goals and recommendations in this report take this into consideration, and hope to create a roadmap for a collaborative management process that youth and older community members alike can take ownership of. The studio made recommendations for a new Johnny Hartman Square that will be a place where the diverse members of this historic community can come together to celebrate both their individual and their shared cultures, where youth can develop and showcase their skills and accomplishments, and where a strong identity for the Hamilton Heights neighborhood is cultivated. This is a first step in a placemaking process that can truly improve the health of a community.
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GRADUATE CENTER FOR PLANNING AND THE ENVIRONMENT | Interdisciplinary Studios
Fundamentals of Planning: The Bronx, NYC The Spring 2019 Fundamentals of Planning Studio was comprised of nine students from GCPE’s City and Regional Planning program. The client was Mothers on the Move (MOM), a grassroots social justice organization focused on bringing equity to the historically disenfranchised community of the South Bronx. The studio examined the existing conditions of the Belmont, East Tremont, Bathgate and West Farms neighborhoods, formally known as Bronx Community District 6 (BX CD-06). Students visited the neighborhood to conduct a land use survey and observations, and prepared a comprehensive analysis of the built, the socioeconomic, and the natural environments. The studio also conducted interviews with key stakeholders to get first-hand information to supplement the existing conditions research. The key assets identified as a result of the research included the legacy of community-based organizations and a strong local business sector. This implies opportunities such as the ability for MOM to influence the decision making over the numerous vacant lots in the district. The analysis also identified some weaknesses, such as the constraints on affordable housing and lack of access to open space, and potential threats to the community district. The Studio developed four asset-based objectives for MOM. These centered on improving the living conditions, strengthening socio-environmental relations, and planning for the potential impacts of gentrification and housing displacement within BX CD-06. Each of these objectives consisted of 3-5 specific recommendations, including technical and financial resources and strategies for the client to consider steps toward implementation. The recommendations aimed at providing innovative strategies for generating employment and creating local wealth – particularly for youth. The approach included the statewide legalization of recreational cannabis and the redevelopment of land uses on selected sites as potential opportunities to create and distribute local wealth. Other recommendations included advocating for the creation of community ownership models, as well as improving weatherization assessments with drone technology to reduce energy costs, create jobs and save lives.
Mercedes Narciso, Juan Camilo Osorio, Ayse Yonder; Professors a a
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GCPE INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS
Green Infrastructure Design-Build Studio Gowanus, Brooklyn, NY The Gowanus Canal has captivated people for more than 400 years, from its salt marsh era to a polluted industrial waterway that today is undergoing revitalization. Recently the area has begun to transform, physically and socially with new construction and the Superfund clean- up process. One such transformation is taking place at the former Brooklyn Rapid Transit Power Station, located along the eastern edge of the Gowanus. This 2-acre brownfield and historic industrial building will soon be home to the Power House Workshop, a modern center for multimedia fabrication. The Summer 2018 Green Infrastructure Design Build Studio explored the relationships between the superfund, art, plants and stormwater management, coming up with four (4) master plan proposals for the Power House site, including walls, rooftops, and water’s edge.
Elliott Maltby and Gita Nandan; Professors a a a. Images of Students’ Work
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GCPE INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS
Red Hook Urban Resiliency Plan Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY The studio’s client, the Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation (SBIDC), tasked the studio with developing strategies to plan for the future of industry and employment in Red Hook, Brooklyn. This studio examined not only the present conditions in Red Hook, but also scenarios for the next hundred years. The studio pinpointed several key challenges; most importantly, the neighborhood’s location, topography, and ground conditions make it extremely vulnerable to multiple kinds of flooding. Another of the key findings that shaped the studio’s proposals is the wide socioeconomic variation between the Red Hook Houses and the rest of the neighborhood. Red Hook also has limited transportation options. The studio recommended four goals rooted in Red Hook’s long history of defiance and resilience. In 1776, Red Hook played a vital role in the United States’ Independence and the development of New York as a whole. Cannons placed on either side of the Buttermilk Channel, on Red Hook’s Fort Defiance and Governors Island, successfully repulsed the attack of the British soldiers and prevented them from advancing north into present day Manhattan. By channeling this history, the studio believes the neighborhood can: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Defy flooding Defy industrial decline Defy the neighborhood divide Defy inaccessibility
The studio suggested a number of short- and longterm strategies that SBIDC can act on by itself and with community partners to achieve the above goals. Some of these strategies included a host of flood adaptation measures, new truck routes, zoning for industrial mixed-use development, and the implementation of small business services. The studio proposed job training programs and advocating for housing that works for residents, while also recognizing and affirming the Red Hook Houses’ role in the future of the neighborhood. The studio also recommended overcoming the neighborhood’s inaccessibility through transportation and placemaking interventions.
John Shapiro and Quilian Riano; Professors a
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GRADUATE CENTER FOR PLANNING AND THE ENVIRONMENT | Interdisciplinary Studios
Sustainable Communities Studio: Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, NY The Sustainable Communities studio marked 50 years of collaboration and innovation in community development between the City and Regional Planning program and the resident-advocates of Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (BSRC). These efforts were resident-driven but amplified and put into plans by Pratt Professor Emeritus Ron Shiffman who co-taught the course and was recognized for his pioneering work with BSRC when they awarded him the prestigious Franklin A. Thomas Award in October 2018. The culminating work of the studio recognizes the success of the community development work initiated by BSRC in the late 1960s while cognizant of how the organization’s earlier work also gave way to a present set of problems. The studio also turned to the Brooklyn Movement Center (BMC) as a second client, in appreciation of their current work to build AfricanAmerican leadership is central to the goals of community development. Bedford-Stuyvesant’s history of self-reliance is a strong foundation for how to address current threats of displacement and income stratification. The recommendations proposed below are informed by: 1) meetings with clients and other local organizations; 2) historical research including combing through archival data; and 3) conversations with neighborhood residents. The proposed strategies focus on protecting the neighborhood’s existing assets, such as the longtime residents who carry Bedford-Stuyvesant’s history, the wealth of exceptional artists and arts organizations that have made the neighborhood an international destination for the arts, the culture of community participation and activism, and its small but resourceful entrepreneurs. The recommendations are founded on the conviction that by strengthening the connections between organizations and individuals, and promoting resource and knowledge sharing, BedfordStuyvesant can navigate current and future threats to its identity. The recommendations for BSRC and BMC entail collaborating with existing organizations in the area, connecting resources, and developing technology platforms that can be used within the community. The feasibility and success of these recommendations rely on collaboration, shared resources, creation and establishment of new resources and organizations, funding, and creativity. Eve Baron, Courtney Knapp, Ronald Shiffman; Professors a
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The Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment
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, with the awareness that socio-spatial urban issues are often linked to systems of global inequality. Resilience and just transitions frame students’ work., regardless of location.
Calle Reina, Havana Los Sitios Studio
INTRODUCTION
The GCPE is responding to the challenges of the “global village” with courses that run partly or entirely abroad. These courses are as much about students learning global innovations and practices from other parts of the world as about providing opportunities for students to study in foreign places and to gain global perspectives on urban issues. As respective examples of a seminar and studio: 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 Puerto Rico to develop learn about the intersection of grassroots social movements and advocacy around response to Hurricane Maria.
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GRADUATE CENTER FOR PLANNING AND THE ENVIRONMENT | International Courses
Sustainable Development and Placemaking in El Vedado Havana, Cuba The Spring 2018 Habana studio was completed through a partnership between architecture students from José Antonio Echeverria Technological University of Habana (CUJAE), and the Pratt Institute Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE). This was the first time in decades that the CUJAE School of Architecture has formally worked together with a U.S. college, making this year’s Pratt students fortunate to participate in this historic partnership. The Pratt group had representatives from each of GCPE’s four programs (City and Regional Planning, Urban Placemaking and Management, Sustainable Environmental Systems, and Historic Preservation), and the CUJAE students participated as part of an architecture workshop. Today, it is a neighborhood in transition, a place that is often viewed as a pass-through between the municipalities of Centro Habana and Habana Vieja, and not listed as a UNESCO world heritage site like Habana Vieja, and therefore underserved in comparison. The city of Habana is a province in Cuba that is made up of 15 different municipalities. Los Sitios is a neighborhood located in Centro Habana, which is one of the most densely and heavily populated municipalities in the city. Los Sitios is also one of the oldest neighborhoods, stretching all the way back to the 1700s. Today, it is a neighborhood in transition, a place that is often viewed as a pass-through between the municipalities of Centro Habana and Habana Vieja, and not listed as a UNESCO world heritage site like Habana Vieja, and therefore underserved in comparison. Nevertheless, it is a neighborhood rich in culture and has been home to many important people and traditions that are the backbone of Cuban culture. Ten days were spent observing and learning with the CUJAE counterparts, and visited Los Sitios, Habana Vieja, Miramar, and Alamar as well, to learn about the culture of the city and its surrounding area. The studio focused on the three most pressing challenges in the neighborhood: housing, mobility, and public space. Utilizing these three topics, they looked through the key lenses of value and heritage, economic vitality, and quality and safety. From this study, an overall goal was developed to cultivate a collective of cooperative businesses, working in collaboration with residents, the local government and neighborhood organizations to address these three challenges.
Jill Hamberg, Ron Shiffman, David Burney, Carlos Rodríguez Estévez; Professors a
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GCPE INTERNATIONAL COURSES
Sustainable Systems Exchange Puerto Rico / NYC In March 2019, a group of five students traveled to Puerto Rico as part of the NYC-Puerto Rico Sustainable Systems Exchange with professors Leonel Ponce and Gita Nandan. The course explored how frontline communities most affected by these crises in Puerto Rico and NYC meaningfully contribute to their climate-resilient development and show alternate paths that allow our cities to thrive through future challenges posed by climate change. Pratt GCPE students prepared case study research in NYC prior to travel and documented information about a series of organizations and programs that planned for coastal, ecological, and social resilience. The program collaborated with a network of grassroots community organizations, public corporations, and NGOs in Puerto Rico, and was facilitated by organizations such as UPROSE Brooklyn and Our Power PR NYC. Local advocates, planners, and designers contributed to the research. Pratt GCPE looks forward to future collaboration and support of local grassroots initiatives in both Puerto Rico and NYC that are working toward equitable and community-led just transition strategies for climate-resilient, and regenerative infrastructural ecologies.
Leonel Ponce and Gita Nandan; Professors a a a. Images of Students’ Work
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Master of Architecture
Critic Names Critic Names Critic Names
INTEGRATED BUILDING SYSTEMS FACULTY Critic Names Critic Names Critic Names
COMMUNITY
FACULTY
RESEARCH
A. Name Title
PSPD
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GAUD
CORE DESIGN LECTURES + EVENTS STUDIO
Master of Architecture | Lecture + Events
GAUD 179
RESEARCH LECTURES + EVENTS
Pratt Sessions Fall 2018 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, nonstandard 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, redefined, and understood within the realm of architectural design (subject two: Architectural Contexts). Fall 2018 Participants PS10 Benjamin Aranda and Dwayne Oyler + Jenny Wu (New Architectural Mediums) PS11 Stan Allen and Robert E.Somol (New Architectural Context) PS12 Manuel De Landa + Graham Harman (New Architectural Context)
a. Pratt Session 11 b. Pratt Session 10 c. Pratt Session 12
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Master of Architecture | Lecture + Events
GAUD 181
RESEARCH LECTURES + EVENTS
Pratt Sessions Spring 2019 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, redefined, and understood within the realm of architectural design (subject two: Architectural Contexts). Spring 2019 Participants PS13 Ellie Abrons/Adam Fure and Brennan Buck/David Freeland (Architectural Mediums) PS14 Michael Bell and Greg Lynn (New Architectural Mediums) PS15 Jing Liu/Florian Idenburg and Lisa Iwamoto/Craig Scott (New Architectural Context)
a. Pratt Session 15 b. Pratt Session 13 c. Pratt Session 14
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Master of Architecture | Lecture + Events
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RESEARCH
Pratt Parallels brings the GAUD, its faculty, and students thinking outside of the boundaries of the Institute and into the city via collaborations with other creatively oriented cultural institutions, governmental entities and/or nonprofit organizations. The talks are meant to be informal and impromptu. They are annually based and typically in the summer and/or fall. All lectures are organized with the generous support of the Maritime Foundation and the Brooklyn Bridge Park.
LECTURES + EVENTS
Pratt Parallels
Master of Architecture | Lecture + Events
GAUD 185
RESEARCH LECTURES + EVENTS
Pratt IN-sides Pratt IN_Sides are a group of ongoing lectures related to course-work across the three programs of the GAUD and showcase the tremendous range of people coming IN to the GAUD and interacting with our students and Directed Research Initiative. The lectures are internally oriented, primarily for enrolled students (through some ARE public) and meant to reveal a “side” of the discourse that is somewhat obfuscated or under exposed - correlating the title to the “B-Sides” of a recording session for musical artists. Participants Kristof Crolla Erin Manning Thom Mayne + Cliff Thomas
a. Thom Mayne + Cliff Thomas b. Kristof Crolla c. Erin Manning
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Master of Architecture | Lecture + Events
GAUD 187
RESEARCH
Department-organized symposiums and workshops aim to reach across disciplines to generate new forms of knowledge and define new modes of practice. GAUD faculty and students are joined by leading experts and practitioners from a range of fields to investigate topics of contemporary importance relating society, politics, education, public information, public space, and the environment within the context of architecuture. What Does(can)Thery Do? A Celebration of the Life of Pratt Professor Vito Acconci Aldo Rossi Symposium Habitat:Vernacular Architecture for a Changing Planet
LECTURES + EVENTS
Symposiums and Workshops
GAUD| Exhibitions
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RESEARCH LECTURES + EVENTS
Exhibitions: Pratt The GAUD actively promotes the discourse of its programs and engages audiences across the School of Architecture and Pratt Institute through a variety of exhibitions and exhibition formats annually. These are a central component for fostering exchange, sharing the exemplary work of our students and cultivating interdisciplinary awareness throughout the Institute and School. 2018-2019 Exhibitions Pratt Shows Featuring Works by Graduating Students Theoharis David 50 Years Teaching and Learning Robert Irwin Site Determined
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RESEARCH LECTURES + EVENTS
Exhibition: Exterior The GAUD forms partnerships with various exhibition-based organizations who have a vested interest in the discourse of our graduate programs and the work that is produced by their faculty and students. Ranging in duration, these exhibitions form a constellation of channels through which the GAUD interfaces with local, national, and international communities. These exhibitions offer those students who are fortunate enough to participate in them the opportunity to exhibit their work and ideas in world leading venuews and to engage audiences within and outside of architecture, New York City and Brooklyn. 2018-2019 Exhibitions: Carapace Art OMI Altered Estates Havana Exhibition Brooklyn Designs Speculations on Architecture in the Anthropocene
a. Vruti Desai + Avinash Sharma b. Alon Koppel c. Bryan Zimmerman d. Havana Exhibition e. Brooklyn Designs
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GAUD| Critic at Large
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RESEARCH
In design studio critiques, GAUD faculty and invited outside evaluators, enthusiasts, and practitioners look beyond the eveluation process to create engaging moments of open debate and discourse about student projects and the studio proposition. CRITIC AT LARGE 2018-2019 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 entirer 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 AND EVENTS
Critic at Large 2018-2019 Stan Allen
GAUD| Critiques
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Cross-Sections reviews are a unique format of review foster discourse between different sections of any single studio. They occur in each program, within both the Core and Advanced Curricular areas of those programs and typically at least once a semester. The intention of these reviews is to allow students and faculty to gain a wider view of Directed Research, the approach toward design research and comparative methods across each studio that brings to the fore parallel (but different) issues/conversations to those commonly found in a conventional review format. Often these reviews include outside guests and/or may be used by students or faculty as a vehicle to facilitate collaborations and/or informal peer to peer networks. CSW06: Design IV Studio CSW07: Design IV Studio + MSAUD CSW08: Design IV studio
LECTURES AND EVENTS
Cross-Sections
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DIRECTED RESEARCH
The GAUD is committed to pushing the limits of contemporary design thinking. GAUD DR is architecturally specific, designoriented, and has a high degree of disciplinary precision; sufficient to engage audiences and disciplines outside of architecture. In the culminating semesters of all three GAUD programs (M.Arch, MS.Arch, and MS.AUD), in our internrational programs (Rome and Havana), and following several semesters of integrative disciplinarily focused learning, these design studios and elective seminars are engaged in pertinent research at the cutting-edge and near future of both disciplinary and professional praxes. The array of courses is fundamentally extra-disciplinary in character and overseen by a stellar ensemble of full-time and visiting design and theory faculty.
RESEARCH
Directed Research (DR) involved 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 enhancng 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 charateristics of the GAUD and Pratt Institute. It is also an effort to characterize existing faculty driven research projects.
GAUD| Directed Research
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Directed Research Studio of Experiments Two broad initiatives guide individual faculty and programled 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 conversation, 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 convetional 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 hygrological, 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.
a. Mor Segal b. Kenith Mak c. Thomas Diorio d. Beste Aykut
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GAUD COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
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. Constitutencies 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 encironment 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| Community Engagement
Pratt Young Scholars Sculpture, Space, and Form This course for scholarship students from underrepresented communities at Pratt’s K-12 Pratt Young Scholars program adapts the methodology of introductory studios developed in the GAUD. This curriculum provides an approach to design education that seeks to address the integration of art with STEM through exercises that combine a variety of digital methods, tools and materials with practices derived from fine art education. Mixed media assemblages or threedimensional collages combine found manufactured objects with digitally fabricated materials and fine art techniques of painting and stenciling. Bringing a more diverse set of tools and processes of making into dialogue produces a feedback loop between digital and physical materialities and between 2d and 3d modes of design and representation. This iterative and recursive approach opens up a new hybrid potential for formmaking in a digital-physical cultural context whose spatial potential is only beginning to be understood. In a society where the digital is mainstream and a dominant driver of daily life in much of the world, and where students are digital natives with no knowledge of a pre-digital world, there is an increasing need for architecture to find new ways to engage the intersection of the digital and the physical realms. In the era of the post digital form, which we are defining here as a three-dimensional physical and material construct, finds new agency as it becomes in-formed and re-formed by the ever-expanding capabilities of digital tools. Rather than merely exploring form as a traditional foil to content as described by Adrian Forty and others, this course argues for a reframing of the discussion of form. Exploration into new combinatorial methods of form making is central to design in a digital-physical world. The fall exercises begin with 3d collage and casting, then move to digital 2d linework, then back to the physical in the form of a 2-1/2d relief. In the spring exercises, the techniques from the fall are revisited with the goal of creating a protoarchitectural object that is output into two different physical forms. The objects and reliefs are combined together and overlaid with painterly techniques of stenciling to create proto-architectural objects and grounds. The assemblage or collage of diverse materials and outputs and a process of “thinking through making� creates seams or gaps that can be exploited for new design opportunities, providing a rich spatial variation that brings context and content into dialogue with form. Fine art techniques allow a post processing of digital outputs that extends the design process beyond the initial digital-to-physical output and allows for the potential of post-output adaptability to local conditions and a way of bridging the physical-digital worlds. Image courtesy Center K-12 Photographs by Samuel Stuart
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Thom Mayne Young Architects In collaboration with the Center for Art, Design, and Community Engagement K-12 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. GAUD students, mentored by Thom Mayne of Morphosis Architects, are awarded Center K-12 Teaching Fellowships to participate in this project. This year, they worked with fifth grade students attending PS284, Gregory “Jocko� Jackson School of Sports, Arts & Technology in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Focusing on key words, verbs, and actions as a driver for the project and a means of grasping larger architectural ideas, students were asked to consider additions and alterations to the current form and program of their elementary schools. Students were guided through incremental steps of understanding and practicing architectural 2D drawing in multiple projections before advancing into experimentation with 3D actions. The classroom serving as a base, students were then asked to further develop architectural or urban ideas for their community. One student created a self-sufficient community using the classroom as a center that was enlarged. Another student used the classroom as a modular unit, which he defined in regards to the element(fire, water, earth, and nature) and continuously aggregated the module to create an urban plan. The program culminated with a visit by the students and their teachers to the Pratt campus and a final presentation (by these talented fifth graders) of the projects in the School of Architecture.
Image courtesy Center K-12 Photographs by Max Branigan
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ART:OMI Carapace was designed and built by post-professional Master of Science in Architecture students as part of a special project between Art Omi: Architecture and Pratt Institute’s Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (Pratt GAUD) program. Pratt GAUD Faculty: Kutan Ayata and Jason Vigneri-Beane.
Vruti Desai + Avinash Sharma Carapace, 2018 a
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Wallabout Brooklyn Spring 2019
Image courtesy of Jonas Coersmeier
Student Name
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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 background. 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 ethnical, 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.
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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-andbest use” determined solely on the basis of how much money can be made from it. The aims is not to demonize profit, but to learn how to balance the pursuit to 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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SAVI The Spatial Analysis and Visualization Insitiative (SAVI) is a mapping research and service center that provides education, technical support, and resrouces to Pratt students and faculty across disciplines and to external clients with a focus on non-profit and community-based organizations. SAVI also performs academic research with itnernal and external partners and offers a GIS and Design certificate program through the School of Continuing and Professional Studies. GCPE faculty and students continually work in partnership with SAVI, supporting a number of students fellowships and research opportunities.
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Pratt Center In the 55 years since its founding, Pratt Center for Community Development has advanced meaningful community participation in public decision-making and has tirelessly delivered technical assistance in support of affordable housing, environmental sustainability, and equitable economic opportunity. Pratt Center evolved from a faculty- and studentrun center for “improvement” to the professionally staffed Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development (PICCED), which encompassed a team of professional architects. Today, Pratt Center’s staff of planners and policy experts continue to work in partnership with community-based groups throughout the five boroughs to build the capacity of local leaders to advocate for their communities. BASE Campaign Since 2006, Pratt Center’s research and advocacy has supported the BASE (Basement Apartments Safe for Everyone) Coalition in advancing a proposal to legalize rentable apartments and thus, protect lower-income homeowners who are under threat of foreclosure and lowincome tenants, who desparately need safe and affordable places to live. This decade long campaign culminated this year in the City approving a Basement Conversion pilot program in East New York. Over the last 18 months Post-Sandy Resiliency Work in Sheepshead Bay Post-Sandy Resiliency Work in Sheepshead Bay -Super Storm Sandy exposed the vulnerability of many communities to climate change. In Sheepshead Bay, a shorefront community in Brooklyn, many of the small homes were built around central courts that are actually below sea level. Super Storm Sandy did tremendous damage and rather than build the homes back as they were, Pratt Center worked with Deborah Gans, an architect and faculty member, to develop a plan with the afftected communities to construct raised homes and resilient infrastructure along with other critical elements of the community to reduce overall vulnerability. After being adopted by the City’s Build It Back program, the Sheepshead Bay redevelopment is now nearing completion. Taconic Fellowship Project Highlight In 2019, Professor of Interior Design Keena Suh worked with students to create an exhibition using historic and contemporary photos of Sara D Roosevelt (SDR) Park in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The exhibition brought together residents of surrounding communities and elected officials to explore past use of the park and connect through shared histories. Other work on display visualized neighborhood generate ideas for reactivating the park’s Stanton Building, and is currently being used by the SDR Park coalition in their ongoing organizing and advocacy efforts.
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Pratt School of Architecture | Faculty and Staff Graduate Architecture and Urban Design STAFF Alexandra Barker Assistant Chairperson of Graduate Architecture
Paul Laroque Visiting Assistant Professor
Bart-Jan Polman Visiting Assistant Professor
Eve Baron GCPE Chair, Professor
Stephen Hammer Visiting Associate Professor
Christopher Nevill Visiting Assistant Professor
Robert Cervellione Adjunct Assistant Professor
Thomas Leeser Professor Katherine Leung Visiting Assistant Professor
Clelia Pozzi Visiting Assistant Professor
Lisa Ackerman Visiting Assistant Professor
Eva Hanhardt Visiting Assistant Professor
Suzanne Nienaber Visiting Assistant Professor
Jing Liu Visiting Assistant Professor
Keyan Rahimzadeh Visiting Assistant Professor Tom Reiner Visiting Assistant Professor
Rony Al-Jalkh Visiting Assistant Professor
William Hart Visiting Assistant Professor
Larisalena Ortiz Visiting Assistant Professor
Jeremiah Lo Visiting Assistant Professor
Morgan Reynolds Visiting Assistant Professor
Bridget Anderson Visiting Assistant Professor
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Georges Jacquemart Adjunct Assistant Professor
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Laura Jay Visiting Assistant Professor
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Thomas Jost Visiting Assistant Professor
Theodore Prudon Adjunct Professor
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Robert Lane Visiting Assistant Professor
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Frank Lang Visiting Assistant Professor
John Shapiro Professor
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Paul Mankiewicz Visiting Associate Professor
Sebastian Toby Snyder Visiting Assistant Professor
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Aaron Beebe Stephen Chu Robotics Operations Manager Visiting Associate Professor David Erdman Chairperson of Graduate Architecture
GCPE
Brennan Buck Visiting Assistant Professor
Alessandra Cianchetta Visiting Associate Professor
Jonas Coersmeier Kurt Everhart Adjunct Associate ProfessorManager of Academic Affairs Cce William MacDonald Professor Pamela Gill Alexander Cornhill Director of Budget and Joseph MacDonald Visiting Assistant Professor Administration Visiting Assistant Professor Cristobal Correa Alexis Gonzalez Peter Macapia Professor Admissions Proccessing Adjunct Associate ProfessorAssistant Cce Cynthia Davidson Visiting Professor Rodrigo Guajardo Radhi Majmudar Model/Woodshop Technician Manuel De Landa Adjunct Associate Professor Adjunct Professor Harriet Harriss Elliott Maltby Dean of the School of Adjunct Associate Professor Koray Duman Architecture Visiting Assistant Professor Hart Marlow Erin Murphy Adjunct Assistant Professor Natalia Echeverri Associate Manager of Visiting Assistant Professor Admissions Benjamin Martinson Adjunct Assistant Professor Michael Faciejew Geoffrey Olsen Visiting Assistant Professor Assistant to the Chairperson Eniko Marton Visiting Assistant Professor Matthew Fischer Gregory Sheward Visiting Assistant Professor Analog and Digital Production Bruce Mau Facilities Manager Visiting Professor Joseph Reid Freeman Visiting Assistant Professor FACULTY Mick Mcconnell Visiting Assistant Professor James Garrison Stefan Al Adjunct Professor Visiting Associate Professor Oliver Meade Visiting Assistant Professor Joseph Giampietro Daisy Ames Visiting Assistant Professor Visiting Assistant Professor Debora Mesa Molina Visiting Associate Professor Ariane Harrison Jeffrey Anderson Visiting Associate Professor Visiting Assistant Professor Kristina Miele Visiting Assistant Professor Daniel Horowitz Benjamin Aranda Visiting Assistant Professor Visiting Associate Professor Amir Mohebi Ashitiani Visiting Assistant Professor Catherine Ingraham Carlos Arnaiz Professor Adjunct Assistant Professor Danil Nagy Visiting Assistant Professor Arif Javed Kutan Ayata Visiting Assistant Professor Adjunct Assistant Professor Sandra Nataf Visiting Assistant Professor Anna Kats Zulaikha Ayub Visiting Assistant Professor Visiting Assistant Professor Erik Neval-Lee Visiting Assistant Professor Robert Kearns Dylan Baker-Rice Visiting Assistant Professor Visiting Professor Loyra Nunez Visiting Assistant Professor Gokhan Kodalak Alexandra Barker Visiting Assistant Professor Adjunct Associate ProfessorAlfonso Olivia Cce Visiting Assistant Professor Carisima Koenig Visiting Assistant Professor Gisela Baurmann Alihan Oney Visiting Assistant Professor Visiting Assistant Professor Mehmet Kolatan Visiting Associate professor Stephanie Bayard Christina Ostermier Adjunct Associate Professor- A.Sulan Kolatan Visiting Assistant Professor Cce Adjunct Professor Philip Parker Michael Bell Adjunct Associate ProfessorDavid Kroner Visiting Professor Cce Adjunct Assistant Professor
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