Exhibition Proposal

Audience

I think the audience of our exhibition should be people we can realistically reach in our promotions and spark interest in the exhibit. A very accessible group of people that would be interested in our work is fellow Pratt students. Fellow students and professors would be the first people I invite to attend our exhibit considering that invitations to view each others work is common at Pratt. Although it is very important that we try to reach out to members of the community, they will be harder to directly access and we will not have personal connections that will influence attendance. It is important that we keep this in mind and develop layers of information that can be enjoyed by people of the community, developers and activists as well as students who are being educated in the design process. It makes sense for us to design for at least a partial student audience since that is who we are and how we understand the material is from the perspective of a student living outside of the effected area. None of our homes or families homes will be displaced by this project and we need to design our exhibit with that consciousness and compassion in mind if our goal is to draw people that will be more directly affected.

Goals

Considering that the development plan for downtown Brooklyn was developed and approved earlier in the decade and has seen and heard much apposition already it is important that we concentrate on presenting the material differently than it has been presented multiple times before. It is important that we constantly keep the question in mind, how can we present the material uniquely in order to bring community members and activists to hear this information again. What makes our exhibition special? How can we include any new information that will spark interest in an old subject? The slow economy has caused an opportunity to reflect on the downtown plan. Perhaps we can include a current event section of the exhibit showing what has been done, what is on hold and what is no longer going to happen at all. I think this information may be difficult to quantify and present for certain, but the community might be interested in where the project stands currently, and what aspects can still be influenced and changed by voicing their approval or disapproval.

Concept

I sought advice from two professionals with experience in urban development on how to approach our exhibition. Please see bio’s that were included in materials distributed at our career day below.

David Danois, RA, Danois Architecture, P.C.
Pratt Institute—Master of City and Regional Planning, Bachelors of Architecture
The firm, Danois Architects, P.C., has been a major contributor to the NYC built environment in the area of affordable housing, with more than 1500 renovated apartments, 850 individual two- and three-family Partnership Homes, 450 units of new apartments, and the preservation of significant New York City landmarks. Mr. Danois entered private practice in 1978 after gaining extensive public sector planning and design experience serving as the Planner and Architect for the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, the nation's largest Community Development Corporation.


Shay Alster, AIA, GF55 Partners
Pratt Institute—Bachelors of Architecture
Shay Alster was named Partner at GFSS Partners in 2006 and has been instrumental in the firm’s growth in mixed-use multi-family apartments and townhouse developments including several large urban developments in Harlem. His efforts resulted in Manhattan Court / Brownstone Lane being awarded the 2006 New York State Association for Affordable Housing project of the year.

The advice of these two professionals included that we as architectural students present materials from a neutral standpoint. Because we are designers we have a responsibility to not just present critiques on the current development plan, but to present our own answers to the problem of development in a dense urban environment. As designers we can find many problems with the existing design that will be apparent even if we present our information as neutral as possible. A way to present alternatives to the current development plan would be to show relevant precedents of effective urban planning in communities with a large transit hub. The precedents should be presented in all aspects of the plans in terms of the demographics, infrastructure, and architecture of the communities where they were realized. It is more likely that not all aspects of successful plans will be similar to our site so we should point out how these precedents relate to our site in some ways and will need to be modified in aspects that do not address the issues of downtown.