Floating platforms hover overhead, drawing visitors into a suspended field of models, images, and structure. Rather than lining walls or vitrines, the exhibition unfolds vertically—inviting movement, curiosity, and close inspection from within an inhabitable landscape.

GAUD14 presents student work from Pratt Institute’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design as a large-scale installation in the Hazel and Robert H. Siegel Gallery. Part of an annual series curated, designed, and fabricated by students in a course taught by Michael Szivos, the exhibition uses the gallery as a testing ground for spatial display and digital fabrication strategies.

The installation is organized around floating model platforms suspended within a continuous, cloud-like structural surface. This surface acts simultaneously as structure and organizer, forming a single tensile system that only finds its final shape once loaded. Despite supporting more than five hundred pounds, the system itself remains exceptionally light, achieving stability through tension rather than mass.

Below, attenuated cardboard tubes shape a directional underside that guides visitors into the interior of the installation. These moments of entry pull viewers beneath the field, allowing models to be experienced from a human-scale perspective rather than the typical overhead view.

Images of student work from Spring 2013 through Fall 2014 are clustered beneath the structure, appearing as if projected downward from above. Projects are grouped through proximity rather than strict categorization, allowing relationships to emerge spatially. Through suspension, tension, and controlled access, GAUD14 reframes the exhibition of student work as an immersive, collective experience—one that reflects the experimental culture of the program itself.y

Photos: Alan Tansey