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THE IRWIN S. CHANIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE
AT THE COOPER UNION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE AND ART
CONTENTS:
01. INTRODUCTION
02. LECTURES AND EVENTS
03. STUDIOS
04. EXHIBITIONS:
- Spectral Emanations: Paintings by Robert Slutzky
- Coming to Light: The Louis I. Kahn Memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt for New York City
- The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi
- Slutzky: Recent Work
- The Storm
- Wall House 2: John Hejduk
05. PUBLICATIONS:
- Books to Celebrate Exhibitions
- Constructed Thoughts
- Education of an Architect
- John Hejduk Works
06. FACULTY
07. DEGREE REQUIREMENTS
08. APPLICATION
09. CAREER SERVICES
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INTRODUCTION:
The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union offers a five-year program leading to the Bachelor of Architecture, a first professional degree accredited by the NAAB. The philosophical foundation of the school is committed to the complex symbiotic relationships of education, research, theory, practice and a broad spectrum of creative endeavors relevant to significant architectural development. The five-year Design sequence is structured to integrate the elements of architecture, investigation of program, construction, structure, form and space; and to generate an effective, forceful and spirited architecture. Students are encouraged to search deeply into the existing abundance of architectural knowledge and to focus on the ideas and works of architecture that have positively affected the environment for the betterment of the human condition. Fundamental to the school is the maintenance of a long-established creative environment where freedom of thought and intuitive exploration are given a place to flourish, where the intangible chemistry of personal and public interactions stimulate an intensity of purpose and dedication, where the gifted mind and spirit can seek the means of expression and the mastery of form, and where a sense of the vast and joyous realm of creation can reveal an unending path for gratifying human endeavor. Students' spontaneous or directed collaboration results from a community wherein mutual respect and appreciation are honored. This authentic collegial environment and experience fosters a developing professionalism drawn from inner growth rather than acquired manner.
The content of the curriculum, based on a wide cultural view of architecture, reflects broad ethical values. Faculty-student interaction is conducted on an intensive basis in the Design studio and other classes. Within this framework faculty members encourage students to develop their individual interests and strengths, with a constant stress on fundamentals and a basic commitment intended to equip the graduate with a lasting ability to produce an architecture which is a meaningful synthesis of the social, aesthetic and technological. The relationship between architecture and other creative disciplines is stressed through the five years. Students are encouraged to express themselves both verbally and visually.
The architecture curriculum is designed to prepare graduates for the professional practice of architecture by equipping them with a depth of understanding of human needs and a command of technology that will enable them to serve their community by shaping the man-made environment in a way that will focus their analytical powers on the many issues involved in creating shelter and space for the complex needs of our society.
The Cooper Union's location in the heart of New York City affords a wealth of practicing professionals of the highest distinction as faculty and has a profound effect on many other features of the program. Students live, work and study in a world city that provides an urban laboratory unparalleled in its stimulation and opportunities for research, as well as unique social and cultural institutions. The school's renowned faculty includes, among others, architects who have won awards in international competitions in the United States and abroad. The school's diverse student body consists of highly talented and motivated individuals and its distinguished alumni are leaders in architecture and related fields.
With over 8,000 square feet of studio space, each student has their own drafting table and work area. The studio functions as a classroom in which instruction occurs, as a laboratory in which projects are conceived and developed, and as a base of operations. Classroom facilities include a lecture hall, seminar room and ample presentation space. Design studios are team-taught and the overall faculty:student ratio is 5:1.
The School of Architecture Computer Studio work stations are each equipped with a drawing table, parallel edge and computer. The computer applications include the latest two-dimensional drafting and three-dimensional modeling and animation programs. The facility offers video-editing programs and equipment with a large projection screen linked to each computer station. Internet access is also available from each computer station.
The school also maintains active exhibition and publication programs. One of its most notable publications continues to be Education of an Architect, the first volume of which documents a 1971 exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art. The second volume presents student work from 1972-1985 and a third volume is currently in preparation.
The Bachelor of Architecture degree requirements are intended to provide students with a rigorous training in and exposure to the creative and technical aspects of architecture. The professional courses in the curriculum are supplemented and enhanced by the general studies requirement which is partially fulfilled by other required courses in the architecture curriculum as well as other elective credits.
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LECTURES AND EVENTS:
LECTURES SPRING 2006
While the schedule for spring 2006 is yet to be announced, the archived lectures for previous years are available below.
Lectures Fall 2005
Lectures 2004–05
Lectures 2003–04
Lectures 2002–03
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03. STUDIOS
THE IRWIN S. CHANIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE
AT THE COOPER UNION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE AND ART
The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture
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04. EXHIBITIONS:
SPECTRAL EMANATIONS
PAINTINGS BY ROBERT SLUTZKY
ARTHUR A. HOUGHTON JR. GALLERY, 14 SEPTEMBER 2005 – 14 OCTOBER 2005
This exhibition celebrated the late painter’s impressive career with a selection of paintings spanning close to fifty years. Slutzky’s explorations of form, space, color and structure within the frame of a square canvas, as well as in theoretical writings like the two seminal "Transparency" articles co-authored with Colin Rowe, reflect a rigorous evolution drawing on the disciplines of painting and architecture and inspired by his love of music.
Robert Slutzky graduated from The Cooper Union in 1951. He then went on to receive an MFA in 1954 from Yale University, where he was a student of Josef Albers as well as Stuart Davis, Burgoyne Diller and Ad Reinhardt. He was subsequently invited to teach at the University of Texas at Austin, joining late Cooper Union architecture dean John Hejduk, Rowe and Bernhard Hoesli in forging a radical new approach to architectural education. Slutzky returned to The Cooper Union to teach in 1968, working closely with Hejduk to frame the renowned pedagogy of that period. He taught in the School of Architecture until 1980, and then in the School of Art for another ten years. He continued to teach at the University of Pennsylvania until three years before his death in May 2005. Slutzky's paintings have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His work can be found in private and public collections throughout the United States and Europe.
COMING TO LIGHT:
THE LOUIS I. KAHN MEMORIAL TO FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT FOR NEW YORK CITY
ARTHUR A. HOUGHTON JR. GALLERY, 10 JANUARY 2005 – 5 FEBRUARY 2005
I had this thought that a memorial should be a room and a garden. That’s all I had. Why did I want a room and a garden? I just chose it to be the point of departure. The garden is somehow a personal nature, a personal kind of control of nature, a gathering of nature. And the room was the beginning of architecture. I had this sense, you see, and the room wasn’t just architecture, but was an extension of self. —Louis I. Kahn
Coming to Light, a website documenting Louis I. Kahn's proposal for a Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial, is currently under construction and will soon be online.
THE BALLAD OF KASTRIOT REXHEPI
WITH AN ORIGINAL SCORE BY MICHAEL NYMAN
ARTHUR A. HOUGHTON JR. GALLERY, 21 NOVEMBER 2002 – 21 DECEMBER 2002
"not a word"—Mary Kelly
The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi retells the media narrative of an Albanian infant caught in the midst of the Balkan conflict. Abandoned by his panic-stricken parents during a fierce Serbian onslaught, Kastriot Rexhepi was found among the battle’s wreckage and given a Serbian name, Zoran, only to be abandoned again during the Serbian retreat. Left in a hospital, he was now assumed to be Albanian and renamed Lirim, before being finally reunited with his parents and having his name restored. Reading his story in the Los Angeles Times, Kelly was fascinated by Kastriot’s plight and the media’s fixation on his first words at the moment he was reunited with his parents. As she writes, "and Kastriot, young patriot, says ‘Bab.’" With his uttering of the Albanian word for father, The Ballad ruminates on the infant’s speech as an inscription of national, familial, and sexual identity.
With her retelling of the "miraculous" narrative of Rexhepi, Kelly mocks the media’s reliance on "redemptive" stories and continues her work’s exploration of the individual’s inscription in language. Kelly’s narrative is constructed in three stanzas and a shorter envoi, evoking the traditional form of a folk ballad. While viewing its 206 foot long expanse, Kelly’s work demands that the viewer physically participates in the reading of this work, suggesting that the use of language is not only mental, but physical as well. This exhibition installed the forty-nine panels of The Ballad around the walls of the Houghton gallery. As it passes through the glass partition to the double-height space of the library below, this installation forces the viewer to concentrate on the eye’s physical movements as it follows Kelly’s narrative, accentuating the viewer’s self-conscious movements through language.
Kelly constructed these panels by attaching stenciled letters to the filter of a clothes dryer. As thousands of pounds of black and white clothes were laundered, this process slowly printed text onto the lint that accumulated on the filter. The ‘wave of the dryers’ pattern suggests, among other things, the lilting tones of oral narrative. This exhaustive process both uses and produces the mundane objects of everyday life which have characterized Kelly’s art since Post-Partum Document (1973), her landmark psychological investigation of maternity that bridged Conceptual art and feminism. The Ballad employs everyday domestic waste as a meditation on the epochal waste of the Balkan conflict; a "cleansing" that, as Ernest Larsen has noted, was chillingly realized in the "ethnic cleansing" of the Serbian forces.
The opening of The Ballad was accompanied by an original score by Michael Nyman, which developed the viewer’s engagement in the work and meditation of its themes. The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi and Mary Kelly’s work was discussed in symposium that was held in conjunction with the exhibition.
Mary Kelly’s work has been exhibited widely, including solo shows at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; the Helsinki City Art Museum; The Generali Foundation, Vienna; and the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles. Her work has featured in group exhibitions in the 4th Biennale of Sydney, the 1991 Biennial and American Century: Part II shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the inaugural exhibition at the Tate Modern, London.
Michael Nyman is a composer who is best known for his scores for the theatre, including Down by the Greenwood Side and The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, and for film, most notably on Jane Campion’s The Piano (1992) and on eleven of Peter Greenaway’s films between 1976 and 1991. He composes for a variety of ensembles and has collaborated with several other artists, including the choreographers Lucinda Childs and Stephen Petronio, and the fashion designer, Yohji Yamamoto.
INSTALLATION PHOTOS: GINA POLLARA
PERFORMANCE PHOTOS: CHUN AE HANNAH LEE
SLUTZKY: RECENT WORK
ARTHUR A. HOUGHTON JR. GALLERY, 17 SEPTEMBER - 29 OCTOBER 2002
Slutzky’s paintings, in the senses outlined in the Transparency essays, have always been deeply architectural by implication, if not in fact, each painting being a fundamental reworking and advancement of these spatial concepts.—Anthony Vidler
As Dean Vidler of the School of Architecture has noted, Robert Slutzky’s artistic and architectural production is a reflection of the intersection between these two disciplines. This exhibition brought together twenty-eight of the painter’s recent works, illustrating Slutzky’s use of architectonic compositions and color to elaborate on the themes of ‘surface’ and ‘transparency’ that he has explored over the last fifty years. Slutzky co-wrote the seminal modernist architectural essay, Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal, with Colin Rowe in 1947, and these paintings suggest a continued play of architectural depth through the painted surface. Playing with the dimension-less properties of the grid, Slutzky manipulates the viewers perception of the work and moves painting beyond the modernist canon of flatness."The primary subject of my painting is color," Slutzky explains, "For this reason I call it color/structure painting. Turning its back on illusionism and allegory, this kind of art attempts to define its own universe of meanings, and in the polemical act of purifying itself from extraneously derived languages and imageries, aspires to ineffability."
The exhibition also included the cHUbE cHrOME project (1988), an exploration of the influence of color and geometry on the design of architecture form, which was produced in collaboration with Bruce Dunning and Pieter Versteegh.An extensive catalog was published in conjunction with this exhibition with a foreword by Dean Anthony Vidler that places Slutzky’s paintings in dialogue with his seminal essay, Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal, (written with Colin Rowe in 1947); an interview with Slutzky by Emmanuel J. Petit that discusses the painter’s critical strategies of artistic production; an essay by Robert C. Morgan that examines Slutzky’s conceptual position in the art historical tradition of Leon Battista Alberti and Josef Albers; and an essay by Robert Slutzky with Joan Ockman on metaphor in his work. Robert Slutzky’s art and his contribution to architectural education was celebrated by a symposium, "Architecture Toward Painting," that was held in conjunction with the exhibition.
Robert Slutzky graduated from The Cooper Union in 1951 and studied with Josef Albers at Yale University, graduating with an MFA in 1954. Invited to teach at the University of Texas in Austin, Slutzky joined John Hejduk, Colin Rowe, and Bernhard Hoesli (the so-called "Texas Rangers") in forging a new approach to architectural education. Slutzky returned to The Cooper Union to teach with Dean Hejduk in the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture from 1968-80, where they closely collaborated to formulate an innovative pedagogical approach to the "Education of An Architect." In 1980, Slutzky moved to the School of Art where he taught until accepting a position in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. Slutzky’s contribution to architectural education and his influence on generations of Cooper Union graduates is inestimable.
Robert Slutzky’s works are in numerous private and public collections in the United States and Europe and have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
CURATED BY STEVEN HILLYER
INSTALLATION PHOTOS: GINA POLLARA
THE STORM: AN INSTALLATION BY LEBBEUS WOODS
THE ARTHUR A. HOUGHTON JR. GALLERY, 2 JANUARY - 1 FEBRUARY 2002
"The Storm is not a single vector, but an accumulation, a community of vectors, unexpectedly acting in concert."—Lebbeus Woods
The Storm was an installation of drawings, architectonic elements, and high tensile steel cables that were suspended in the Houghton gallery. Initially, elaborate drawings were produced on the walls at either end of the room that served as construction documents for the cables and elements that were then drawn-out through the space between them. If the turbulent geometries of these drawings suggested the origins of the storm, then they also illustrated the unpredictability of its effects, and with this gesture Woods implies that while the storm’s forces may be charted on the two-dimensional surface, the full force of its impact will always spring out, literally, into the three-dimensionality of space.
This installation employs the metaphor of the storm; a metaphor that begins, as all allusions do, in the very substance of the conditions they describe. Woods uses this metaphor to construct an installation that speculates on the effects that the destructive forces of history, such as war or natural catastrophe, can have on buildings and the architecture of cities, and the possibilities that this destructiveness offers for a radical design practice. In the chaos the storm sweeps before it, a "new order is set in motion," Wood’s states, and it is this reordering that allows for the emergence of new, previously unconsidered, architectural practices. The inability to predict the storms events does not mitigate the necessity of attempting to understand or learn from its causes. As Woods writes, it is essential that "we architects must not abandon the knowledge of [architecture’s] constructed causes to the lack of knowledge in the uncertainty of its effects."
With its speculation on the storms impact, this installation describes how rapid and often difficult forms of social change can be formulated architecturally and transformative processes can be balanced between the destructive and creative. For Woods, "Perhaps the storm can be understood as a convulsion of history, a ‘learning experience.’" The Storm was exhibited along with a collection of forty drawings from the War and Architecture Series (1992-5), which illustrate a series projects designed for the reconstruction of Sarajevo. These drawings and their accompanying texts propose new principles for the architectural reconstruction of cities that have been destroyed by war.
Lebbeus Woods is an international renowned architect and theorist, a Professor in The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, and a co-Founder and the Scientific Director of RIEAeuropa, an institute devoted to the advancement of experimental architectural thought and practice. His drawings and ideas on architecture have been collected in Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997). His work is represented by the Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery (New York) and is in numerous private and public collections, including the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Austrian Museum of Applied Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Getty Research Institute for the Arts and Humanities.
CONSTRUCTED IN COLLABORATION WITH ALEXANDER GIL AND AMIR SHAHROKHI
CONSTRUCTION PHOTOS: CHUN AE HANNAH LEE
INSTALLATION PHOTOS: LISELOT VAN DER HEIJDEN AND OLIVIA VALENTINE
WALL HOUSE 2: JOHN HEJDUK
THE ARTHUR A. HOUGHTON JR. GALLERY, 6 NOVEMBER - 30 NOVEMBER 2001
In 1990, as part of a proposal for the Marking the City Boundaries of Groningen project, John Hejduk wrote:
"During the past 15 years I have a singular method/way of practicing my loved discipline architecture. I have worked out of a room in my house. The room measures 7 feet by 9 feet. From this room has come the thoughts on a new way at looking at architecture and the construction of structures. The way is osmotic, by a form of osmosis. I am also a teacher and I fabricate books. When I work on my drawings I listen to music and I read. When I take a break from my work/room I go into the garden which my wife Gloria has so tenderly... tenderly and lovingly created. Like her the garden is a source of tranquility and inspiration. Together we live a simple life, an almost 19th-century life. She speaks for herself and has graciously taught me about music and literature... and about the growth of life. We cherish our privacies and we love literature... the silent word. Within this atmosphere work proceeds, structures are built through the social participation (almost medieval) of students, of architects, of engineers, of artists, of faculties, of a community of souls (through the world). "
Eleven years later, the Social Contract is alive and well in Groningen. Through the persistent efforts of several members of that community of souls – who captured the spirit of the initial design – Wall House 2 exists in the built world. Its manifestation is the story of a developer, a real estate agent and a group of city planners who spent eight years negotiating with various potential buyers, to no avail. A story so unusual that the developer, frustrated with the failed attempts to realize the house, decided to finance the construction himself, without a client. It is also the story of a project architect and devoted group of builders, who had never constructed anything so technically complex and artistically rewarding. And perhaps the final chapter of the story is about a neighborhood's inhabitants, who have fallen in love with the house and consider it an honor to be living with this great work of modern architecture.
Wall House 2 was originally to be built in Ridgefield Connecticut in the 1970's for the landscape architect A. E. Bye. The initial sketches and drawings for the house were developed during the same period of time that the interior of The Cooper Union's Foundation Building was being renovated by John Hejduk. It is fitting then, that this is the first place where Wall House 2 is exhibited in the United States; a house presented within a school, both created by the same architect.
The design of Wall House 2 was conceived in part through John Hejduk's study of cubist still life paintings, and his interest in the re-presentation of reality on the vertical surface of a painted canvas. This led to the decision to suspend the living elements of the house from the concrete wall, thus isolating each volume independently, and using the wall as a plane through which one must pass to move from space to space. The coloration of the elements came from the study of the colors of Le Corbusier's Maison La Roche, where John Hejduk spent several days installing an exhibition of his own work in 1972.
"After that experience, I could never do another white or primary-colored house. In La Roche, the colors were hardly apparent at first, but after you were there a while you saw not only that they changed constantly, but that they were delicate and muted, and also saturated at the same time."
Wall House 2 is one of many wall houses designed over John Hejduk's vast and prolific career, but it is the only one built to date. The fabrication of this house is an enormous contribution to the world of architecture. In just one month, it received over 12,000 visitors. It is a house that yearns to be inhabited, studied and explored, as it holds many secrets yet to be revealed.
Steven Hillyer, Director
The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive
CURATED BY STEVEN HILLYER
WALL HOUSE PHOTOS: HÉLÈNE BINET
INSTALLATION PHOTOS: LISELOT VAN DER HEIJDEN
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05. PUBLICATIONS
In a way a publication is the result of a kind of communication between persons and places. The actual product is a short hand, a sign, a code of things past. The passing of so called real time: that is, long hours of intense work-thought, relationships brought to an edge, some joys, some sorrows (which may not be apparent at first). Then one reads a list of names that somehow have had something to do with a place and each other. It is then revealed that a place of quality existed, and persons of quality existed. The convolution of these forces joined, and worked on a place at a place for a place. A "communitas" was established.—John Hejduk
Available titles can be ordered by Mail, Telephone, or Fax from:
The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive at The Cooper Union
51 Astor Place
New York, NY 10003–7136
T. 212.353.4232
F. 212.353.4219
BOOKS TO CELEBRATE EXHIBITIONS
COMING TO LIGHT:
The Louis I. Kahn Memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt for New York City
I had this thought that a memorial should be a room and a garden. That’s all I had. Why did I want a room and a garden? I just chose it to be the point of departure. The garden is somehow a personal nature, a personal kind of control of nature, a gathering of nature. And the room was the beginning of architecture. I had this sense, you see, and the room wasn’t just architecture, but was an extension of self.—Louis I. Kahn
Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name co-sponsored by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture and the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute at The Cooper Union from January 10 – February 18, 2005, this catalogue examines the evolution of Louis I. Kahn’s design for the Roosevelt Memorial, his only completed late work that remains unbuilt.
Designed between 1972 and Kahn’s death in March 1974, the memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt was to be constructed at Southpoint Park on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island. Reproduced within the book’s pages are illustrations of Kahn’s model and drawings for the memorial including previously unpublished sketches from a pocket notebook that Kahn carried with him during his travels. These are accompanied by the construction documents for the project, which were completed with the support of the office of Mitchell/Giurgola Architects and David Wisdom Architect after Kahn's death in March 1974.
The catalogue contains several major texts on both the Roosevelt Memorial and its context within the body of Kahn’s work. These include Kahn and the Civic Realm by Robert Geddes, Kahn and the Belated Monument by Michael J. Lewis, and Monument, Memory and Modernism by Anthony Vidler, Dean of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture.
NY: THE IRWIN S. CHANIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE OF THE COOPER UNION, 2005.
48 PAGES. 12 X 8.
44 ILLUSTRATIONS, 25 IN COLOR.
SOFTCOVER, $20.00.
SLUTZKY: RECENT WORK
Slutzky’s paintings, in the senses outlined in the Transparency essays, have always been deeply architectural by implication, if not in fact, each painting being a fundamental reworking and advancement of these spatial concepts.—Anthony Vidler
This catalog celebrates an exhibition of 28 recent paintings by Robert Slutzky, works which elaborate the theme of ‘transparency’ that the painter has explored over the last fifty years. This catalog collects 27 full-color illustrations of these paintings, along with generous examples of Slutzky’s earlier work, to critically examine how the painter’s manipulation of color and transparency have transgressed the modernist canon of flatness. "The primary subject of my painting is color," Slutzky explains, "For this reason I call it color/structure painting. Turning its back on illusionism and allegory, this kind of art attempts to define its own universe of meanings, and in the polemical act of purifying itself from extraneously derived languages and imageries, aspires to ineffability."
The catalog contains a foreword by Dean Anthony Vidler that places Slutzky’s paintings in dialogue with his seminal essay, Transparency: Literal and Phenonmenal, (written with Colin Rowe in 1947); an interview with Slutzky by Emmanuel J. Petit that discusses the painter’s critical strategies of artistic production; an essay by Robert C. Morgan that examines Slutzky’s conceptual position in the art historical tradition of Leon Battista Alberti and Josef Albers; and an essay by Robert Slutzky with Joan Ockman on metaphor in his work. This evaluation of Slutzky’s work makes it evident that, in the words of by Robert C. Morgan, "To study—and therefore enjoy—a painting of Robert Slutzky is to become a part of it."
Professor Robert Slutzky taught at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture from 1968–80, and at the School of Art from 1980-90. Published to coincide with an exhibition in the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery from 17 September to 29 October 2002. Designed by Brett Synder.
NY: THE IRWIN S. CHANIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE OF THE COOPER UNION, 2002.
52 PAGES. 9 X 9.
76 ILLUSTRATIONS (15 FULL-SIZE), ALL IN COLOR.
SOFTCOVER, $20.00.
LANDSCAPE & MEMORY:
The Paintings and Drawings of Richard Upton
Kim Shkapich
To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth.—Auguste Rodin
An intimate portrait of the landscape paintings of Richard Upton, selected from works completed in Cortona, Italy between 1982–88, documenting his journey from realism to abstraction, capturing the essence of space, color, light, and form. Richard Howard’s poem A Table of Green Fields: Richard Upton’s Cortona Landscapes is included, along with citations from the artist and others, that impose a way of reading the depths behind Upton’s works.
NY: THE IRWIN S. CHANIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE OF THE COOPER UNION, 1999.
48 PAGES, 5 1/2 X 7
31 ILLUSTRATIONS, 30 IN COLOR.
SOFTCOVER, $10.00
DRAW POKER
Sue Ferguson Gussow
Sue Gussow is the Matthew Brady of civil warfare where playing cards are the weaponry of winning and losing. She sends forth revealing portraits from the battlefield. Equipped with her penetrating pencil, the artist creates ambient portraits of social strife—around the poker table.–John Jay Iselin
For anyone who revels in the art of drawing or cards, this book will delight the eye and the hand. These forty drawings span two decades where Gussow plays her craft among a circle of friends who gather to play cards. Her portraits and still lifes capture the theatrical mis en scène of the poker game, where tension, concentration, and the wry bluff are expressed in her idiosyncratic structure of line, gesture, color, and composition, revealing essential features carved in light or concealed in shadow.
As Kay Whitney wrote, "Her realism is made of more sophisticated stuff than mere veracity or photographic mimicry; it is a simple acknowledgement of creative data. Gussow is part of a generation of artists who have matured slowly, privately, who have survived the cataclysmic transitions that have characterized the art world for the past forty years. Part of her great accomplishment lies in her ability to retain her conviction in an art that critics and institutions have damned to irrelevancy for decades."
Texts by John Jay Iselin, John Hejduk, and Kay Whitney. Published to coincide with the 1997 exhibition of her paintings and drawings in the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery. Sue Ferguson Gussow is a member of the faculty of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture.
Designed by Kim Shkapich.
NY: THE IRWIN S. CHANIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE OF THE COOPER UNION, 1997.
64 PAGES, 6 X 8 1/4
40 ILLUSTRATIONS, 6 IN COLOR.
SOFTCOVER, $20.00
THE NEW YORK WATERFRONT:
Evolution and Building Culture of the Port and Harbor
Edited by Kevin Bone
One of the most remarkable sea- or bulkhead walls is that constructed by the Department of Docks in New York City, which in some places is built in mud 170 feet deep. It is of the relieving-platform type, supported on piles, which do not extend through the mud to hard bottom, with a vertical facing of concrete blocks extending seventeen feet below low water. This wall [was] originally designed in 1876.—Carleton Greene
This densely illustrated book uses photographs and drawings culled primarily from the archives of the Department of Docks and the New York City Municipal Archives to tell the story of the rise and fall of the waterfront’s architectural, technological, industrial and commercial existence over the past 150 years. Created by a team of architects and historians, the essays by Mary Beth Betts, Eugenia Bone, Gina Pollara, Donald Squires, Michael Z. Wise, and Wilbur Woods offer unique perspectives on environmental issues and various masterplans, discussing built and unbuilt structures and the visionary proposals that made the building culture of the waterfront one of the greatest public works of New York City. Newly commissioned photographs by Stanley Greenberg capture many modern sites in the melancholy beauty of their present derelict state.
Published subsequent to the 1994 exhibition and symposium devoted to examining the past and future of the waterfront, which was curated by Kevin Bone and Mary Beth Betts, members of the faculty of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture.
Designed by Kim Shkapich.
NY: CO-PUBLISHED WITH THE MONACELLI PRESS, 1997.
280 PAGES, 7 1/4 X 9 1/4
207 ILLUSTRATIONS, 32 IN COLOR.
SOFTCOVER, $40.00
[UN]BUILT
Raimund Abraham
Edited by Brigitte Groihofer
A wall, a door, a window, a roof have archetypical meanings. It is in their elaboration and repetitions, [Abraham] maintains, they they become abstract. This abstraction neutralizies the nostalgias dwelling in the elements. Although neither the column nor the window, nor any other isolated element, represents an aspect of the natural world, in their very isolation they conjure up a mode of cognition and a state of being to which moods inevitably cling.—P. Adams Sitney
A massive volume documenting the architecutral oeuvre of Raimund Abraham from 1961 to 1995. The book is structured in three parts: Imaginary Architecture; Projects; and Realizations. The architectural drawing occupies a central position in the evolution of Abraham’s work in challenging the predominant notion of built architecture. When Raimund Abraham refers to the reality of the [Un]built he does not simply want to equate buildings actually realized with projected ones, but he provides a view of the theoretical starting point of a project and its artistic statement.
Essays by Norbert Miller, John Hejduk, Kenneth Frampton, P. Adams Sitney, Lebbeus Woods, and Wieland Schmied.
In 1991 an exhibition of the same name was held in the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery. Raimund Abraham is a member of the faculty of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture. His project for the Austrian Cultural Institute in New York is currently under construction.
Designed by Maria-Anna Friedl.
VIENNA: SPRINGER-VERLAG, 1996.
316 PAGES, 9 X 12
402 ILLUSTRATIONS.
HARDCOVER, $85.00
NIGHT DRAWINGS–1956
Tony Candido
White bright shining pure straightforward frank
In short: Candido
black lightning:
the calligraphy of being is body.—Cid Corman
Published to coincide with an exhibition in the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery presenting a selection of the work of this painter/architect and member of the faculty of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture. While the exhibition presented a selection of Candido’s monumental painting and drawing oeuvre from between 1955 and 1993, this volume reproduces drawings from a 1956 sketchbook which, in the words of the artist, are "the seeds of insight—the beginning of the fulfillment of a vision. Every mark is clearly there in drawing out the content." The mastery of Candido’s calligraphic brushwork creates subtle nuances of form in gesture, these brooding figures provoke and evoke the night of these drawings.
With contributions by John Hejduk, and the poet Cid Corman.
Designed by Kim Shkapich, received a 1994 American Graphic Design Award.
NY: THE IRWIN S. CHANIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE OF THE COOPER UNION, 1993.
102 PAGES, 6 X 9 1/4
47 ILLUSTRATIONS.
HARDCOVER, $20.00
THE MUSEUM PROJECTS
Josef Paul Kleihues
Edited by Kim Shkapich
Museums deal with history, but also primarily with memory. The term anamnesis was slightly changed from the original when translated to mean remembering. It actually means not forgetting.—Dr. Claus Baldus
During the seventeen years from 1972 to 1989 Josef Paul Kleihues produced sixteen designs for museums and exhibition halls in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. This volume comprehensively covers seven of these buildings; including the reconstruction of the Palais Ephraim and the Jewish Museum, the reuilitization of a former monastery as the German Museum for Swords and Blades, as well as an expansion proposal for the Städel Museum. The evolution from construction to occupancy of the Museum for Pre-History is narrated in photographs by Hélène Binet which capture the spirit of place. Illustrations include architectural plans, models, and sketches.
A poetic rationalist, the strength of Kleihues’ work lies in the endeavor to transform the reality of an original site into a new ideal reality in which historical elements, building structure, and the building’s context are adapted to his own architectural vocabulary, creating a relationship where building typology and urban form are synthesized.
Foreword by John Jay Iselin. Introduction by John Hejduk. Dialogue between Josef Kleihues and Dr. Claus Baldus. Kleihues studied with Hans Scharoun, has worked with Peter Poeizig, and begin his private practice in Berlin in 1962. In 1979 he was appointed Director of Planning of new construction for the International Building Exposition (IBA) in Berlin. From 1986–91 he was appointed to The Irwin S. Chanin Distinguished International Professorship at the School of Architecture. Published to coincide with an exhibition in the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery.
NY: CO-PUBLISHED WITH RIZZOLI INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATIONS, INC., 1989.
160 PAGES, 8 X 10
104 ILLUSTRATIONS, 29 IN COLOR.
HARDCOVER, $ 40.00 SOFTCOVER, $25.00
OSCAR NITZCHKE, ARCHITECT
Edited by Gus Dudley
In such dramatic structures as the Johnson Wax Tower, General Motors Technical Center, Lever House, the Corning Glass Center, Equitable Life, the Prudential Buildings, (and many more), U.S. big business has financed the most revolutionary advances U.S. architects were ready to make. And now—ALCOA (1949–53). Possibly the most revolutionary advance of the postwar years. ALCOA, the completely sealed, completely engineered, completely controlled, completely finished "building package"—all neatly and elegantly wrapped in Oxford-gray aluminum.—Architectural Forum, November, 1983.
This volume begins with an illustrated chronology of projects complimenting Nitzchke’s biographical notes and an interview with C. Morey de Morand from 1980. Oscar Nitzchke worked in the offices of Le Corbusier and the Perret brothers and was a central participant in the modern movement in Paris in the early 1920s. The radical Maison de la Publicité on the Champs-Elysées, featured a six-storey open sky-sign framework suspended in front of the street facade which Kenneth Frampton called "a dematerialized, pyrotechnic, semiotic field . . . constantly active during the day and dynamically resplendent at night."
In 1938 Nitzchke came to the United States to become an associate professor at Yale University in the School of Architecture, joining Wallace Harrison and Max Abramovitz; and to work with Harrison and Fouilhoux as head of design research. Projects include the Bronx Zoo African Habitat, the Hotel Avila in Caracas, Time Life Building, participation in the United Nations Headquarters design, and Alcoa Headquarters, among others.
Essays by Joseph Abram, Kenneth Frampton, Isabelle Gournay, and George A. Dudley. Foreword by Bill N. Lacy. Afterword by John Hejduk. Supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Published to coincide with an exhibition in the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery. Produced by The Cooper Union Center for Design & Typography, George Sadek, Director. Design by Mindy Lang.
NY: THE COOPER UNION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE & ART, 1985.
64 PAGES, 12 X 12
140 ILLUSTRATIONS, PLUS 24 COLOR PLATES BOUND INSIDE GATEFOLD .
SOFTCOVER, $50.00
PLACES AND MEMORIES:
Photographs by Roberto Schezen
Roberto Schezen’s photographs speak of architecture with such eloquence as to silence those who would lessen his images with words.—Bill N. Lacy
Eighteen places—from Paestum to the Beagle Channel in Patagonia—are documented through the lens of Schezen’s photographic eye. The images of Casa Malaparte on the rocks of Capri, Aldo Rossi’s Cemetery in Modena or the Gallaratese Housing in Milan; Josef Hoffmann’s Primavesi House or the Villa Karma of Adolf Loos all capture a haunting emptiness that echo other memories. Mayan ruins of Mexico and Guatemala follow photographs of the houses of Newport and the Fagus Factory of Walter Gropius, resounding in a monumental stillness that suspends time and space.
Diana Agrest’s notes on photography and architecture serve as a context for the reading of the work of Roberto Schezen, for his photographs form a discourse on some crucial moments of photographic history. The photographic discourse presented here is a discourse on the (mythical) nature of forms of habitation, and it fits uneasily into a category such as architectural photography. It is more of a text, open, metonymic, and fragmentary—a kind of collection of a heterogenous nature that touches simultaneously on the nature of architecture and on that of photography itself.
Preface by Bill N. Lacy. Introduction by Diana Agrest. Afterword by John Hejduk. Published to coincide with an exhibition in the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery.
Designed by Massimo Vignelli.
NY: CO-PUBLISHED WITH RIZZOLI INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATIONS, INC., 1987.
120 PAGES, 11 X 11 1/4
96 ILLUSTRATIONS.
HARDCOVER, 60.00
IRWIN S. CHANIN: A ROMANCE WITH THE CITY
Edited by Diana Agrest
A sense of pleasure, a sense of the spectacular, an energetic drive that was characteristic of the New York of the twenties is also what best describes Irwin S. Chanin. The case of Chanin is one in which there’s a perfect articulation between the subject and the historical conditions. He enjoyed the city and mass culture and this love for the multifacted aspects of city life that informs some of his most important architectural contributions—the theaters for drama and musical comedy, the Chanin Building, the Century and Majestic apartment buildings on Central Park West—and which we could call, paraphrasing Chanin himself, a mise en scéne for American Modernism.
Celebrating Irwin S. Chanin’s career as architect, engineer, builder, and philanthropist, this volume presents nineteen projects built between 1925–59, including two phases of the suburban development Green Acres, 1936–39 and 1951–59.
Diana Agrest’s essay reintroduces us to Chanin’s work, recapturing the spirit of the man in his time. Afterword by John Hejduk. Contemporary color photographs by Roberto Schezen were commissioned for this project. Published to coincide with an exhibition in the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery.
Designed by Rudolph de Harak and Janice Bergen.
NY: THE IRWIN S. CHANIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE OF THE COOPER UNION, 1982.
112 PAGES, 9 3/4 X 13 1/2
167 DUOTONE AND 23 COLOR ILLUSTRATIONS.
SOFTCOVER, $30.00
WINDOW ROOM FURNITURE: Projects
Tod Williams and Ricardo Scofidio
In recent years many attempts have been made to redefine in architectural terms certain elements common to the experience of each of us. Such simple words as wall, window and hearth resonate with meaning. We are inviting you, along with other selected artists and architects to submit your personal interpretation of the following three elements: Window Room Furniture—Letter of Invitation
Invited to submit responses in a format eight inches square, this catalogue documents the assembled work of 115 artists and architects, falls into a few broad catagories—exploratory : continuing the investigation; reflective : a catalogue of the exisiting; and self-justifying : previous work which happened to fit into the program.
Published with an exhibition of the same name at the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery.
Produced by The Cooper Union Center for Design & Typography, George Sadek, Director. Designed by Stephen Doyle, typography by Thomas Kluepfel.
NY: CO-PUBLISHED WITH RIZZOLI INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATIONS, INC., 1981.
112 PAGES, 8 1/2 X 9 1/4
379 ILLUSTRATIONS, 47 IN COLOR
OUT-OF-PRINT
FORTY YEARS OF ARCHITECTURAL WORK
Richard G. Stein
I can now describe the metabolism of buildings both in birth and in life. –Richard Stein
Known for his pioneering research in energy-conserving design and its application in the building industry. This monograph on Richard Stein is comprised of photographs, drawings, and texts of both built and unbuilt projects. They range from furniture he designed in 1939, when he worked for Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, to hospitals, schools, and housing projects. Notable among them are buildings for the Wiltwyck School for Boys, Coney Island Hospital, a small beach house, and a development plan for the Bronx River.
Published to coincide with an exhibition in the Arthur A. Houghton Jr.Gallery. Richard Stein was a member of the faculty of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture from 1946–90.
Introduction by Arthur Rosenblatt. Foreword by Bill N. Lacy. Designed by Rudolph de Harak and Robin Plaskoff.
NY: THE COOPER UNION SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, 1980.
56 PAGES, 9 3/8 X 13 1/4
42 ILLUSTRATIONS.
SOFTCOVER, $15.00
MICHAEL WURMFELD:
European Travel Sketches 1963, 1964, 1965, 1970
Throughout history artists and architects have had a deep thirst to travel and record although there have been a few who have remained stationary; fixed and conjured...imagined. Still, old places and old architectures fascinate.... Sometimes information was captured, sometimes spirit. Information tangible, spirit intangible.—John Hejduk
This pamphlet has selected pages from Michael Wurmfeld’s travel sketchbooks, the result of two stays in Europe. The first was as a Fulbright Scholar in Italy from 1963–65; the second was a trip to Greece and Turkey of about eight months duration in 1970. The drawings represent a method of learning about architecture, a type of research into form and detail. As an aide-de memoire, each drawing records an encounter with a building, a public space, or a landscape.
Published to coincide with an exhibition in the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery. Michael Wurmfeld was a member of the faculty of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture from 1972–84.
Afterword by John Hejduk
Designed by Rudolph de Harak.
NY: THE COOPER UNION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE & ART, 1979.
20 PAGES, 7 3/4 X 7 3/4
7 COLOR ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAMPHLET, $7.00
ABRAHAM EISENMAN HEJDUK ROSSI
A booklet of selected drawings from architectural projects exhibited in Urban Center–Suburban Alternatives: Eleven American Projects at the Biennale di Venezia in 1976 which includes Seven Gates to Eden, by Raimund Abraham; House X by Peter Eisenman; John Hejduk’s The Silent Witnesses and Suburban Houses; and Aldo Rossi’s houses La Calda Vita, and Casa Aborgoticino. For the serious ephemeral collector, these projects have been published in full in other sources.
Published on the occasion of the visit of Aldo Rossi as a Mellon Professor and in conjunction with an exhibition in the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery.
NY: THE COOPER UNION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE & ART, 1977.
20 PAGES, 8 X 10
23 ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAMPHLET $8.00
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CONSTRUCTED THOUGHT
ARGONAUTICS, PHILOSOPHICAL FLANERIES
Remo Guidieri
Edited by Kim Shkapich
The term Argonautics refers to the rhythms of breath and the rhythms of thought which so closely resemble the rhythms of the sea.—Ilya Bernstein
Argonautics offers the reader eleven scenes from the drama of Modernity. Among the subjects of his philosophical chronicle are personalities and places, and ideas of contemporary culture: the Mediterranean; Malinowski and anthropology; Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Shipwrecks; Naples; Marcel Broothaers; Orson Welles; Mexico and Paris. The pedagogical ambition of these essays are meant to establish and partially focus on a trend concerning the duality between nomadic and sedentary manners of assuming time, space, memory, strength, and destiny.
Guidieri teaches anthropology and aesthetics at Nanterre University and Ecoles des Beaux Arts in Paris; he is co-founder of Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, and is the author of numerous books published in France. Argonautics is Guidieri’s first book published in the United States. He is a visiting International Professor at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture.
Designed by Kim Shkapich.
NY: THE IRWIN S. CHANIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE OF THE COOPER UNION, 1997.
184 PAGES, 7 1/4 X 9 1/4
SOFTCOVER, $15.00
A WORD ABOUT WORDS
Václav Havel with illustrations by Jirí Kolár
Alongside words that electrify society with their freedom and truthfulness, we have words that mesmerize, deceive, inflame, madden, beguile, words that are harmful—lethal even.—Václav Havel
Originally delivered as an address to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1989, during the collapse of communist Europe, Havel’s text A Word About Words is a reflection on the relation between words and freedom and the mysteries that words have woven in human history. For Havel, words are mysterious, ambiguous, and ambivalent and their duplicity is such, that, while they could signify "the first glimmer of hope for a Europe without cold wars or iron curtains," as Havel writes, they also provided a precondition for the removal of freedom. One of the most important writers of the late twentieth century, Havel knew the binds of language well, having been jailed as a dissident for his drafting of Charter 77 (1977), the founding document of political resistance in Czechoslovakia. Twenty-six years later, the Chamber of Deputies elected Václav Havel to be the first President of the independent Czech Republic.
Havel’s text is accompanied by 18 full-color illustrations by the Czech poet and artist Jirí Kolár. Using a fragment of Gutenburg’s 42-line Bible as a point of graphic departure, these illustrations show Kolár‘s fascination with the word as both a means of poetic expression and a graphic image. As John Hejduk acknowledges in his afterword, Václav Havel has always given his words freely with an awareness that, as Havel writes, "all the important events in the real world—whether admirable or monstrous—always have their prologue in the realm of words."
Introduction, Jirí Setlík. Afterword, John Hejduk.
Co-designed by George Sadek and James Nix.
NY: THE COOPER UNION PRESS,
PUBLISHED IN COOPERATION WITH THE V HAVEL SECRETARIAT IN PRAGUE, 1992.
62 PAGES, 11 1/2 X 17.
18 ILLUSTRATIONS, ALL IN COLOR.
HARDCOVER, $200.00. LIMITED EDITION OF 500 COPIES.
ALL YOURS
Cid Corman
Cid Corman personifies the enduring place of prophets, who spread knowledge and advance understanding. Through his penetrating poetry, this celebrated, creative spirit adumbrates light and exemplifies illumination.–John Jay Iselin
Fifty-seven poems by the preeminent poet published to celebrate his return visit to America as the first Feltman Fellow in the Illumination Series; Fukuoji to Cooper Union, August–November 1991.
Designed by Kim Shkapich.
NY: THE IRWIN S. CHANIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE OF THE COOPER UNION, 1991.
72 PAGES, 6 X 9
SOFTCOVER IN WRAPS, $15.00
ADVENTURES OF THE SYMBOL:
MAGIC FOR THE SAKE OF ART
Francesco Pellizzi
Although no one has succeeded in defining culture as such—there are more than four hundred definitions, no two corresponding, in Clyde Kluckhohn’s classic anthology—Pellizzi is among the few researchers whose imaginative approaches have added fresh insights to its study.–Dore Ashton.
With an approach that hovers between the fields of anthropology and art history, Francesco Pellizzi questions the status of the Modern "art" object, asking us to consider its links to the enigmatic products of Primitive peoples. This essay discusses the role and meaning of symbolism and the issues of representation to discern the underlying attitudes that lead to artistic ‘appropriations.’
Presented as a lecture on constructed thought in the Great Hall of The Cooper Union in December 1986. Produced by The Cooper Union Center for Design & Typography, George Sadek, Director.
NY: THE IRWIN S. CHANIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE OF THE COOPER UNION, 1986.
20 PAGES, 6 X 11
PAMPHLET, $5.00
SOLITARY TRAVELERS
In the Spring of 1977, under the auspices of the Mellon Professorship, John Ashbery, poet; Jay Fellows, literary critic; Robert Freeman, filmmaker; John Hawkes, novelist and playwright; Aldo Rossi, architect; and Joseph Rykwert, historian were invited to the fifth year studios of the architectural school of The Cooper Union. The purpose was general: to make the school a crossroads where the maker and his work were no longer heroically apart but where the guest and student, in company, could share and sense the affinities of each other’s craft.
This book is a collage of thought containing eleven Poems by Ashbery, a labyrinthine text by Jay Fellows on John Ruskin, stills from Secret World by Robert Freeman, a story by John Hawkes and essays by Aldo Rossi and Joseph Rykwert. The reader may make a whole fabric of these pieces, or may remember these encounters, chance or chosen, as a necessary experience—something is always there for the eye that listens.
Preface by John F. White. Introduction by Sean Sculley. Afterword by John Hejduk.
Designed by Janet Gold and Tom Kluepfel.
NY: THE COOPER UNION SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, 1980.
VOLUME 1, 118 PAGES; VOLUME 2, 38 ILLUSTRATIONS, 6 1/2 X 12
SOFTCOVER IN WRAPS, SLIPCASED. $20.00
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EDUCATION OF AN ARCHITECT
ROME | BERLIN | NEW YORK
Diane Lewis, Peter Schubert, Georg Windeck
"Now prepare to make a fantastic assumption. Rome was not a human inhabitation, but also a psychic substance or creature, with a similarly rich and substantial past in which not only whatever has been in existence has never perished but also, parallel to the last phase of development, all earlier incarnations live on."—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontent, 1927
The project is a study of the plans of the cities Rome, Berlin, and New York in order to propose a 21st-century civic institution and define its site with significance in regard to Freud's definition of the city as a psychic entity. This was the assignment to the fourth-year architecture students at the Cooper Union on September 7, 2001. Four days later the destruction of the World Trade Center occurred.
All the participants in this class witnessed the 9/11 event with their own eyes. Whether seen from the roof of the Cooper Union building or within the streets of New York, each student and faculty member proceeded to address the civic space of architecture at the scale of the city, past, present, and future, for one semester. Although there is only one project specifically proposed for the Ground Zero site, the subject as a whole can be seen as an address to the question. This study as conducted in the aftermath of this monumental urban event is motivated toward the creation of intimate civic space with inventive contemporary program. As the city is now open for redefinition, the project can be considered to address the future conscience necessary to solve the problems posed. The institutions proposed integrate an understanding of the relation between form, site, and program within a literary vision of the possibility of the city.
NY: THE IRWIN S. CHANIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE OF THE COOPER UNION, 2002.
116 PAGES, 7 X 11.
SOFTCOVER, $20.00
BODY OF PRAYER: SHAPIRO, GOVRIN, DERRIDA
Edited by Kim Shkapich
I leave you with this image, of prayer in a house with windows. Here, at The Cooper Union.—Michal Govrin
The ‘Advanced Concepts’ course has been an integral part of the education of an architect within the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union, researching writing, art, and sound and their relations to architecture. In 1998, the poet and professor David Shapiro invited Michal Govrin, the Israeli writer and theater director, to lecture on certain spatial concepts of the sacred. She, in turn, asked Jacques Derrida to elaborate on questions these concepts raised and their visit coincided with the English publication of Govrin’s Name, a novel voiced as a prayer that was the starting point for the meditations contained in this volume. Body of Prayer is a record of the trialogue recorded on 14 October 1998, and the reverberations between the writings, poems, and fragments of novels written by Shapiro, Govrin and Derrida and an almost silent host, the Cooper Union School of Architecture’s late dean, John Hejduk.
Designed by Kim Shkapich
NY: THE IRWIN S. CHANIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE OF THE COOPER UNION, 2001.
104 PAGES, 7 X 10.
SOFTCOVER, $15.00
EDUCATION OF AN ARCHITECT: A Point of View
John Hejduk and Roger Canon
Thirty years later, the Cooper experience in architectural education has demonstrated that in order to deal with the issues enumerated by the critics, in order for the work to be truly of this, our modern world, it was crucial not to abandon the discipline of architecture and substitute it for either planning and engineering, or for sociology, psychology, or anthropology, or to engage in nostalgic or populist evasions. It is a tribute to the original program of the school that such popular and often legitimate concerns never weakened the fundamental faith in the possibilities of an authentic architecture for a modern humanity, simultaneously imaginative and ethical.
—Alberto Pérez-Gómez
On November 13, 1971, the exhibition Education of an Architect: A Point of View—featuring the work of Cooper Union students under the direction of the chairman of the Department of Architecture, John Hejduk, and the dean George Sadek—opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The installation of models, drawings, and photographs along with faculty and student statements, documented work from 1964 to 1971.
To accompany the exhibition, The Cooper Union published an extremely influential limited edition book—long since out of print—of 54 projects by some 60 students showing their in depth explorations of problems based on the visual discoveries of cubism and neo-plasticism as they related to architectural space and thought.
This new volume is a smaller-format reprint that includes all material from the original book—exceptional color and black-and-white drawings and model photographs—and the original introduction by Ulrich Franzen, along with two new texts, a reintroduction by architectural historian and educator Alberto Pérez-Gómez, and an essay by Kim Shkapich, director of the Architecture Archive at The Cooper Union. The reprint charts the foundations of the pedagogical inventions and methodology that a spirited and independent faculty, under the aegis of John Hejduk, brought into what has been called "the best school of architecture in the world."
Reconstructed (with additions) by Kim Shkapich based on the original design by Roger Canon.
NY: THE MONACELLI PRESS, 1999.
376 PAGES, 9 3/4 X 9
340 ILLUSTRATIONS, 20 IN COLOR.
SOFTCOVER, $50.00
EDUCATION OF AN ARCHITECT, Volume 2
Edited by John Hejduk, Elizabeth Diller, Diane Lewis, and Kim Shkapich
[This book] is a tour de force and, as such, is too much to absorb in any way but repeated visits, tours, comparisons, and readings. It has the capability of inspiring and reinspiring...mobile and accessible, it is a vehicle for ideas and a container of dreams.—Dennis L. Dollens
Demonstrating the transformation and evolution of the student works of the school from 1972 to 1985, and, as well, recording their stability, this second book documents the pedagogical intensity with respect to the study of architectural form-making. It is an extraordinary display of talent, invention, and technical virtuosity.
The first part of this volume chronologically covers the first four years of the design studio: including the Ledoux exercise, the Cartesian House, the Beam and Balance projects; the Utilitarian Object; Analysis; and the urbanism investigations of the fourth year studios.
The thesis year is organized by topic: Instruments, Orders and Projections, The City, The Institution, Outskirts, The House, Bridges, Topographies, and Texts, each punctuated by faculty essays presented as tangential thoughts.
Forewords by John Jay Iselin, Bill N. Lacy and Alan C. Green. Preface by John Hejduk, Introduction by Diane Lewis and Elizabeth Diller. Designed by Kim Shkapich.
NY: CO-PUBLISHED WITH RIZZOLI INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATIONS, INC., 1988.
352 PAGES, 9 X 12
829 ILLUSTRATIONS, 129 IN COLOR.
HARDCOVER, $55.00 SOFTCOVER, $35.00
THE ARCHITECTURE OF LITERACY:
The Carnegie Libraries of New York City
Mary B. Dierickx. Photographs by Lisa Clifford.
"The branch libraries provided amenities sadly lacking in the neighborhoods in which they were located. They offered books and periodicals in more than one language, a clean and well-lighted place for reading, programs supporting reading for adults and children, educational lectures, theater, and an educated and available staff of librarians for multi-lingual programming from their inception."—Mary B. Dierickx.
Andrew Carnegie donated five and a quarter million dollars for the construction of sixty-seven branch libraries in the New York City Library System that were built between 1901 and 1929. These libraries were conceived as a collection, with similar plans, materials, and style, and were designed by the finest architects in the U.S. and New York: McKim, Mead & White; Carrere & Hastings; James Lord Brown; Babb, Cook, & Willard; and Lord & Hewlett.
Fifty-four of these libraries are still used today, comprising over a quarter of the New York Public Library system. This publication is a historical, cultural and architectural overview of the New York City Carnegie Libraries, with photographic documentation of the extant libraries and extensive bibliographic information on Carnegie libraries.
Forewords by Rudolph W. Guiliani, John Jay Iselin, and Kenneth B. Miller. With an Introduction and overview by Mary B. Dierickx, a Catalogue of the Original New York Carnegie Libraries and an Inventory of the New York Carnegie Libraries.
NY: THE IRWIN S. CHANIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE OF THE COOPER UNION,
and THE NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF GENERAL SERVICES, 1996.
220 PAGES, 8 1/2 X 11
167 ILLUSTRATIONS.
SOFTCOVER, $35.00
TREE
Edited by Sue Ferguson Gussow
Trees celebrate life and death. Their branches flare upward in the sky attempting to offer perches to the angels and trees root down into the earth encompassing the remains of the long dead. Man cuts trees to produce his own casket. The sap of some trees gives forth a sweetness to the lips. To draw them is to taste them.—John Hejduk
The drawings in this volume are the outgrowth of the first year freehand drawing class in the School of Architecture. Professor Gussow juxtaposes these studies with citations from literature and poetry, creating a visually engaging book which is a visual testament to the senuousness of the graphite line. Published to celebrate the 125th anniversary of The Cooper Union.
Produced by The Cooper Union Center for Design & Typography, George Sadek, Director. Designed by Stuart Hicks.
NY: THE IRWIN S. CHANIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE OF THE COOPER UNION, 1985.
36 PAGES, 8 1/2 X 11
35 ILLUSTRATIONS.
SOFTCOVER $7.00
TRENTON INDUSTRIAL CORRIDOR STUDY
An old building is a piece of history. It can teach us about our past: how things were made, and what was considered important, the "look" and the "feel" of the times.—Frank Brill
Documenting a design studio project conducted by the faculty Diana Agrest, John P. Clarke, Sean Sculley, Richard Stein, Fred Travisano, and Michael Wurmfeld. Fourth-year Cooper Union students were challenged to draw on Trenton’s past in designing new uses for six old industrial sites along the canal corridor in Chambersburg.
The study shows that buildings constructed to meet the needs of a bygone era of industrial development can be adapted for new, modern roles. Black and white photographs of the site are accompanied by exquisite ink drawings of the solutions.
Funded by the National Endowment of the Arts. Introduction by John Hejduk.
Text by Frank Brill.
Designed by George and Co.
NY: THE COOPER UNION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE & ART, 1979.
28 PAGES, 11 X 8 1/2
46 ILLUSTRATIONS, 8 IN COLOR.
SPIRALBOUND, $7.00
Return to contents
JOHN HEJDUK WORKS
John Hejduk graduated from the the Cooper Union for the Adavancement of Science and Art in 1950. In 1964 he returned to the institution to teach in the School of Art and Architecture. In 1975, he became Dean of the School of Architecture, where he developed the school's renowned pedagody for the next 25 years. In Hejduk's words; " I believe in the social contract therefore I teach. I believe that the University is one of the last places that protects and preserves freedom, therefore teaching is also a socio/political act, among other things. I believe in books and the written word, therefore I fabricate works with the hope that they will be recorded in books. I am pragmatic and believe in keeping records. I believe to record is to bear witness. The book I wrote, Victims is to bear witness and to remember. I believe in the density of the sparse. I believe in place and the spirit of place."
PEWTER WINGS GOLDEN HORNS STONE VEILS:
Wedding in a Dark Plum Room
John Hejduk
Edited by Kim Shkapich
An architectural journey traversing a mental/physical landscape of architectural sites, churches, chapels, and cathedrals. The landscape was developed out of the influence of Spain on the architect. Framed in seven chapters: Crossings, Sites, Rituals, Wedding in a Dark Plum Room, Sacraments, Testaments, and Journeys; the book is scripted with water colors, ink drawings, and texts. The narrative unfolds between framed views, reading space, drawings, and texts that have formed a solid.
NY: THE MONACELLI PRESS, 1997.
304 PAGES, 200 ILLUSTRATIONS, 180 IN COLOR.
SOFTCOVER $40.00
ADJUSTING FOUNDATIONS
John Hejduk
Edited by Kim Shkapich
Hejduk’s subject is a reconcillation—between East and West, art and architecture, humans and nature. He was inspired by the revelation that not only had the Impressionists known Japanese prints, but the Cubists had also come under their influence....Neither architectural monograph nor exhibition catalog Adjusting Foundations is complete unto itself. In every sense it is a built work. Better still, it is architecture that each and every one of us can hold.—Ellen K. Popper
The renowned architect asks, "If the painter could by a single transformation take a three dimensional still life and paint it on a canvas into a natura morta, could it be possible for the architect to take the natura morta of a painting and by a single transformation build it into a still life?"
In Hejduk’s rich series of watercolor paintings, each one is cubist in spirit, an assemblage and celebration of color and form. These explorations produced sixty-one projects, including serpentine structures, secret spaces, houses constructed of horizontal and vertical mazes. Cemetery for the Ashes of the Still Life Painters, the Suspended Punctured Roof.
Designed by Kim Shkapich, received a 1996 International Architecture Book Award from the American Institute of Architects.
NY: THE MONACELLI PRESS, 1995.
224 PAGES,
190 ILLUSTRATIONS, 150 IN COLOR.
SOFTCOVER, OUT-OF-PRINT.
ARCHITECTURES IN LOVE
John Hejduk
Edited by Kim Shkapich
A reproduction of one of the architect’s personal sketchbooks this beautiful volume contains fifty-two drawings and collages that explore the passage of time and the possibility of a tender architecture. The thoughts and drawings in this book were made in the month of January, 1994, Hejduk explains, I wanted to make two architectures in love . . . to have architectural intercourse on every level...chromosomic exchange.
The drawings are explained in his essay Sketchbook Notes, and Still Life/Dead Nature elucidates his thoughts about space.
NY: RIZZOLI INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATIONS, INC., 1995.
72 PAGES, 7 X 9 1/2
52 COLOR ILLUSTRATIONS.
HARDCOVER, $25.00
SECURITY
John Hejduk
Edited by Astri Than
John Hejduk is spiritually the most building human being I have ever met. His every thought, his entire poetic world, is expressed with the precision of the working drawing.—Sverre Fehn
Published to document the 1989 construction of John Hejduk's 'Security,' (a structure from Victims, designed for the city of Berlin) by a group of architects, teachers and a student class of the Oslo School of Architecture within Christiania Square, Oslo’s first city square of 1630. At that time it was the city’s center, surrounded by the city hall, hospital, and cathedral. To the southwest is Akerhus fortress which dates to the early thirteen hundreds, that became the headquarters of the Nazis during the German occupation from 1940 to 1945. This history made the site an apt locus for Security’s many conceptual layers.
This bilingual edition featuring essays by Sverre Fehn and Astri Than, with poems by David Shapiro. Photographic essays by Annette Faltin and Hélène Binet. Designed by Terje Langeggen/Krasis, Oslo.
OSLO: AVENTURA FORLAG, 1995.
96 PAGES, 7 X 10 1/2
39 ILLUSTRATIONS.
HARDCOVER, ONLY 10 COPIES FOR SALE. $65.00
BERLIN NIGHT
John Hejduk
Hejduk leads us into the space of amazement and imagination–the chora of poetic thought, the liminal space of the feast and the game.—Wim van den Bergh
For an American architect John Hejduk's architecture is a world of history, emotions, practical ingenuity and visions of the future. In his view, new buildings too must be the bearers of inspiration and narratives. He gives voice to this contention with extensive explorations and peerless sign language. The essay with which the publication opens, by the dutch architect Wim van den Bergh, indicates how Hejduk's work leads to the essence of architecture.
Published to coincide with the opening of the new building of the Netherlands Architecture Institute. The exhibition Verschoven Fundamenten/Adjusting Foundations, The Work of John Hejduk, Architect was opened on this occassion, among others.
Designed by Piet Gerards bno, Heerlen.
ROTTERDAM: NAI UITGEVERS/PUBLISHERS, 1993.
60 PAGES, 7 3/8 X 9 3/4
30 ILLUSTRATIONS, 28 IN COLOR.
SPIRALBOUND IN BLIND STAMPED HARD BOARDS, ONLY 10 COPIES FOR SALE. $50.00
SOUNDINGS
John Hejduk
Edited by Kim Shkapich
Stark, astringent, and stunning—filled with vivid forms and sensous language—Soundings is an examination of architecture’s naked heart from a visionary in the practice. By sounding the depths, uttering or interpreting, Hejduk takes a radical look at the nature and purpose of architecture, showing how every component of the built world derives from our most rudimentary understanding of shapes, matter, movement, and stillness. The architect explores the concepts behind seventy-three projects for a wide range of building programs, produced since 1990, including the Library for Books on Heaven and Hell and the Institute for Perspective Investigations. The reader is asked to associate ideas and images, attaching and detaching forms to concepts in the service of the architectural process and we’re reminded how architecture is not merely a technical, self-contained trade but a mode of expression intimately linked to our deepest desires, ambitions, anxieties and fears. This volume completes Hejduk’s trilogy.
Designed by Kim Shkapich.
NY: RIZZOLI INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATIONS, INC., 1993.
400 PAGES, 9 X 12
540 ILLUSTRATIONS.
HARDCOVER, $50.00
AESOP'S FABLES
Joseph Jacobs. Illustrations by John Hejduk
The Frogs were living as happy as could be in a marshy swamp that just suited them. They went splashing about caring for nobody and nobody troubling with them. But some of them thought that this was not right, and they should have a king.—Joseph Jacobs
Including such fables as The Frogs Who Desired a King, The Fox and the Cat, The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, and The Hare and the Tortoise, this collection of Aesop’s Fables features 29 full-color illustrations by John Hejduk. These vibrant tempura illustrations, painted in 1947 while Hejduk was a student at The School of Architecture of The Cooper Union, beautifully complement 14 of Aesop’s timeless fables and are presented here in full-color in a hardcover edition by Rizzoli.
NY: RIZZOLI INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATIONS INC., 1991.
32 PAGES, 9 1/2 X 9 1/2.
29 ILLUSTRATIONS, ALL IN COLOR.
HARDCOVER, $25.00
PRÁCE (PRACTICE)
John Hejduk
Published and produced in Czechoslovakia in conjunction with the dedication of his structures 'House of the Suicide' and 'House of the Mother of the Suicide' in the Prague Castle Royal Gardens and two exhibitions: John Hejduk, Practice and Relatives, photographs by Hélène Binet from September 6 to October 20, 1991. This bilingual book contains selections from projects previously published in other sources: Wall House 1, Victims, Reflections of the Silent Witness.
This book is a strange hybrid of content and design, for the serious collector of Hejduk’s books.
PRAGUE: THE COOPER UNION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE & ART
AND OBEC ARCHITEKTÜ, 1991.
58 PAGES, 8 1/4 X 10
52 ILLUSTRATIONS.
SOFTCOVER, $7.00
THE RIGA PROJECT
John Hejduk
These two structures belong to the complementary side of the role of architecture, the one that we always forgot: to shelter our dreams and the mystery of our presence here.—Meton Gadelha
Published to document the 1987 construction of John Hejduk’s "Object/Subject" structures by the Department of Architectural Studies at the University of the Arts; "the first actual building based on the architect’s then unpublished book, Vladivostok; the first of the architects special projects to be built in the United States; and all of this happening in the center of Haviland Hall, an early 19th century building, itself conceived as utopian architecture." This book contains the architect’s preparatory drawings for the two structures, and documents their construction in a timeline format. The opening night performance Crooked Lightning by Connie Beckley, and The Fall of Guilt, a response to the project conceived and choreographed by faculty and students from the School of Dance are included.
Foreword by Eleni Cocordas, essays by Meton Gadelha and Larry Mitnick. Poetry by David Shapiro. A haunting photographic essay by Hélène Binet documents their stark presence.
PHILADELPHIA: THE UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS, 1989.
40 PAGES, 9 X 12
63 ILLUSTRATIONS.
SOFTCOVER, $20.00
VLADIVOSTOK
John Hejduk
Edited by Kim Shkapich
Designed as a dictionary to read the architectural drawings that track a ten-year eastern journey from Venice and Berlin to Prague; from Riga, Lake Baikal, to Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan, this is the second volume of John Hejduk’s trilogy.
The reader is introduced to the cast of iconographic sketches named in english and in russian. These icons identify the architectural subject within the frame of the drawing in order of appearance. A text introduces each structure within the masque of the book, incorporating fiction, expository writings, descriptive prose, and poetry, until text runs out and the icons become words.
These projects are a new a approach to urban form—an intensive investigation of programs that are a catalyst for an architecture deeply concerned with the metaphysics of objects and subjects, and their associations with a place.
The projects include designs for such structures as The Museum for the Preservation of Icons, Buildings of the Informers, The Ministry of Culture, among others.
Designed by Kim Shkapich, this volume received the Golden Letter and Medal for The Best Designed Book in the World from the Leipzig Stiftung Buchkunst, Germany.
NY: RIZZOLI INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATIONS, INC., 1989.
272 PAGES, 9 X 12
250 ILLUSTRATIONS, 100 IN COLOR.
HARDCOVER, OUT-OF-PRINT.
BOVISA
John Hejduk
Edited by José Raphael Moneo
Published in connection with an exhibition of work by John Hejduk, the Eliot Noyes Visiting Professor of Architecture, at the Gund Hall Gallery, Harvard University in the Fall of 1987. Introduction by José Raphael Moneo. Designed by John O’Connor.
NY: RIZZOLI INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATIONS, INC.,
AND HARVARD UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN, 1987.
126 PAGES, 11 X 17
60 ILLUSTRATIONS, 9 IN COLOR.
SOFTCOVER, $25.00
MASK OF MEDUSA
John Hejduk
Edited by Kim Shkapich
The first major book of the architect is an encyclopeadia of his works between 1947–83, framed in time. Hejduk’s work and thought is introduced by the voices of the first section; interviews with Don Wall and Peter Eisenman, essays by Franz Oswald and Richard Pommer, and excerpts from literature that have informed his work—in counterpoint—to the voice of the architect over time. Hejduk’s texts written at the time of the projects, and those written contemporanous to the production of the book, looking back, harmonize with his prose pieces and poems, revealing a body of work and methodological thought.
One crosses over on pages 158 through 160, as table of content and index to the second section which chronologizes eighty-two projects in hundreds of drawings, among them the Texas and Diamond Houses, the Wall Houses, the Italian projects and the early masques.
Constructed to be read at random, or chapter by chapter as a linear account, the reader can always locate oneself in time to the architect’s work.
Introductions 1984 & 1978 by Daniel Libeskind.
Designed by Lorraine Wild.
NY: RIZZOLI INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATIONS, INC., 1985.
480 PAGES, 9 X 12
816 ILLUSTRATIONS, 109 IN COLOR.
OUT-OF-PRINT.
FABRICATIONS
John Hejduk
A collection of twelve Wall House projects by architect John Hejduk printed in color on eight by ten inch cardstock in a paper portfolio. Limited to an edition of 1000, was funded by the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, and continues the "tradition of commitment to search for new relationships of forms—in our opinion the only possible, as well as necessary role of a school of architecture."
NY: THE COOPER UNION SCHOOL OF ART & ARCHITECTURE, 1974.
7 1/2 X 10
12 COLOR ILLUSTRATIONS.
IN PAPER PORTFOLIO, $25.00
THREE PROJECTS
John Hejduk
In his introduction George Sadek writes, "The Diamond Thesis by Professor Hejduk is both creative and analytical. It imples new points of view in architectural space. It delineates with clarity the frontal facet of isometric projection in the two-dimensional space of the picture plane of the drawings. This didactic aspect of the Thesis has challenged the students who in turn have advocated its publication.
Persons, places, and particular times act as provoking forces upon a work. Ideas do act as that substance which holds a work together and makes it evolve. After the ochre light of Rome (Fulbright, 1953) the sharp intensity of heat and light in the Southwest made for precision. The Diamond genesis was somehow already inherent in that sparse landscape. Through the argumentation and associations of Colin Rowe, Bernhard Hoesli, and Robert Slutzky, during their stay at the University of Texas, architectural positions, form positions, and spatial positions began to develop. The dialogue of persons and places continued during Professor Hejduk's years at Cornell and at Yale and found its final position at Cooper Union. The idea has come full circle."
This portfolio contains Hedjuk’s Diamond Houses A and B, as well as the Diamond Museum that were exhibited in the gallery of the Architectural League in November 1967. The Diamond in Painting and Architecture was a radical exhibition and included paintings of the same theme by Robert Slutzky.
Introduction by George Sadek. Designed by Galen Harley.
NY: THE COOPER UNION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE & ART
IN COOPERATION WITH THE GRAHAM FOUNDATION FOR ADVANCED STUDIES IN THE FINE ARTS
AND THE ARCHITECTURAL LEAGUE OF NEW YORK,
1969.
35 PLATES, 18 X 18
24 ILLUSTRATIONS, 2 IN COLOR.
HOUSED IN VACUUM FORMED STYRENE BOXES
OUT-OF-PRINT.
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06. FACULTY
Administration
Anthony Vidler, Dean
Elizabeth O'Donnell, Associate Dean
Monica Shapiro, Administrative Associate
Pat De Angelis, Secretary
Steven Hillyer, Director, Architecture Archive
Gina Pollara, Associate, Architecture Archive
Kevin Lippert, Coordinator of Computer Instruction and Technology
Full-Time Faculty, Professors
Peter D. Eisenman, Irwin S. Chanin Distinguished Professor (leave of absence)
Sue Ferguson Gussow, Professor Emerita
Diane H. Lewis
Ricardo Scofidio
Ysrael A. Seinuk
Anthony Vidler
Proportional-Time Faculty, Professors
Diana Agrest
Kevin Bone
Anthony Candido
David Gersten
Roderick Knox
Sean Sculley
Lebbeus Woods
Guido Zuliani
Proportional-Time Faculty, Associate Professors
Tamar Zinguer
Adjunct and Visiting Faculty
Samuel Anderson
Bennett Carlin
Fred Chomowicz
William Clark
Manuel DeLanda
MariaElena Fanna
Louis Katsos
Jennifer Lee
Thomas Leeser
Jana Leo de Blas
Erik L'Heureux
Kevin Lippert
Pablo Lorenzo–Eiroa
Elizabeth O'Donnell
Ahmad Rahimian
Ashok Raiji
Anne Romme
Stephen Rustow
Peter Schubert
Catherine Seavitt–Nordenson
D. Grahame Shane
David Shapiro
Daniel Sherer
Richard Stapleford
Anthony Titus
Andrew Tripp
David Turnbull
Nanako Umemoto
Mersiha Veledar
Joan Waltemath
Georg Windeck
Suzan Wines
Michael Young
Robert Gwathmey Chair in Architecture and Art
Peter Eisenman, Spring '00
Norman Bryson, Spring '99
Robert Gwathmey Chair in Art and Architecture
Hans Haacke, Fall '02
Vito Acconci, Spring '02
Maya Lin, Fall '00
Victor Burgin, Spring '00
Bill T. Jones, Spring '99
Recent Faculty
Anders Abraham
Raimund Abraham
Donald Bates
Walter Bishop
Mark Campbell
George Chaikin
Peter Davidson
Rachel Doherty
Yuval Gluska
Remo Guideri
Janis Hall
Bradley Horn
Rodolfo Imas
Gareth James
Christopher Janney
Kevin Kennon
Mark Kroeckel
Jason Lee
Jonas Mekas
Dario Nunez
Maria Oliver
Christopher Otterbine
Dwane Oyler
Lyn Rice
Lindy Roy
Andrew Saunders
Galia Solomonoff
Linda Taalman
Tom Weaver
Regi Weile
Michael Webb
Dan Wood
Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon and
Other Visiting Professors of recent years
Weil Arets
John Ashbery
Manuel Baez
Norman Bryson
Sverre Fehn
Jay Fellows
Robert Freeman
John Hawkes
Josef Paul Kleihues
Bruce McM. Wright
James Merrill
Don Metz
Francesco Pellizzi
Gaetano Pesce
John Rajchman
George Ranalli
Aldo Rossi
Joseph Rykwert
Antonio Sanmartin
Jurgen Sawade
Massimo Scolari
Bernhard Strecker
Bernard Tschumi
Hans Tupker
Wim van den Bergh
Return to contents
07. DEGREE REQUIREMENTS
Academic requirements for a Bachelor of Architecture Degree can be obtained by clicking here.
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08. APPLICATION
First year and transfer applicants to the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture must submit preliminary applications, along with their nonrefundable application fees, no later than January 1 of the year they plan to attend.
After the preliminary application deadline, the Office of Admissions sends first-year applicants a home test intended to gauge innate talent, drawing ability and potential for academic success. The test comprises drawing and conceptual problems, and because its intent is to demonstrate talent, it is not possible to study for it. Applicants complete the test at home. Although this test is the most important factor in the admissions process, applicants also are required to submit transcripts, SAT I scores and other academic records.
Transfer applicants are required to submit a portfolio of creative work and to complete the home test, in addition to submitting other materials. Transfer applicants include those who have completed at least one year of architectural study at an accredited program by June of the year in which they are applying, students who have a bachelor's degree in another discipline, or those who have started studies in a field related to architecture.
Portfolios may present creative work in any field, including architecture, design, photography, sculpture and original prose or poetry. There are no restrictions on the amount or types of work a student can submit. An offer of admission to a transfer applicant includes placement into a particular year of the five-year design sequence. Students should not assume that all of their previous academic credits will transfer.
The high number of applicants to the school makes it impossible to schedule individual interviews. It is possible to visit the school on a tour of the studios with an Architecture student. The School's admission process is highly selective. Each year, 30 to 40 freshman applicants and 10 to 20 transfer applicants are offered admission. Competition is keen. Students are encouraged to apply, however, and successful applicants will find their time at Cooper unique, challenging and rewarding.
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09. CAREER SERVICES
Cooper Union's Office of Career Services provides counselling and placement services for graduates from the School of Architecture.
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