The 33-credit, three-semester, fully encapsulated (fall, spring, summer at Pratt’s Brooklyn campus only) 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. Its specific focus is on the multifaceted reformulation of architectural context, an area of research that explores the ways in which urban design activates context and 21st-century cities as they become increasingly more populated and dense, and as they grow inward and accumulate on top of themselves to conserve resources that are cultural, economic, and ecological. The program centers on cultivating an understanding of architecture and context that is fundamentally premised on the design of urban qualities for a dense city. The curriculum embraces an intertwining of architectural design, landscape architecture, urban design, interior design, and architectural/urban conservation.

At the pinnacle of Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (GAUD) Directed Research, studio projects engage scales larger than a building yet smaller than a city. 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 and with audiences outside of architecture and urban design. Specific to this program are questions of how we design and inhabit the urban realm as it continues to densify in the 21st century, using Brooklyn and New York City as its basis of study and projection.