A Day in Rome with Pratt Institute's Catherine Chattergoon

Catherine Chattergoon is a fourth-year student in the Bachelor of Architecture program at Pratt Institute with Minors in Social Justice/Social Practice and Photography. With an interest in spatial equity, she is passionate about architecture being a practice centered in community engagement and creating agency through design. Her work is driven by a desire to uplift others, and she currently serves as a board member of The National Organization of Minority Architects, The American Institute of Architecture Students, and was the inaugural Student Advisor to the Dean at Pratt Institute. She believes in the power of participatory design and supports making space for diverse voices through her involvement in NOMA(S), the Mistresses of Pratt Archive, Re:Play (Reset Towards a New Commons), the Pratt Weeksville Archive, the Madame Architect Next Generation Council, and the Architects’ Newspaper New Voices in Architectural Journalism Fellowship.

7:30am: Every day feels like a blessing to be living and studying in Rome, somewhere I have dreamed of being for so long! I am still trying to figure out a daily routine for myself, but I like to get up early and rise with the sun when possible. I slept in a little later today because my first class starts an hour later than normal. I am always super stiff in the mornings — one of the many hardships that comes with having an inflammatory arthritis condition, so the first thing I do when I get out of bed is stretch. It is also a nice way to ground myself before I start my day.

8:00am: I don’t normally eat breakfast — which is a bad habit I am trying to change — but this morning, I made breakfast since I was up early. I currently live with my friend Cheryl, who is also an architecture student at Pratt, and I am thankful we get to enjoy this journey of being in Rome together.

I am most productive in the morning when I first wake up, so I set aside time to check things off my to-do list, which routinely includes sending and responding to emails and completing any studying or homework for school. With the time difference, I am still struggling to find a time to call my family and friends consistently. Thankfully, in the morning, my younger sister Natalie, who is studying at FIDM in Los Angeles, is usually still awake, so I spoke with her for a little bit before my day started.

9:00am: My roommate and I live near St. Peters and The Vatican, which is about a half-hour away from our school in Trastevere. We always try to leave around forty-five minutes early for our morning commute just in case there are any issues with bus delays. I am on crutches, and sometimes in a wheelchair, due to inflammatory arthritis issues I am having in my knee, so I also add extra time to our commute to walk to and from the bus. We live on a pedestrian-only street, so it’s always very quiet and tranquil in the morning. It’s delightful to see the street fill with life as the day goes on.

The majority of our classes take place in the fabric of Rome itself, which is something that I cherish about the Rome study abroad program at Pratt. Today, instead of meeting at our school building, we are starting our day at the Theatre of Marcellus for our Urban Studies class to walk through the Campo Marzio of Rome, which is the part of Rome that has continually remained inhabited since antiquity.

9:15am: The bus ride in the morning gives me the chance to see Rome from a different perspective, and this is something I look forward to daily. Having the opportunity to use Rome’s public transportation has been another intimate way to discover and experience the city. It never fails to amaze me how many layers of history and time I encounter on one bus ride.

10:00am: We are meeting at the Theater of Marcellus in the southern part of the Field of Mars to start our day! For every walking class, we are given individual headsets to ensure everyone in the group can hear the lecture. The lecturer for this class, Jan Gadeyne, is one of the most knowledgeable people I have ever met. I immensely appreciate the faculty we have in the Rome Program because their passion for the city and history makes our experience more enriching.

Urban Studies in the Campo Marzio with Jan Gadeyne.

I enjoy our walking classes immensely because we are getting to learn about the city by continually being immersed in it, but it has been a difficult challenge to move around Rome with a wheelchair and crutches. My experience with having to navigate the city differently from my classmates has opened my eyes to the fact that you cannot truly fathom all the barriers that are present in the built environment until you yourself are in a situation where you are not able to move around in a world built for the able-bodied. It has been a struggle to traverse uneven surfaces, follow routes where stairs are unavoidable, take separate entrances into the sights we see or be directed through the service spaces to take the accessible path — where I may miss out on the main designed architectural experience of the space, and do small things that we may do every day without a second thought, like pick up or reach for items, turn around, open doors…and the list is doesn’t end here.

However, everyone has been extremely loving and supportive in helping me get around, and I am immensely grateful for the new perspective I have gained. To be able to move through space with a slower embrace, a renewed sense of care, and eyes that have a different view of the world is something I am grateful for — and to be able to see through and learn from this new lens in Rome, a city that, even with its large elevational changes, has always been shaped around public and interconnected spaces — is something that I immensely treasure. This experience has truly reinforced for me how the physical environment affects us in ways we do not realize and how design can both enhance and impact our spatial encounters.

1:30pm: After our morning class ends, my roommate and I take the bus back to our apartment to make lunch together. It was a very quick break as we had to get back on the bus again to head to our next class. In the afternoon, we have classes at the Pratt Rome Program studio building in Trastevere.

3:00pm: The afternoon of learning begins with Italian class! Our professor, Emanuela Ricciardi, is also the Director of Student Affairs for the Rome Program and has been teaching in this program for almost as long as it has existed. Learning a new language has been a struggle for me, but Emanuela makes every class entertaining and encouraging. In addition to doing a great job of teaching us, she truly takes care of us while we are away from home. In my eyes, she is the heart of the Rome program. It is her love and care, her strength, and her spirit that have helped to shape the Rome program into the wonderful experience and family that it is today. We are all better because of her!

4:30pm: I had a little break in my day before my next class, so I decided to go to the bar between classes to have a cup of coffee. I was not a coffee drinker before coming to Rome, but Italy has opened my eyes to the delight and energy boost that coffee can bring to my day.

Italian Class in the Pratt Rome Program Building.

5:30pm: Our day of learning ends with a lecture in our History of Modern Italian Architecture class. The lecture today is about neoclassicism in Italy. This class always presents interesting content, but most importantly, it has been very enlightening to see how architects of the twentieth century were contending with and trying to answer some of the same questions I have been asking myself. How do we learn from the lessons of the past? What lessons does the city present to us now, and how can we continue to listen to them, to draw from them, to uncover the secrets of the quiet grandiosity that surrounds us?

7:30pm: With our classes being done for the day, my roommate and I make our way back to our apartment. I am normally in a lot of pain after walking and moving around for the majority of the day, so the first thing I do when I get home is ice and elevate my knee. We spend our evenings making dinner, taking time to relax and shower, and finishing work for school. By this time, it is the middle of the workday in the US, so this part of my night is typically dedicated to zoom meetings.

11:30pm: Maintenance and managing my health is a big part of my day, so I try to be consistent with when I take my medicine. In addition to my daily medications, today is my day to take Humira, which is a weekly self-injection I do. I’ve been using Humira for years now, but it still makes me a little anxious every time I have to inject it, so I always listen to music to relax before giving myself the shot.

1:00am: I am trying to be better about getting as much sleep as possible, so I have been ending my day at 1:00am even if I am still in the middle of something. Since I am normally working up until I go to bed, I give myself time to unwind by reading before heading to sleep. I’ve been reading a few pages of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino at night. It’s one of my favorite books and one of the few I packed to come with me. I’ve re-read this book many times, but it is very fitting to read it while studying abroad. It's a reminder of the wonder of place as we travel to dreamlike destinations. I’ll end with this quote in the pages I read tonight: “You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”

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I want to say a special thank you to Julia Gamolina for inviting me to share my day and to all of you who took the time to read this and be part of my journey studying abroad in Rome!

In my interview, I shared a little bit about how my chronic health issues impact me from day to day and the maintenance necessary to take care of myself. For anyone else who also has chronic health issues, I hope you know that there are people (like me) who share in an experience that may be similar to yours and are here for you! I discussed my rheumatoid arthritis, but I also have Crohn’s disease and Sjogren’s syndrome, which are all autoimmune illnesses that leave you with the lifelong responsibility of finding ways to live with diseases that cannot be cured but managed through taking care of your health, your energy, and your stress. Autoimmune diseases similar to these are sometimes invisible illnesses, which means they are not outwardly apparent and can go unrecognized. Since we are in the unique position to shape the future as architects, I hope that this interview can encourage you to think about how we can redefine what health and accessibility mean to us as an industry and reimagine how we foster well-being into the built environment.

We need to design for accessibility beyond what we can clearly see by making sure the voices of those most impacted are centered in our work. We have the power to create a world that works for everyone. While architecture is an ambitious and transformative field, it, both in practice and education, can demand a lot from us. For those of you who also find yourselves trying to endure everything, I hope you are able to extend to yourself the same care that you place into your work and passions as you manage the challenges of the built environment and your health. My journey in advocacy work started with me learning to advocate for myself with a chronic illness. It is here that I first learned to share my words to speak up for what I believe in, and I hope we can all continue to use our voices and agency as designers to advocate and create a better world and profession.

Catherine with Federica Vannucchi, New Director of the Pratt Rome Program, in the Pratt Rome Program Studio. Photo by Cheryl Luo.

In addition, this year is also the 50th year anniversary of the Rome program at Pratt, and as I write about what my experience has been like in this program so far, I wanted to share how much gratitude I have to Pratt for creating this program but also to every educator and student who has been part of it over the last half-century and helped shape it to the amazing educational experience that it is today. My architectural education started with an interruption from the pandemic, and to be in Rome now, after everything that has happened and is continuing to happen, is a dream and a blessing. My hope is that we all have the opportunity to travel, to experience new places, to learn from an understanding of the world different from our own — and to grow, love, and live in the process.

In the spirit of Madame Architect — I want to end by taking time to uplift someone else who has been a significant part of my architectural education and has transformed my life for the better: Federica Vannucchi! Federica is going to be the new director of the Pratt Rome Program, following Richard Piccolo who has done a phenomenal job leading the program since its inception. Richard is the soul and the foundation of the Pratt program. His knowledge and appreciation for history and Rome is inspiring, and it is an honor to know someone that recognizes the beauty in art and the world around us and invites us to get to not only see this but know this through drawing and our own encounters with space.

I cannot think of someone better to continue the legacy of learning and discovery that this program and Richard have created. I first met Federica when we worked together on the Mistresses of Pratt archive in 2020 during the pandemic, and I continue to be inspired by how thoughtful she is and how passionately she examines our world. I deeply admire how her work and interests are a testing ground for building a better world — through writing and theory, through practice, through collective action, and through architectural education. One of my favorite memories with Federica is the first time I got to see her in person after the pandemic, and she gave me one of the most heartfelt hugs I have ever received. It is this unyielding care, generosity, and unwavering curiosity that she possesses that leaves me with no doubt that the Pratt Rome program will continue to flourish under her guidance.