Pratt opening brings school a step closer to single complex.

Pratt Institute will hold a public dedication ceremony at its new Juliana Curran Terian Design Center on the Brooklyn campus at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, April 17, 2007.

The event will celebrate the completion of the center's new pavilion and honor Juliana Curran Terian, a Pratt alumna and trustee, for her generous $5 million gift--the second largest gift from a living individual in Pratt's 120-year history--which made the construction of the building possible.

Celebrity designers from each of Pratt's four design disciplines will attend the dedication to unveil the new center and to celebrate the collaborative learning and research that will take place in the complex, which represents one of very few centers dedicated to collaborative design education through a physical consolidation of programs.

The completion of the new building, designed by Hanrahan Meyers Architects, marks the first step in bringing together under one roof all of Pratt's design disciplines--interior design, fashion design, industrial (product) design, and communications design--to offer graduate and undergraduate creative minds a modern center where they can cultivate new ideas in a collaborative setting that fosters interdisciplinary research and learning initiatives among the different design programs.

"The grand opening of the new Juliana Curran Terian Design Center is a major milestone in Pratt's history as it positions the Institute at the forefront of innovative design education worldwide," says Pratt Institute president Thomas F. Schutte.

"I am grateful to Mrs. Terian for her generosity and dedication to Pratt and I am proud to credit the building's remarkable design to Pratt's Dean of the School of Architecture Tom Hanrahan and to Victoria Meyers of Hanrahan Meyers Architects."

Juliana Curran Terian, the donor whose $5 million gift made the completion of the new building possible, graduated from the Pratt Institute School of Architecture in 1990 and later founded Curran Architects and Planners. She is currently the chairman of the Rallye Group, the largest woman-owned automobile dealership in the United States and among the nation's largest.

"The architecture of the building as an integrative space reflects the mission of the center as a common ground to foster creative ideas among designers from all fields," says Terian. " The center is extraordinary because it achieves this visionary model not only in concept, but also in purpose and design. It's important for designers to glimpse more than their own specialization and gain a sense of the larger context in which they're working. After all, the great timeless designs--and the most successful--have embodied seamless relationships between disciplines."

The structure consists of an elevated, roughly rectangular volume of stainless steel and glass that floats above a new entrance plaza and provides its visitors with a welcoming entrance lobby, a landscaped courtyard, and the first gallery devoted to design on campus. One of the building's most exciting features is its use of state-of-the-art audio-visual equipment to project images onto the northern glass wall at night, which transforms the building itself into one of the changing art installations on the campus and allows outdoor video and film screenings for the Pratt community.

As an elevated, sculptural form, the pavilion covers a concrete podium of ramps, stairs, and entrance spaces where students and faculty can gather, while connecting the two loft buildings (Pratt Studios and Steuben Hall) on four levels, specifically from the basement to the third floor, to allow interaction and communication between formerly disparate disciplines.

The design gallery is the building's most central feature and its transparency allows those on campus to see into the installations in that space during the day.

At night, it becomes a brightly lit beacon facing out toward the interior campus quadrangle, also known as the Pratt Mall. The four-story courtyard to the south serves as a quiet space for reflection and brings light into the entry area and to the center's classrooms.

The concept behind the Juliana Curran Terian Design Center is to bring most of the design disciplines at Pratt together so that the majority of design students are studying together in the same facility.

Terian said he hoped designers would take away an awareness of the great breadth and depth of the design process. "It's important to glimpse more than your own specialization and gain a sense of the larger context in which you're working," she said.

With the opening of Higgins Hall Center Section and now the new Design Center, the Pratt campus now has notable examples of both historical and contemporary building designs.

According to Terian, this gives visitors a new experience.

"An artist thrives in the visual and physical surroundings of Pratt with its layers and the consolidation of old and new spaces designed for adaptability, richness, and character," she said.

"This experience of successful integration of necessity, circumstance, and time gives each artist and each design discipline a blank canvas when approaching a task."