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ARCHITECTURES OF TRANSITION
Raymond Craib — Libertarian Noir: Exit Strategies and New Enclosures (1960 to the Present)
Tuesday, February 28
315F and Zoom | 12:00PM
This event is free and open to the public through Zoom. Please register in advance here.
In the aftermath of World War II, decolonization and the cold war wrought dramatic geopolitical changes around the globe. In the US, battles were waged over the meaning of ideals such as democracy, equality, and freedom, often pitting those who believed in individual liberty and social equality as mutually reinforcing aspirations against those who prioritized liberty and believed equality would follow. In the midst of such struggles, some individuals concerned with protecting their wealth, their safety, and their freedom from what they perceived to be an encroaching state and a threatening rabble, sought to exit the nation-states to which they belonged and to establish their own independent, sovereign, and private countries on ocean and island spaces. Rarely successful, they nevertheless established a precedent for today’s current exit advocates—from seasteaders to advocates for free private cities, from Milton Friedman’s grandson Patri to anarcho-capitalist architect Patrik Schumacher—who aspire to new forms of colonization and enclosure in the midst of proliferating political and climate crises.
The presentation will be followed by a conversation moderated by Elisa Iturbe.
Raymond Craib is Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Duke University Press, 2004); The Cry of the Renegade: Politics and Poetry in Interwar Chile (Oxford University Press, 2017); and most recently Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age (PM Press/Spectre, 2022).
The in-person lecture is open to current Cooper Union students, faculty, and staff.
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CURRENT WORK
raumlaborberlin: Working on Common Ground
Wednesday, March 1
Zoom | 12:00PM
Founded ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, raumlaborberlin is an experimental collective working at the intersection of architecture, urban planning, art, and education. Though the collective’s nine members share a background in architecture, they resist simple categorization: They are self-avowed artists, performers, researchers, inventors, curators, and teachers. Eager to expand the definition of architectural practice, the collective—whose name means “space laboratory”—maintains a critical stance towards dominant modes of production, focusing instead on provocative participatory activations of urban space.
The lecture will be presented by Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius and Jan Liesegang.
Recent projects include:
- [Working on] Common Ground, a 100-day learning laboratory in a former brick factory in Kosovo’s capital city
- Floating University Berlin, an experiment in collective learning housed in a temporary structure floating in a Berlin rainwater basin
- Allmänna Badet / Bathing Culture, a public sauna built above the harbor of a deindustrializing Swedish port city.
raumlaborberlin won the Golden Lion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale and the 2018 Global Award for Sustainable Architecture.
This program will be moderated by Mark Wigley. Wigley is a professor of architecture and dean emeritus of Columbia University GSAPP. He received his BArch and PhD from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
This event is free and open to the public through Zoom. Please register here.
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EXHIBITION
Demolished Manhattan Hotels
February 10 through March 2
Third Floor Hallway Gallery | 5:00PM
This exhibition features postcards selected from the Architecture Archive’s Joseph Covino New York City Postcard Collection. Dating from the late 19th to mid-20th century, the collection is among the largest documenting New York City’s built environment and infrastructure. Its nearly 3,800 postcards were donated to the Architecture Archive between 1999 and 2003 by Joseph Covino, an avid postcard collector.
Originally presented in 2009 by Barb Choit, the Archive’s collections assistant from 2007 – 2010, the postcards shown here depict Manhattan hotels—from the Astor House to the Hotel Piccadilly—that were built and demolished over the course of more than 120 years. Presented chronologically by their construction date, these buildings now exist only as images.
Indeed, many of the collection’s postcards document no-longer-extant buildings, interiors, businesses, and public spaces. They record a city in constant flux, capturing several decades of urban development across all five boroughs, from the city’s piers, airports, subways, and armories to its public parks, aquariums, monuments, and libraries. Some subjects, including hotels, restaurants, and museums, as well as Coney Island and the 1939 World’s Fair, are extensively documented, attesting to the diverse commercial and public interests that shaped both the subjects depicted and the medium of the postcard itself. In addition to recording the city’s evolving physical form, the postcards are also commercial artifacts marking the rise of consumer culture, the growth of middle-class tourism, and the development of publishing technologies that fostered their widespread distribution and explosion in popularity during the first decades of the 20th century.
Open to Cooper Union students, faculty, and staff.
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EXHIBITION
Confronting Carbon Form
March 21 through April 16
Arthur A. Houghton Gallery | 6:30PM
A new spatial order was born in the fossil fuel age: new building typologies and urban archetypes emerged to meet the demands of a new economy while unprecedented mobility fundamentally changed human perception of space. From the steam engine onward, these architectural and urban configurations—which could be referred to as carbon form—have enmeshed the cultural, economic, and political aspects of social life within an energy-intensive network of space and form. They are also the spatial roots of the climate crisis.
This exhibition is dedicated to the study of carbon form. Central to this work is the premise that the spatial building blocks of an extractive economy remain unchallenged, despite permutations in architectural discourse over the past two centuries, and despite advancements in building technology. The proliferation of carbon form continues unabated, revealing that at the core of the climate crisis, there is a spatial problem.
Confronting Carbon Form repositions architecture’s relationship to energy within a spatial and formal discourse, arguing that alternatives will remain unlikely until we better understand the nature of carbon form and how it came into being. As such, the exhibition looks to history and precedent to confront the urban archetypes, building typologies, and spatial concepts that must now be supplanted and transformed, an undertaking that is just as important for understanding architecture’s complicity in the climate crisis as it is for locating fruitful terrain for climate action.
Curated by Elisa Iturbe, Stanley Cho, and Alican Taylan.
Opening reception: Tuesday, March 21, 6:30 pm
Exhibition hours: Monday – Sunday, 12 pm – 7 pm
This exhibition is free and open to the public.
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CATALOG RELEASE
Log 56: The Model Behavior Exhibition
Fall 2022
This special issue is the cataLog for “Model Behavior,” a group exhibition of models, architectural and otherwise, curated by the Anyone Corporation and presented by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, in New York City. The exhibition, which ran October 4–November 18, 2022, questioned the role of the model in projecting or eliciting social behavior. In addition to documenting the 55 exhibited works with four-color images and project descriptions, the 160-page cataLogincludes essays by curator Cynthia Davidson; by architecture theorists Jörg H. Gleiter, Kiel Moe, and Christophe Van Gerrewey; and by art historian Annabel Jane Wharton.
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VIDEO ARCHIVE
Watch Our Public Lectures and Events Anytime
Vimeo | On Demand
The School of Architecture records, archives and publishes videos of public programs to open access and accommodate asynchronous learning and research for audiences in different time zones. You may visit our Vimeo channel for access to all our video content.
You may also use Cooper website's search bar to look for a particular lecture title or a lecturer's name to find embedded videos of their events with us, if any are available, along with other pertinent event and bio information.
If you recently missed a lecture or event you wanted to see, make sure to check out the Fall 2021 and the Spring 2022 Lecture and Events Lists. Links to earlier semester event lists are found at the bottom of their respective event pages.
Our public programs are free and recorded for access anytime.
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Michael Young, Arch fac | Speaker | Book Talk: Geo-Conversations: Nature and Technology in Architecture, Center for Architecture, February 15, 2023, NYC
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Lydia Kallipoliti, Arch fac | Lecture | "Our Dirty Footprint," Church Memorial Lecture, School of Architecture, University of Tenessee, Knoxville, February 6, 2023 | Participant | "The Metabolic Sublime," Medialab Matadero, Department of Culture, Tourism and Sports, Madrid City Council (Online) February 10, 2023 |
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Daniel Libeskind AR’70 | Article | “Daniel Libeskind First Architect Awarded the Dresden International Peace Prize,” ARCHITECTURAL RECORD, February 6, 2023
Diane Lewis AR’76 | Group Exhibition | CONCEIVING THE PLAN: NUANCE AND INTIMACY IN CIVIC SPACE, Mana Contemporary, January 28-February 2023, Jersey City, NJ
Maurice Cox AR’83 | Speaker | City Club of Chicago, February 7, 2023, Chicago, IL
Shigeru Ban AR’84 | Article | “Tokyo’s Public Restroom Success Story,” SURFACE magazine, February 6, 2023 | Lecture | Shigeru Ban: Timber in Architecture, Japan Society, February 27, 2023, NYC | Article | “Shigeru Ban Is Unimpressed by the Mass-Timber Boom,” METROPOLIS, February 6, 2023
Peter Lynch AR’84 | Group Exhibition | CONCEIVING THE PLAN: NUANCE AND INTIMACY IN CIVIC SPACE, Mana Contemporary, January 28-February 2023, Jersey City, NJ
Holger Kleine AR’90 | Group Exhibition | CONCEIVING THE PLAN: NUANCE AND INTIMACY IN CIVIC SPACE, Mana Contemporary, January 28-February 2023, Jersey City, NJ
Catherine Seavitt Nordenson AR’94 | Speaker | Meadows Symposium: Transgressive Practices to Transformative Policies, The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, February 24, 2023, Austin, TX
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Elizabeth Graziolo AR’95 | Article | “Foster forward-thinking collaboration with architect Elizabeth Graziolo on 'Guests and Gusto',” Savannah College of Art and Design, February 22, 2023, online
Vladimir Belogolovsky AR’96 | Exhibition Lecture | Harry Seidler: Painting Toward Architecture, National University of Singapore, February 16, 2023, Singapore
Sotirios Kotoulas AR’03 | Participant | 23W Artist-in-Residence: Sotirios Kotoulas, Dartmouth College, Spring 2023 | Group Exhibition | CONCEIVING THE PLAN: NUANCE AND INTIMACY IN CIVIC SPACE, Mana Contemporary, January 28-February 2023, Jersey City, NJ
Mersiha Veledar AR’03/Arch fac | Group Exhibition | CONCEIVING THE PLAN: NUANCE AND INTIMACY IN CIVIC SPACE, Mana Contemporary, January 28-February 2023, Jersey City, NJ
Laila Seewang AR’05 | Group Exhibition | CONCEIVING THE PLAN: NUANCE AND INTIMACY IN CIVIC SPACE, Mana Contemporary, January 28-February 2023, Jersey City, NJ
Uri Wegman AR’08 | Group Exhibition | CONCEIVING THE PLAN: NUANCE AND INTIMACY IN CIVIC SPACE, Mana Contemporary, January 28-February 2023, Jersey City, NJ
Yael Hameiri Sainsaux AR’10 | Curator | CONCEIVING THE PLAN: NUANCE AND INTIMACY IN CIVIC SPACE, Mana Contemporary, January 28-February 2023, Jersey City, NJ
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Open Calls & Opportunities |
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NEW
CALL FOR APPLICANTS
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
DEADLINES APPROACHING
CALL FOR APPLICANTS
STUDENT DISCOUNT
AZURE Magazine For a limited-time only, students can receive a one-year subscription for just $25 — that’s 58% off the cover price!. Deadline: February 24
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
AZ Awards is Azure's international design competition recognizing the world's best projects, products and ideas. Deadline: February 24
CALL FOR APPLICATIONS
CALL FOR FELLOWS
JAE Fellowship supports one year of scholarship for architectural educators who self-identify as Black, Native/Indigenous, and/or as members of groups that are and have been historically and systematically marginalized and excluded. Deadline: March 1
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ONGOING
CALL FOR APPLICATIONS
Wortham Fellowship Program gives promising and outstanding candidates the opportunity to teach and conduct research. Deadline: March 10
CALL FOR STUDENT SUBMISSIONS
Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale University: Rothko Sukkah Design Competition would like to commission a student Sukkah design (a temporary dwelling used for the Sukkot Holiday) for their building. Deadline: April 1
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
SUNY ESF Challenge: Mass Timber Construction The competition seeks leading students to develop and apply new concepts and strategies to develop a mass timber design which incorporates innovative fabrication and assembly methods. Deadline: May 12
CALL FOR APPLICATIONS
CALL FOR WRITING
Write for Urban Omnibus! Shaped by a wide range of contributors In an effort to advance the collective work of city making, Urban Omnibus calls for students and professionals to submit article proposals. Deadline: Ongoing
FREE GROCERIES
The College Student Pantry welcomes all college students in need of groceries. Open first and third Wednesdays from 3-5pm. Stop by 602 E 9th St in the East Village (corner of Ave B) for a free bag of groceries. Ongoing: 1st and 3rd Wednesdays at 3PM.
CALL FOR ALLIES
CALL FOR SUPPORT
Mophradat: Support the Arts in Beirut Prioritizing those already disadvantaged, and those who influence the community around them in a thoughtful manner, Mophradat offers resources to artists, visual thinkers and architects. Deadline: Rolling
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