The Cooper Union’s Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture has created a new digital archive of student work in a comprehensive online database. As one of the few online collections of a school of architecture's student work, the database represents over eight decades of work, dating from the 1930’s through the present.
For the first time in history, a John Hejduk structure has been permanently installed in a public space. The American architect's Jan Palach Memorial has officially opened last week at Jan Palach Square (formerly Red Army Square) on the Alšovo Riverbank in Prague after 25 years in the making.
"The work, entitled House of the Suicide and House of the Mother of the Suicide, which was originally built in Atlanta in 1990, then Prague in 1991, honors the Czech dissident Jan Palach, whose self-immolation in protest of the Soviet invasion of 1968 served as a galvanizing force against the communist government in Czechoslovakia. A plaque at the base of the monument displays the poem The Funeral of Jan Palach, by former School of Architecture Professor David Shapiro," says The Cooper Union.
Nader Tehrani, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) architecture professor and founding principal of Office dA and NADAAA, has been appointed dean of The Cooper Union's Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture. From 2010 to 2014, Tehrani served as the head of MIT's Department of Architecture, while leading two offices in Boston and New York City. He will now join Cooper this month and focus his efforts on speculative research and interdisciplinary collaboration.
In honor of Thom Mayne's birthday today, we're sharing this video interview from Danish Website Louisiana. In it Thom Mayne introduces his building at 41 Cooper Square by saying "I wanted to produce something that was off, and was not at all systematic in any normal architectural sense." Ultimately, the form of the building is, he says, an attempt to engage with New York City, understanding Cooper Union as a key part of the city's incredible intensity of intellectual creative capital. He also discusses how the building - despite its avant garde form - won over the local community. Enjoy!
With the news earlier this year that The Cooper Union in New York will, for the first time in 155 years, begin charging tuition fees to students in 2014, the existing students at its Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture are taking steps to ensure that it stays true to the meritocratic principles on which it was founded. To achieve this, they have launched the One Year Fund, an attempt to crowdsource $600,000 in order to cover the tuition fees of the incoming students in 2014.
Read more about the One Year Fund, and how it fits into the students' larger aims, after the break.
Each year The Architectural League in its Current Work program presents the work of significant international figures who powerfully influence contemporary architectural practice and shape the future of the built environment. David Adjaye will present his work in a public lecture to be followed by a conversation with moderator Gregg Pasquarelli, founding principal at SHoP Architects.
The Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI) is proud to partner with The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union and The Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design to exhibit DYMAX REDUX, a crowdsourcing design contest to highlight today's graphic designers, visual artists and citizen cartographers own interpretation of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map. Originally published 70 years ago, Fuller's map was a cartographic breakthrough showing one island in one ocean; an iconic design that has inspired generations since.