Deans List: Pratt's Dr. Harriet Harriss on Academia's Role in Preparing Architects of the Future

Pratt Institute's School of Architecture continues to focus its teaching curriculum by engaging its students in planning, design, sustainability, technology, and understanding the changing urbanization of the built environment. With campuses located in Brooklyn and Manhattan, Pratt's School of Architecture department has launched innovative programs such as the Urban Placemaking and Management graduate program in 2015 as well as the Master of Science in Real Estate Practice in 2017. Since then, initiatives to push students into diverse styles of learning and application have put Pratt at the forefront of architectural academia. With notable alumni such as Annabelle Selldorf, Peter Zumthor, and Carlos Zapata, it's no surprise that the institute's undergraduate program has been nationally ranked by DesignIntelligence as the 7th best in the U.S. 

What would you consider to be your own pedagogical stance on architectural education?

Architectural Education has long been expected to produce two types of graduates simultaneously: the practice-ready graduates; those able to fit into an established industry model, and the pioneers and polymaths; graduates who use their architectural training to make an impact in other ways besides building and in other sectors beyond the construction industry. 

This duality enriches but also destabilizes architectural pedagogy, and divides opinion concerning what should and shouldn’t be taught in schools of architecture, both across Europe and in the U.S. From a practitioner perspective anxious about industry skills, architectural education should serve the needs of practice as it is. From an educator perspective, instruction in any discipline carries the obligation of graduating tenacious, ethical, and civically-inclined graduates who are confident and committed in their ability to lead lives of consequence, within any sector, context or region. 

In some senses, architectural education is the love child of conflicting epistemologies, from the humanities and the arts, the natural and social sciences, and it is this hybridity that ensures architecture graduates possess an unrivaled foundation in interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary thinking. By implication, this means they are well equipped to respond proactively to emergent opportunities and productively to uncertain market conditions. It also means they are skilled at envisioning what new forms of processes will exist and are not just focused on outputs. 

How would you characterize the program at Pratt? What makes it unique?

Pratt Institute School of Architecture has established a longstanding commitment to technology, ethics, and professionalism, and the criticality needed to make creativity resonate across commercial as well as civic contexts. Pratt’s alumni are a true testimony to this: from world-leading architects and practice directors to social innovators pioneering disaster relief initiatives, the school has proven to be enormously successful in generating leaders, innovators, and pioneers across a range of spatial applications. 

With the politics that exist today and the changing of the licensure process, it seems like that practice is moving into education. Do you see this happening more?

Yes. Pratt has always enjoyed a close proximity to practice, and this is something I’m determined to strengthen and continue. Pratt’s graduate recruitment rates are impressive: students leave with a rich portfolio of skills and interests that prove attractive to practices and organizations of all shapes and sizes and across a range of sectors. The changing of the licensure process is a good thing in that it provides the impetus needed to de-partition of academe and practice to the mutual benefit of both. ‘Practice’ is enriched by exposure to nascent thinking and research-driven outcomes whereas ‘education’ gains from understanding the enduring and emergent challenges and opportunities facing professional practice. This close proximity will help ensure both education and practice thrives, despite predicted market uncertainty. 

Within the UK, we are seeing new models of entirely practice-based education emerge. These options - something that the Brit’s quaintly describe as ‘apprenticeships’- are tantalizing because they offer fee-free routes to qualification. The downside is that they risk creating a two-tier education system, one where college environments will disproportionately serve students from more affluent backgrounds. Ensuring college cohorts remain diverse is a critical imperative. This is what Pratt’s impressive scholarship program works hard to address.  

What do you anticipate will be the biggest challenges you're going to be facing as the new dean at Pratt?

If schools of architecture are required to nurture a new ecology for architectural education we need a rigorous pedagogical framework that supports within it a freer conceptual space for variation, creative experiment and critical practice. Architecture needs to serve the public by first reflecting the public, in profile and presence. The environmental collapse we are facing means that envisioning what the future might look like is less important than ensuring we even have a future to envision. This makes curricula change a pressing imperative, requiring architecture to operate as a social movement rather than an immutable institution, and our schools and institutions to respond with the urgency the situation demands. I am committed to co-designing a new pedagogic ecology for Pratt that responds to these issues: one that will ensure it continues to thrive and grows in its influence and impact in the years ahead.

You have taught and led architecture programs in Europe and various parts of the U.S. What insights from those teaching experiences do you think will inform your role as the School of Architecture Dean at Pratt?

Schools of architecture carry a mantle of professional and public expectation requiring each school to distinguish its own theoretical and practical approach to spatial authorship. However, in the face of seismic global challenges – from possible mass extinction to the rise in populist politics – architecture schools are moving toward increased levels of collaboration and exchange, with a view to transcending regional and national boundaries. The design of these platforms may well provide the blueprint for other forms of cooperation and trans-regional engagement across other disciplines, too.

What lessons about student culture have you learned from your time as a student at RCA, Manchester, and The Architectural Association?

Students entrust their schools with more than the acquisition of a qualification: they expect us to provide learning experiences that allow them to develop as citizens and not just professionals. Throughout my time as a student, I wanted to test my ideas within real world contexts, to elicit feedback from end users, not just my professors, and to explore ways in which the design process itself could become more participatory and inclusive. At the Royal College of Art in particular, emphasis was placed upon self-directed innovation, experimentation, and risk taking. We were infused with the idea that our design work could change the world and result in a positive difference to everyday life. While many of my student projects were hopelessly idealistic, taking the risk, learning from failure, and developing more rarefied iterations formed the basis of my award-winning design practice, Design Heroine Architecture (DHA). As a consequence, it remains my firm conviction that architecture schools need to provide spaces for authentic risk-taking, innovation, and entrepreneurship that are not only capable of commercialization, but also hot-wired to the communities in which the intended impact will be realized.

What plans do you have to strengthen collaboration within the department's various programs?

Throughout my academic career, I’ve developed a body of teaching and research work based upon models of inter-program, inter-faculty and inter-disciplinary collaboration and exchange. Rather than crudely superimpose these tried and tested models upon the Pratt school ecosystem, the intention is to work collaboratively and inclusively with faculty and students in order to develop and test strategies and initiatives that uniquely and effectively serve the Pratt community culture.

You are heavily involved as a council member for the European Association for Architecture Education and charted architect for RIBA. Do you think it is important for the leader of an architecture school to still be a practicing architect?

I see co-designing a new future for Pratt as the ultimate design project: one that draws upon the same multi-faceted, three-dimensional, solutions focused thinking that I use to design buildings within architectural practice.  Designing outstanding architecture pedagogy isn’t a matter of simply trying to do something ‘different’. Instead, it’s about valuing and leveraging the ‘root’ – whose etymology means ‘radical’ – whereby teaching expertise is valued, supported, protected, and promoted. It requires a willingness to be an immersive dean – involved in all aspects of the school’s daily life, and a commitment to work closely with students and faculty in order to build upon Pratt’s enduring strengths and to leverage its latent potential.

What do you think are the biggest challenges facing students today?

Today’s students are forced to confront the very real possibility that the planet may not survive beyond their lifetime, that the precarity they face is immense, and that they will need to learn far more than professional skills in order to mount an effective response to the problems. Both educators and practitioners need to be willing to step up to the challenge of supporting them in doing so.

As an educator, how do you see the future of architecture changing? What advice do you give to students?

Architecture’s value is embodied in its processes, not just its outputs, and tomorrow’s most successful architectural designers will be those whose education has enabled their intellectual agility, connectivity to community, and a pre-disposition towards innovation and invention. Buildings aren’t just products, they’re philosophies, situated at the zeitgeist of transformation. They should offer alternative futures not just iterations of a set of past principles when they are no longer able to be productive, relevant, or inclusive.

What’s the best advice you’ve both been given during your careers in architecture and academia?

Architecture creates spatial legacies for living in. Whether these legacies are good or bad depends on whether the architect prioritizes people or product during the process of creating them. The needs of the end user will always out-live technologies, trends, and tastes. By addressing these needs, architects ensure that their legacies are relevant, lasting and even loved, rather than become redundant liabilities. 

Source: Archinect.com

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