VISITING LECTURE

Shannon Mattern: Arboreal Media

Tuesday, October 10

315F and Zoom | 6:30PM

Trees commonly serve as proxies for progress. We count and map them to track climate health and social justice. Their transformation into datafied and computationally fabricated objects offers the promise of more efficient and sustainable construction and communication. But trees — in their organic, knotty, networked forms — also embody different ways of knowing: they encode deep histories, serve as media for material expression, scaffold broad systems of ecological exchange. This talk examines these branching forms of arboreal intelligence.

Shannon Mattern is the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies at Art History at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2004 to 2022, she served in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York. Her writing and teaching focus on media architectures and infrastructures and spatial epistemologies. She has written books about libraries, maps, and urban intelligence; she serves as president of the board of the Metropolitan New York Library Council; and she contributes a column about urban data and mediated spaces to Places Journal. You can find her at wordsinspace.net. 

For Zoom attendance, please register in advance here.

The in-person event is open to current Cooper Union Students, Faculty, and Staff only. The Public may attend this event through Zoom.

EXHIBITION

Sue Ferguson Gussow: Retrospective

Thursday, October 12 through Friday, November 17

Arthur A. Houghton Gallery | Opening at 6:30PM

This fall The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture celebrates the work of Sue Ferguson Gussow, a figurative painter, faculty member, and 1956 School of Art graduate. Gussow has been teaching at Cooper since 1970, and in the School of Architecture since 1975, when then dean John Hejduk asked her to teach architecture students freehand drawing, particularly from the figure, skills Hejduk felt they lacked at the time. Gussow developed her approach to teaching architects how to draw over decades, and in 1981 became the first woman appointed as a full-time faculty member in the School of Architecture. She has been Professor Emerita since 2003.

The eighty-six works in the exhibition, most of them figurative, span from 1955 when Gussow was a Cooper art student to works completed in 2023. Her subjects range from family members, friends, colleagues, and former students to dresses, dolls, and floral studies. Each work holds an underlying narrative that not only captures a subject’s likeness, but also their essence or spirit.

Opening Reception on Thursday, October 12 at 6:30 PM.

Free and open to the public.

EXHIBITION

First Edition: ARCH 205.22 in Process

Wednesday, October 4 through Friday, October 27

Third Floor Hallway Gallery | 6:30PM

The analog/digital dichotomy is perpetuated by nostalgic narratives and technological fetishism, when in fact there are a multitude of tools, machines, and techniques between these two modes of production. First Edition, a course taught by Owen Nichols and Clara Syme, focuses on printmaking as a method for constructing architectural images that evades these two deceptively neat categories. The exhibition First Edition: ARCH 205.22 in Process presents student work from the course, specifically from its first two assignments.

A guiding principle for the semester is that the construction of images is integral to the design process. The course examines primary visual sources in the form of architectural prints, drawings, and hybrid media. Students are performing close readings of images—discerning the techniques, tools, and materials used in the construction of the works—while developing an understanding of the context in which they were produced. Simultaneously, students are working on their own representational projects in the printmaking studio, providing an opportunity to explore concepts through the production of a series of prints.

Gallery Remarks on Thursday, October 26 at 6:30 PM.

Open to current Cooper Union students, faculty and staff.

BOOK TALK

Peter Trummer: The City as a Technical Being

Wednesday, October 25

Library Atrium and Zoom | 12:00PM

The city is our largest artifact on this planet. Throughout its history it has spawned many new kinds of buildings, including the theater, the opera house, the museum, the bazaar, the shopping mall, the high-rise tower, and most recently, buildings like the pencil tower or the village on the roof of a shopping mall. How does the city affect the mode of existence of all these successively new buildings? This question typically has been answered in the discipline of architecture and urban design by looking to social and economic forces or a priori archetypes, understanding these as what give rise to all new urban objects. This lecture attempts to reverse that convention, arguing for the inner qualities of the city itself as that through which all its forms and functions come into existence.

Underscoring the argument that there is no direct or certain correlation between form and function leading to new urban building types, the book depicts the city throughout history as the site of fusion of the qualities of urban objects, or buildings, which ultimately gives rise to new kinds of architecture.

For Zoom attendance, please register in advance here.

The in-person event is open to current Cooper Union Students, Faculty, and Staff only. The Public may attend this event through Zoom.

ARCHLOG

Bridging the Megacity: Cooper at the Seoul Biennial

Posted on September 8

The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture is thrilled to announce its participation in the 4th Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism in Seoul, South Korea. Work by twelve current thesis students from their spring 2023 Design IV studio section with Associate Professor Adjunct Nima Javidi is now on view from September 1 – October 31 in the Biennale’s Global Studios exhibition. The students who participated in the studio and whose work is being exhibited are Jihoo Ahn, Razaq Alabdulmughni, Jaemin Baek, Laela Baker, Aerin Chavez, Ji Yong Chung, Martina Duque Gonzalez, Alex Han, Annie He, Jiwon Heo, Rebecca John, and Xinyuan Zhang.

Using Seoul and its unique geological condition as a starting point, the studio considered multilayered mat structures that can accommodate, through their thickness and crust, the passage and continuity of waterways, windways, and human inhabitation. This reading of infrastructure, because it operates at both human and ecological scales, informed design approaches that afford ecological continuities while allowing human settlement as an overlay. The resulting mat generated from different rhythms of structure, access, and ecological flow required reworking and montage with the edges of the bridge to create a seamless and meaningful connection with urbanity on each side of the river. 

VIDEO ARCHIVE

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