INPROCESS 19

GRADUATE

GRADUATE

INPROCESS 19 2012 – 2013

PRATT INSTITUTE 200 WILLOUGHBY AVENUE BROOKLYN, NY 11205 SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE 61 ST. JAMES PL BROOKLYN, NY 11205 TELEPHONE 718-399-4304 www.pratt.edu

INPROCESS 19 GAUD + PSPD School of Architecture Fall 2012-Spring 2013

GRADUATE

INPROCESS 19 GAUD + PSPD FALL 2012-SPRING 2013

INPROCESS is the yearly publication of student work from Pratt Institute Graduate Architecture and Urban Design Editor: Megan Hurford Assistant Editor: Maria Nikolovski PSPD Archival Coordination: Pebel Rodriguez Diaz Undergraduate Archival Coordination: Taylor Sams, Intiporn Rojanasopondist, Mari Kroin, Shaked Uzrad, + Erianthe Semerzakis

Pratt Institute School of Architecture Administration: Thomas Hanrahan, Dean Kurt Everhart, Assistant to the Dean Pamela Gill, Assistant to the Dean

Pratt Institute Administration: Thomas F. Schutte, President, Pratt Institute Mike Pratt, Chair to the Board of Trustees Peter Barna, Provost

Graduate Administration: William Mac Donald, GAUD Chair Philip Parker, Assistant GAUD Chair Erin Murphy + Erika Schroeder, Assistants to GAUD Chairs

PSPD Administration: John Shapiro, Chair of City and Regional Planning Eric Allison, Coordinator of Historic Preservation Jaime Stein, Coordinator of Environmental Systems Management Harriet Markis, Chair of Construction Management

PCCD Administration: Adam Friedman, Director of Pratt Center for Community Development

Additional Image Credits: Cover Image: Milad Showkatbakhsh Erich Schoenenberger, critic Interior Cover: Andrew Kroll Roland Snooks, critic

The following hardware and software was used for this publication: 3 Apple Mac Pro 3 desktop computers 5 Apple iMac desktop computers Canon EOS 6D camera Adobe Creative Suite CS6 Hewlett Packard Color LaserJet 5550dn Hewlett Packard Color Laser Juet 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 19 would like to extend a thank you to the Fall 2012-Spring 2013 student body and professors for their astounding contribution of over 108 gigabytes of work as well as many outstanding models and drawings.

Additionaly we would like to thank Kurt Everhart, and Pamela Gill for their tireless efforts and Thomas Hanrahan, William MacDonald, and Philip Parker for their invaluable input and guidance.

Forward

GAUD

TABLE OF CONTENTS GRADUATE ARCHITECTURE + URBAN DESIGN

005

007 02 1 033 045 055 07 1

Design Studios Semester 1 Semester 2 Thesis Semester 3

081 055 087

Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design

Design Studios Semester 1 Semester 2 Culmination Project Semester 3

Seminars

Core Media Core Elective International Programs

PROGRAMS FOR SUSTAINABLE PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT

093 097 099

101 107 119

Forward

125

Master of Science in City and Regional Planning Master of Science in Historic Preservation Master of Science in Urban Environmental Systems Management Master of Science in Facilities Management Bachelor of Science in Construction Management International Courses

126 127 128 129 130 131

Interdisciplinary Studios

133

RESEARCH

Forward BIOmetric Green Infrastructure Cold War Cool Digital Post-Sandy Topographies

151 153 155 157 159

COMMUNITY

Community Projects K-12 RAD RAMP SAVI Pratt Center Lectures, School Culture, Events and Exhibitions School Culture Lecture Series Faculty

163 165 167 169 171 1 75 1 76

COMMUNITY

Master of Science in Architecture

RESEARCH

Core Design Studios Semester 1 Semester 2 Semester 3 Comprehensive Design Studios Semester 4 Advanced Option Design Studios Semester 5 Semester 6

PSPD

Master of Architecture

Pratt School of Architecture

DEAN’S FORWARD Graduate In Process 19 celebrates the work of eight programs in the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute’s Brooklyn and Manhattan campuses, a school embedded in the two most creative urban communities in the world. Three of these programs form the GAUD, or Graduate Architecture and Urban Design, known for advanced design methods and design research.

Four other graduate programs, together with the undergraduate Construction Management Program, make up the PSPD – the Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development distinguished by their progressive urban and ecological agenda. Together they comprise over 450 students focusing on virtually every aspect of the design, planning, building and ecological challenges facing cities today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas Hanrahan, Dean

Graduate Architecture and Urban Design GAUD

CHAIR’S FORWARD

PSPD

InProcess 19 Graduate Architecture publication introduces Graduate Architecture and Urban Design’s (GAUD) progressive design environment for advanced architectural research. The GAUD proposes speculative debate and experimental architectural production based on a relational construct among theoretical inquiry, computational research, digital design, and technological investigation. To this end, GAUD seeks to formulate a contemporary approach to architecture that is “ecological” in the sense that it provides collective exchanges which are both trans-disciplinary and trans-categorical. This ecological approach encourages feedback relationships among architecture, landscape, urbanism, technology, software programming, industry, manufacturing, political agencies, theoretical studies, as well as categories and disciplines that are newly emerging in contemporary culture. This approach seeks to productively intensify heterogeneous interests and agencies through an integrative model of education.

RESEARCH COMMUNITY

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

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

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

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

William J. Mac Donald, Graduate Chair

5

Zachary Grzybowski Peter Macapia, critic

Master of Architecture

In the fall of the second year, studios build in complexity, with a mixed-use housing project based in the Gowanus area of Brooklyn investigating the relationship between the site and the complex matrix of multiple programmatic conditions. This studio seeks to apply technical concepts introduced in the material assemblies and environmental controls seminars to the development of building envelopes and environmental systems in the projects.

Alexandra Barker, coordinator

DESIGN STUDIO FACULTY Carlos Arnaiz Alexandra Barker StĂŠphanie Bayard Jonas Coersmeier James Garrison Theodavid Harris Karel Klein

Craig Konyk Carla Leitao Peter Macapia Richard Scherr Erich Schoenenberger Maria Sieira Jason Vigneri-Beane

COMMUNITY

The spring context studio highlights issues of context as a topological condition and a programmatic one of circulation and accessibility.

Digital techniques are further developed and diagramming becomes more advanced. This year the program was a Montessori school in Peck Slip, a site in Lower Manhattan that was once a ship dock.

RESEARCH

The core sequence comprises the first three semesters of the sixsemester program. The first year begins with investigations of material form and conventions of representation that use physical and digital formal manipulations to explore tectonic conditions of structure and envelope and programmatic potentialities. These studies are parlayed into projects exploring program and context that consist of small scale interventions into New York City infrastructural networks. This year the studios developed projects for a network of new public plazas across the city.

PSPD

The three-year M. Arch 1 program guides students through an interdisciplinary approach to architectural education to prepare students to become professionals that can accommodate current issues of inhabitation and anticipate emergent conditions of site and program. Our studio sequence is the fundamental mode of instruction in architecture. Studios work in a variety of media, from physical material explorations to digital modeling, imagery, and fabrication. Studio projects cover a range of topics, from explorations of techniques as generators of new formal and tectonic systems to investigations into issues of contemporary culture and emerging spatial, social, and political structures.

GAUD

CORE DESIGN STUDIO

Master of Architecture | First Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Public Plaza Waterworks Lower Manhattan + Downtown Brooklyn, NY The studio introduced the students to concepts, processes, and methodologies that are fundamental to contemporary architectural design. These themes are introduced through a series of studies that investigate the architectonic potentialities of different types of materials ranging from planar to volumetric, open to closed, and structure to surface. Students translated physical models into parametric digital models that could explore calibrated ranges of tectonic conditions and produced aggregated systems that could be manipulated to respond to imagined external pressures of site and internal programmatic potentialities. Students analyzed the systems they developed and generated graphic notation strategies.

In the second half of the semester, students applied these techniques to the development of an intervention into the strata of the urban street edge or boundary condition. Boundary conditions in architecture are examined as spatial zones with subdivisions that overlap and change according to daily or seasonal shifts. The tectonic units developed in the material study were aggregated and manipulated at the local and global level to be employed to generate intricate, multivalent spatial conditions that could be employed to address issues of site and program discovered through research and testing.

The program this year was an intervention of a water-based community program into a series of underutilized city sites slated to be converted into public plazas. The studio studied two sites in the flood zone of the city, one in lower Manhattan and one in downtown Brooklyn.

Alexandra Barker, critic a

a

b

b

c

a

b

a. Thea Sarkissian b. Ulrika Lindell c. Melissa Braxton

9

Master of Architecture | First Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Waterworks Dumbo Brooklyn, NY The studio was an introduction to the fundamental concepts, processes, and skills required for first-year graduate architectural design students. The initial stages began with an investigation of conceptual and spatial relationships through exercises abstracted from architectural context. Through a series of non-uniform manipulations and digital production processes, students developed unit modules based on the conceptual relationships of form and performance. Units were aggregated in systemic ways and introduced notions of space, pattern, scale and connection to the design. This protocol became an evolutionary process engaged simultaneously in the architectural production as well as in representation, with contingencies emerging from the constant confrontation between the physical model and the digital representation.

Previous material explorations from the first part of the studio enabled students to link conceptual ideas and form through architectural design. Explorations were contextually tested in small public spaces in Manhattan and Brooklyn, NY where students were asked to design a public bath and think of water as a speculative infrastructural and social program. As part of the infrastructural role that this program can play, sustainable aspects of water including gray water treatment, runoff collection and multiple water usage were considered as part of the program. Through a study of the multitude of relationships between water, human and environment, the studio explored a wide range of conceptual and practical ideas to develop an architectural language and manifestation of the central concepts.

StĂŠphanie Bayard, critic a

c

b

b

c

a. Lindsay Schragen b. Han Saem Lee c. Alexander Cornhill

11

Master of Architecture | First Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Objects Inside of Objects Dumbo Brooklyn, NY Though buildings are often thought of as a neutral functional containers for the objects within, the studio considers an alternative idea where the building is yet another object that is in a complex—sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory—relationship to the objects within. With this premise, the projects explored alternatives to part to whole hierarchies. Rather than thinking of building components as lifeless, generic parts serving the whole, everything (column, slab, wall, panel, fixture, nail, etc) has the potential to be a specific figure, in and of itself. We are very comfortable with the complex interplay of multiple identities giving meaning to individuals and collectives in life itself. However, we are very uncomfortable with difficult organizational ideas when it comes to the design of the non-living.

Can a building be the collective identity of multiple objects existing in a legible proximity?

Karel Klein, critic a

b

b

b c

c

a. Jeqing Zheng b. Sasimanas Hoonsuwan c. Ka Ki Lee

13

Master of Architecture | First Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Very Simple Lower Manhattan + Downtown Brooklyn, NY Our operating procedures are very simple. A nest-list algorithm rather than geometry as form – geometry is what eventually gets produced.

One number was sent to another only to be returned as another, and so on iteratively. Another algorithm graphed the results using spring mechanics and sent each number as a point in 3space connecting them in sequence – the numbers then spread out. The graph is diagram since there is no natural “space,” no metric system, for an algorithm. An algorithm is the basis of computation. There is only sequence – one thing follows another, or it doesn’t – and the series of that sequence which continues until it stops. We selected a result, then submit it to another move. We flattened it, to give it dimension in 2space. And we materialized it in laser cut objects sending it back into 3space. And then 1) applied various folds to this module and 2) connected these modules, at first slowly, and then in combinations of combinations. But then we tested this further. We submitted these to another algorithm - which uses CA rules to connect, reconnect, sending the modules again into 3space. Number has been replaced by module. And the original algorithm was recaptured. Point line and plane have been replaced by this “goes to that,” and “that goes to something else.” The implied ontology of geometry as an internal relation to form does not fall into an abyss – it is simply much less metaphysically profound than previously held: the connections, rather than the elements, including curves and surfaces, are now the basis of the ontology. This goes to that. Or, if you prefer: the order in which this goes to that, and so, algorithm and topology.

Algorithmic combinatorial systems are not static but rather generative of global transformations based on minute local changes over time. This is called Modulation. In general this procedure of simple operations begins to introduce complexity. This set of problems considers the fabrication of module, the question of complexity, and the definition of space as that which is spatialized rather than pre-existent. We are no longer in the domain of a pictorial logic of geometry. Everything else stems from how we look at these operations as architectural categories, from structure, to circulation, site and envelope. Site was Brooklyn, various locations, using open triangular plaza.

Peter Macapia, critic a c b

b

b c

a

a. Ran Tian b. Seth Embry c. Zachary Grzybowski

15

Master of Architecture | First Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

WaterWorks Coney Island Brooklyn, NY The fundamentals design studio introduced the students to approaches of form and space-making through the investigation of material potentials, limits, and performance. This approach to design embraced the notion that new formal and spatial potentials could emerge out of formation and material properties that were not merely solution-based responses to functional requirements and constraints.

Our section initiated the first third material study with the Taxonomy of PASTA: An investigation of pasta. Formal, compositional, and spatial properties were manipulated through a range of analog and digital tools and techniques to generate serial unitized protoarchitectonic models that explored a range of spatial conditions including negotiations between surface to volume, structure to skin, and enclosure to aperture. These formal investigations of aggregation and assembly were understood as studies of the potentials of emerging design and fabrication technologies and their role in the production of architecture. Through various techniques of generative drawings these assemblies were studied and interrogated in relation to architectural potentials. Further iterations were investigated at both the unit and global scales to generate a range of potentials for inhabitation that will be employed in the project phase of the semester.

In the second half of the semester students applied their research to the development of an intervention into the realm of an infrastructural project. The premise of the program was how to rebuild New York’s waterfront and beaches after Superstorm Sandy that hit in the fall of 2012. Our site was an empty lot of a former amusement roller coaster located in Coney Island adjacent to the boardwalk. The discoveries made by the students in their site and program research direct their project development by defining the boundaries or territories in which the intervention will operate and by determining the ways in which different users will interface with the new structure. Students develop representational tools and techniques with which to convey their ideas.

Erich Schoenenberger, critic a

b

c b

b

c

a. Naomi Levin b. Milad Showkatbakhsh c. Addie Duplissie-Johnson

17

Master of Architecture | First Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Identities + Formation Bogardus Plaza Manhattan, NY This studio explored multiple ways in which tectonic transformations across architectural categories can create structures that are simultaneously concrete realities and identities in formation. Students were asked to develop explicitly material models that, while based on the properties, behaviors and intelligence of a single self-consistent material, articulate and execute transformations across any number of proto-architectural categories such as surface becoming volume, structure becoming skin, inside becoming outside, two-dimensional becoming three-dimensional and so on. Operations at play in the modeling of material transformations were simultaneously developed as abstract drawings and notational systems in a parallel set of graphic iterations. While these formations were robust entities with many anticipatory architectural conditions, they were still unformed enough to be pressured, repurposed and further transformed by the folding-in of program (public bath houses) and the pressure from and infiltrations of forces, vectors and constraints of the site (street reclamation sites). Ultimately, the architecture that was to emerge was to be simultaneously abstract and real, novel and informed, alien and embedded, self-consistent and differentiated and systemically unique to the materials, populations and events that flow in, around and through it.

Jason Vigneri-Beane, critic a a b

b b

c

a. Monica Wynn b. Elisa Yi Feng c. James Maldonado

19

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Object Oriented Peck Slip Manhattan, NY LET US CALCULATE The method of probing, testing and rewriting served as an introduction to the algorithmic routine, whether it is employed for the making of computational, manual or conceptual models. In principle we do not discriminate between bits and atoms, and we consider digital material and physical material as equally defined by specific behaviors and resistances.

We started by making three models: Site Model, School Model and Math Model. Each model was informed by research, analysis and speculation, and each one was developed in the making and remaking from three different ‘materials’: 2d line drawing, 3d wireframe geometry and paper. We considered both research and production as integrated activities and as a prior expression of architectural intent.

We considered the frequent transposition between the respective three media as the primary space of architectural invention.

PROBE SPACE The ‘probe space’ expanded via dirty bridging and happy accidents, it crystallized through smooth translation and willful synthesis, and compressed by thorough testing against architectural assessment criteria, filtered through the author’s personal bias and design agenda.

While the probe space never fully collapsed, it successively added definition to an emerging design solution. After three weeks, a preliminary proposal was established for an urban site intervention, spatial and organizational system, and a tectonic assembly logic based on a specific geometric language (site, school, math.)

OBJECT-ORIENTED DESIGN The studio was also referred to as the “Context studio”, and while in architecture the idea of context is neither congruent to that of site nor pertaining to the built environment alone, we do take this making of a site model as an opportunity to position ourselves in the ‘context debate’. In postmodern architectural discourse, contextualism is the critique of assumed early modern tendencies of privileging the particularity of the program over that of the location, a certain indifference to context and the desire to always arrive at a unique solution. It can also be seen as the critique of abstraction of the architectural problem. Consequently contextualism promotes a dialogue between the building and its surroundings, in part to conserve both the physical and historical continuum of the urban fabric.

Jonas Coersmeier, critic a b

b

c d

a

a. Diana Kokoszka b. James Maldonado c. Thea Sarkissian d. Danica Selem

21

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

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

The goal of the studio was to help each attain the ability to conceive of architecture in a unique way, devoid of any dependence on preconception, current trends or stylizations or form dictated by computer software. It was meant through individual questioning and personalized research relevant to the subject, an urban elementary school, to strengthen their creative process through which a meaningful dynamic work of architecture could come into being; a build-able proposal expressive at once of theoretical positions, technological exploration, programmatic invention, site redefinition and pragmatic concerns.

The studio was also meant to assist the students to develop their individual representational skills and identity by exploring diverse methods of representation and design development including digital explorations, hand drawings, photographic media and models

Theodavid Harris, critic a

a

b

b

c

a

a. Erik Nevala-Lee b. Gee-Ana Sanchez Perez c. Han Saem Lee

23

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Math Play Vertical School Peck Slip Manhattan, NY The studio required the vertical organization of an education program for a math themed elementary school on a highly constrained urban site with significant flooding potential. The interaction of the community, the susceptibility of the ground floor to flooding and the need to reinforce the identity and purpose of the school were guiding considerations. As this was the first applied problem of the studio sequence, the studio emphasized the development of architectural fundamentals. Site, space, sequence, structure, massing, and environmental response were considered individually and as a holistic assembly.

James Garrison, critic a a b

a b

b

c

a. Karla Lockhart b. Maria Nikolovski c. Elizabeth Van Orden

25

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Visible Variability Peck Slip Manhattan, NY This Studio explored the concept of “Visible Variability” in the design of an Elementary Public School for the site in Peck Slip of Lower Manhattan. It is the idea that architecture can be evidence of progressive change that is part of its urban context.

Lower Manhattan is constituted of a series of land filing of its water’s edge; each one increasing the land-mass of the edge. Ironically, it was these land filled sections that are the flooding Zone A in the Sandy Hurricane damage zone. It was interesting to note that the entire edge of Lower Manhattan is a man-made artificial landscape.

Concepts of the development of Growth and Form permeated our discussions this semester; whether it was in child development or the concepts of mathematics evidenced in the natural and man-made worlds.

Can architecture be a pedagogical tool for the demonstration of these phenomenons? Can it be the “first lesson” in the mediation between the urban (man-made) and the natural (water’s edge)? How does an Elementary School “teach” not only its students, but also the larger population of its urban community?

Craig Konyk, critic a b a

b

b

a. Ka Ki Lee b. Ran Tian

27

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Active Tension Peck Slip Manhattan, NY Elementary Schools in/as CONTEXT Given the studio theme, program and larger framework of the semester, this section placed equal emphasis on CONTEXT being understood simultaneously as: - relationships between the school and surrounding site - relationships across school spaces, and of schools in a field of other schools - relationships between space form and mathematical content The studio inquired upon topics within structural mathematics that were relevant to the spatialization and conceptualization of space form, structure and material – focusing on the capacity of learning by subjects through perceived contextualization of concepts as realized and experienced in space form.

As well, the studio section did research that was evocative of possible future programmatic connections across school spaces and between the school and surrounding communities by, among other strategies, integrating contemporary and speculative/extrapolative concepts and forms of classroom interaction.

The section experiments with the definition of spatial character by expanding on techniques of subdivision and compartmentalization into more diverse modalities of ‘connection’ and of suggestion of spatial gradient.

The goal was to use this understanding of ‘connection’ across spaces as possible new modes of thinking of the performance of classrooms spaces as sets (space-form relationship to suggestion of program), as well as, to inquire into the possibility of structure and its connectivity to demonstrate (and exercise) mathematical concepts (structural mathematics to deeper program).

Carla Leitao, critic a

a

b

b

c

b

a. Dan Tomita b. Elisa Yi Feng c. Christopher Testa

29

Master of Architecture | Second Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Occasional Slip Peck Slip Manhattan, NY This was the second year our studio has collaborated with the software maker Side FX, a Canadian company with offices in Santa Mรณnica, California. Ari Danesh came to Pratt to run a workshop on their Houdini software package and our students were able to use its procedural logic in the organization of the architectural program of their projects. Students were asked to develop digital assets based on some idea they had about the programmatic organization of their project, an elementary school in lower Manhattan.

The site, Peck Slip, was flooded during hurricane Sandy the previous fall, and so the students were keenly aware of the need to address flooding on the lower levels. And of course, early maps of Manhattan revealed that what would now be the footprint of the building was once a slip for landing and launching ships out of the New York harbor.

We discussed early on that there may be architecturally sophisticated ways to address a flood zone. I was in Columbia, MO after the 1993 Missouri River flooding, and river edge residents there had taken their wooden bungalows and simply raised them up on concrete posts above flood risk. A sight to be seen, to be sure, but as an approach in an urban context, it only creates that undefined covered ground that is difficult to transform into a lively urban environment. We have an example of this adjacent to this site--the large swatch of land under the FDR elevated highway.

We looked to the Dutch and were inspired by how they have dealt with their own waterfront flooding. Instead of lifting the building and loosing precious space below it, Dutch architects design the lower building spaces as flood zones: these are still part of the usable space in the building, but designed in such a way that, were the space flooded, the damage would be minimal and the remainder of the building would remain usable [by choosing finishes that withstand salt water, by locating mechanical equipment above flood danger, etc.].

These were the two concerns in this context studio project: a desire to build a digital generative tool that generates a procedural system for programmatic distribution, and a site that occasionally floods (and in a sense becomes once again what it once was).

Maria Sieira, critic a b

c a

c

a. Ulrika Lindell b. Yin Jia c. Denise Tang

31

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Housing Gowanus Canal Brooklyn, NY Cities are sites of acute and agonizing density: more people, less space and more amenities. An architecture studio dedicated to the task of urban housing should be an exercise in thinking through the limits of our profession’s organizational systems. We were taught by the modernist to obsess over efficiency yet our world is no longer interested in technocratic solutions. The challenge appears to be structures that inspire community. Yet what exactly does that mean?

Our studio was structured as an open laboratory for the investigation of excess, redundancy, hybridity and episodes of exclusions in the hope of fostering different ways of living amidst others. We took a deep interest in the tools of pattern-making as a means to work through dense formal clusters of matter. We studied the qualities of the patterns we made and tracked their transformational potential.

We sought a new form of organizational intelligence whereby the parameters regulating urban housing could be re-engineered to unlock the power of digressions and divergence from the norm. In other words, wisdom came from our ability to project our dreams.

The City of New York posed the challenge of a micro-scaled future.

Existenze minimum for the era of radical income disparity. What does this mean for the social ecology of cities? Brooklyn, with its artisanal, post-punk subculture can offer the world an alternative vision of domesticity that challenges the global problematics of climate change and uneven development.

Housing always means more than what we can design as it involves other people’s imaginations. It holds more than what we plan. How can we design spaces, “with the curious property,” as Foucault once wrote, “of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.”

Carlos Arnaiz, critic a

c b

b

c

a. Jenna Steinbeck b. Elle White c. Dillon Hanratty

33

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Thematic Micro Housing Gowanus Canal Brooklyn, NY This studio explored the potential for high-density housing serving individuals in a setting that includes elective communal activities.

The site was an underdeveloped post industrial urban site adjoining Brooklyn’s Gowanus canal. Communal themes include culinary arts, visual and performing arts, digital fabrication, physical fitness, and literary pursuits among others. The studio developed techniques for unit aggregation and the integration of environmental and structural systems. The relationship of the individual living units to communal spaces generated primary organizational concepts. The design of individual living environments of less than three hundred square feet required the detailed design of the human environment at an intimate scale. Given the sites tendency to flood during storm events grade level programming were limited to spaces that could be evacuated.

James Garrison, critic a

b

b c

c

b

a. Caroline Vickery b. Matiss Zemetis c. John Torpy

35

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Undocumented Gowanus Canal Brooklyn, NY This studio explored housing for undocumented immigrant workers to be located in the industrial district of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.

Along with Mayor Bloomberg’s adAPT NYC housing initiative, he also recently gave a speech at the June 15th Council of Foreign Relations Meeting in Washington DC where he argued for National Immigration Reform. Immigrants supply a vital source of inexpensive labor to the economy of New York City. Imagining a new housing model that supports this fact, and indeed adds to the immigrant workers’ quality of life is a special emphasis of this studio.

By minimizing the dwelling unit into a one to two person studio space the project study sought to maximize the public realm of the housing complex. The site as chosen was in the heart of a former industrial hub; an intersection on the Gowanus Canal, which has close proximity to work sites for the laborers and subway connections to the other boroughs.

Craig Konyk, critic a b

c a

c

a. Alex Lightman b. Sean Whalen c. Greg Mulholland

37

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Housing and the Public Realm Gowanus Canal Brooklyn, NY The studio focused on the problem of housing from the perspective of the public realm: the formation of “in-between” space outside the unit that establishes transition at all scales, circulatory sequences, the aggregation of group form, and the establishment of new social, interactive space. The public realm is defined as figurative space— systems of linkages, public spaces and mixed-use programs that serve as the circulatory and social armature of the building. Thus, the housing project, along with significant mixed-use programs chosen by individual students, was analogous to the design of the city in miniature—complex organizations that both responded to and generated larger urban patterns of the Gowanus Canal district, rather than the formation of an architectural object disconnected from the city.

The other significant parameter was to understand the nature of architectural limits as not being fixed, impenetrable enclosures that isolated interior from exterior space, but as a “thickened” space of multiple 1 limits, generating variable degrees of closure, exposure and protection. The concept of façade, rather than being a taut, singular membrane, is rather conceived as spatial systems of mediation, or a performative surface. The façade thus became a field of multiple components that conditions environmental forces, achieving energy conservation and sustainability; a spatial zone of intermediate interior-exterior habitation; an articulated zone that demarcated “difference”—readings of unit identity and group scale; and finally, a membrane that redirected the relationship of the body to the public realm beyond, incorporating possibilities of visual cropping, voyeurism, and exhibitionism.

Richard Scherr, critic a b

a b c

c

a. Megan Hurford b. Nicholas Wright c. Benjamin Wells

39

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Housing in Gowanus Gowanus Canal Brooklyn, NY In this studio, students researched the physical, environmental, social, and cultural conditions of a NYC urban site, one that currently has some socio-political import in New York City. It was both a housing studio and an urban context studio and students examined the urban dwelling unit’s contingencies relative to urban systems and infrastructure.

The area around the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn has a long sordid history of pollution (including a Superfund designation) and a more recent history of skyrocketing speculation. Students were asked to evaluate the urban conditions of the site and to develop a small mixeduse project (housing + commercial space). If some of the perceived failures of modern architecture resulted from the imposition of a form on a social context that did not take to the new social order implied by it, then here lies the opportunity for the social program to precede the plan. Designers and community activists are aware of the character of this neighborhood as seen in the nightclubs, exhibition spaces, concert venues, and artists’ residences that are steadily taking over former industrial spaces.

Theoretically, students were asked to consider “Deformations” as a process of changing shape, theoretically opposed to the erasure of the existing site. Speculation on the site could imagine a potential clean slate, a fresh start—take it all out, roll out the lawn, install the lamps, done.But in this studio we introduce a delay in which students use architecture, the critical sort, as a kind of research into what the site might be. Perhaps the acceptance of the deformations at the Gowanus Canal is the beginning of an architecture that uncovers the life already at the site and works with it to tease out an urbanity particular to Gowanus.

Already there are a number of programmatic deformations emerging along the canal: there is boating in the toxic waters of the canal, and nightclubs holding taxidermy contests. Students exaggerate program in a similar way. Exaggeration and humor is how the residents approach the toxic conditions and hope that the “clean-up” will leave Gowanus true to its industrial roots.

Formally students engaged digital media to orchestrate progressive deformations. Aggregation (accumulation of dwelling units on a façade, around a void) and repetition will be used to articulate housing groupings, not unlike the composer Philip Glass repeats and slowly transforms a repeated set of notes.

Maria Sieira, critic a b

a c b

c

a. Steph-michelle Komornik b. Brian Vallario c. Miranda Rogers

41

Master of Architecture | Third Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Materials and Assemblies What is architecture made of? How is it documented and built?

This course explores critical building concepts of materiality, structure, envelope, environment, life safety and constructability.

Precedent and construction documentation studies augment these discussions and culminate in the design and detailing of a complete exterior wall section, coordinated closely with each student’s Design Studio project.

The primary objective of the course is to arm the student with a comprehensive conceptual knowledge of building systems to use as a foundation for integrating and applying knowledge developed in Environmental Controls, History & Theory, Structures and Computer Media coursework that can then be applied to designing and detailing actual construction documents.

Steven Chang + Karen Brandt + Frank Lupo + Jessica Young, critics

a

b c

d b

e

a. Brian Vallario b. Jenna Steinbeck c. Steph-michelle Komornik d. Alex Lightman e. Sang Shin Lee

43

Megan Hurford + Steph-michelle Komornik + Shehrbano Salahuddin Erich Schoenenberger, critic

Master of Architecture

Alexandra Barker StĂŠphanie Bayard Thomas Leeser Erich Scheonenberger

INTEGRATED BUILDING SYSTEMS FACULTY Cristobal Correa Jeff Thompson Bob Kearns Mark Malekshashi

Sameer Kumar Karen Brandt Elliott Maltby Meta Brunzema

COMMUNITY

DESIGN STUDIO FACULTY

RESEARCH

Alexandra Barker, coordinator

PSPD

In the Master of Architecture fourth semester design studio, students undertook the design of a Comprehensive Architectural Project (CAP). Students worked in groups and were assigned a program of moderate complexity on sites with varying climatic conditions. The projects were brought to a high level of completion and incorporate extensive site and climate analysis, material research, structural and mechanical system design, and the documentation of construction details. The agenda for the studio was to develop a collaborative approach across disciplines that could produce architecture that was able to integrate systems at the scale of the building and made connections to infrastructural networks at the urban scale.

To accomplish this, the course was taught concurrently with the Integrated Building Systems seminar (IBS), the culminating course in the technology sequence, where instructors in the disciplines of structural, mechanical, environmental and facade engineering advised students alongside the design instructors in the studio. This year, the project was to design a sustainable car showroom in a range of urban climatic regions and cultural contexts. Sites included Tokyo, Japan, Hong Kong, Santa Monica, California, and Moscow.

GAUD

COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN STUDIO

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Sustainable Car Showroom Tokyo, Japan The project for this studio was a car showroom located on the Tokyo waterfront that would incorporate sustainable practices such as passive solar design, passive cooling, and geothermal/ hydrothermal heat sourcing into a design that was responsive to the site and programmatic conditions. The studio focused on the examination of climatological, topological and cultural aspects of the city as generators for the design concept. They considered how their project could spearhead renewed development of Tokyo’s neglected waterfront and researched speculative materialities and systems that would take advantage of the unique conditions of the coastal city location, including seismic issues and climate.

One project incorporated a landscape proposal that would be a component of a proposed waterfront edge park. Another project focused on the challenge of a tower design in a tight site that incorporated ramping floors. A third proposal incorporated spaces that addressed the cultural practice of car racing on the adjacent Shuto Expressway, and a fourth project designed the showroom as a custom-build organization that showcased the assembly aspect of car production.

Alexandra Barker, critic

a

b c

d

a. Jonathan Shockley + Jenna Steinbeck + Elle White b. Jon Bucholtz + Sana Iqbal + Chris Yu c. Miranda Rogers + Caroline Vickery + Darion Washington d. Alessandra Burton + Nick Wright + Matiss Zemitis

47

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Car Showroom Hong Kong, China The CAP studio, taught concurrently with the Integrated Building System seminar, emphasized the relationships between conceptual ideas taught in the Design Studio and technical aspects of the studio projects. The tight relationship between the two classes gave students the opportunity to engage multiple facets of a programmatically complex building, from the primary structural system to the finish materials, fully developing the project to the level of architectural detailing.

The purpose of this Studio was to design a sustainable car dealership on site of the former Hong Kong airport, Kai Tak. Kai Tak, located on the densely populated Kowloon peninsula is currently going through a mix of residential, commercial and touristic redevelopment with focus on environment and sustainability. The site, with a prime view on the island of Hong Kong became an opportunity to design a car dealership that challenged social, political and programmatic issues despite the paradoxical ideas of car and ecology. Students engaged the specific climatic, programmatic, and urban conditions to design a performative building that decreased dependency on external energy sources.

StĂŠphanie Bayard, critic a. Jeian Jeong + Justin Trudeau + Ryan Whitby b. Ardavan Arfaei + Maryam Delshad + Arielle Lapp + Camilo Valencia c. Taesoo Kim + Hyeyong Wang + Che Yu

a

a b c

c

49

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Soviet Truck Factory Moscow, Russia Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has undergone radical political, economical and cultural shifts and transformations leaving the country in a state of flux, reinvention and uncertainty. Western influence is pouring into the country, mainly driven by the new rules of capitalism – capitalism “Russian style”, also coined “The Wild East”, leaving many to question this new direction the country is moving towards. This rupture is felt in all aspects of society, and architecture is no exception. Monuments are dismantled, while others are being restored or even newly erected.

After nearly fifty years of “building socialism” in the first half of the 20th Century, Moscow was dominated by Stalinist architecture until, two decades ago, the former Soviet Union embarked on yet another grandiose task, this time the construction of a capitalist society. The capitalist model, so rapidly and chaotically forced onto the city’s socialist urban structure, which is still desperately trying to accommodate the demands of the new post-socialist society, has often resulted in negative transformations. If Moscow’s social and economic structures have been transformed in these last twenty years, its urban reality has proved to be more enduring.

This new social and political reality presents an opportunity for potential architectural solutions which are neither just preconceived western models nor unquestioned extensions of Russian or Soviet architecture. Could Russia’s social ideals and creative energy revive and coexist with the new capitalist reality? What are the opportunities for architecture to fill this void?

The Moscow site is a centrally located large industrial site containing an important Soviet era truck factory (including a constructivist style workers club nearby, designed by the brothers Vesnin), once a symbol of Soviet industrial power, now in decline and a symbol of the fallen empire. The ZIL factory, as it is called, produced rugged trucks capable of reaching the most uninhabitable regions of the country, military vehicles as well as hand crafted presidential limousines. The inventions of ZIL produced unique vehicles with capabilities suited for extreme environments.

Students chose a site for a new car and truck showroom within the existing ZIL factory or in its direct vicinity.

Thomas Leeser, critic a. Marsh Lindley + Brian Varillio + Sean Whalen b. Sally Acevedo + Hyo Rin Choi + Sira Kiatnun + Ally Spier c. Sang Shin Lee + Alex Lightman + Greg Mulholland d. Puja Chand + Shayna Cooper + Lila Tedesco

a b

d c

c

b

51

Master of Architecture | Fourth Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Electric Car Dealership Santa Monica, CA The objective of this studio was to design and develop a showroom for a car dealership next to Santa Monica Pier in California. The dealership / showroom assignment aimed to showcase and brand electric cars and vehicles. Electric cars (like Tesla-cars) have entered the US marked over the past few years and are becoming increasingly popular. These non-combustion cars are in need for recognition among the vast car market. Their innovative size and shape and their new technologies have plenty to offer yet it seems they have not yet been marketed and properly branded as an attractive transposition solution in the US. The studio researched successful signature buildings and product branding with the aim to develop a dealership that portrays a new and exciting trend in car design. A prime example of branding is Apple. It is said “Apple’s brand is the key to its survival”. With this in mind the studio thrived to further the branding of the small cars through the architecture of the showroom.

Further research went into the maneuvering behaviors, parking and display possibilities that these small vehicles have, whereby questioning the standards set forth by the current large car majority.

This studio made the attempt to adapt new standards and create a building representing these new trends to sell and promote the use of ecological car technology.

The project site was set to interact with the public attraction of the Santa Monica Piers and the start of the famous highway No. 1.

Further, the maze of choked highways and Los Angeles extensive car population provides the stage for the electric car dealership program.

Erich Schoenenberger, critic

a

b

b

a

a

a. Fajer Alqattan + Victor Nuñez + John Torpy b. Megan Hurford + Shehrbano Salahuddin 53 + Steph-michelle Komornik

Asli Agirbas Sulan Kolatan, critic

Jason Vigneri-Beane, coordinator

ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN STUDIO FACULTY Vito Acconci Meta Brunzema Joseph Giovannini Hina Jamelle Sulan Kolatan Peter Macapia

David Ruy Erich Schoenenberger Henry Smith-Miller Scot Teti Maria Ludovica Tramontin

COMMUNITY

For both sets of students, the option studios are an environment in which the important challenges of advanced studio culture may intensify both collectively and individually emerging positions on contemporary design thinking, intelligence and execution.

Accomplished instructors with diverse and progressive interests are invited to lead these intense and exploratory studios that contribute deeply to the evolving identity of the program. Themes explored in the option studios this year included: elegant formations and digital techniques, synthetic ecologies and architectural innovation, new buildings for changing populations, cultural centers and urban transformation, urban and ecological interfaces, provocative relationships between street and tower, architectural protagonists in world-cultural events, the radicalization of scale, vertical farming and systemic design, digital techniques and complex organizational logics.

RESEARCH

The Graduate Architecture and Urban Design program’s option studios create a progressive environment for (upper-level) firstprofessional and post-professional students to engage in advanced design research through a number of specially formulated themes in contemporary architectural design research, practice and discourse. For first-professional students, they act as a vehicle to push capabilities accrued throughout the core curriculum through advanced design scenarios. They bring post CAP-studio skills into more speculative venues that are further intensified in relation to advanced electives accessible at this point in the program. For post-professional students they are opportunities to confront new territories and emerging questions in architecture culture in the ascent towards a thesis formulation.

PSPD

ADVANCED OPTION DESIGN STUDIO

GAUD

Master of Architecture + Master of Science in Architecture

Master of Architecture | Fifth + Second Semesters

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

HYBRD-HS/GRB-BG-BLDNG/CRSS-BRD-CMPLX Think before you design…Think of the building you’ll design as a compound (it wraps all its different parts up in itself, turning itself into 1 unit made out of many): or think of that building as a complex (its different + varied parts are each separate & distinct from every other part, so that they each have a role to play, each on its own but together, all at once, as an ensemble): or think of it as an assemblage, a miscellany, mishmash, hodgepodge, something of a mess (anything goes here, it’s not a mixture but a mingling, nothing need cohere here, everything goes here though nothing has to fit with anything else, there’s everything but the kitchen sink here -- no, there’s everything plus the kitchen sink here, plus an extra one upside-down + another smashed to a million pieces for good measure…

Think so much, so heavy, that you can’t stop to do anything real, actual, factual, material: think so fast that you never stop to think, you can’t stop 1 minute to think just 1 single implacable uninterrupted thought…

Make your new building into: not a half-breed but a mongrel… not a blending but a commingling, intermingling… not fusion but coalescence…not a merger but an amalgamation…not integration but combination…not an intermixture but a composite…not a concoction but an ensemble…not hash but an assemblage…not a stew but an assortment…not a jumble but a miscellany…not a conflation but an entanglement…etc…

Vito Acconci, critic a

b

b

a. Merve Poyraz b. Shawn Walsh

57

Master of Architecture | Fifth + Second Semesters

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Transition Studio 3.0 Long Island City Queens, NY “Buildings, and even whole cities, have become infrastructural technologies”… “Activity in infrastructure space is information, or the action is the form” -Keller Easterling: The Action is the Form: Victor Hugo’s TED Talk Strelka Press. 2012.

“Transition Studio 3.0” was the third of a series of studios that focused on “Transitions” – or technological, economic, ecological and sociocultural developments at different scales that influenced and reinforced each other. These included the health care, energy, transportation, construction, and agriculture sectors and more. In the last 10 years, interdisciplinary researchers (building on complexity theory, systems thinking, sociology etc...) have been studied non-linear dynamics of structural change in societies, and how these transformations are initiated, facilitated and influenced with experimental projects. As a profession that leads cultural development, architecture should play a catalytic role in these transitions.

This studio sought to catalyze transitions in the health and wellness sector by offering alternatives to institutional health care facilities – and new infrastructural models for well-being in our cities. Instead of focusing on increasing health-care efficiency, we developed new institutions by engaging the abundance of our symbolic, material and spatial culture.

Inspired by Keller Easterling’s e-book “The Action is the Form Victor Hugo’s TED Talk”, the students were encouraged to think infrastructurally, and to develop adaptable and reproducible architectural “spatial products” that can be deployed in the US and beyond. In addition, each student designed a local iteration of this health-related “spatial product” for a site located directly across the street from MoMA P.S.1 in Long Island City, Queens.

Students created open narratives that change the way people care for each other. Focusing on engagement, interpretation and adaptation strategies, students developed hybrid facilities for people with Alzheimer’s disease, Schizophrenia and other mental disabilities, dialysis clinics for kidney patients, as well as innovative wellness and fitness interventions.

Meta Brunzema, critic a b c

a

c

a. Liduam Pong b. Jonathan Fox c. Emmy-Juliette Rodriguez

59

Master of Architecture | Fifth + Second Semesters

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Elegant Formations Soho Manhattan, NY Today’s digital techniques allow us to deal with the full complexity of material systems, by offering the tools to create effects that exceed the sum of their parts. Elegant Formations examined some ways in which this can contribute to the formulation of architecture, utilizing generative techniques for the evaluation of growth patterns and their variation in the development of form.

The act of designing using digital techniques is reliant on a two-way exchange of information. By allowing for positive feedback, these systems become open to opportunities to incorporate responsiveness, contingency, and the accidental in their generative process. Digital techniques circumvent pre-determined analytical processes that focus on fixed formal issues such as figure/ground, ideal types and static program. Instead, these projects give primacy to FORMations that are in variation, scale-less, accumulative and subject to changes that may shift in part to whole relationships, spatial qualities and color. In addition, projects using digital techniques incorporate program, space, structure, and enclosure into a singular formation that incorporates a range of experiences and formal variations of gradated intensities.

The explorations of Elegant Formations sought to push beyond the austerities of digital technique, encouraging concerns for refinement, precision, to unleash a visual intelligence pertinent for architectural design. The most sophisticated of contemporary projects used this intelligence to achieve nuances within the formal, spatial and material variation of projects.

The site was on a unique trapezoidal 110 x 235 sq. ft. lot on Canal St between Varick Street and Sixth Avenue in Soho. Catalyzed by Soho, Chinatown, Tribeca and the nearby Tribeca Film Festival Cinema’s, the program is a uniquely configured 35 Story Mixed Use Office and Hotel Tower. The intended result was a project exhibiting innovative architectural features in variation, produced using topological surfaces and component arrangements with different spatial and material qualities contributing to the development of architecture.

Hina Jamelle, critic a

b

a

a. Jennifer Gottlieb + Adam New + Christina Whipple b. Michael Grieser + Victoria Maceira

61

Master of Architecture | Fifth + Second Semesters

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Championing Architecture in Olympic Cities: 2020 Istanbul, Turkey With the memory of the London Olympics still fresh in our minds, it was timely to think about the event as an opportunity for matching the highest aspirations of the human body and spirit with their counterparts in architecture. In spite of the games’ fleeting nature, each host city makes enormous investments in infrastructure, facilities and housing with large-scale buildings and structures remaining as physical reminders long after the event has passed. The studio examined the games’ potential as a catalyst for lasting urban transformation beyond the event and beyond the mundane.

The studio worked simultaneously at the macro and micro-scales to design patterns for urban transformation while creating a single building. Students used the capacities of the digital tools to develop topdown and bottom-up strategies corresponding to these scales. The emphasis was on the micro-scale of the building itself and the manner in which it “emerged” from the macro-scale of the urban field. This methodology distinguished itself from traditional master-planning still deployed in designs for Olympic Cities in that it does not follow a linear scale trajectory; in that it does not view the city as fixed; and in that it privileges situational differences over universal norms.

Sulan Kolatan, critic a

a

b

c

a

a

a. Asli Agirbas b. Katia Loizou c. Maurizio Huaylla

63

Master of Architecture | Fifth + Second Semesters

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Fun Place II Abu Dhabi, UAE + Bangkok, Thailand + Moscow, Russia Cedric Price spent most of his career designing, promoting and building his most famous work known as The Fun Palace. Even though the project was never quite realized as he imagined, it significantly influenced the field unlike any other single project in the recent history of architecture. Ironically, for most of his contemporary colleagues, it was not architecture at all. A three-dimensional structural grid constructed in a form of a giant machine, resembling a factory that was in constant flux, with its moving objects, theaters, screens, loudspeakers and entire audiences enclosed within the grid.

Fun Palace was possibly the first interactive, habitant responsive, cybernetic structure leaving a lasting influence on various architects, from Archigram, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers to Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi.

Students will investigate the concept of fun and leisure in contemporary society and will develop a “Fun Theory” as a basis for the design of their own “Fun Palace II”. Students will develop design strategies and goals based on their Fun Theory, develop a program/ function/reason as a group or individually, (team work is encouraged) and design a project on one, two or all three sites given. Projects will be located in Abu Dhabi, Bangkok and Moscow, and students will define their own locations within these cities.

The project is not an amusement park, it is not a museum, it is not an exhibition pavilion, it is not a concert hall, it is not a nightclub, it is not a spa, it is not a brothel, it is not a gym or sport center, it is not a theater, but maybe it is all of these things combined. You decide.

The educational goal was based on the understanding that advanced students should be exposed to take responsibility for the complex task of the decision making processes in the development of architectural design, starting from taking an architectural (cultural) position, to sitting, to programming and design. The re-examining and questioning of the status quo of all those decisions and their “conventional” applications is a fundamental principle of this studio.

The cultural understanding of leisure, fun and entertainment was examined as a starting point for a critique of our preconceived notions of social interaction as well as assumptions about one of the most important and possibly most misunderstood human needs, emotions and experiences.

Thomas Leeser, critic a

a b

c

c

c

a. Anja Pavlin b. Alex Lavecchia c. Marissa Liff

65

Master of Architecture | Fifth + Second Semesters

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

The Garden in the Machine Various Sites This studio was about the relationship between technology and nature. More specifically, it was about aesthetics and concepts underlying what we thought were appropriate relationships between technology and nature. In the early 21st century, we are obsessed with technological innovation while we fetishize a picturesque landscape— the IPhone hugger is usually also a treehugger. We are fascinated by the Large Hadron Collider and Niagara Falls; Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon; Fukushima and Sandy. It is when the machine has to be placed in the garden that problems arise. The premise of the studio was that there is no good way to put the machine in the garden (no matter how carefully we try to do it). The intuition for the investigation was to reverse this and attempt to cultivate a garden in the machine itself. Students were asked to develop speculative research and designs for a large infrastructural machine (like a hydroelectric dam or a nuclear power station) that made innovative arguments for its possible presence as architecture and reconsider the possibilities of what we call the real.

David Ruy, critic b b

a

b c

a

a. Stephen Ullman b. Erdem Tuzun c. Sina Ă–zbudun

67

Master of Architecture | Fifth + Second Semesters

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Material Memory + Thermal Adaptability Sardinia, Italy The studio looked at the sustainable aspect of temporality by investigating the accelerated mutation - decomposition and adaptability in materials, as these responded to natural and/or induced biological, chemical and environmental fluctuations. In particular, we were interested in the characteristics of absorption and erosion in wood under increased entropy, to water within the context of our site. Process and final physical models were developed within the studio to examine scale heterogeneity from structural massing models to conceptual expansion joint details that could further articulate transformation in materials. The discourse extended to the relationship of time and new emerging modes of occupation and communication in architectural space. Initial program articulation included office space for the local port authority along with public zone for sport and well-being activities. The site proposed for investigation was located in the waterfront of the city of Cagliari, Sardinia (Italy) in the historical Port of the Via Roma.

Operatively, we experimented with parametric component systems and analogue models using material investigations. We were interested in material behavior when exposed to changing environmental parameters such as temperature, humidity and air quality. Most architectural materials today are designed to be static, exhibiting impervious qualities and failure under increased stress. As adaptability is desired within responsive architecture, then transformation and mutation in materials should be celebrated, such as elasticity in wood due to moisture absorption and its porous characteristics. We instigated these fluctuations through induced environmental dynamics, time and scale shifts that can begin to inform structural responses relating to performance and boundary thresholds.

M. Ludovica Tramontin + Tania Branquinho, critics a

a

b

c

a

a. Sheenae Kim + Shu Yi b. Michael Hoak + Sierra Sharron c. Courtney Jones + Mujoo Sheenam

69

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

LAST-CHANCE ARCHITECTURE (DIE, YOU SUCKER/ FUCKER/DUCKER!) Your last semester at Pratt is being introduced with sights & sounds…

(Curzio Malaparte: ‘A house like me -- but which me?’…’I am like a bird that has swallowed its own cage’…’I had seen in the mud of the street the imprint of a dog that had been killed and crushed by the caterpillars of a tank. A carpet made of the skin of a dog’…Malaparte was a fascist. The house was designed --maybe by Bruno Libera, more probably by Malaparte -- in the late 30’s & early 40’s, & built by or with a local mason, Adolfo Amoitrano…)

The sight, the sight…

It’s (almost) every architect’s favorite house: Ambasz, Eisenman, Hejduk, Holl, Isozaki, Venturi, Wines…The site of Malaparte’s house in Capri is a promontory that goes out into the Mediterranean sea, it stretches out & up to become something like a mountain…The mountain wasn’t high enough: Malaparte designed/built a house of steps that go higher…

The sound, the sound…

George Delerue’s score to Godard’s Contempt is no more than 10 notes, switched around & played backwards/forwards/sideways -- it goes away & comes back from another direction…

‘Silenzio!’…Godard’s voice ends the movie. No: silence ends the movie, the screen is nothing but sea & sky, then 1 or 2 of Delerue’s notes come in as a period, the final point.

Your project…

It’s your last project, not only at Pratt but in your life. This is your last project before you die. You can leave it unfinished if you want; you might leave it unfinished even if you don’t want; you can keep on going & never finish, it’s finished by itself as you die. This might be your end, but you can’t stop someone else, anyone else, from coming in & taking over on his or her own…

Vito Acconci, critic a b

a b

a

a. Eban Singer b. Adam New

71

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

London Aquatics Center London, England The project was to design the Aquatics Center in London according to the competition brief for the 2012 Olympics. The program called for four pools, seating for 20,000 spectators and back-up facilities that included lockers, press room, ticketing kiosks and offices. Between the lines, the brief implied an iconic structure that would symbolize, on the one hand, swimming, athletics and the Olympics, and on the other hand, the civic goals and national pride of London and Great Britain. The site was a reclaimed brownfield at the edge of a densely occupied, lower income section of London; the Aquatics Center would continue to serve the community as a sports facility, and presumably endow the area with a focal civic monument usable after the Olympics on a daily basis. The building also would at the edge of a park, and therefore had all the potential of participating in the landscape and life of the park, which it would seek to animate even as it responded on the other side to the urban edge. The site made the role of the building complex. The design of the Aquatics Center followed a brief period of research in several domains. Students individually chose and studied other stadia, and presented their analyses in class in order to develop a shared background of knowledge in the building type.

Part of the study analyzed shell structures, and their potential for engaging the landscape directly and indirectly, so that the eventual solution would not simply involve a helmet covering a set of pools surrounding by bleachers.

A major segment of the pre-design research involved studies in the history of space. Students chose any one of many concepts in the long history of spatial thinking: Aristotelian space, irrational Suprematist space, Modernist space, Einsteinian space, Newtonian space, the space of continuous surfaces, etc. Each student presented an analysis and built a sketch design for an unprogrammed pavilion that exemplified the space, to contribute to a common pool of research on the subject. Students chose and developed a concept(s) of space they wanted to posit in their project for the Aquatics Center.

Joseph Giovannini + Evelyn Kalka, critics a b c

a c

a

a. Heena Patel b. Molly Hare c. Michael Hoak

73

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

The End of Streets Manhattan, NY “The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets.” -John D. Rockefeller The studio explored the development of the corporate tower and the public plaza by exchanging the plaza for the street. Quite recently public space has shifted from a 19th century logic of leisure to an early 21st century political question about legitimacy. Meanwhile the economic and demographic forces continue to sustain the tower typology with hundreds of formal variations of the plaza which remain completely identical in their performance, in their relation to the city, in their social expectations. As such, the relationship between the street and the plaza continue to play themselves out in fantasies that contradict what is in fact happening globally. The means of architectural thinking are both formal and political, and the emphasis in this studio is to inquire where they meet topologically.

Our primary interest was the tower’s intersection, not with the plaza, or even the sidewalk, but rather the street. The program of the tower was an open proposition for students to develop according to their own narrative interests. The situation at the ground was extensively researched. The studio will use advanced computational software supplied by Altair to explore structure and space, while at the same time students will introduce their own software research to develop problems of circulation and enclosure. Together these were used to explore the contemporary urban spatial politics and technologies of mobility to develop problems of site. At the same time we examined some important historical, theoretical and contemporary case studies: Guy Debord and Situationism, Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida on the Force of Law and urban space, precedent studies from ancient Rome to the Seagram Building to Rem Koolhaas, as well as histories of urban warfare.

In 1920, Mies van der Rohe submitted a competition drawing for the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. Well, maybe he submitted 2. No one is really sure. Not even Mies. Between the first and the second the actual street was erased what was added under this erasure?

Peter Macapia, critic a ab

b c

c

b

a. Nikki Petitpierre b. Marcus Ziemke c. Dong-Kyum Park

75

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Wild Water Beyond Flow Gansevoort Peninsula Manhattan, NY Just as water has been used to give evidence in architecture via fluid dynamics, to smoothness and to establish contemporary understandings of continuity through variation it may also be seen to demonstrate those moments where continuity breaks and various heterogeneous even novel capacities emerge. New York was recently visited by this other - an excessive form of water. Sandy brought about new forms of communication, new forms of transportation and new forms of habitation. Most of these in one way or another were wild even horrific as the city in particular was visited by a new and uncontrolled set of forces. A first response to these events would be to find a solution to the problem of flooding, another is to look at the excess conditions of water, to see what is produced. And while we will necessarily need to do the first, the second, mining the excess capacities of liquids in its wilder states is the studio’s concentration.

Excess is not so much found in the destructive abilities as it is evident in the constantly available and multiply rigorous capacities of water to form new assemblies and alter others.

The assumption here is in this wildness and excess our – architecture’s – abilities to see can be extended, made more acute, more sensitive and ultimately offer a more nuanced material articulation and expression. As the ecological – relational - problems of living at the edge will most certainly continue to evolve our sense of the roles of science and aesthetics and more generally how architecture speculates wants to become more nuanced, more finely grained, more responsive. The studio begins by closely observing and transcribing the excess capacities of water, those not yet domesticated and beyond its measure as flow. It works with these in the proposition of an evolving institution at the water.

The project is situated at Gansevoort Peninsula, opposite the new Whitney Museum and currently in transition between its previous use as a garbage depot and its integration into Hudson River Park. The studio transcribes and works within three site framings: biological, geological, and social frames provide liquid and interconnected sets of movements in place of solid ground. As a grounded space of the park, the site is built on fill rather than as a pier, its topography is readily altered and in preliminary programming by the Hudson River Park Trust it is envisioned as large recreational fields with access to the Hudson River, with a beach. It is the only remaining block of a larger infilling of the river that was begun in the mid19th century and had almost vanished by 1910. It is the site for the New York Harbor Fire Boats.

Philip Parker, critic c

b c

a

a

c

a. Stephen Ullman b. Aylin Cinarli c. Christina Ostermier

77

Master of Architecture | Sixth Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Mediatheque Soho Manhattan, NY The Mediatheque - “an organized collection of information resources made accessible to a defined community for reference or borrowing.

It provides a physical or digital access to material, and may be a physical building or room, or a virtual space or both.”

The Site was located on the North side of Spring Street in SoHo (Lower Manhattan) between the Judd Foundation Building and Broadway. The Community were both local and global. Tours included visits to the New Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image, the downtown Whitney, and other NYC cultural institutions.

The program included two media theaters, a translation and archiving laboratory, analogue and digital libraries, short term and long term residences for visiting researchers and scholars, a commercial storefront and support spaces. We expected that the conceptualization and realization of the project would be shaped by the Mediatheque’s content.

Henry Smith-Miller + Scot Teti, critics a b

b

c d

c

a. Jonathan Blistan b. Trey Lindsay c. Michael Licht d. Alexander Davis

79

Yujin Lee

William MacDonald, critic

Master of Science in Architecture

Jason Vigneri-Beane, coordinator

DESIGN STUDIO FACULTY Kutan Ayata Sulan Kolatan William MacDonald Philip Parker Jason Vigneri-Beane

COMMUNITY

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

RESEARCH

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

PSPD

The three-semester Master of Science, Architecture Program is an investigative, rigorous, and progressive environment for experimentation and research into advanced architectural designresearch and discourse. Option studios, seminars, a range of electives and a thesis sequence are opportunities for both individual and collective work on themes/practices that examine existing assumptions and potential futures in architecture. Some of these studios and courses have looked closely at emergent forms of organization, computational techniques, and parametric design; networks, flows, and collective intelligence; complexity in urban, architectural, and institutional systems; innovative building systems, advanced materials, and digital fabrication techniques; transdisciplinary thinking from scientific models to new forms of media; scenario-planning and near-future thinking; multidimensional agency in architecture and urbanism; globalization, ecology and far-from equilibrium thinking.

GAUD

DESIGN STUDIOs

Master of Science in Architecture | First Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Alter_able Architectures: By Land, Air, Sea + Time East Side Manhattan, NYC The project was conceived to challenge anachronistic architectural and planning ideas of process and production which result in singular unique design solutions ‘freeze-framed’ in time. Our method was to investigate incremental and aggregative processes and systems in form/void/volume. These studies which stemmed from a synthetic design research into complex adaptive geometries eventually yielded the potential of ‘open-ended systemic hybrids.’ These systemic hybrids lead to continually generative architectural solutions with the potential to respond to sponsored systemic change via ever evolving variables. An architecture which is able to be altered with time, for time, and by time. Of particular interest in the investigations was to address ecological issues pertaining to coastline flooding and the significance of the ideas concerning ‘resilience and robustness’ in architecture and transportation.

The site was located on a particular strip of Downtown Manhattan at its eastern coastline. Bordered to the south by the Downtown Manhattan Heliport, to the North by South Street Seaport, the studio’s proposed structures are also intended to add to the “Elevator Acre Park’s” size, scale and agenda, which is privately owned public space or ‘P.O.P.S’ [now located at 55 Water Street] on its western most border, and bridge over the F.D.R. highway to the East incorporating and extending the Pier 11/Wall Street Ferry Terminal. The site consisted of a collection of existing transportation infrastructures which were separate and disjointed singular ‘set-piece’ infrastructures/ architectures located in the immediate and adjacent area.

The transportation hub was to provide for an idea of ‘seamless travel’ via arrival and destination points for land, air, and sea travel. In essence to make continuous the latent relationships between existing discrete transportation infrastructures, architectures, and public open spaces with the new proposals. Importantly, the studio considered and provided the ways in which the proposals could alter in time, size, shape, form, space and program according to projective conditions and changes in site, climate, program, economic, cultural, legal or even political realities.

William Mac Donald, critic a b

a a

c b

c

a. Guanxi Chen b. Yujin Lee c. Jen Shieh

83

Master of Science in Architecture | First Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Turbulent Exchange Manhattan, NY Seen from a distance, Manhattan and the Hudson River may engage one another in the smooth movements of material flow where the river and its tides form an even rhythm of rising and falling along a more or less rigid shoreline. Similarly the cultures of the city and the river may remain distinct from one another when the line of the map is drawn between them. The movements where water and another material meet are rarely so smooth. An apparent and often idealized fluidity is interrupted at the surging of storms, the freezing and thawing of the river, and at the more local scale of water and land meeting in turbulent flows of deposition and erosion. This turbulent exchange found in abrupt directional change, changes of state, and intersection with another medium provides active models of a dynamic set of boundaries. These boundaries are mined for their variability and refusal to declare a final this side and that side, for their ability to become agile and resonant with variable pressures. These lines are not so much stable and parallel with one another as they are caught up in dissipating and convective currents, flows and eddies.

These excessive movements formed where the unsteady vortices mix with one another leave the boundary as multiple and variable traces. In the studio these were sampled from many sources mapped, diagramed, and traced, their variation – the line of difference and the forces of its positioning - provide the concrete actions for other forms of differentiation. These operative line fields are the apparatus, a form of play for material articulation. They are operated, played for their abilities to produce variable surfaces of exchange.

Water is both a model and a material protagonist between Manhattan and the Hudson River the traces of its dynamics inform architectural processes of boundary production, organization, and here - it models behavioral variation for institutional exchange; and water is of course the active agent in the many redefinitions of the city’s multiplying, extending, and collapsing edges. As the narrow zone of difference at the edge increasingly becomes composed of multiple strands, it is a region where scientific and analytical research meet art practices of production, display and participation meet strands of leisure and athletic activity. In this thickened territory turbulent boundaries and equally turbulent exchange play with and support other institutions.

Philip Parker, critic a

b c

b

a. Harry Vicci b. Che Chung Lin c. So Jung Nam

85

Master of Science in Architecture | Third Semester Thesis

The Water is Coming...

Financial District Manhattan, NY The urban environment of our cities indicates that humanity historically searches for different meanings in its architectural development that most of the time exclude, the natural parameters that are linked with the balanced coexistence between the human being and nature. Today, in anticipation of the upcoming environmental changes that define the future of our cities, architecture has to find this lost balance and re-establish a new meaning that will make our cities more adaptable to its evolving environment. This research was inspired by the smartness and beauty of the systems that exist in nature and suggest an architectural proposal for the future problem of flooding at the edges of Manhattan. The proposal was an invention of a hybrid system able to correspond to the future conditions of inundation merged with the city’s infrastructure, encouraging an urban development that incorporates a life closer to the water.

The future climate changes, especially the warmer temperature and the rising sea level will pose extensive hazards to the edges of Manhattan island and its infrastructure. According to this, great threat for the existing infrastructure is also the short duration climate hazards, extreme events like heat waves, brief intense precipitation, storms, hurricanes and wind events that will increase the rise of the sea level more abruptly and will cause periodically flood hazards to the coast areas.

The topography of Manhattan and the recent research of Manhattan project indicates that the potential inundated areas by rising sea level will be a zone of several blocks along the edges. The most critical infrastructure impacts will be the street, basement and sewer flooding, increased structural damages, inundation of law - lying areas and wetlands and reduction of water quality.

In contrast to our urban environments, nature has its own successful mechanism of adaptation. Natural landscapes have the appropriate resilience to reshape according to climate changes. By looking closer at natural examples, the project suggests a merging of the city’s infrastructure with sustainable systems that can correspond successfully to the future conditions of inundation. Moreover, the proposal introduced a new sustainable circulatory system for the vehicles in the city. The existing motorway system (highways and urban grid) seem inefficient to satisfy the new needs of the contemporary dwellers. The proposal was an invention of a hybrid system in conjunction with the old natural flood barriers of Manhattan that incorporates new motorway and pedestrian systems of roads in order to encourage an urban development that incorporates a life closer to the water and nature.

Christina Giannoulaki with Sulan Kolatan, critic

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Adaptive Food System in Manhattan Stuyvesant Town Manhattan, NY Living in NYC enables people to sample a huge variety of world cuisines. The variety is shaped by different desires and demands, which form a complex organization, so called as “Food Cycle”. This thesis seeked to examine this issue from a different angle in order to observe these orders, to understand the cycle as “complex adaptive system”, and also for the sake of proposing a new type of urban farm for Manhattan. With the use of “Minimal Surface“ cell topology and Locust system, we were able to localize the issue and merge the new system into the existing residential pattern. Basic units and blocks were considered at both human and biological scales, and these blocks were aggregated according to local conditions, which gave this proposal more adaptive and dynamic qualities. Within this proposal, we were not just focusing on solving the current food supply issues, and also included couple debates and considerations about architecture and other issues, which would give us a broader view about what position we, architects, should be in the development of society, besides that, the project itself is also an experiment of this utopia notion to enhance the whole living environment in the future.

Jiacong Zeng with Sulan Kolatan, critic

87

Master of Science in Architecture | Third Semester Thesis

Developed City + Its Symbiotic Rivers Between E. 90th + 96th Street Manhattan, NY Every great city has its own symbiotic rivers. With the development of cities, not only landscapes and sceneries of river change over time, but the concept of what is an appropriate relationship between cities and rivers also constantly shapes the boundaries between each other.

With the greatest developed technologies and the best understanding of how natural environments work in the history, Manhattan is literally standing at the edge of facing how to gracefully collaborate with the ecosystems around it and looking forward to reconstruct a sustainable environment along its rivers.

This research and design thesis focused on how to use today’s parametric and dynamic-base animate software to discover new relationships between a post-industrial city and its symbiotic rives, specific on how to develop an adaptive environment in which human’s activities and river’s ecosystems are both major characters affecting the architectural design.

After systematically analyzing Manhattan’s river edges and the human effects over time in order to understand the current general situation, the research selected a site between East 90th to 96th street and Second Avenue towards to the East River to continuously seeked the advanced relationships in a local level and an architectural scale.

While redefining the urban elements and reconstructing the river edges, from dynamic surface operations, which were responding the local forces, to rebuilding the architectural contour for connecting the urban preserved spaces, the whole waterfront community gradually forms an unique interface between the city and the river.

This interface retained the original functions and the same amount of mass of architecture for urban usage, and it supported spaces and networks allowing natural communities to exist as well. In the end of the process, the design achieved the major goals to reconstruct a relationship between an artificial-grid urban systems and an organicirregular river environment, and developed a new interior structure and space by using dynamic colliding simulate methods.

With a thought that architecture located in a natural environment should not be designed only for the human being but for the creatures who live there as well, approaching to a sustainable environment by introducing adaptive and complex concepts from the mother nature into the computational environment so that architects could be able to design and make decisions along with the dynamic results is the major attempt and concern for this waterfront space research and design thesis.

Thomas Huang with Jason Vigneri-Beane, critic

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Interfaces through Urban Boundariesww Manhattan Bridge, NY Physical, functional, and socio-cultural boundaries can emerge in cities over time. These boundaries can be strengthened or weakened by external forces. Since these boundaries affect the integrity of city circulation negatively, their effect should be reduced by design. In this thesis, qualities like mutualism, porosity, permeability and connectivity have been thought of as principles of design for integration. The Manhattan Bridge was chosen for study. The networks between the meshworks are weak in the area where the Manhattan Bridge hits ground level. Continuity is supplied by strengthening connections between these existing nodes. Creating interfaces and strengthening the existing functions reduces the physical boundary effect which the bridge creates. De Landa discussed strengthening the nodes (meshworks in his terms): “...meshworks and hierarchies not only coexist and intermingle, they constantly give rise to one another… The addition of new nodes to the meshwork as it complexified did not occur according to a plan but simply following internal constraints; that is, each new node had to ‘mesh well’ with the existing ones (i.e catalyze and be catalyzed by existing nodes)”.

Asli Agirbas with Jason Vigneri-Beane, critic

89

Master of Science in Architecture | Third Semester Thesis

Mat and Objects /// Revisiting Modernist Typology Stuyvesant Town Manhattan, NY “The objective of architecture is works of art that are lived in. The city is the largest, and at present the worst of such works of art. … The kinds of repetition and control that are now offered to the building industry can be edged towards a kind of dreamy neutrality.” (Alison and Peter Smithson) A lot has been said since the demolition of the Pruitt Igoe housing project about the death of modern architecture and its negative contributions to society. Although it is true that modernist social housing did not provide the best situation for new environments, it is naïve to think that modernist architecture caused violence. There are too many factors that influence how life evolves. Proof of this idea are modernist housing projects that still operate in a healthy way.

Although we cannot blame it all on the architecture, a space can stimulate and accelerate the occurrence of events and ideas, having said that we cannot negate the fact that most projects were repetitive copies based on a model which at a specific moment of history was successful.

The thesis explored possibilities for rehabilitating existing modern housing typology blocks. The proposed project did not take the site as a tabula rasa, nor as preservation, but rather as a new urban landscape in which a new type of urban life can develop. The intervention injected new programs into the site, as well as re interpreted the traditional courtyard to create a new sense of singularity and scale.

It dealt with the contingency of the existing site as a way to produce form, but also developed its own autonomy where it generated a new way of dealing with existing structures.

Isaac Michan with Kutan Ayata, critic

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

the Thing - A New Transition to Picturesque Central Park Manhattan, NY Central Park, a piece of artificially designed nature in the center of one of the most heavily built cities in the world, is surrounded by a grid with strict orthogonal borders. Between its closest capillary roads and the separating wall around the park lies the poché, the zone that separates the city from the nature (!). The idle transitional area, suffocated by the wall, tasks the fast dissolution of the urban environment into the park, This project lied in the interstitial space between Central Park and the rest of the city, forming a vascular tissue that feeds and transitions between both environments.

The exhibition space of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was unfolded, exposing its artifacts on the edge of 5th avenue. The cultural symbol of the Manhattan Island was opened up, its borders blurred, and became an organic part of Central Park’s modern archeological texture. The project, encircled and exhibited the artifacts, by questioning the ongoing relationship between the exhibition space and the exhibited objects. The ever-changing density of the accumulated matter opened the apertures. By creating vistas, the exhibition experience became integrated with the nature experience of Central Park. The dissolving matter redefined the surface and guide people along the programmatic body of the exhibition space, The new space opened up to organic growth, like a fungus that surrounds the lake, it can spread all around Central Park oozing into the deeper parts or out from the edge to the cityscape. The program can be enriched by the collaboration of other museums, such as the Natural History Museum, or other types of public programs that find presence around the parks and squares worldwide.

Sina Özbudun with Kutan Ayata, critic

91

Michalis Skitsas

Ferda Kolatan, critic

DESIGN STUDIOS

David Ruy, coordinator

DESIGN STUDIO FACULTY Ferda Kolatan Carla Leitao David Ruy

COMMUNITY

Intensive and ambitious in its scope, the program is structured around a single urban design project that is continuously developed by each student across three studio semesters. Each studio semester has a specific focus that is supplemented by advanced seminar topics in histories of urban design, urban planning and zoning policies, GIS, and digital design technologies. This year, the program continued its speculative investigation of producing new land masses within the New York City estuary. Students examined the spectacular and problematic opportunities that come with creating new land where none existed before. The geoengineering scenarios considered how this problem might articulate a new kind of architectural ground leading to new urban typologies. Projects developed extensions of this premise into new real estate economies, new infrastructures, new zoning logics, and perhaps mostly importantly, new experiences.

Examining as a precedent, the astonishingly artificial geology of New York City itself, students were asked to consider the profound and paradoxical coherence of a city that is always changing.

RESEARCH

As of 2010, for the first time in human history, the majority of the global population now lives in cities. As noted by the World Health Organization, seven out of ten people will be living in cities by the year 2050. Given the astonishing scale at which urbanization is taking place today, how we are designing our cities is becoming synonymous with how we are designing civilization itself. Mirroring the complexity of the contemporary situation, the program is itself highly international. From all corners of the world, students converge on this program in New York City, a city that remains one of the great laboratories for urban thought and innovation.

PSPD

The Graduate Architecture and Urban Design program is a unique three semester program for students that have already completed a professional degree in architecture. Preparing students to take leadership positions in the 21st century, the program takes into consideration the most urgent questions confronting the design of cities today. Guided by leading design professionals and scholars, students develop powerful contemporary design techniques and a sophisticated conceptual outlook in order to advance new strategies and new possibilities.

GAUD

Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design

Master of Science in Architecture + Urban Design | First Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

The 6th Borough East River Estuary Brooklyn, NYC Anthropocene- it’s a new name for a new geologic epoch—one defined by our own massive impact on the planet. That mark will endure in the geologic record long after our cities have crumbled.

-Enter the Anthropocene—Age of Man, Elizabeth Kolbert, National Geographic, 2011 The 6th Borough is a speculative urban design project, which investigated the transformative potentialities of the East River estuary. A mayor artery and natural habitat, which connects and separates four of New York’s five existing boroughs, the estuary has often been marginalized within the context of the city. The students proposed design scenarios, which provide novel ideas for a future city that fully engages the immense and unprecedented potential of one of its most vital, diverse, and dynamic elements. Part city, part infrastructure, part landscape and environment, the estuary escapes any one-dimensional categorization and encourages radical as well as subtle approaches.

In their projects the students engaged critically the conventional notion of the modern Nature-Technology-Culture paradigm, which polarized all sides into opposites and by doing so generates a number of conflicts and false equations. A common assumption for example is that we (society, technology) are bound in an eternal balancing act with nature. But since we constantly both disturb and maintain this very balance we find ourselves inescapably caught in a never-ending adversarial relationship with nature. We ‘break’ and attempt to ‘fix’ it, while nature seemingly wants to be left alone and continue in its own natural ways. To break away from this perpetually disruptive (and false) hierarchy and to entertain more productive scenarios we must rigorously question and re-investigate in fundamental ways our relationship to nature and vice-versa.

Ferda Kolatan, critic a c a

b b

c a

b

a. Michalis Skitsas b. Cecilia Maier c. Maia Muniz Moreno

95

Master of Science in Architecture + Urban Design | Second Semester

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Archipelagic Networks: Cloud of Reassembly East River Estuary Brooklyn, NYC This studio is part two of a series of three Urban Design studios, through which sequence students will complete the development of a final project. Archipelagic Networks: CLOUD of REASSEMBLY continues to develop the main theme and site explored in the Summer Semester in the studio “The 6th Borough”, including evolving concepts of Ambiance Approach, by proposing a conceptual framework of Cloud Architecture and a pro-active attitude of Reassembly.

The Cloud Architecture framework proposed a change in the mode in which materials, energy, structures and objects are connected in an architecture project, emphasizing micro-performance of distributed elements and their potential assemblies: to attend to this, students engaged ways of thinking of architecture as potentially made from highly sensitive and distributed particles in networks.

A ‘Reassembly’ approach procured to further questions of merging city and nature - dealt with in the Summer semester - by emphasizing the engagement with the specific temporal aspects of the existing context/site mapping and its entities, enrolling these in the project as natures that all the while intangible (as suggested by T. Morton) or virtual, are evidently present and actual.

The studio worked in a reassembly mode by actively identifying, unpacking, unfolding existing entities and find new processes of linkage between them and new created natures.

Carla Leitao, critic a b

b a c

d

a. Luana Reis b. Aditi Shah c. Alfonso Patarroyo d. Samuel LeBlanc

97

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

Inside out Urbanism East River Estuary Brooklyn, NYC This work is motivated by the idea to expose and make evident two important components of the city: people and transportation. The project explored a city alternative where these elements can develop freely without obstructing one from the other. They receive their own space, their own importance, and their own attention.

Streets (OUT) became the operative area, where all possible flows and connections happen. The backyards (INSIDE) become the community generator; diversity and interaction will be its incentive.

The idea is based on the intention to bring outside everything that occurs behind the scenes. All the components that makes a city work will be expose to the streets, they will become the new city image. The inside is left for free diversity development. Blocks generate sufficient densification in order to concentrate plenty purposes. People will stay outdoors on different schedules and insecurity will be out of the system. The project enhances the creation of community through the programs’ diversification and spaces’ continuity. It generates an efficient vehicles use by facilitating circulations, commuting, and connections. These permit and stimulate more diversity, and more live to the city. Therefore, improves living standards.

Alfonso Patarroyo with David Ruy, critic

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Extraterritorial Borough East River Estuary Brooklyn, NYC The proposed tidal barrage closed the East River between Lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn waterfront. The proposal initiated studies of a new landscape that reconnects energy harvesting and energy usage as a new entity extension of the city fabric. A bundle of infrastructure connecting airports, railroads, and subway networks emerges creating a synthetic landscape. This unusual “superbundle” of infrastructure and landscape is used to form an extraterritorial space—an internationally regulated scientific and tech research space in the waters of New York City. The United Nations, Embassies, The European Central Bank and CERN (perhaps being the most fascinating of these cases), can all be examples of this extraterritoriality. Interestingly, extraterritoriality is a condition that has always belonged to the water (International Waters).

This condition changed the rules of what kind of research can be done here. Knowledge can be developed here that might be impossible within the space of a given nation, due to the laws and regulations of certain countries. It is the United Nations of the scientific community, where great minds from all over the globe converge. It is not ruled by a specific nation or government, but by all the ones represented there.

This new research borough houses technology and hydrology research facilities, pharmaceutical startups, and even a college technology campus. Hydroponic warehouses for medicinal plants, exotic botanical gardens and biological and genetic agricultural experimentation occupy the space below the upper landscape. The towers are a hybrid of the home, the hotel, the dormitory, and the office. I proposed that they might be all of them and none of them at the same time. My general principle was to promote the active mixing and hybridizing of conditions. I am interested in how intensive specificity might paradoxically result in strange but productive ambiguities.

Francisco Patino with David Ruy, critic

99

Milad Showkatbakhsh

Benjamin Martinson, critic

Master of Architecture

SEMINAR FACULTY Robert Cervellione Christopher Kroner Hart Marlow Benjamin Martinson Philip Parker Jason Vigneri-Beane Christopher Whitelaw

COMMUNITY

Philip Parker, Assistant Chair

RESEARCH

Mapping, modeling, animating, scripting, rendering, filmmaking, play into the multiple outputs of printing, cutting, milling, assembling, vacu-forming in an expanding realm of technical expertise in digital production. Computer Media One and Two sought out the linkages among critical, affective, conceptual, and technical action, they seek to establish the multiple modes of intensifying the relations among forms of design practice and architectural ambitions. The core courses proposed for the architect to become both more expert and more aware of the implications embedded in the long history of design media. They anticipated a more nuanced and agile invention and engagement between architecture and media formed in seminars and studios.

PSPD

As much as it seeks out and produces clarity the architectural drawing complicates our relations with architecture and the world in the drawn, rendered, and modeled image. The presumed agency of the architect, representation, production, and generation become entangled in the back and forth, give and take feedback of architecture’s acts of drawing – its media events. Architecture and design media are of course not alone or isolated from other forms of production. Our project in Computer Media continued the long formation of architecture’s development of its working spaces through projects, discussion, lectures and readings. This is where the many linkages among media as an active design instrument, media as a filter or screen of reception, and media as an inhabited territory – a medium - become evident and mutually informing. The projects began with investigation of a media apparatus and continue with specific instances of media’s historical relations to architecture and its many forms of production. This work builds in increments toward and intensive collaboration between architect and media where architecture is understood to unfold in a broad, diverse and active media ecology.

GAUD

CORE MEDIA

Master of Architecture | Core Media

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Computer Media I Computer media 1 maintains that our most vital and critical questions in architecture enjoy a lift, an intensification when the media of their inquiry reaches a limit, a threshold of communication, and have to be recalibrated to proceed on an altered track. The course sought to cultivate the necessary agility for the negotiation of the critical leap in the architect’s movement into new forms production when these limits are encountered. It proposed to introduce and reintroduce critical practices, locating specific movements among concepts and object, topologies and tectonics, process and objects, and image and sense in architecture. Projects interrelated historical practices and conventions in forms of artistic practice, scientific representation, cartography and graphic media with contemporary techniques to establish a nuanced participation in the evolution of design intelligence formed in media.

Projects explored in depth the limits of the trace, cut, fold, and projection in a series of computational works beginning with the most clear incision into a thing, extending through its most distant and removed movement and changes.

Modes of generation, modeling, rendering, mapping, and animating matter are deployed as instruments with varying effects to be played where they act as participants with the architect in the architecture’s production.

Finally, projects recognized the working spaces of architecture as being continuously reformed and intimately linked with the exchange in and among media practices.

Christopher Kroner + Benjamin Martinson + Philip Parker + Christopher Whitelaw, critics

a

d e

b

c

f

a

a. Milad Showkatbakhsh b. Zachary Grzybowski c. Garrett Lord d. Monica Wynn e. Christopher Testa f. Maria Nikolovski

103

Master of Architecture | Core Media

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Computer Media II Digital considerations of tectonics, kinematics and parametrics established similar yet different forms of engaging systemic architectural constructions consisting of assemblies, collectives, populations and interconnected sets of componentry. Each of these paradigms of modeling provided a mode of conceptualizing designed systems in relation to time, process, performance, differentiation and iterative formation.

Consequently, each media explored simultaneously configured and catalyzed an architectural imagination within its specified field that is enhanced and intensified.

Computer Media 2 was organized into two parts. One part developed tectonic/kinematic modeling techniques by using a range of timebased software that included architectural, animation and video platforms. The other part developed tectonic/parametric modeling techniques with architectural, parametric design and representational software with an emphasis on technical proficiency, precision and complex yet legible delivery. Each half of the course concentrated on design media’s capacity to inform behaviors and relationships among constructions wherein strong internal and systemic logics of form and organization become agile enough to be responsive and adaptive to varied external inputs. In addition, both parts of the course contributed heavily to studio culture by fostering students’ capacity to produce efficient models and simulations activated through iterativeness, generative processes, relational dynamics, cascading change, nested behaviors, feedback loops, productive constraints and complex formations of continuous tectonic change.

The course was heavily invested in methodology, craft, technique and other deeply disciplinary aspects of media and architectural idiom. At the same time, the course also emphasized the public nature of design and presentation by creating multiple opportunities for students to view their work together, as a collective, in shared digital and printed formats ranging from small (monitor) to medium (screen, pin-up) to large (wall-size projection) to disseminated (web-based video sharing). Working across this range allowed students to experience media as framework for becoming disciplined in relation to design and to participate in a fully immersive environment through which production and representation can become merged.

Robert Cervellione + Christopher Kroner + Hart Marlow + Benjamin Martinson + Jason Vigneri-Beane, critics

a b c d

e f g

h

a. Zachary Grzybowski b. Sven Oredsson c. Karla Lockhart d. WooSeong Kweon e. Alaa Tarabzouni f. Dan Hoch g. Maria Nikolovski h. Lindsay Schragen

105

Kyle Dunnington

Ferda Kolatan, critic

Graduate Architecture + Urban Design

PSPD RESEARCH

The GAUD program offers a range of elective courses concentrating on contemporary approaches to technique and trajectories in history and theory. Courses include content from digital media (scripting, dynamic models, interactive systems) to digitally-driven fabrication technology; representational techniques (film, new media) to innovative structural logics; cross disciplinary models (biology, landscape, emergent systems, legislative constraints) to sociopolitical constructions. This collection of electives provides an environment that both fosters innovation and deepens knowledge in particular areas of architectural and urban discourse and production.

GAUD

ELECTIVE SEMINARS

COMMUNITY

SEMINAR FACULTY Catherine Ingraham Ferda Kolatan David Ruy Maria Sieira Roland Snooks Michael Szivos Jeffrey Taras Christopher Whitelaw

M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + U.D. | Core Elective

Digital Fabrication Architects continually deploy and employ materials to achieve aesthetic effect, such as lightness, mass, transparency and reflectivity.

Schools, architecture offices and for-profit firms maintain material libraries to meet the demands of architects for better, more functional and, especially now, cheaper materials. This class took off-the-shelf materials as a point of departure and investigated how architects can manipulate, extend, and modify existing materials through design and experimentation with digital fabrication tools, especially the CNC router.

We began the semester with an introduction to digital fabrication, and specifically the use and safe operation of a 3-axis CNC router. Students learned the standard milling tactics offered by by contemporary CAM software, such as curve machining and parallel finishing. The students then sought to subvert these stock operations through a productive patterning exercise, in which they explored the interactions between bit geometry, cut path and surface geometry to create an emergent 3D patterning.

The students then engaged in a mold-making and thermoforming exercise, through which they learned to produce 3D surface geometry using the CNC mill, and then used those surfaces as molds to thermoform materials such as Corian and acrylic.

The final assignment empowered students to produce a highly considered and finished 3D surface of their own design employing their recently learned tactic. Students were encouraged to look beyond the material pallet of MDF and Corian used thus far, and to explore options such as plaster, epoxy resins and concrete. Some students went so far as to produce their own hybrid materials by creating custom laminations of plywood and acrylic, or epoxy resin and plywood. Working from a design proposal, through prototypes, and to a finished product, students learned to turn material and budget limitations into design opportunities and produced finished work of a high caliber and acrylic.

Jeffrey Taras, critic a

a b

a. Dillon Hanratty + Brian Vallario b. Alaa Tarabzouni

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Scripting and Form: Swarm Intelligence This elective examined the role of agency within generative design processes and the implications of high population computational swarm systems. The seminar introduced the lightweight programming language, processing and developed a series of multiagent algorithms. The seminar’s focus was on non-linear design methodologies and their impact on architectural aesthetics and pattern.

The course acted as an introduction to the mediated nature of algorithmic authorship, where it is the interaction of localized behaviors that gives rise to the emergence of organization and form.

The repositioning of design intent and the complex order generated by the behavioral techniques of multi-agent systems has implications for the affects which are generated as well as the nature of hierarchy within architecture. The distributed non-linear operation of swarm systems intrinsically resists the discrete articulation of hierarchies within modern architecture and contemporary parametric component assemblies. The bottom up nature of these systems refocuses tectonic concerns on the assemblage at the micro scale rather than the sequential subdivision of form. Instead we will look for an alternative organization of matter that draws from an understanding of microstructures such as those found in butterfly wings; where color and pattern are determined through the organization of matter as a geometrical configuration rather than through chemical attributes such as pigmentation.

The semester focused on two areas of research, initially developing techniques and methodologies of multi-agent design and secondly the radical effect this has for the production of pattern and affect.

Roland Snooks, critic a b

a

a. Marissa Liff + Jennifer Gottlieb b. Andrew Kroll + Stephen Richardson

109

M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + U.D. | Core Elective

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

CODIFYing This course pursued various methods through which the role of the designer can shift from “space programming” to “programming space”; the designation of software programs to generate space and form from the rule-based logic inherent in architectural programs, typologies and building code. Through the use of a native scripting language, students were able to effect the software and their workflow in a more natural way. Through a way that becomes more responsive to outside conditions. Students were no longer be designing solutions, but systems to produce a variety of solutions.

Students approached the objectives from two ends. 1. The use of rulebased algorithms to produce a range of formal strategies and 2. The use of the software’s native scripting language to generate custom tools to adjust those formal strategies.

This course also has a secondary agenda, demystifying the tools of design provided by particular software packages and consequently empowering the designer to invent their own software tools and practices. The majority of 3d software packages, Maya, Softimage and 3dStudio Max, are designed for use in the filmmaking industry and have been appropriated by the architectural design profession. These tools have inherent formal biases based on their heritage, and limit the capacity of the designer. The course will explore methods through which the designer can shape a custom set of software design tools to correspond with specific design agenda or formal language.

Michael Szivos, critic a

b c

c

a. GAUD++ Exhibition b. Justin Trudeau c. Ryan Whitby

111

M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + U.D. | Core Elective

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY Computer Aided Construction - Parametric Manufacturing Animation & Computation Computer Aided Construction - Parametric Manufacturing explores the potential of computation to deliver a new class of parametrically driven manufacturing workflows designed for production using CNC machines. This seminar emphasizes the architect’s role as active agents of the process of digital fabrication that is enabled and demanded by what has become the ubiquitous presence of computer aided manufacturing systems. Students are challenged to rethink the relationship between design and construction, by learning how to design and implement their own manufacturing workflows, including 3-dimensional parametric assemblies, associated logic, and associated fabrication strategies.

Students are introduced to existing parametric manufacturing workflows. These workflows include specific parametric techniques and logic capable of generating and sorting the CAD data required to manufacture component based assemblies.

Students explore each of these techniques utilizing them to fabricate their own unique assemblies. Students designed new parametrically adaptable assembly methods, optimized for CNC fabrication.

Working individually or in small teams, students designed and implemented a parametrically controlled fabrication workflow for the manufacturing of component based assemblies.

Architects actively engage “computation” in our design strategies.

It allows us to explore an increasingly complex set of questions.

The implementation of computation in architecture is traditionally through scripting (i.e. programming).

Historically, there are examples of computation in design that did not rely on digital computers including Antoni Gaudi’s catenary string structures and Frei Otto’s thin film soap bubble models. These models were developed as analog computers and were more interactive, visually responsive and intuitive than the more commonly scripted algorithms employed today. By employing advanced physics based 3D computer software, Animation & Computation seeks to reestablish the interactive and visually responsive characteristics found in early analog models.

For the first half of the course, lectures focused on introducing students to a range of animation tools through the development of a set of sample analog models based on historical examples. During the second half of the course, students developed their own analog models derived from existing kinetic precedents.

Christopher Whitelaw, critic

a

b

c d

a

e

f

a. Justin Cho + Erin Kelly + Adam New b. Matthew Lightner + Cara Hyde-Basso + Jorge Urias + Jiacong Zeng c. Zhu Di + Wing Peng d. Milad Showkatbakhsh e. Andrew Kroll f. Chris Yu

113

M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + U.D. | History + Theory Seminar

Architecture and Film Students in this course studied film as if it were architecture and then make space with moving images by filming, manipulating, and editing digital shots. The work you see here is the result of a semester long investigation into the constructive nature of a cinematic assembly of images. The critical discussion of filmmakers such as Lynch, Jonze, Altman, Soderbergh, Varda and others prepared the student to challenge traditional constructions of narrative. When students went out and filmed they looked for the framing of a space that potentially abstracts its representation from the context in which it is found and enables it to be reassembled into a space that exists only in the film projection.

The slices of time seen here as frozen stills are no stranger a representation of film than plans and sections are of architectural space--strange depictions that are nevertheless informative about relationships that are understood intellectually but not viscerally. We never “see” the stills in a film just as we never see the sectional cut as we walk through a building, but the precise delineation of these cuts across a sequence/a building orchestrates the space that the inhabitant (because we inhabit film in order to make sense of it) is left with once the film (or the architecture) stops.

There are several categories of film architecture investigation that permeated the work of students this semester, among them: The alignment of architectural elements with screen composition, the horizontal opening and closing of freight elevator doors, both a door and a kind of strange room-sized mouth.

The lingering in the superimposition of two spaces that are vaguely graphically aligned, a delay in the transition between shots of two spaces that momentarily constructs a hybrid of the two.

The use of light simultaneously as a spatial maker and a flat compositional device in such a way that blacks alternate in the viewer’s mind between solid and void.

The use of spatial constructions to challenge narrative conventions-that wonderful word “story” said to have its origins in both narration and depiction of something like a narration on buildings.

Maria Sieira, critic a a b

a. Sean Whalen b. Cara Hyde-Basso

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

MIXING objects This year’s Design Finesse seminar investigated “Material Mixing” as a technique to explore patterns, structures, textures, and colors to generate architectural objects.

The deliberate shaping of matter has been the single most important characteristic in identifying humans as cultural beings. Throughout history we have made things and while we often made them for a direct purpose, these objects almost always displayed properties that could not be understood through an ethics of functionality or optimization alone. Design is not a pure engineering problem. Rather, it is an expression of a Zeitgeist, a collective desire of a group of people during specific periods of time, which reflects equally on the latest technologies as it does on history, place, material, and most importantly “ideas”.

Matter in architecture history was also often portrayed to have a “will”.

Marble had a different way of “expressing” itself than let’s say wood, masonry, or iron. Similarly, today’s novel materials such as composites, and bio-engineered materials allow for radically different design expressions that could not have been explored at any other time in history. Any new material also requires a developing technique, and skill to force it to produce a radical condition. Only if we engage a material condition excessively will we learn what the boundaries of expression are.

Ferda Kolatan, critic a b

a

a. Kyle Dunnington b. Eban Singer

115

M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + U.D. | History + Theory Seminar

Advanced Representation + Propaganda [1968-2001] Architects are constantly employing and deploying materials to achieve a desired structural or aesthetic effect, such as lightness, mass, transparency and reflectivity. Schools, offices and not-for-profit firms maintain material libraries to meet the demands of architects for better, more functional, and, especially now, cheaper materials.

This class takes off-the-shelf materials as a point of departure and investigates how architects can manipulate, extend, and modify existing materials through design and experimentation with digital fabrication tools, such as laser cutting and CNC routing.

We began the semester with an introduction to digital fabrication, and specifically the use and safe operation of a 3-axis CNC router. Students learned the standard milling tactics offered by contemporary CAM software, such as curve machining and parallel finishing. The students then sought to subvert these canned operations through a productive patterning exercise, in which they explored the interactions between bit geometry, cut path and surface geometry to create an emergent 3D patterning.

WIth a working knowledge of the possibilities and limitations of CNC routing, students spent the balance of the semester working in groups to research and develop ways to physically alter a material -- in many cases Dupont Corian -- in order to improve or enhance its capabilities.

These explorations largely began with learnings from the earlier patterning exercise and quickly moved on as students experimented with the material and its abilities and limits. Through a process of rapid iteration and testing, the student groups developed both strategies and methods for altering the material as well as proposals for use of their “new� materials.

David Ruy, critic a

b c d

a. Kyle Dunnington b. Elisa Li c. Anastasia Filippeou d. Umberto Plaja

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Plasticity This course concerned second-order systems theory. The word plasticity means, among other things, the ability of an organism to adapt not only genetically, but also phenotypically, to an environment.

We have plasticity of lung function, for example. When we go to a higher altitude our bodies produce more red blood cells to carry more oxygen and our lung capacity increases. When we leave that altitude everything returns to its former homeostasis. An adaptation to high altitude does not immediately enter the deeper genetic system. If every adaptive ability became genetic our development an organism would be over-determined and too specific. Accordingly, each generation is oriented to, and schooled inside of, their own time and space.

Through plasticity of body and mind (brain plasticity is now under intensive study) we come to experience, and indeed bring forth, a world.

To use the current nomenclature (from Maturana and Varela in the late 20th century) there is both a self-organizing and systemic closure as well as a simultaneous and essential openness of each system of life to a larger environment. This is the autopoietic system made familiar to architects by Patrik Shumacher’s foray into Niklas Luhmann’s work. Every organism, and indeed every system, is organizationally closed yet energetically open. Breathing air at high altitude brings oxygen from an enormous oxygen environment into our particular lung-blood structure. Plasticity (which often also refers to regenerative capacities of an organ or network) is thus a way of managing the intake of energy from a much larger system.

It would not make sense for the DNA to instruct our mouth and brain in how to speak English. While languages have changed over time, our genetic structure is almost identical to the way we were hundreds of thousands of years ago. Genetic systems define us biologically, as an animal with a capacity for speech and self-reflection. Phenotypic adaptations are the definition of ourselves as English (or Swahili or Chinese) speakers, or as architects or citizens. This course, which asks students to study animal-environment relationships in these terms, is not intended to address the architectural program (who lives where and how in space) or bio-mimetic forms or functions. Instead it looks into how various forces of change, homeostasis, and resources affect the closure and openness of a system. To use Gibson’s excellent word: plasticity constitutes the affordances of any given system.

Catherine Ingraham, critic b c d

a

a. Neuro-Network and Web b. Etosha Pan c. Annette Miller d. Christina Giannoulaki

117

Shasha Qin

Sulan Kolatan, critic

Graduate Architecture + Urban Design

PROGRAM COORDINATORS + FACULTY Sulan Kolatan Jason Vigneri-Beane

COMMUNITY

Jason Vigneri-Beane + Sulan Kolatan, coordinators

RESEARCH

While the Graduate Architecture and Urban Design program benefits enormously from its New York location as a hub for both local and imported resources it recognizes the importance of operating at sites across the world at the levels of both architectural/urban and global experience. Graduate architecture and urban design students have a range of exposure to explicitly international content and faculty in courses that make excursions to Europe, Asia and South America as short-run features of the coursework. However, in order to give more robust architectural, urban and cultural experiences to students in this period of globalization the GAUD program offers full-immersion study abroad opportunities in Rome and Istanbul.

Each program engages a complex of issues that are shaping architectural and urban discourse and practice. At the same time, these issues are understood as part of a trajectory that includes the historical material that is an inextricable presence in these locations.

The Rome program includes trips to Florence, Siena and Venice while the Istanbul program also travels to Ephesus and Aphrodisias.

In combination the programs provide a powerful framework for graduate students to deeply engage the materials, practices, events and influences that have catalyzed the development of our discipline.

PSPD

Rome + Instanbul

GAUD

INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS

M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + U.D. | International Program

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Design in the Age of the Super Wicked Problem Istanbul, Turkey Multi-Scalar One of the indispensable qualities of eco-systems is their multi-scalar structure. Relational functions and influences between different scales are critical to eco-system health. The Kauffer and Moltke plans of Constantinople, outstanding in their detailed documentation of the Golden Horn’s urban and natural features and therefore of great interest to us, capture the full extent of the intricately veined watershed. Istanbul, as it turns out, was a city of many many waters, not just of the large bodies of the Golden Horn, the Bosphorus and the Black and Marmara Seas.

Hierarchies and Heterarchies Multi-scalar environments come in two different modes. In tree-like hierarchies, such as watersheds, the connections are based on ranking according to size, capacity, power etc. Different scales are linked progressively via intermediary scales. In network-like heterarchies, such as the human brain, the connections are overlapping and multiple. They exhibit mixed-ascendancy. Different scales share horizontal positions of rank and power. Hierarchies and heterarchies are not mutually exclusive. They often exist in hybrid or nested states.

This is the territory of super wicked problems.

Master Plan The attitude toward favoring singular, large scales of space and time at the expense of multi-scales is embedded within the mindset of the Master Plan. Hence, the remediation and redevelopment of the Golden Horn is firmly rooted in this modernist tradition. The Master Plan, a “plan of plans”, is focused on large urban features, such as large bodies of water, and fixed timeframes over big chunks of time.

In combination this spatio-temporal mono-master scale engenders the kind of rigid structure that is engineered only for specific circumstances but fails to perform as soon as these circumstances change –or if they never materialize.

Trying to address complex systems and the Super Wicked Problems that arise from them through the device of the Master Plan seems akin to performing surgery equipped with pruning scissors. There is no correlation between the capacity of the tool and the intricacy of the task.

Sulan Kolatan, critic a b d

c c

d e

f

a. Shasha Qin b. Lexx Gray c. Asli Baysan d. Dan Tomita e. Group photo f. Eğri Kemer

121

M. Arch, M.S. Arch, M.S. Arch + U.D. | International Program

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Differential Rome Rome, Italy Rome is an extremely powerful environment through which to study contemporary architectural and urban design principles. It is a complex construction that has emerged in adaptive, iterative and explosively dynamic ways. Rather than being planned and composed in the traditional ways that one might assume, the city has been, and still is, in a process of constant formation. It proved to be a catalytic landscape for the convergence of population dynamics, commercial flows and geological resources that would set in motion an astonishing amount of cultural activity and physical production.

It grew rapidly and then devolved back into ruralization that was still strangely contained with ancient city walls. It grew again in a polycentric way through locally intensified urban meshworks that simultaneously densified and differentiated the physical environment. At multiple scales ranging from regions to zones to infrastructural systems to neighborhoods to piazzas to buildings, the city physically demonstrates accretion, differentiation, adaptation, self-organization, appropriation, heterarchy, flow, decentralization and cascading change. These terms, and others, form the discursive framework through which we study the city as a system of objects, system of systems and a complex of memes on an extraordinary trajectory from the historical to the contemporary. While Rome is the primary environment of study, our additional visits to the cities and structures of Florence, Siena and Venice offer powerful similarities and differences for deeper understandings of complex architectural and urban thinking. While it is of deep importance to study this material discursively it is also important for us to study it through contemporary representational techniques. Therefore, the primary course deliverable consists of producing mappings and drawings of the physical and temporal conditions that we study and, in doing so, develop techniques, notational systems and other representational innovations that resonate with the ways in which we deliver our complex projects in the studio based culture of the GAUD program.

Jason Vigneri-Beane, critic

a d

b

e

c

f g

h

a. Yin Jia b. Elisa Yi Feng c. Elizabeth Van Orden d. Chang Cheng e. Chia-Yi Huang f. Parco della Musica g. Group photo h. Karla Lockhart

123

Leonel Ponce

Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development GAUD

PSPD FORWARD

PSPD

The Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development brings to the School of Architecture a concern for community, heritage, development, and sustainability – unique among the comparable schools of architecture in the United States. Inspiration is drawn from the city in all its complexity. The mission is to teach a new generation of professionals to be leaders as well as technicians. The pedagogy emphasizes skills and values over theory, interdisciplinary sharing, and the combination of creative vision and problem solving. PSPD graduates have gone on to positions throughout the world, from a community organizer for Sustainable South Bronx to the Deputy Mayor of the City of New York. The faculty is drawn from the top expertise and leadership of the city and region.

RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Studio coursework emphasizes teamwork and interdisciplinary, integrative thinking as an effective method of acquiring professional skills. The studio typically involves a real client and culminates in a multidisciplinary proposal that is evaluated by an array of distinguished professionals and community leaders. The studios emphasize hands-on work where the students can have an immediate impact on public policy and community action.

As part of its hands-on approach to urbanism, the programs teach in the evening to promote internships and fellowships. This past year, students found one-year Fellowships at The Pratt Center for Community Development, NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, and five outer-borough Community Boards (thanks to the Fund for the City of New York); as well as a variety of internships, such as at the Municipal Art Society, NY Landmarks Conservancy, NYC Department of Transportation, Arup, Aramark and the major NY based Construction Companies such as Turner and Gilbane.

Under the leadership of Ron Shiffman, students are now working with School of Architecture professors on a multi-semester program of linked studios, seminars, charettes, training sessions, panel discussions and more – modeling a transdisciplinary pedagogy called Resiliency Adaptation Mitigation Planning (RAMP). Each semester RAMP’s studios address one neighborhood at a time, on behalf of a community client. RAMP has received a national grant to present its innovative pedagogy to the nation. It is one component of the PSPD’s engagement, which also involves partnering with the Pratt Center for Community Development, creating a new GIS lab that is available to non-profit organizations, and pursuing direct design innovation for green infrastructure.

David Burney, Coordinator of Programs for Sustainable Planning & Development Harriet Markis, Chair of Consruction Management and Facilities Management Nadya Nenadich, Coordinator of Historic Preservation John Shapiro, Chair of City and Regional Planning Jaime Stein, Coordinator of Urban Environmental Systems Management

125

Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development

MASTER OF SCIENCE IN CITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING The 60-credit City and Regional Planning (CRP) Program trains students as practicing urban planners whose knowledge encompasses communities, cities and regions. The curriculum aligns with the design-centered programs in the School of Architecture, with a further focus on sustainable development, participatory planning and social change.

A few years ago, the CRP Program celebrated its 50th anniversary; and this past year the program won an award from the MetroChapter of the American Planning Association. Over time, the CRP has remained true to its emphasis on practice over theory, participatory planning over top-down policy making, and advocacy over technocracy.

Studio courses generally combine two or more of the four concentrations of the Program: community development, environmental planning and policy, preservation planning and physical planning. Often, studios relate to the ongoing work of the Pratt Center for Community Development, one of the nation’s first and foremost university-based research and technical assistance organizations in the service of disadvantaged communities.

Studios involve real clients facing significant planning challenges, consistent with the CRP Program’s emphasis on participatory planning and equity issues. Past and current studios have taken students to work on plans for Ward 9 in New Orleans; collaborate on a regional planning framework for a town in Goa, India; and work to preserve locally-owned businesses as well as the unique neighborhood character in New York’s East Village. The CRP Program offers a unique chance for students to make a difference as they complete a first-rate education.

John Shapiro, Chair of City and Regional Planning a

a. Land Use & Urban Design Studio

A range of professional opportunities are available to preservation graduates today. Preservationists find employment in government agencies, community and advocacy organizations, historical societies, museums, architectural offices, and as consultants to architects, developers, and planners. Preservationists participate in the design of buildings; frame government policy; assess the importance of sites and structures; carry out historical research; evaluate and rule on proposed alterations to historic buildings; design interpretive exhibits, plaque programs and publications; award grants and government funds for preservation; evaluate the impact of proposed new developments; and organize civic campaigns for preservation.

Studio coursework in the HP Program emphasizes teamwork and interdisciplinary, integrative thinking as an effective method of acquiring professional skills. The studio typically involves a real client and culminates in a multidisciplinary proposal that is evaluated by an array of distinguished preservation professionals and community leaders. HP students are also required to complete at least one internship, where they gain hands-on experience in the field. In the past, students have interned at the NYC Department of City Planning, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, Long Island Traditions, the Municipal Art Society and the New York Landmarks Conservancy.

Nadya Nenadich, Coordinator a b

a. Jessica Baldwin b. Preservation, Economic Development + Sustainability Studio

127

COMMUNITY

Residing within the Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development in the School of Architecture, the historic preservation program is wide-ranging rather than narrowly defined. It draws on Pratt’s interdisciplinary resources in graduate architecture, urban design, city planning, environmental management and real estate.

Students become familiar with broad concepts of building consensus and affecting public policy, as well as building, district and cultural preservation.

RESEARCH

The 44-credit Historic Preservation graduate program was created to go beyond the traditional concept of historic preservation education.

Rather than focus mainly on the conservation and restoration of historic structures, Pratt’s program embraces a broad spectrum of preservation issues, including heritage, public policy, community planning, sustainability, and advocacy. The program encourages students to understand preservation policies and methods as part of a broader historical and social context, while providing the range of skills that practitioners need in today’s professional environment.

PSPD

MASTER OF SCIENCE IN HISTORIC PRESERVATION

GAUD

Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development

Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development

MASTER OF SCIENCE IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT The 40-credit Urban Environmental Systems Management Program studies the nexus of environmental science, policy and design.

The curriculum is steeped in Pratt’s community based ethos and examination, through the lens of social justice, of the systems our urban environments construct to manage water quality, solid waste and energy. Graduates are prepared to take on a range of roles as policy analysts, sustainability consultants, low impact developers, researchers and advocates, collaborating with environmental scientists, designers, policy makers and communities.

The UESM Program combines a foundation of theoretical and technical core courses with innovative mini-courses taught by cuttingedge practicing professionals. Students learn the interdisciplinary skills needed to: assess contemporary environmental issues; catalyze innovative environmental problem solving; uphold environmental and social justice; and engage diverse stakeholders in designing and developing sustainable plans and policies.

UESM studio courses are either place-based, as in a zero-carbon studio for a neighborhood, or sector-based, as in a sustainable economic development studio. Every UESM student is assured an internship with organizations, agencies and professional practices. In the past, interns have been placed with Living City Block, the New York Industrial Retention Network, New York City Council, Department of City Planning and most recently the program has awarded five fellowships to work with the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance. In addition, the Pratt Center provides the opportunity for students to participate in their projects, such as an initiative to make buildings in Bedford Stuyvesant more energy efficient. This professional experience enriches seminar discussions and studio courses, provides students with a wealth of contacts in the field and strengthens their job qualifications.

Jaime Stein, Coordinator a

a. Kristin Bell + Matthew Treat + Natalie Vichnevsky

GAUD

Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development

PSPD

FACILITIES MANAGEMENT

Pratt’s Facilities Management Program is looking forward to continuing and growing our relationship with the University of Applied Science Kufstein Tirol Austria, and the many business consultants and professors from Norway and the Netherlands. We look forward to participating in the next year’s WinterCongress and WinterSchool.

Audrey Schultz, faculty a

a. Facilities Management Studio

129

COMMUNITY

This year’s theme was healthcare and the WinterSchool student competition scenario was designed around the students developing an open plot of land next to the Kufstein hospital. The project scenario touched on built environment elements such as: project management, sustainable urban development, healthcare facilities, net-zero and energy efficient concepts, market analysis and perspectives and SWOT analysis, and residuum cost analysis. There were over 200 students in attendant with 13 teams of approximately 13-15 students from Austria, Germany, Netherlands and Norway. Pratt students and professors represented the US. There were also extra curriculum team activities such as a night of ice stock sport contest and dinner outing.

RESEARCH

The 16th annual FM & REM WinterCongress 2014 and the 3rd annual Facility Management & Real Estate Management WinterSchool was held at the University of Applied Science Kufstein Tirol Austria from January 29th through February 5th 2014. Facilities Management Adjunct Professor Gerald McGowan, Professor Audrey Schultz and FM MS students Min-Wook Lee and Leo Kim attended. This is the third year that Pratt’s Facilities Management professors and students have been invited to attend the WinterCongress and WinterSchool.

Professor McGowan was a coach for the student teams and lectured on Trends in FM. Professor Schultz was also a student team coach and lectured on Health Care Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) projects and Integrated Project Management. Students Min-Wook Lee and Leo Kim participated in the international student competition.

Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development

CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT Pratt Institute Construction Management students engage in the act of building by participating in field trips, competitions, and rigorous and relevant course work. Through their interaction with construction management professionals and hands-on experience Pratt Institute’s Construction Management students gain valuable exposure to the construction management profession that yields immediate rewards, and often leads to employment upon graduation. Some students are able to apply the knowledge from their coursework during internship experiences in construction management firms while studying at Pratt.

In October 2013 the Introduction to Construction Management (CM-201) class visited a New York School Construction Authority construction site under construction by Pavarini Construction at 10 East 15th Street in New York, NY. The project included a total of 130,000 square feet over 9-floors. The students observed the construction in process for structural steel, concrete deck, exterior wall installation, ductwork, electrical, plumbing, sprinklers, and carpentry.

In November 2013 six construction management students participated in the 2013 Associated Schools of Construction (ASC) Region 1 Annual Competition. Pratt Institute competed against 14 construction management program teams in the Commercial Construction division.

The students were provided with a set of construction document drawings and specifications, and were required to develop a complete construction management proposal in one day. They then created a slide presentation and made a presentation to the sponsor company the following day. The students also met with and submitted resumes to industry professionals during a job fair.

In December 2013 the Capstone Project class presented their final construction management proposals for the Vernon E. Cleaves Regional Vocational Technical High School to a panel of construction management industry professionals. The Capstone class is the culmination project for Pratt’s Construction Management students, and includes elements from all four years of construction management courses including: schedule, budget, site logistics, site safety, value engineering, constructability, sustainability, and Building Information Modeling (BIM).

Kent Hikida, faculty Harriet Markis, Chair of Construction Management a b c

a. Pratt CM student team at Associated Schools of Construction (ASC) Region I competition b. Capstone Project c. Site Visit

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Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development

PSPD

INTERNATIONAL COURSES

COMMUNITY

The current list of international courses includes: - Austria. Facilities Management.

- Copenhagen, Denmark. Placemaking and Urban Design - India. Innovations in Urban Planning & Design - Istanbul, Turkey. Redevelopment and Justice.

- Rotterdam, Netherlands. Climate Adaptation Strategies - Rome, Italy. Preservation and Adaptation - Sao Paolo, Brazil. Community Innovation - Tokyo, Japan. Urban Design and Placemaking Within the PSPD we believe in preparing our students with not only the tools and knowledge to practice locally, but also the perspective to approach these complex issues while evaluating the milieu of local environment, equity and economics concerns. We better understand our own milieu when taken out of our comfort zone through international travel and study.

John Shapiro, Chair of City and Regional Planning a b c

a. Kethia Joseph b. Pebel Rodriguez c. Studio Work

RESEARCH

The PSPD is responding to the challenges of the “global village” with courses that run partly or entirely abroad. These courses are as much about students learning global innovations and practices as about providing opportunities for students to study in foreign places. As respective examples of a seminar and studio: Pratt students have traveled to Brazil to consider innovative approaches to affordable housing in the New York–São Paulo Exchange; and with Indian students fleshed out the community details of a regional sustainability plan for Goa.

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Elisabetta Di Stefano

Studio courses generally combine two or more of the four concentrations of the Program: community development, environmental planning and policy, preservation planning and physical planning. Often, studios relate to the ongoing work of the Pratt Center for Community Development, one of the nation’s first and foremost university-based research and technical assistance organizations in the service of disadvantaged communities.

Studios involve real clients facing significant planning challenges, consistent with the CRP Program’s emphasis on participatory planning and equity issues. Past and current studios have taken students to work on plans for Ward 9 in New Orleans; collaborate on a regional planning framework for a town in Goa, India; and work to preserve locally-owned businesses as well as the unique neighborhood character in New York’s East Village. The CRP Program offers a unique chance for students to make a difference as they complete a first-rate education.

PSPD STUDIO FACULTY Eddie Bautista David Burney Elizabeth Finkelstein Michael Haggerty Daniel Hernandez Mary Kimball Mathew Lister Elliot Maltby Ben Margolis

Jonathan Martin Gita Nandan Mercedes Narciso Juan Camilo Osario Stuart Pertz John Shapiro Ron Shiffman Jaime Stein Ayse Yonder

COMMUNITY

This past year, the CRP Program celebrated its 50th anniversary; and this year the program won an award from the MetroChapter of the American Planning Association. Over time, the CRP has remained true to its emphasis on practice over theory, participatory planning over top-down policy making, and advocacy over technocracy.

RESEARCH

The 60-credit City and Regional Planning (CRP) Program trains students as practicing urban planners whose knowledge encompasses communities, cities and regions. The curriculum aligns with the design-centered programs in the School of Architecture, with a further focus on sustainable development, participatory planning and social change.

PSPD

INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS

GAUD

Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development

Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development | Interdisciplinary Studios

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Land Use & Urban Design Studio Harlem, NY A physical urban design proposal for two study sites on the Harlem River.

Students involved in this studio, familiarized themselves with existing and emerging conditions relating to the study sites and their surrounding neighborhoods by; reviewing existing documents and proposals for the sites, expressing existing and emerging conditions in graphic form (diagrams), awwnd developing conceptual (but evocative) design recommendations.

Students engaged in a basic land use and zoning analysis, however, the focus of this studio was on how best to capitalize through design on the great opportunity these sites can offer their surrounding communities, while recognizing that some existing facilities must remain, as they are part of the urban context (and a successfully operating city). As such, a challenge of this studio was to successfully work within the existing opportunities and constrains present on the site and refrain from displacing any uses simply for normative “higher and best” use programmatic opportunities. A better strategy, whenever practicable, was incorporated to accommodate necessary existing uses within new design.

The final products for this studio were a series of “completionstyle” urban design boards clearly showing conceptual design strategies for the site that stress the sites’ potential. The studio took a predominantly physical, urban design focus –one that advances the social, economic and environmental goals of the community and the city– that encourages you to think “outside of the box” so as to present a design that puts forth an inspirational, potential-rich vision for what the future could hold.

Students: Rebecca Crimmins, Lindsay Donellon, Anastassia Fisyak, Chris Hamby, Krystin Hence, Matt Juliana, Osi Kaminer, Simon Kates, Tyler Klifman, Elaine Mahoney, Shane McCabe, Annie McQuillan, Brooke Mayer, Isabel Miesner, Rosa Munar, Claire Nelischer, Leonel Ponce, Lenny Reisner, Benjamin Stark.

Jonathan Martin + Ron Shiffman, faculty a

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Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development | Interdisciplinary Studios

Feasibility Political

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Economic

NQ’s Capacity in Near Future

PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Envisioning Melrose Commons Melrose Commons Bronx, NY This fall, the Pratt Studio support the mission of the Nos Quedamos community development organization – in the 20th anniversary of its founding - as it serves the neighborhood that has been its historic base, Melrose, in the City’s South Bronx. The Studio worked with the director, as their client, to understand the transition that has taken place over the last twenty years of successful development and provide a Needs Assessment, an Analysis of Assets and the development of a Neighborhood Conservation and Development Plan.

One of the main goals of our studio was to re-visit and update the current urban renewal plan called Melrose Commons. Included in our analysis was an assessment of the implementation of the Melrose Commons plan (i.e., what goals were and weren’t achieved), and an evaluation of the area’s current issues and assets, including opportunities for developing/planning strategies for areas in and adjacent to Melrose Commons, and weighing the benefits and costs in concert with Nos Quedamos.

The Studio meet over a period of fifteen weeks. Students researched, physically survey, created GIS mapping of demographic and physical information, interviewed individually and in visioning workshops and listened to visiting lectures from experts in both the neighborhoods historic efforts and the redevelopment of neighborhoods in general.

As a result of their investigations, and their interactive and responsive work with the director, the students produced the assessments, analyses, plans and proposals that provided an environmental management, historic preservation, planning and development framework that supports Nos Quedamos as it charts its course for the future.

Students: Jose Cardenas, Ryan Chavez, Alix Fellman, Nicole French, Peter Furst, Humberto Martinez, Catalina Parra, Ankita Rathi.

Ron Shiffman + Eddie Bautista + Stuart Pertz , faculty a

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Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development | Interdisciplinary Studios

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Seward Park Urban Renewal Area Manhattan, NY The objective of this studio is to develop students’ capacity to analyze urban districts, and to create sustainable urban redevelopment solutions. This course combines basic principles and practices of city planning and urban design to a specific district or neighborhood.

Physical, social, eco nomic, cultural and political factors are considered in order to produce a workable plan and viable design. Students document their proposals in a professional-level presentation. In addition to studio work, there are lectures, site visits, written reports and input from official and community representatives.

This is a very interactive class structured as a design studio. Students learn how to assess existing and emerging community conditions; how to formulate goals; how to translate projections of economic and population change into their land use implications for land, location, and community services; how to determine the suitability of land and locations for various land uses; how to apply computer technology to specific plan-making tasks such as map presentations, land suitability analyses, and the drawing of plans. Students also practice oral, graphic, and written communication skills; and participation as an effective member of a professional planning team.

The class is divided in three phases: (1) Discovery – students explore the study area in terms of its physical composition, historical and cultural background, demographics, local stakeholders, economic activity, transportation and the forces that influence its future.

(2) Design – students work in teams to begin creating redevelopment scenarios, interventions, redevelopment strategies.

(3) Synthesis – students create portfolio- quality development proposals and presentations.

This studio examined the New York City proposal to develop several city blocks known as the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA).

Students developed several alternative development proposals that sought to maximize the economy, equity and environment of the community.

Students: Gavin Barber, Francesca Brady, Graham Cavanagh, Lydia Chapman, Trang Dong, Anastassia Fisyak, Krystin Hence, Matt Juliana, Tina Lee, Elaine Mahoney.

David Burney + Daniel Hernandez + Matew Lister, faculty a

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Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development | Interdisciplinary Studios

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Flushing Meadows Corona Park Queens, NY The Spring 2013 Sustainable Communities Studio worked in conjunction with the Pratt Center for Community Development and the Fairness Coalition of Queens to create a series of deliverables that responded to the client’s needs and built toward a neighborhoodbased resilience agenda. The coalition comprises several local and immigrant groups concerned about the impacts of large-scale development in and around Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

The impacts of the Willets Point redevelopment project, the World Soccer Stadium construction, and the USTA Expansion remain unexamined for their cumulative impacts on local communities and eco-systems that serve the Flushing Bay and the Flushing River. Communities and their local representatives have not been meaningfully involved in the decisions leading to the re-use and redevelopment of much of the neighborhood’s public recreational and open spaces, which constitute much of the local system of green infrastructure—that serves one of the city’s most diverse and populous immigrant communities.

The studio was an opportunity to critically evaluate the costs and benefits of large-scale development in light of climate change, to build the capacity of community groups to work in tandem with decision-makers about what is and is not appropriate development, and to challenge decision-makers to re-examine development impacts in light of severe weather events.

Students familiarized themselves with existing neighborhood conditions, synthesized existing planning documents, examined neighborhood demographics, plan and executed community focus groups, help formulate recommendations, and contribute to the creation of reports and preliminary plans. This is a trans-disciplinary studio--planning students work with students and instructors from a variety of disciplines to enrich our understanding of the complexity of local planning challenges and solutions. Students had the opportunity to contribute to a professional planning project.

Students: Matthew Castro, Milton Kondilis, Joseph Kozar, Joseph Lagrand, Stephen Miller, Natalie Vichnevsky.

Ron Shiffman + Eve Baron, faculty a

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Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development | Interdisciplinary Studios

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Bedford-Stuyvesant’s Sacred Places Brooklyn, NY Historic congregations play an important role in the community fabric of Bedford-Stuyvesant and have been a part of the neighborhood for many decades. They provide a wide range of services and programs— some critical—for their congregational members as well as other community residents. They serve as hubs of activity that sustain the surrounding community and give residents a safe place to learn, grow, and thrive.

Yet these congregations face unique challenges. Many reside in historic buildings that are growing old and suffer from years of deferred maintenance. Some are fortunate to be growing so much that they are running out of space, while others barely fill the cavernous spaces they own. Resources are few, staff is stretched thin, and clergy leadership often does not have the time or resources to manage the needs of the buuldings while also managing the neeeds of the community and the spiritual mission of the congregation.

These challenges make it difficult for congregations to continue to serve the ongoing community needs in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Widespread health concerns, low incomes and high rates of poverty, and poor quality schools that lack arts or after school programming still plague the neighborhood. In addition to these challenges, BedStuy is also increasingly showing signs of gentrification, with rising property values and residents with higher incomes and higher levels of education moving into the neighborhood over the last ten years, displacing community members.

This project builds upon the work of two previous studios in Pratt Institute’s Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development, as well as the work of the Pratt Center for Community Devleopment’s Sustainable Houses of Worship program. The following report is an exploration of the existing conditions in Bedford-Stuyvesant, an analysis of the challenges and opportunities both in the neighborhood and for each of the four participating congregations, and a set of recommendations tailored to the unique needs of each congregation.

These recommendations are intended to help the participating sacred places meet both short-term and long-term goals to ensure the sustained presence of these sacred places as valuable community resources.

Students: Rex Chao, Andrea Devening, Alix Fellman, Laura Fortunas, Annie McQuillan, Francine Morales, Claire Nelischer, Blayze O’Brien, Maurice Robb, Meric Ugdul, Fred Wolf.

Beth Bingham + Ben Margolis, faculty a

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Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development | Interdisciplinary Studios

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Community Planning Studio Red Hook Brooklyn, NY The community planning studio applies skills and knowledge of planning, design, preservation, and environmental systems management within the complex settings of disaster recovery and climate change. The studio develops and tests tools for the analysis and planning of the built environment in New York City post-Hurricane Sandy with a focus on addressing social vulnerability. The studio also explores the concept of resilience – especially with respect to social, economic and environmental equity in the rebuilding process and the ways in which disaster recovery can create opportunities to address long-term social, economic, and environmental issues.

The studio is organized in three phases: 1) Assessment, 2) Scenario Planning, and 3) Strategies for Sustainability and Resilience. During the first phase, students map and analyze the New York City Harbor and Red Hook, Brooklyn, with a focus on identifying vulnerabilities.

During phases 2 and 3, students develop a conceptual framework for adaptation, mitigation, and community development for Red Hook. Throughout the studio, students work collaboratively within an “office team� environment with the goal of producing a cohesive final project. Each student or small group is responsible for contributing to and directing the team project and is responsible of a particular focus or specific intervention to be developed over the course of the studio.

Students collaborate with other Pratt studios and visiting students and with stakeholders, including private, government, or non-profit organizations with a prioritization of the community perspective.

Studio assignments include mapping and GIS analysis related to vulnerability assessment; scenario planning; legal, regulatory, community development, and political strategies; and written reports and visualization.

Students: Francesca Brady, Rebecca Crimmins, Katy Donald, Joshua Eichen, Matthew Howie, Michael Johnson, Brooke Mayer, Christopher Rice, Omari Washington.

Michael Haggerty + Mary Kimball + Ron Shiffman, faculty a

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a. Chessy Brady + Rebecca Crimmins + Brooke Mayer + Omari Washington

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Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development | Interdisciplinary Studios

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Green Infrastructure Design/Build Studio Red Hook, NY Building upon the previous studios’ research and their own explorations, students designed and built interactive interventions in the field that illustrated a specific green infrastructure typology.

Students developed detailed drawings of current green infrastructure best practices, and explored how specific site and social conditions, among other factors, impact these best practices.

As in past years, lead practitioners from multiple disciplines shared their expertise; in addition to these in studio lectures, we visited green infrastructure projects throughout the city. We also looked at information design precedents that move beyond the static “poster on a stick”, such as the work supported by the Center for Urban Pedagogy.

Sites included Red Hook and areas around Newtown Creek. Students identified which green infrastructure type they will be interpreting and the community / audience they are targeting, and built and installed their communication device. The class as a whole also assembled a green infrastructure ‘user’s manual’ based on their research.

Students: Kristin Bell, Maya Carter, Lindsay Donnellon, Hans Jensen, Milton Kondilis, Kevin Kraft, Thomas Mutell, Maurice Robb, Jesse Such, Matthew Treat, Natalie Vichnevsky, Frederick Wolf.

Gita Nandan + Elliott Maltby, faculty a

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a. Studio Work b. Maya Carter + Jesse Such + Frederick L. Wolf

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Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development | Interdisciplinary Studios

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Physical Planning Tokyo, Japan During the summer of 2013, 17 students from Pratt Institute’s Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development traveled to Japan to study public space in the Tokyo metropolitan area. Assisted by a grant from the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership and funding from the School of Architecture, the interdisciplinary team of researchers, led by Professors Jonathan Martin and Namiko Martin and assisted by Alexa Fabrega, represented students from City and Regional Planning, Urban Environmental Systems Management, and Historic Preservation.

The course included pre-departure sessions to introduce students to Japanese history, language, arts and culture, planning, urban design and architecture, and the 16-day study-tour program included site visits in Tokyo, Kamakura, and Kyoto.

Academic activities included lectures, workshops and guided walking tours, and social gatherings with Japanese professors and students from Tohoku University, Waseda University and Tokyo Institute of Technology. Through these interactions, students gained an understanding of Japan’s planning history and methods, its approach to historic preservation and urban design. Workshops included collaborations with graduate planning students from Waseda University to identify urban quality environment indicators in Okubo, one of the more ethnically diverse neighborhoods in Tokyo. Guided field visits included those with a machizukuri (citizen community group) touring and learning about urban revitalization in and around the Tokyo Tree project, and visits to several government-sponsored projects with planners from Machida City.

In addition to these activities, students worked on a research project on Japanese public space. This involved developing research protocols and conducting secondary research before departure, and fieldwork in Japan, including observational mapping, diagramming, sketching and interviewing. The research resulted in three reports on the social and planning aspects, typologies, and history and policy structure of public spaces in Japan, and contributes to Professor Martin’s ongoing research on Japanese planning and urbanism.

Students: Jessica Baldwin, Matthew Castro, Alejandra Chacra, Lakan Cole, Matthew Garcia, Kethia Joseph, Lingyao Lai, Shaobo Li, James McGregor Lloyd, Isabel Miesner, Claire Nelischer, Catherine Nguyen, Hande Oney, Bryan Portes, Mariana Rich, Pebel Rodriguez, Kelly Smolenski.

Jonathan Martin, faculty a

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Sheenam Mujoo + Chang Hee Park Robert Cervellione, critic

Pratt School of Architecture

Thomas Hanrahan, Dean

FACULTY Alexandra Barker Robert Cervellione Catherine Ingraham Alihan Polat Erika Schroeder Maria Sieira

COMMUNITY

Research is not only confined to these centers, but can be found throughout the studios in all of the programs within the school. The research culture in these pages defines the center of our research activities here at Pratt, but this culture is also a catalyst for a broad range of research activities across the entire school that will only continue to grow in the coming years.

RESEARCH

Broadly, the areas of research in the School of Architecture fall under the headings of urbanism, sustainability, computation and structural / material studies. Specific Graduate Architecture and Urban Design research during the year involved computation in the project Agent Structures with Bentley Systems, collaboration with the Architectural Association in Atacama Workshop in Chile; the specific historical moment of urban space and the economy catalyzed by “Occupy Wallstreet�, and Geospatial mapping contemporary Brooklyn.

PSPD

The following pages document the work and activities of our primary research centers and laboratories in the School of Architecture.

Some of these centers have been in existence for many years while others are a relatively recent phenomenon. Nevertheless, the idea of research as a pursuit in the school has been growing exponentially in recent years, and the energy and production of these centers has been growing in importance as well.

GAUD

RESEARCH

Pratt School of Architecture | Research

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

BIOmetric BIOmetric is a series of student investigations generated in Arch 711A at Pratt Institute, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design.

This course concentrated on using parametric design and scripting techniques to create directed intelligence as a way of form-finding.

We explore the nature of these complex systems and their impact on design. Using object oriented programming with parametric design tools we investigate how these emergent systems can feed into the discourse of architecture in order to evaluate new methods of making.

The seminar focused on adapting bioluminescent behavior found in nature to create a parasitic building element, which registers various environmental parameters such as heat and occupancy.

The investigations focused on developing a parasitic element that attaches to a host and provides real time feedback of particular parameters of the host element.

A Swarm behavior simulation was used to control the various parametric and geometric deformations. The bioluminescent behavior was translated into electroluminescence and controlled using various sensors and microcontrollers. Each project is represented as an interactive installation.

Jellevation: Courtney Jones + Miranda Rogers Teaming the Tate: Victoria Maceira + Trey Lindsay Stiptic Cube: Sheenam Mujoo + Chang Hee Park

El Diablo Rojo: Stephen Ullman + Heena Patel Sonoscape: Michael Hoak + Elisa Li Light Links: Christina Ostermier + Nicole Petitpierre

Robert Cervellione, critic

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Pratt School of Architecture | Research

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Green Infrastructure North Hall- An Intensive Green Roof with Swale System.

In the summer of 2012, students and faculty within Pratt’s school of Architecture joined with the Facilities Dept. to conceptualize and design an intensive green roof on Pratt’s North Hall building. The project is funded through the NYC Department of Environmental Protection’s 2012 Green Infrastructure Grant Program and will be completed in July 2014.

The summer 2012 Green Infrastructure Design+Build Studio worked to develop conceptual green roof plans and systems. Under the guidance of Professors Gita Nandon and Elliott Matby, each student developed their own insightful, creative design after learning the fundamentals of green roof systems.

The North Hall green roof will be built by Highview Creations.

Highview is a GRP certified green roof design, build, and consultation company based in New York City. The company has designed and installed several extensive, intensive, and agricultural- green-roofs throughout the Northeast. The company has worked with Department of Environmental Protection on a green-roof/blue roof analysis as part of a Department of Environmental Conservation funded stormwater pilot study within the Jamaica Bay Watershed. Highview Creations is also a previous DEP Green Infrastructure Program award winner, and is familiar with the program agenda.

The projects also recieved funding to create and implement a monitoring plan.

Green roof temperature and soil moisture will be collected continuously and in real time. One of many feedback loops included is for soil moisture data to trigger the solar powered irrigation system.

Cannoneer Court- Parking Lot Retrofit with Bioswales.

In the summer of 2012, Pratt’s Green Infrastructure fellows worked alongside Professsor Paul Mankiewicz of the Gaia Institute to conceptualize and design a retrofit of the Cannoneer Court parking lot. This system of bioswales and permeable paver areas is funded by the NYC Department of Environmental Protection’s 2012 Green Infrastructure Grant Program and will be completed in July 2013.

Fellows: Jose Valdes, Gina Kosty, Trang Dong, Marcel Negret, Wenkai Kuo, Osi Kaminer, Omari Washington, Johane Clermont, Ross Diamond, Leonel Ponce & Andreas Theodoridis.

Jaime Stein, Coordinator of U.E.S.M.

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Pratt School of Architecture | Research

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Cold War Cool Digital When I invited the Chilean architects Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Hugo Palmarola in the Spring of 2013 to exhibit their research on Cold War large concrete panel systems at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture in New York, I was interested in their motives in digitally modeling and 3-D printing small scale prototypes of these building systems. I felt such an exhibition— which I wanted to link to contemporary digital prototyping—had to be more than an exercise (however impressive) in 3-D printing and exhibiting models of the forty different systems that Pedro and Hugo had researched. One of the strangest things about these large panel systems was their struggle to be both adaptive and dictatorial. They were early demonstrations of the global promulgation of a typological modernism. They reveal some of the political and material constraints such systems confronted and exploited as well as insistent cultural resistance. They were not architectural in most cases—James Stirling’s Saint Andrew dormitories were an exception—and yet they directly engage the fundamental tensions between structure and ornament, contingency and autonomy, will-to-power and formal fascinations, that defined modern architecture. And models have the power to collapse time.

This is why it is not surprising that Pedro and Hugo won the competition for curating and designing the Chilean Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale. Rem Koolhaas, the director this year, is interested in revisiting modernism’s evolution. Koolhaas argues that modernity and globalization have homogenized the typology of modern architecture and erased cultural memory. Pedro and Hugo’s proposal is to hang the original Chilean concrete panel signed by Salvador Allende in 1972 in the center of the Chilean pavilion and bathe it with projections of images that tell its story. Allende signed the panel to confirm economic ties with the Soviet Union, who helped Chile build production factories for these systems. A year later, Allende was overthrown by a military coup d’etat, and Augusto Pinochet came into power and began to erase all traces of Chile’s relations with the Soviet Union. Serendipitously, however, the panel itself was recovered. Allende’s signature had been plastered over.

In the voided center of the panel a statue of the Virgin Mary and Child had been fixed, flanked by two neo-colonial columns. This is the techno-political scene, rehearsed in some sense during the Pratt exhibition, that Pedro Alonso and Hugo Palmarola will install in the Chilean Pavilion this summer.

Exhibition mounted in collaboration with Pedro Alonso and Hugo Palmarola. Photographed by Neil Alexander.

Catherine Ingraham, critic a

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Pratt School of Architecture | Research

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Post-Sandy Topographies This exhibition was a set of studies that mapped geospatial conditions and speculative scenarios in the New York City region following the destruction caused by the storm. Models documented the damage in the immediate aftermath, projected temporary and permanent relocation scenarios of residential populations and businesses in the flood zone, and imagined more extreme zoning scenarios that would dramatically alter the built landscape of the city. The work was completed as part of a seminar/workshop titled Critical Geography and Techniques of Representation taught in the fall of 2012 by Alexandra Barker and Alihan Polat. Students used GIS software and a range of open source and empirical data sets to generate their results. nycDamaged: Sheenae Kim nycDisplaced: Megan Hurford + Jenna Steinbeck nycSubmerged + nycRelocated: Fajer Alquattan nycFAR: Trey Lindsay + John Redington

Alexandra Barker + Alihan Polat, critics

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M. Arch. First Year Studio Review

Pratt School of Architecture

RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Philip Parker, Graduate Assistant Chair

PSPD

Students and faculty in the graduate architecture programs actively participate in and build the communities with the arts, and sciences in exhibition and research venues and in many projects focused on K-12 education, community and environmental justice, advancements in design, imaging and fabrication technologies. These may span a range of generations as the education programs often do, or they may extend well into the realms of the very concrete issues of the environment as imaging and development projects. They may engage a larger community of citizens and professionals in a global dialogue and collaboration on questions of water and contemporary modes of urbanization as part of our International programs. Collectively, the overlap and resonance of these varied constituencies contributes to a more integral and hopefully active participation of architecture in its many communities.

GAUD

COMMUNITY

Pratt School of Architecture | Community

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

K-12 R.A.D. Manhattan + Brooklyn, NY The Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (GAUD) department has collected experiential evidence of a growing interest in educational environments from GAUD students and faculty. This interest has overlapped within the educational strategic goals of both New York City and Pratt Institute as it acknowledges the connection between the higher educational institutions’ role in delivering outreach, partnerships and access in order to build a bridge for young people from school, to higher education to employment and beyond. The goal of these K-12 RAD (Rising Architects and Designers) projects are two-fold, empowering local youth through STEAM related projects and giving Pratt students the opportunity to see how their skills in design can be used for positive community development.

The interest and research in educational environments initially grew out of the Master of Architecture (M. Arch) second semester ARCH 602: Context Studio curriculum. Each year during this spring semester studio, about 60 students take on a project in New York City that has socio-political relevance, challenging students to develop an institutional program with some complexity. The educational context explored has been in response to the growing need to address spatial and learning issues in K-12 educational environments that can be supported through architecture and design.

Since 2012, the design of the Context Studio (ARCH 602) curriculum has included short-term partnerships with six elementary schools over three boroughs. Through these partnerships the M. Arch students engage with a K-12 community as they co-teach an architecture related lesson to an elementary class with common-core and STEAM centered curriculum integration.

GAUD’s integration of K-12 interest in curriculum continues to be an interest for both students and faculty. Each spring semester the M. Arch Structures II course (ARCH 632) curriculum has included a final project to engage NYC public schools. Through this partnership Pratt students act as ‘the engineers’ and collaborate with public school students who are designated as ‘the architects’ as they learn to design together.

In addition to the integration of K-12 research topics within M. Arch curriculum there have been numerous GAUD students over the past two years who have volunteered their time in collaboration with the Art and Design Education department at Pratt, including Saturday Art School, Young Scholars and Reclaim Works.

William Mac Donald, Graduate Chair + Erika Schroeder, Assistant to Graduate Chair a

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Pratt School of Architecture | Community

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Recovery, Adaptation, Mitigation and Planning RAMP In response to Superstorm Sandy, in Spring 2013, the PSPD initiated a multi-year program of coordinated planning and architectural studios/ urban labs, workshops and conferences called “Recovery, Adaptation, Mitigation and Planning [RAMP].” At its core, RAMP is working closely with community partners/clients to develop plans and strategies for rebuilding and adaptation. Training sessions and workshops will be offered to complement the technical assistance to be provided in the participatory planning, urban design, architectural and development studios. In addition to students, RAMP workshops are open to practicing design, planning and development professionals, community residents and advocacy groups, and wherever possible undertaken in partnership with other cooperating technical assistance providers, advocacy organizations, professional associations and Community Based Development Organizations.

Community residents must be the foundation of any resiliency strategy.

They are part of the team of “first responders” in their neighborhoods.

As experts on their communities, and the ones for whom resiliency is most directly relevant, they are central to the development of any resilience strategy in the face of future severe weather events or disruptions of any kind. This is particularly important in low- and moderate-income areas and in communities of color where issues of economic status and race have too often led to exclusion and isolation in decision-making. By including these communities we improve the innovation and quality of resiliency planning, create social capital – an element critical to resiliency - and ensure rooted and on-going buy-in, participation, and government and private sector accountability in the adaptation and mitigation process.

Ron Shiffman, faculty

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Pratt School of Architecture | Community

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Spatial Analysis & Visualization Initiative SAVI Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has caused a revolution in the collection, organization, analysis and presentation of data. GIS allows information to be collected in data form, visualized in spatial form, analyzed and layered in map and ‘infographic’ forms. GIS has the power to inform diverse networks of stakeholders: decision makers, municipal agencies, researchers, artists, community and civic organizations – to understand and visualize complex spatial relationships.

Pratt Institute’s Spatial Analysis and Visualization Initiative (SAVI) is a GIS-centered enterprise that aims to create a “commons” for practice-based learning accessible to all Pratt students, faculty and community-based organizations. SAVI promotes a cross-disciplinary, collaborative learning and research community where faculty and students can share projects, ideas, resources and tools via a service center and research lab. Students and faculty across campus will find SAVI beneficial for research projects, studios, course work, theses and art projects.

The Initiative also intends to provide New York City-based nonprofit, civic and community-based planning organizations with access to GIS technical assistance, analysis, training and access to resources that allow independent GIS work. These groups will be able to efficiently document existing conditions of urban areas, more meaningfully contribute to policy discussions, and create their own visions for improving quality-of-life and sustainability.

SAVI is an independent center under the Office of the Provost with three founding partners: the Programs for Sustainable Planning & Development, the Pratt Center for Community Development, and the graduate Communications Design Department. This cross-disciplinary approach empowers Pratt to expand upon its contribution to the well-being of New York City and its neighborhoods.

Jessie Braden, Director of the Spatial Analysis

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Pratt School of Architecture | Community

Pratt Center for Community Development The Pratt Center for Community Development occupies a unique niche at Pratt Institute, operating both outside the gates of the Institute and firmly within the School of Architecture. It is in some ways an independent non-profit – a sort of “think and do” tank devoted to solving urban problems – and simultaneously an academic department enriched and supported by the Institute’s resources, ideas and energy.

For 50 years, Pratt Center has worked closely with the Pratt planning and architecture programs to further its mission to create a more just, equitable and sustainable city for all New Yorkers. The community groups the Center works with are on the frontlines of today’s economic struggles, directly confronting the crisis facing low- and moderate-income communities throughout the city. Pratt student interns play a major role in most of the Center’s urban planning and policy projects and are given serious responsibilities, from conducting community interviews to producing GIS and zoning analyses, to developing schematic drawings. The relationship is mutually beneficial: Pratt Center interns have the opportunity to fully engage in vital projects and to witness community-based planning and design in action. The Center benefits greatly from their energy, enthusiasm and fresh perspectives.

Adam Friedman, Director of Pratt Center a a. Pratt Center collaboration

GAUD PSPD RESEARCH COMMUNITY

Sheepshead Bay The bungalow courts of Sheepshead Bay are representative of many of NYC’s waterfront areas just beginning the long process of rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy.

Hundreds of small homes were flooded, extensively damaged, and face ongoing mold problems, and dozens more were completely destroyed. Compounding these challenges, local residents have little knowledge of the complex zoning, regulatory, and engineering processes necessary to rebuild comprehensively. In order to address the complications and urgency of rebuilding, along with the absence of formal local stakeholder representation, Pratt Center, in conjunction with Professor Deborah Gans of Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture and several architecture students, collaborated with a group of impacted homeowners, providing them with preliminary architectural assistance to support their rebuilding efforts.

Gans and her team reviewed zoning, engineering, and building code issues that could impact raising the small homes above new base flood elevations; assessed historic and current sewer and infrastructure conditions that impact these small homes; and presented recommendations for a context-specific integrated approach to rebuilding at a neighborhood scale. Pratt Center provided community organizing and outreach support.

As a framework for elevating multiple homes simultaneously and integrating residential rebuilding into the creation of a more resilient infrastructure, our recommendations collectively represent a more comprehensive approach to rebuilding and climate adaptation in waterfront communities. The homeowners we worked with were enthusiastic about seeing this community-wide resiliency framework come to fruition. We are currently working closely with them to catalyze the implementation of our recommendations through City, State and Federal resources.

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Pratt School of Architecture | School Culture

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Pratt School of Architecture | Lecture Series

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Pratt School of Architecture | Faculty

Graduate Architecture and Urban Design

Erik Ghenoiu Adjunct Associate Professor

William MacDonald Chair

James Graham Visiting Assistant Professor

Philip Parker Assistant Chair

Matthew Herman Visiting Assistant Professor

Vito Acconci Adjunct Associate Professor

Catherine Ingraham Professor

Nicholas Agneta Adjunct Associate Professor

Hina Jamelle Visiting Assistant Professor

Maria Aiolova Adjunct Assistant Professor

Bobby Johnston Adjunct Assistant Professor

Gilland Akos Visiting Assistant Professor

Evelyn Kalka Adjunct Assistant Professor

Jonathan James Alexander Adjunct Assistant Professor

Robert Kearns Visiting Assistant Professor

Nathaniel Stanton Adjunct Associate Professor Michael Szivos Visiting Assistant Professor

Adrien Allred Adjunct Assistant Professor

Karel Klein Adjunct Associate Professor

Jeffrey Taras Visiting Instructor

Daniel Hernandez Visiting Assistant Professor

Ramon Carlos Arnaiz Adjunct Assistant Professor

Carisima Koenig Visiting Instructor

Meredith Tenhoor Adjunct Assistant Professor

William Higgins Visiting Assistant Professor

Kutan Ayata Adjunct Assistant Professor

M. Ferda Kolatan Visiting Assistant Professor

Scot Teti Visiting Assistant Professor

Jeanne Houck, PhD Visiting Assistant Professor

Alexandra Barker Adjunct Associate Professor

A. Sulan Kolatan Adjunct Professor

Maria Ludovica Tramontin Adjunct Assistant Professor

Anne Hrychuk Visiting Assistant Professor

Elizabeth Barry Adjunct Associate Professor

Craig Konyk Adjunct Associate Professor

Nanako Umemoto Adjunct Professor

Keenan Hughes Visiting Assistant Professor

StĂŠphanie Bayard Adjunct Assistant Professor

Christopher Kroner Adjunct Associate Professor

Jason Vigneri-Beane Adjunct Associate Professor

Georges Jacquemart Visiting Associate Professor

Cole Belmont Visiting Assistant Professor

Sameer Kumar Adjunct Assistant Professor

John Christopher Whitelaw Visiting Instructor

Ned Kaufman Adjunct Associate Professor

Karen Brandt Visiting Professor

Wilfried Laufs Adjunct Associate Professor

Christian Bruun Visiting Assistant Professor

Thomas Leeser Adjunct Professor

Meta Brunzema Adjunct Associate Professor

Carla Leitao Adjunct Assistant Professor

Christian Bruun Visiting Assistant Professor

Qian Liu Visiting Assistant Professor

Vincent Burns Adjunct Assistant Professor

Teresa Llorente Adjunct Assistant Professor

Robert Cervellione Visiting Instructor

John Lobell Professor

Steven Chang Adjunct Assistant Professor

Peter Macapia Adjunct Assistant Professor

Jonas Coersmeier Adjunct Associate Professor

Radhi Majmuder Adjunct Assistant Professor

Christobal Correa Adjunct Associate Professor

Elliott Maltby Adjunct Associate Professor

Theoharis L. David Professor

Hart Marlow Visiting Assistant Professor

Manuel De Landa Adjunct Professor

Diana Martinez Visiting Assistant Professor

Giuliano Fiorenzoli Professor

Benjamin Martinson Visiting Instructor

Matthew Flannery Adjunct Assistant Professor

Signe Nielsen Adjunct Professor

Michelle Fowler Visiting Assistant Professor

Hannibal Newsom Visiting Assistant Professor

Frances Fox Visiting Assistant Professor

Alihan Polat Visiting Assistant Professor

Deborah Gans Professor

Bridget Rice Visiting Assistant Professor

James Garrison Adjunct Associate Professor

David Ruy Associate Professor

Joseph Giovannini Adjunct Associate Professor

Richard Scherr Adjunct Professor Erich Schoenenberger Adjunct Assistant Professor Paul Segal Adjunct Professor Benjamin Shepherd Adjunct Associate Professor Maria Sieira Adjunct Assistant Instructor Henry Smith-Miller Adjunct Professor Roland Snooks Adjunct Assistant Professor

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

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

Juan Camilo Osorio Visiting Assistant Professor

Visiting Assistant Professor William E. Henry Visiting Assistant Professor

Mike Flynn Visiting Assistant Professor

Stuart Pertz Visiting Assistant Professor Theo Prudon, PhD Visiting Assistant Professor

Adam Freed Visiting Assistant Professor

David Reiss Visiting Assistant Professor

Adam Friedman Visiting Assistant Professor

Steven Romalewski Visiting Assistant Professor

Ben Gibberd Visiting Assistant Professor

Alison Schneider Visiting Assistant Professor

Henry Gifford Visiting Instructor

Ronald Shiffman FAICP FAIA Professor

Eva Hanhardt Adjunct Associate Professor

Toby Snyder Visiting Assistant Professor

Justine Heilner Visiting Assistant Professor

Jaime Stein Coordinator, Environmental Systems Management Program

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

Ira Stern Visiting Assistant Professor

Clifford Opurum Visiting Assistant Professor

Gelvin Stevenson, PhD Visiting Associate Professor

Jack Osborn Visiting Associate Professor

Samara F. Swanston JD Visiting Assistant Professor

Sharvil Patel Visiting Assistant Professor

Lacey Tauber Visiting Assistant Professor

Edward D. Re Adjunct Associate Professor

Petra Todorovitch Visiting Assistant Professor

Carol R. Reznikoff Visiting Assistant Professor

Meenakshi Varandani Visiting Assistant Professor

Joseph Tagliaferro Visiting Assistant Professor

Meg Walker Visiting Assistant Professor

Simon Taylor Visiting Assistant Professor

Urvashi Kaul Visiting Assistant Professor Gavin Kearney Visiting Assistant Professor Katie Kendall Visiting Assistant Professor Brad Lander Visiting Associate Professor Frank Lang Visiting Assistant Professor Matthew Lister Visiting Assistant Professor Tina Lund Visiting Assistant Professor Elliot Maltby Adjunct Associate Professor Paul Mankiewicz PhD Visiting Associate Professor Jonathan Martin PhD Adjunct Assistant Professor William Menking Professor Jonathan Meyers Visiting Assistant Professor Norman Mintz Visiting Associate Professor Amy Anderson Nagy Visiting Assistant Professor Gita Nandan Visiting Assistant Professor Christopher Neville Visiting Assistant Professor Signe Nielsen Adjunct Professor

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

Edward Perry Winston RA Visiting Assistant Professor Kevin Wolfe RA Visiting Assistant Professor Vicki Weiner Visiting Associate Professor Joseph Weisbord Visiting Assistant Professor Sarah Wick Visiting Assistant Professor Andrew Wiley-Schwartz Visiting Assistant Professor Kevin Wolfe Visiting Assistant Professor Ayse Yonder PhD Professor Arthur Zabarkes Visiting Assistant Professor Catherine Zidar Visiting Assistant Professor

Construction & Facilities Management Harriet Markis CMFM Chair Howard Albert Visiting Assistant Professor Gail Bressler Visiting Assistant Professor Kathleen Dunne Professor Matthias Ebinger

Thomas Hanrahan Dean, Pratt School of Architecture