Program Introduction

MS Urban Design Program Introduction

We began the 2019-2020 MS program year musing on the dense block as a figure of the Anthropocene, the geological period marking the undeniable impacts of human activity on the planet; we concluded the program with urban hybrids and entirely new learning conditions that, on some level, usher in the “post-Anthropocene.”

What does it mean to be post-Anthropocene? The term “post” may be lazy, realistic or optimistic. We might suggest that “post” yokes us to our prior condition: we cannot just dive into new terminology and ignore it. “Post-Anthropocene” then means we wrestle with our anthropocentric exploitation of the planet; that we examine and acknowledge the inextricable relationship between racism and environmental degradation; and that we look at the manner in which social inequity is inscribed in the built environment, in particular regarding access to urban transportation systems.

Pandemic brought us into new dialogues with the effects of the Anthropocene. Infection is not limited to animals and humans, but describes, as well, a structure of interactions that are reconfiguring around pandemic, racism, isolation, and environmental catastrophe. The conventional physical aggregation of non-diverse academic bodies makes way to zoomed discussions across time-zones and perspectives; studio reviews, the province of top down expert monologues makes way for new platforms of committed listening, engaged looking and real dialogue.

The Covid-19 crisis atomized urban space. Self-quarantine and isolation, necessary to fight the epidemic, are spatial practices that inscribe intimate boundaries and that counter the ideals and, in fact, the very idea of public space. Urban parks, considered the lungs of the city, today become potential hot spots for respiratory illness; access to verdant material and fresh air is increasingly constrained by life circumscribed by one’s interior space. Yet any “nature” left in the city is highly unnatural: it is constructed, cultivated and maintained by man and machine. It has few if any provisions for non-human species. Yet the “garden” remained lodged in our urban imaginary, ready to be reconfigured by alternative transportation systems and novel figurations of the urban block.

The pandemic cast a harsh perspective on urban mass-transit. We had grown accustomed to the crowded bustle of the subway, the churn of buses and the vagaries of train schedules, but had not been prepared for Covid19’s dismantling the very raison d’être of the city: its masses, its community. The MS Urban Design’s research on micromobility and alternative transportation seemed prescient: we had already begun to allocate streets to new circulation rhythms. The blurring of façade and street to create variations on the “porte-cochère” anticipated our spring 2020 reality: a street-scape in which pick-up and drop-off of goods, food, supplies required the infrastructure of awning, archways and canopies. The interface between building façade and street would prove complex and contentious.

We became newly allied in virtual space, linked by our screens; we grew physically distant from the lively makers’ spaces of Pratt studios yet joined in the spaces of activism. Pratt itself has been transformed: the understanding that 3D printers could produce frameworks for emergency workers PPE set design activism at the top of our agendas; the imperative of self-isolation made us critically evaluate our home-spaces; the requirements of quarantine made us reflect on the critical role of accessible and distributed greenspace in the city; the needs of our families, our health and wellbeing, impressed a new shape of concern on this spring’s culminating projects.

To arrive at this result, the MS Urban Design project worked across several different scales with Studio faculty (Jonas Coersmeier, Oliver Schaper, Ferda Kolatan) and studio instructors (Emilija Landsbergis) and studio partners, RXR’s The Hall (David Gise), HK Development (David Dobkin) and EA Creative (Erich Arcement, Charlie Cunningham). The, starting with a dense urban block, expanding to an expansive urban context that took note of transit deserts, flood zones and pollution hotspots, and finally returning to The Hall in Wallabout to explore the interface between Hall Street and its flanking blocks. The culminating studio examines how the integration of autonomous vehicles (AV’s) reconfigures the very understanding of the street as a hybrid space.

Ferda Kolatan, leading the culminating studio, suggests in the UD 903 course syllabus the manner in which the hybrid provokes new questions for the postAnthropocene city: “Is it possible to think of the objects brought along by AV technology as vital counterparts to the existing (and new) artefacts of the city’s architecture? Can we perhaps produce truly novel urban hybrids that combine technology, design, and even “nature” in unprecedented ways? If so, can these hybrids further articulate new conceptual and theoretical strategies for the 21st century city without reversing back to the modernist tropes of technological positivism?”

The culminating studio developed hybrid architectures comprising building facades, sidewalks and street, basements and scaffolds. Hall Street transformed accordingly, becoming an AV scaffolded greenspace, a carbon garden, a plastic-sequestering street mural, and infrastructural façades for new art spaces and for a vertical vineyard. The final projects demonstrate the hybrid functioning of AV technology, street and building, but also produce a compelling vision for our rapidly transforming city. This work is the subject of Pratt GAUD’s “The Street of the 21st Century” virtual exhibition, designed by Jeffrey Anderson.

It is a testament to your resiliency, your commitment to your education and your understanding of the significance of this spring — that this period of pandemic, protest, national quarantine and national protest – will mark a significant change for architecture and urban design. We are different now. Your culminating projects suggest that we have already ushered in the post-Anthropocene: that, in acknowledging the blinkered perspectives of the Anthropocene period, architects and urban designers will now envision, fabricate, and script more inclusive engagement in a global environment circumscribed by pandemic, climate change and inequitable socio-economic policies.

Ariane Lourie Harrison MS Urban Design, Program Coordinator