If you have already completed a professional degree in architecture and are looking to gain new skills, or a professional looking to pivot in your career, this one-year masters program will help you become an architectural leader through research, prototyping and measurable results.
Discover architecture at the intersection of research and experimentation in real world design-built projects. During the highly-condensed and laser-focused three-semester curriculum, you’ll be introduced to contemporary theoretical works around climate change; experiment with cutting-edge methods and fabrication techniques of diverse architectural media; conduct rigorous research of historical, sociological and physical properties of sites; build iterative prototypes of hydrological, energetic, horticultural, metabolic, luminous, and material systems; and culminate in a publication, an exhibition and a work-in-progress building project.
The Experience
MS. Arch program is a laboratory environment where you work collaboratively with peers, faculty, and industry experts to enhance and refine your skills through the feedback loops between research and experimentation, and between interactive design critiques and real world building process. Interdisciplinary, socially engaged, and climate focused, our tight-knit community is connected by a shared mission for transformative change.
Directed Research
Building on the preceding and ongoing work of the program, you will define your pinnacle directed research project in which you will ask the often difficult and challenging questions facing the profession today, through design. Throughout the year, your endeavor will be supported by faculty at the forefront of their own research and practice, a lively ecosystem of research fellows at the GAUD, as well as the robust fabrication facilities and their support staff. With class sizes of just 8-12, you’ll collaborate closely with your team, faculty, and community partners to learn the skills needed to create strategies and systems that meet real-world challenges.
Seminars, Lectures & Events
Complementing your studio experience, you’ll be exposed to relevant issues through intensive architectural media seminars, history-theory and architecture electives, and lectures and events featuring prominent scholars offered at the school. Beyond that, you’ll have the opportunities to visit reference projects, design studios, industry leaders, and storied sites at the heart of architectural design and research in New York City.
Learning Resources
Pratt School of Architecture’s state-of-the-art media and fabrication labs and newly established cross-disciplinary climate center are available to you, as well the labs from other Pratt programs, like the ceramic studio or the fashion fabrication lab. Learn about resources.
Our Faculty
Pratt’s distinguished faculty are outstanding creative professionals and scholars at the forefront of their own research, and you’re invited to be a part of it. Our faculty become your mentors, directing and supporting you in your research. See all Graduate Architecture and Urban Design faculty and administrators.
Join us at Pratt. Learn more about admissions requirements, plan your visit, talk to a counselor, and start your application. Take the next step.
You’ll find yourself at home at Pratt. Learn more about our residence halls, student organizations, athletics, gallery exhibitions, events, the amazing City of New York and our Brooklyn neighborhood communities. Check us out.
The 36-credit, three-semester, fully encapsulated, STEM-accredited (fall, spring, summer) post-professional program aims to expand a student’s previously established professional education by imbuing them with the disciplinary and technical precision to engage in evolving forms of advanced design research, thinking, and practice. The specific focus of the program is on the multifaceted reformulation of architectural mediums—an area of research that explores how architectural design can engage multiple senses via the media and mediums that interact with the built environment. The program centers on architecture as the design of “live experience,” engaging concepts and design methods ranging from architecture to object design, robotics, branding, material visualization, and environmental graphics.
At the pinnacle of Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (GAUD) Directed Research, the program explores a specific scale of architectural projects, the outputs of which hover between oversized products and undersized architecture. The goal of immersing students in directed research is to enhance their individual capacities to ask often difficult and challenging questions facing the profession and discipline through design. Specific to this program is the question of how contemporary and future architecture can harness the design and integration of media in buildings, using the urban and rural environments of Brooklyn, New York City, and the surrounding region as the program’s testing grounds.
Open to students holding a five-year (BArch) or equivalent (MArch) degree in Architecture, the program helps students cultivate specific interests in architecture through a precise, disciplinary framework. All students are exposed to relevant issues through intensive architectural media courses exposing them to cutting-edge methods, fabrication, and visualization; rigorous history-theory and architecture electives; and through a dense array of lectures and events, including the participation of prominent scholars. This ensemble of learning complements and reinforces the studios where the understanding, comprehension, and integration of theoretical and technical knowledge is tested, pushed to its limits, and discussed in a critique format with faculty, guests, partners, and the GAUD critic at large. Studio subjects span from the inclusion of hydrological, horticultural, luminous, and sonic media to speculating upon the use of media facades, sensory net-works, graphics, cinema, op art, and robotics. The broader strokes of this area of GAUD Directed Research shifts its disciplinary focus from the generative and representational aspects of architectural media (the processes that lead up to a piece of architecture) to the experiential and qualitative effects of highly mediated architectures.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES FOR THE MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE AND MASTER OF SCIENCE, ARCHITECTURE PROGRAMS:
Throughout the curriculum design is approached with an emphasis on advanced architectural mediums with opportunities for students to explore physical, virtual, and hybrid applications of cutting-edge design and architectural media.
Studios, seminars, and electives are coordinated to approach design and discourse as progressive cultural acts with cutting-edge to near-future potential for speculation and innovation.
The program provides intermediate and advanced experience with contemporary design techniques and technologies; physical and virtual media; cutting-edge theories of architecture; new materiality and allied disciplines; discourse-generating and polemical writing techniques; architectural research; publication and book design; new architectural graphics and representational logics; and exposure to prominent contributors to the discipline.
Coursework involves a combination of design studios; directed design-research studios; discursive seminars; directed research seminars; architectural media courses; and a combination of history, theory, and architecture electives that give students opportunities to broaden or deepen their interests and the understanding of their work.
The program seeks to provide strong internal curricular frameworks for students to develop advanced discourse and design work, while also providing directed-research opportunities to connect with internal faculty and external partners through arts organizations, fabrication groups, and technology companies.
