It’s the end of summer and again time for architecture students and faculty to return to studios and classrooms all over the country. There are several new high profile architecture Deans facing their first week of dealing with academic regulations, nervous students, and lack of classroom space. In addition young new faculty are preparing for their first lectures and several well known senior faculty have transferred institutions. Pratt Institute for example, has just announced two high profile additions to its faculty.

Pratt announced two high profile “signings” that are big news for the design institute. First, David Burney, former Commissioner of the City’s Design and Construction agency,will become a full time member of the faculty, but, more importantly, will became the first coordinator of a new design program called Urban Placemaking and Management. It will become the first in the nation, focusing, Pratt claims, on “public space creation and management based on  community planning.”

Pratt also announced that theorist Sanford Kwinter will join the institute as a Professor of Science and Design in the School of Architecture this fall. Kwinter is co-founder and editor of the influential journal, ZONE, and Zone Books for 20 years. Trained in philosophy and literature, he has written extensively on philosophical issues of design, architecture, and urbanism, as well as art and aesthetics. In addition to continuing his research and writing, Professor Kwinter will teach seminars and lecture courses in the graduate and undergraduate architecture programs.

Architecture Dean Thomas Hanrahan states, “Professor Kwinter is one of the world’s most important voices in architecture today because of his broad, interdisciplinary interests in art and science as they apply to design.”  Kwinter most recently co-directed the Masters in Design Studies programs at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He wrote that  Pratt’s “historical and urban context allows for a broad engagement with local social and political conditions as well as with the wider discipline of architecture as it relates to game-changing practices at a truly cosmopolitan scale. I am, as a theorist, greatly looking forward to coming to Pratt.”