The Gensler Family AAP NYC Center welcomed architect and founder of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) Vishaan Chakrabarti to the faculty this semester as the Thomas J. Baird Visiting Critic. In this capacity, Chakrabarti led Master of Science in Advanced Urban Design students in The Fundamentals of Urban Design, the first in a series of the degree program's studio courses that prepares students to explore, analyze, and develop design ideas in an urban context and effectively collaborate and communicate them to stakeholders. Chakrabarti's professional career spans involvement in many complex and high-profile design and planning projects in major urban hubs — including Brooklyn's Domino Sugar Refinery, Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and New York's Pennsylvania Station — which positions him to share a deep range of professional experience.

"I arrived at Cornell as a confused teenager in 1983 who had enrolled as an engineering student, mainly in an effort to be a good Indian boy," Chakrabarti recalls. Freshman course requirements led him toward art electives and, ultimately, to a dual bachelor's in both engineering and art history in 1988 with the aid of many coffees consumed in the Green Dragon. He acknowledges that "while it was a struggle to achieve both and bridge the cultural divide between the two departments and pedagogies, it was navigating that interdisciplinary crucible that forged and foreshadowed the rest of my nonlinear career," work that has now come to interweave the practice of architecture, writing, and research.

This fall, Design Philadelphia celebrated the impact of Chakrabarti's career and commitment to addressing societal challenges through his work by naming him a 2025 Edmund N. Bacon Honoree. His latest book, The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy (Princeton University Press, September 2024), dives deeply into the role design can and should play in addressing major social and environmental issues. It follows Chakrabarti's  A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America (Metropolis Books, 2013), and he says that "in many ways my latest book is an argument with my first, which was a somewhat technocratic narrative about the merits of density. The second book is much more about design and culture, specifically focused on the experiential uplift and positive social fiction urbanity can bring when formed through connective architecture and urbanism."

Continue reading on the Architecture, Art, and Planning website.