Pratt Sessions: Neri & Hu

Pratt Sessions are a format for discourse at the Department of Graduate Architecture, Landscape, and Urban Design. The sessions seek to refine and intensify the event-structures commonly found in the design academy. Whereas lectures desire general audiences for broad overviews or introductions, Pratt Sessions focus on just one piece of work by a single author or practice. Whereas juries convene faculty to critically engage student work at the end of a project, Pratt Sessions gathers colleagues to support the intellectual project of a figure we mutually admire.

Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu, principals of Neri & Hu, will present a single project from their recent body of work. Founded in 2006, the Shanghai-based firm is responsible for catalyzing several inversions in the landscape of architectural practice: first, in theory, returning to the phenomenology of buildings, grounded in first-person human experience and physical sensuality; and second, in the economics of practice, demonstrating that the most accomplished instances of American-style design entrepreneurship may now be centered in China.