Massimo Brocchini, BID ’28, had never set foot in New York City before applying to Pratt Institute, but he had long dreamed of immersing himself in a global center for the arts, and instinctively felt that New York was where he belonged.
“I could picture myself feeding off the energy, the museums, the vast creative resources,” he said.
His intuition was confirmed when he toured Pratt’s Brooklyn campus. The bustling studios, state-of-the-art fabrication labs, and especially the expansive library convinced him he had made the right choice.
In high school, Brocchini had explored fine arts but found few opportunities to delve into Industrial Design, something that first captured his imagination through the handcrafted objects that decorated his childhood home in Houston.
“In my family home, everything is created and painted by my grandmother and my mother. My grandmother lives in Brazil and she sends us things like forks, knives, porcelain ducks, pigs, paintings, just all of these objects,” he said. “The fact that they both put their practice and skills into these little objects really blew me away as a kid. All these things were thought of by someone and then conceptualized and created. I wanted to be able to do that and make an impact in someone’s life.”
New Perspectives
Entering Pratt’s yearlong Foundation program, designed to equip art and design students with creative fundamentals, processes, and a practice of critical inquiry, initially challenged what Brocchini thought he knew.
He remembers how on the first day of his “Visualization / Representation” class, his professor asked the class to draw spirals over and over with charcoal.
“The exercise seemed so rudimentary, but really focusing on doing that was such a challenge for me,” he said. “It was like reverse-engineering for my skills. It really helped to bring me down and build me back up.”
Courses such as “Time and Movement” and “Light, Color, and Design” pushed him to embrace new mediums and methods of expression. He created an accordion book and approached digital media for the first time.
“I was a little reluctant going into that class but I really felt that each teacher was there for me and walked me through these concepts that I didn’t really know before,” he said. “They really helped me build my skills and expand my practice.”
Foundation has offered Brocchini not only a space to deepen his own artistic practice but also connections that expanded his horizons. His Foundation cohort, a community of fellow students in Foundation year, included film students, animators, and future art educators, all with unique insights and perspectives.
“Seeing their work motivated me to push myself harder,” he said. “Everyone around me is so talented. You feel like you can do anything with these people, that they’ll support you and critique you and make you better. We’ve really grown together as a cohort.”
Branching Out
Eager to experience what he called New York’s “boundless opportunities,” Brocchini takes advantage of Pratt’s museum membership access to visit world-renowned spaces like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. He also finds inspiration on campus, admiring the various specimens in the Foundations Lab, sitting on benches and reflecting in the Sculpture Park, or browsing titles in the library.
“The library is such an amazing space to get inspired,” he said. “I probably check out three books every two weeks just to read and look through.”
While working part-time as a production assistant in the 2D Design Lab, he learned how to use laser cutters, waterjet cutters, and other industrial machinery. He also dove deeper into his field of industrial design by joining the AIGA, a design club that hosts industry professionals to discuss trends and career paths. He plans to participate further with Pratt’s Industrial Design Student Association next year so that he can learn from other designers.
Brocchini hopes to one day build furniture that enhances people’s lives through beauty, purpose, and sustainability. If he ever gets stuck, he knows he can return to the lessons of his Foundation year for a way forward.
“I’ve found that putting a label on what I am, as an industrial designer, is not something that should limit me,” he said. “It’s something that I can branch off of. You can take stuff from other fields and implement it into your work.”