Living Models for the Future
Pratt Institute, New York
28 August – 3 December 2025
Students from Pratt Institute, led by Prof. Dagmar Richter, spend the fall semester in Berlin, exploring one of architecture’s oldest challenges: housing. The program combines a design studio and seminars, focusing on cooperative housing, collective living, and experimental approaches to public space, emphasizing flexible, sustainable, and socially conscious solutions for contemporary urban life.
Task
The programme explores one of architecture’s most fundamental challenges by focusing on the design of adaptable, inclusive and socially responsive urban environments. Against the backdrop of shifting social structures, longer lifespans and increasingly fluid ways of living and working, the studio explores how contemporary cities can respond through adaptable, affordable and socially conscious housing models.
Through the lens of Berlin’s experimental approaches to public space and cooperative housing, students will investigate new forms of density, shared living and community-driven development. The semester combines studio work and seminars to study Berlin’s unique urban history and its evolving housing typologies, tracing a line from early reformist models to contemporary co-housing projects. Field visits and research will inform each student’s individual design project.
The students will select an empty site in Berlin and develop a concise manifesto defining their intentions, programmatic strategy and spatial approach. The projects aim to propose inclusive, flexible housing concepts that foster diversity, shared resources and collective authorship, reimagining what it means to live together today.
What if..
”Berlin became a 21st-century model for a cooperative city?
Input
Mon., 03.11.2025, 18:30 – 20:00 Sam Chermayeff, Founder, Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff, Berlin, New York
Mon., 10.11.2025, 18:30 – 20:00 Dagmar Richter, Professor for Undergraduate Architecture, Pratt Institute, New York
Mon., 17.11.2025, 18:30 – 20:00 Alison Crawshaw, Founder, Alison Crawshaw, London
Studio Coordinator
Prof. Dagmar Richter
