As someone who spent much of her childhood periodically relocating to different spots around the world, I developed a real sense of respect for the idea of being able to see a process through from start to finish in any one place. I think I was probably hit hardest when I graduated from high school because, at the time, I watched waves of nostalgia wash over my peers as they made commemorative trips back to the kindergarten and lower grade branches of our school to reminisce about the time they had shared there together. I had just spent two years at that high school, and therefore only felt a very casual sense of ownership and attachment to it. My peers, on the other hand, shared a much deeper bond with the school and with each other, due to their mutual history with the school.
I guess the reason that I find myself mentioning this memory is because it was something I was reminded of when we woke up to the sad news of Prof. Kevin Pratt’s passing away on the night of Tuesday, February 19th. Kevin (or KP, as he was fondly referred to by his peers) was the first face that greeted the M.Arch I Class of 2014 on our first day of school – at our very first class in Balch Hall. Later that week, he took us on an extensive tour of the plantations nearby, walking at a furious pace that few of us could keep up with – all the while giving us an exhaustive and amusing lecture about the historical evolution of the ecological and geological systems around us. We didn’t know it at the time, but that tour was to become his most enduring memory for many of us. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of sustainable design projects and lively and engaging mannerisms that enlivened his Environmental Systems Class throughout the term. Those of us who had attended his class couldn’t help but feel saddened by the thought that the person who kicked off our Cornell experience, wouldn’t be able to see us through to the end of it.
So in order to pay tribute to his life and his enduring passion for environmentally friendly design, we decided to make a commemorative trip to a site that he was genuinely fond of mentioning quite frequently in his lectures: we visited the steps in front of the Low Library at Columbia University. KP must have spent some time sitting on the great expanse of those steps (while he was at Columbia) because he thought they performed remarkably well as a thermal mass: storing heat during the day and re-radiating it later in the evening. He believed that this thermal property gives the steps a kind of magnetic appeal for hordes of Columbia students who continue to sit on them in order to soak up their warmth. On that Wednesday, we sat on them to honor Kevin’s memory and in doing so, we were able to make ourselves feel ever so slightly better considering the heaviness that had settled on us with the news of his passing.
Many of us had visited Columbia previously, but before we were to leave its strikingly manicured quads that day, with the aid of AAP NYC’s Executive Director Robert Balder we discovered more than a handful of things about Morningside Heights that we had been completely in the dark about before. For instance, we had never realized that the reason this area always seems windier and colder than some other parts of Manhattan is because of its topographic isolation: it is situated on an elevated plateau that rises above the Harlem lowlands. There was once an insane asylum situated right in the middle of the plateau, which had the adverse effect of lowering land values in the area and deterring real estate investment for much of the nineteenth century. I also learned that before the neighborhood settled on its official name, it was alternatingly dubbed Bloomingdale Heights, Riverside Heights, Columbia Heights and University Heights etc. As we left “New York’s Acropolis” to return to studio, it was not without a sense of wanting to come back to the neighborhood to explore its many remarkable buildings in more detail at some point soon.
