Description: Pratt Sessions presents a series of conversations between notable practitioners and thinkers. It is a distributed symposium that is curated and yet open-ended.
Based on an ongoing lecture series at Pratt Institute's Graduate Architecture and Urban Design program, each Session brings together two participants as a means of instigating discourse and dissolving and/or reinforcing the artifice of geographically-based discourse networks. Participants are carefully paired together based on the content of their work and the region in which they reside and/or practices. Participants frame their work around a disciplinary provocation in short, non-standard lecture presentations, and engage in an in-depth dialogue. Pratt Sessions is intended as a book series, each volume featuring six conversations, which originally took place over the course of two academic semesters. The six sessions are divided in two areas of focus, exploring and examining how new mediums and new contexts can be defined, redefined, and understood within the realm of architectural design.Brief description: David Erdman is Chair of Pratt Institute's Graduate Architecture & Urban Design program. He was previously Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong, and has taught at UCLA's Graduate Department of Architecture and Urban Design, and held visiting Professorships at Rice University, University of California Berkeley, and University of Michigan.