Graduate Architecture

Graduate Architecture offers two different degrees in architecture: 

The first-professional Master of Architecture (M. Arch) is an 84-credit, three-year, professional degree program for students holding a four-year undergraduate degree in any field. The post-professional Master of Science, Architecture (M.S. Arch) is a 36-credit, three semester (summer, fall, spring) program for those who hold an accredited five-year Bachelor’s of Architecture or the equivalent. The intensive curricula in these two programs require focused participation from the student. Master of Architecture is an NAAB accredited program. Students in the Master of Science, Architecture program are encouraged to develop specialized areas of research.

The Graduate Architecture programs have a strong faculty of distinguished educators and practicing architects, excellent facilities, trans-disciplinary connections with the well-known art and industrial design departments of Pratt Institute, and a developing research network that connects the department to national and international work in architecture and urban design. Distinguished visitors present their work to graduate students on a regular basis in research forums and guest studios and seminars. Students in both programs come from national and international backgrounds. 

The Graduate Architecture programs at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture contribute to the progressive design environment for advanced architectural research located in New York City. The programs propose speculative debate and experimental architectural production based on a relational construct among theoretical inquiry, computational research, digital design, and technological investigation. To this end, the programs seek 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 industry, manufacturing, political agencies, theoretical studies, and other categories and disciplines that are newly emerging in contemporary culture. This approach seeks to productively intensify heterogeneous interests and agencies. In addition, the program sees architectural innovations in both the theory and practice of architecture and the interconnected phenomena out of which it emerges. Recent courses at Pratt Institute’s 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.

The school’s New York City location provides students immediate and frequent access to the city’s resources. The graduate programs also have excellent internal resources: a strong faculty, good facilities, and a developing research network that connects the department and its students to serious national and international work in the field.

Learning objectives for the Master of Architecture and Master of Science, Architecture programs:

- Design is approached as an integrated discipline and established throughout the curriculum paying special attention to linkages across categories of knowledge and action.

- Design is a cultural act. Given the breadth and depth of contemporary culture, students and faculty are expected to participate fully within global culture and design culture specifically.

- Professionalism involves the innovative and evolving relationships between theory and practice. Innovation extends to all forms of technology, computation, fabrication, communication and theory. It also the projective approaches of critical thinking and making.

- Design research generates new forms of knowledge emergent with the environmental, ethical, technological, political, professional situation of contemporary culture.

- Industrial and natural ecologies are addressed beyond the boundaries of each, where they merge and exceed the anachronistic bounds of sustainability. 

 

 

Graduate Urban Design