Today's fertile atmosphere provides a novel condition for the specific relationship between Architects and Structural Engineers as both try, breathlessly, to keep up with the pace of change driven by technological advancement, economic and ecological challenges. The combination of the brute forces of computation and intuition have encouraged new innovations in processes and methods of design allowing a freer movement between disciplines and binding design as well as fabrication and construction more coherently. Professor Kara will try to share the impact of these expanded opportunities through a series of built projects .The presentation will show examples of "design research" that can be realized as projects from the use of new materials through to bespoke computation and inversion of the most familiar processes that have been routinized at the expense of creativity and innovation. The presentation will speculate about the need to banish the perception of the polarizing characterization of the Architect and Engineer that is prevalent in practice, by adapting a new behavior of interaction, deep appreciation of the design disciplines that the presenter has labelled as "The Pink Noise Of Design Engineering"

Hanif Kara is a London-based structural engineer and Professor of Architectural Technology at Harvard GSD. Since co-founding Adams Kara Taylor (now AKT II), his particular 'design-led' approach and interest in innovative forms, material uses and complex analysis methods have allowed him to work on unique, award-winning projects with leading designers. The practice has won over 300 design awards.

This lecture is sponsored by The Ornamental Metal Institute of New York with support from The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture and The Albert Nerken School of Engineering. 

This event is free and open to the public. CEU and PDH Credit is Pending.  

The exhibition  Hélène Binet - John Hejduk Works will present seven of Hejduk's built works as photographed by Hélène Binet, a renowned London-based photographer who was Hejduk's photographer of record. Binet's photographs of both permanent and temporary structures will be presented, including the Berlin Tower, Wall House 2, The Collapse of Time, Security and Object/Subject. The exhibition will also include a chronology of the numerous realizations of Hejduk's design for the Jan Palach Memorial, which was permanently installed in Prague in 2016. Comprised of two structures - House of the Suicide and House of the Mother of the Suicide - this work honors the Czech activist and dissident Jan Palach, whose self-immolation in protest of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 served as a galvanizing force against the communist government then in power.

As a companion to the interior installation, the School of Architecture will install  the  Jan Palach Memorial on the plaza outside The Cooper Union's Foundation Building. These structures, first constructed at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta in 1990, represent an architectural manifestation of a powerful socio-political act, the ultimate personal sacrifice at a critical moment in the ongoing global struggle for individual freedom against autocracy and centralized control.

This exhibition is free and open to the public.