Pratt Institute Residence Hall completes, opens

The Pratt Institute Residence Hall has completed and opened on Pratt Institute’s Brooklyn campus. The new residence hall is designed to foster a culture of exploration and invention via a purposeful blending of shared and public living, learning, and maker spaces.

The tower’s exterior is composed primarily of brick with curved stainless steel panels. The materials are intended to actively engage the historic brick campus and neighborhood while setting apart the distinctive forms of the central void and lounge spaces.

The project is located about one block from the main campus gate in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood. The main floors are set back from the street with the entrance through a one-story podium. Within the podium, students can use the central event space for social or study activities as well as the adjacent maker spaces, which include studio resources. The tower’s upper floors comprise 14 rooms for two students each. A central lounge on each floor has a work counter and furniture for community use.

A vertical courtyard or “void tower” acts as a distinctive exterior expression that centers student community activity on each floor. The void tower is both an organizational concept for the building as well as a distinctive form that is configured in elevation to expand the dimensions of the openings to the lounges at the upper floors of the building and compress around a skylight central reception lobby.

Hanrahan Meyers Architects worked in collaboration with Cannon Design to design the building. The facade was designed in collaboration with Thornton Tomasetti’s building envelope team.