2006 SCUP/AIA-CAE Awards

Honor Award for Excellence in Campus Architecture Additions

The Higgins Hall Reconstruction Project at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York with Rogers Marvel Architects in New York City

Click to view a pdf presentation of the project.

Years of deferred maintenance created a need for Pratt Institute to hire architects in 1994 to stabilize, repair, and renovate the Higgins Hall Complex made up of the North, South, and Central wings.

Overall design goals included better adaptation and integration of the separate elementary and high school structures into a unified complex for a contemporary architecture program. Goals also included better connection between classroom studios and shop spaces, and increased opportunities to bring students in contact with work underway in different parts of the school.

But, in the summer of 1996, a fire resulted in the complete destruction of the Central Wing and severe fire, smoke, and water damage to the North Wing. Two-thirds of the building was severely damaged.

A nine year process was begun to rebuild Higgins Hall as a contemporary workplace for the largest architecture program in the Northeast. The space left by the destroyed central area created an opportunity to create big assembly spaces of dramatically contemporary architecture.

The North Wing reopened in 1999; the South Wing in 2003 and the full complex opened in September 2005 with the completion of the Central Wing.

The jurors were impressed with how the project "maintained its historical exterior, maintained its character, and created beautiful interiors, which speaks both of history and contemporary design."

Partially made of bricks reclaimed from the fire, a public courtyard was created that protects and connects students and the neighborhood to and from each other, while creating a forecourt for the new academic building.

Throughout the duration of the project, students from the School of Architecture were engaged. The process of design and construction provided teaching and learning opportunities, especially important for this particular student audience.

Higgins Hall sits in a New York City Landmarks District and the design is respectful to this district, keeping with the scale, texture, and rhythm of the neighboring brownstone townhouses.

Today Higgins Hall embodies and illustrates Pratt's institutional mission, providing a visible example to students, faculty, staff, visitors, and the surrounding community of the philosophies that Pratt embraces. The success of the building and the decadelong design and construction process speaks to the strength and foresight of Pratt's past fifteen years of strategic planning processes.

Higgins Hall has promoted the "opening up" of what was a contained, gated campus and has helped the Institute reach out to the surrounding community. Its landmark quality is further enhanced in the evening by its translucent glazing; the building performs as a lantern, or beacon, ablaze with light, a unique institutional presence projecting its internal activities to those passing by.

The exhibit space and lecture hall directly accessed from the street, suggests not only an educational, but also a social mission.

Higgins Hall, in the organization of its entry court, the design of a two-story addition as a "great hall," and the central location of its public, collective functions (lecture hall and exhibition space), now has a unifying heart in its Central Wing, where all the extended linkages and activities come together. The North and South Wings anchor this heart.

Project Team

Richad Scherr
Director of Facilities Planning
and Design
Pratt Institute
rscherr@pratt.edu

Guido Hartray
Rogers Marvel Architects
ghartray@rogersmarvel.com