Aspiration and Accountability: Building the High-Rise After 9/11

An exhibition, reception, and panel discussion for the Urban Utopias Studio taught by Kathleen Dunne and Michael Trencher, Pratt Institute.

This exhibition presents a body of work developed in the decades following the September 11 attacks, exploring how design ambition responds to demands for safety, responsibility, and performance.

Drawn from Pratt Institute’s Vertical Urban Utopias studio, the work treats technical rigor as the foundation for speculation. Using the high-rise typology, students imagine new forms of collective life, testing how architecture might support new social, spatial, and cultural relationships within the vertical city.

In recognition of Michael Trencher’s contributions to the High-Rise Studio, we gratefully acknowledge his guidance of generations of Pratt students.