Our recent Make It in Brooklyn Design Social brought together students, architects, and creatives at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture for an evening of design discourse, networking, and inspiration. The gathering was made possible by the generous support of FXCollaborative. 

At the heart of the evening was a tour of Levers Long Enough to Move the World: Sketches in Contemporary Architecture, an exhibition featuring architectural sketches from over 50 contemporary practices. The show poses a deceptively simple yet profound question: what is the sketch today? 

The exhibition’s answer is compelling: the sketch is a lever. In an era of digital abstraction and increasingly immaterial processes, the hand-drawn mark asserts architecture’s physical presence, exerting force entirely out of proportion to its smallness, quickness, and humility. Walking through the gallery, attendees were invited to consider how these intimate, often provisional marks carry the weight of entire buildings, cities, and ideas.

Andrew Holder, Pratt Institute

Gallery Talk & Conversation 

The evening opened with a gallery talk by Andrew Holder, Chair of Graduate Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Design at Pratt Institute. Holder guided attendees through the exhibition with insight and curiosity, unpacking the curatorial premise and inviting the audience to reflect on their own relationship to drawing as a tool of thought. 

The talk was followed by open conversation among students, faculty, and Brooklyn-based architectural professionals. The presence of working professionals alongside students created a rare and energizing exchange — one where emerging architects could engage directly with established practitioners, ask candid questions, and begin to imagine their own futures in the field. 

Regina Myer, President of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, underscored the significance of these gatherings for the broader community. The Make It in Brooklyn Design Socials are part of DBP’s ongoing initiative to strengthen connections within Brooklyn’s creative ecosystem, bringing together designers, architects, artists, and urbanists in the spaces where they work and learn. 

Participating practices included an extraordinary cross-section of contemporary practices: MOS; Smith-Miller + Hawkinson; Johnston Marklee; NADAA (Nader Tehrani); nARCHITECTS; Neil Denari;OFFPOLINN (Andrés Jaque); Productora (Wonne Ickx, Carlos Bedoya, Victor Jaime); Reiser Umemoto (Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto); SO-IL (Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu), Steven Holl; Weiss Manfredi (Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi); and WORKac (Amale Andraos and Dan Wood).