Julia van den Hout

Pratt Sessions presents a series of conversations between notable practitioners and thinkers. It is a distributed symposium that is curated and yet open-ended. Based on an ongoing lecture series at Pratt Institute's Graduate Architecture and Urban Design programme, each session brings together two participants as a means of instigating discourse and dissolving and/or reinforcing the artifice of geographically-based discourse networks. Participants are carefully paired together based on the content of their work and the region in which they reside and/or practice. Participants frame their work around a disciplinary provocation in short, non-standard lecture presentations, and engage in an in-depth dialogue. Pratt Sessions is intended as a book series, each volume featuring six conversations, which originally took place over the course of two academic semesters. The six sessions are divided in two areas of focus, exploring and examining how new mediums and new contexts can be defined, redefined, and understood within the realm of architectural design.

In Western culture, from an early age we are ingrained with the notion that weight in building construction equals strength as evinced even in children's stories such as the 'The Three Little Pigs'. This idea of the relative strength of mass pervades our culture as a fundamental truth, but heavy materials are not intrinsically stronger than lighter ones. While time will be needed to remove the biases that we carry in our cultural DNA, our perception of strength has begun to shift. If we look at the historical evolution of architecture - from the massive pyramids of Egypt to the framed structures of Greek and Roman construction, to the lighter Gothic vaulting and eventually modern architecture of the twentieth century - we see a continuous, almost linear progression from solid mass construction to diaphanous skins of glass and steel. This is our historic journey from mass to membrane.