MS Urban Design (Post Professional) at Pratt Institute
Focused on the multifaceted architectural approach that includes landscape and architectural strategies, you’ll learn to design for denser 21st-century cities while preserving cultural, economic, and ecological resources. Seminars explore urban history and theory, 3D fabrication, data modeling and digital twin cities.
New York City and Brooklyn-based urban design-directed research and interactive design critiques with students, faculty, and industry professionals will hone your theoretical and technical skills.
This program is an intense 3-term springboard into the practice of urban design with a culminating project and graduate thesis that offers a unique scaffolding for your vision of the future city. Class sizes of just 8-12 foster close collaboration with faculty and community partners, while the curriculum helps you frame and develop an individuated position for the resilient city. The Urban Design culminating projects are featured in an annual Fall Exhibition highlighting large scale physical models, immersive AR/VR models and thesis books and bringing your work into dialogue with a broad audience.
You’ll be exposed to relevant issues through urban theory and architectural media seminars, history-theory and architecture electives, and a dense array of lectures and events featuring prominent scholars. Complementing your studio experience, you’ll address topics of urban interiority, biodiverse cities, composite building typologies, and climate resilience, all with an emphasis on challenging conventional notions of adaptive reuse, infill development, and architectural and urban conservation.
The MS Urban Design is an intensely local program in its focus: field studies include close dialogues with New York community partners, office visits, and workshops in New York’s museums and archives. We work on sites in New York and Brooklyn with experts that range from forensic hydrologists to resiliency engineers; we have office visits with leading urban design firms in New York; and we meet with local community partners invested in our area of study.