Clinton Hill, 1884 to 1891.

Pratt Institute carries the name of its founder, Charles Pratt, a Brooklyn industrialist. Wikipedia says he founded Astral Oil Works in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, established Charles Pratt and Company in 1867, and in 1874 combined his companies with those of John D. Rockefeller, which became part of the Standard Oil trust.

Wikipedia says Pratt had never gone to college himself and wanted working men and women to be able to improve their lives through education. In 1884 he bought land near his home in Clinton Hill, and the school was built two blocks from his house on Clinton Avenue. He endowed the institute in 1886; in May 1887 the New York State Legislature granted him a charter, and on 17 October 1887 the institute opened to its first students in the Main Hall.

The curriculum was practical from the start. Wikipedia lists early programmes in architectural engineering, mechanics, dressmaking and furniture making, and says drawing, whether freehand, mechanical or architectural, was treated as a common language that linked all of them. A liberal arts curriculum of history, mathematics, physics and literature sat alongside the technical training.

The motto came from the founder too. Wikipedia says that at the first Founder’s Day celebration in 1888, Charles Pratt spoke the words that became the school’s motto: “Be true to your work, and your work will be true to you.” Wikipedia still lists the line as the motto of the institute.

New departments followed. Wikipedia names the Pratt High School, a Library School, a Music Department and a Department of Commerce, which later separated from the institute. In 1891 the founder’s eldest son, Charles Millard Pratt, became president of the school.

Romanesque brick, a cannon and a sculpture park.

Pratt’s main campus in Clinton Hill is an enclosed site of about 25 acres, and Wikipedia says the majority of its buildings were put up before the Second World War in Romanesque Revival, Victorian and Neoclassical styles. The Main Building, the first to open, is a six-storey Romanesque Revival brick building designed by Lamb and Rich, with a clock tower that overlooks the Rose Garden.

Behind it stands East Hall, designed by William Windrim, whose tall smokestack served the institute’s own steam-powered electrical generating plant in the lower level of the building. The Student Union, by the architect William Tubby, was built as the Trade School building and later remodelled. The three buildings wrap around a courtyard whose centrepiece, Wikipedia says, is a seventeenth-century Italian marble well-head fountain bought by the Pratt family in 1900. South Hall, finished by Tubby in 1892, was built as the Pratt High School.

Several campus landmarks carry their own dates. Cannon Court, south of the library, is named after a bronze Spanish cannon of 1720, cast in Seville and brought to Pratt from Morro Castle in Havana in 1899. The Rose Garden holds a 1926 memorial to members of the Pratt community who served in the First World War, and a small amphitheatre at the north of Newman Mall was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

Since 1999 the campus has also been a gallery. Wikipedia says the Pratt Sculpture Park was added that year as part of a programme of restoration and beautification, placing contemporary sculpture across the lawns and gardens, and that the campus is open to the public as park space during the day. Artists who have loaned work include Mark di Suvero, Richard Serra, Tom Otterness and Donald Lipski.

The historic fabric has formal recognition. Wikipedia says the campus was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005, and that Higgins Hall and the Caroline Ladd Pratt House of 1898, now used by the president, lie within the Clinton Hill Historic District. Newer buildings include Myrtle Hall, opened in 2010 to a design by WASA/Studio A, and Pratt Manhattan on West 14th Street, a historic building the institute acquired in 2000.

A founder’s name, a motto and a campus.

An art school’s identity rarely starts with a logo. It usually starts with a name, and that name is often a person’s: a founder who opened the first studio, a teacher whose classes drew the first students, or a benefactor whose gift paid for a building. Over decades those names get shortened, merged, abbreviated into initials or folded into a parent institution, and each change leaves a trace on letterheads, signs and diplomas.

Buildings carry as much of the identity as any mark. A converted warehouse, a purpose-built studio block or a hillside campus becomes the image people picture when they hear the name, and architects’ choices of glass, steel, brick or concrete end up doing the work a brand book would do elsewhere.

Then there are the everyday surfaces: lettering painted on studio doors, signage on stairwells, and above all the posters, catalogues and websites made each year for graduate shows. These are often designed by students or staff rather than agencies, so the look shifts from year to year while the name stays fixed. For a designer, the useful lesson is how a short wordmark has to sit comfortably beside work that changes every season.

Higgins Hall, old and new.

The architecture school’s home shows how Pratt has added to its historic buildings. Metropolis magazine reported on 1 February 2006 that a new building by Steven Holl for the School of Architecture had opened the previous year at Higgins Hall. The addition slips between a pair of elaborate nineteenth-century buildings, which had themselves been updated by Rogers Marvel Architects, the architects of record for Holl’s work.

The project began with a fire. Metropolis reported that a 1996 fire, caused by faulty vending-machine wiring, chiefly damaged the centre section of the H-shaped complex, which had linked the north and south wings through an auditorium and a gym and had no recognisable front entrance. Within weeks of taking charge, the dean, Thomas Hanrahan, asked Holl to design a new connector, and Holl produced a design in watercolour within a month. Restoration problems in the old wings delayed construction for seven years.

Holl turned an awkward fact into the design. Metropolis said the floors of the north and south wings are misaligned, and that Holl joined them with ramps set perpendicular to the facade. Clear windows mark the points where the ramps begin and end, set into a wall of structural channel glass that glows at night, with some red-painted frames running beyond the windows. The building rests on concrete columns that were trucked in from Canada and left exposed, along with the rest of the structure, so that students could see how it was put together. Rob Rogers of Rogers Marvel described the firm’s approach to the old wings, exposing original brick, iron and timber, as “a subtle pedagogy”.

For a design guide, Pratt Institute shows how a school can build its identity from a founder’s name, a motto and a campus of brick and stone that it keeps adding to. Compare Parsons School of Design, another New York school, and Cranbrook Academy of Art in this collection. For this guide we use brick red, brownstone and black with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Pratt Institute’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.