David Gersten
Distinguished Professor Adjunct
David Gersten is an architect, writer and educator based in New York City. He has been a Professor in The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union, since 1991, where he has served as Associate Dean under Dean John Hejduk and Acting Dean of the School of Architecture. He has taught studios and seminars at every level of the School’s five-year program, as well as a series of seminars titled 'The House of Poetry' in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. He has held the Ellen and Sidney Feltman Chair and is a former Chairman of the School’s Administrative, Curriculum and Admissions Committees. Professor Gersten currently heads Architectonics, the first-year Design Studio and teaches an Advanced Concepts seminars entitled; ‘A Material Imagination of the Social Contract’
Professor Gersten has been a visiting professor in the U.S. and abroad at: City University of New York; Rhode Island School of Design (RISD); Universidad Politecnica de Valencia in Spain; Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark; Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar and Universidad Privada de Santa Cruz in Bolivia; and Universidad Catolica de Cordoba in Argentina. He is currently a visiting professor in the Graduate Studies division at RISD teaching seminars and studios across sixteen Masters of Fine Arts, Design and Architecture departments. He regularly teaches workshops and lectures in academic and cultural institutions though-out the world, including: The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, (Denmark), McGill University (Canada), Cranbrook Academy of Art, Harvard University, Yale University, The Canadian Center for Architecture, the National Science Foundation, the Círculo de Bellas Artes, (Madrid, Spain), The University of Puerto Rico, and the United Nations International School.
Professor Gerstens’ drawings, stories and constructions have appeared in numerous international exhibitions, and are held in the collection of the Canadian Center for Architecture, the New York City Public Library’s print collection and many private collections. He has published extensively on diverse areas of research including: The financial markets, ethics and technology, the poetic / material imagination, social justice and the linkages between perception, language and space. National and international publications including: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, the Peabody Museum; Ineffable; Architecture Computation and the In-expressible; The Making Of Design Principles, RISD; Critical Digital, Harvard; Boulevard, Saint Louis University; Making Science Visible, National Science Foundation. The Paris-based publisher Editions Firmin-Didot will soon release “Hunting Life: A Forever House”, a collection of Professor Gersten’s drawings and writings
In 2003, Professor Gersten co-founded Maimar LLC, a multidisciplinary finance and development company dedicated to fostering a healthy and balanced relationship between people and their environment. Serving as Managing Director and Creative Director from 2003-2010, Professor Gersten oversaw multiple projects including a 1600 acre sustainable development and a 120 acre medical campus. He also co-designed the ‘Stone House’ one of Maimar’s community centers in the Hill Country of Texas.
In 1992, Professor Gersten founded Tree-Time Workshop, Inc., serving as the New York City-based company’s President and CEO until 1998. Working primarily in the film, television and theatre industries, Tree-Time Workshop provided production design, art direction, production management and scenic construction for hundreds of projects ranging from feature-length and industrial films to live music, television and theatrical performances, to commercials and music videos. Clients included: Sony International, Columbia Records, Epic Records, VH1, the Intrepid Air and Space Museum, PBS Television and the New York Stock Exchange.
David Gersten is a graduate of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union. He has also pursued studies in phenomenology at the New School for Social Research as well as Islamic Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary
View David Gersten's CV here.
Projects
Hunting Life: A Forever House
Making and Memory
Maturation
Structures
Films
Films
Having directed over a dozen films in the last 6 years, I have included here three short films as examples of this part of my practice.
Galapagos in C, 2015
‘Galapagos In C’: is an interactive, multimedia performance combining architecture, performance, and music in the RISD Museum. Terry Riley’s canonical 1964 piece “In C” was accompanied by Community MusicWorks alumni with composer and music scholar Stuart Isacoff of the Wall Street Journal, playing piano.The performance was the culminating gesture of a collaboration between architect/director David Gersten and composer / musician Michael Harrison.
This Film Captures the performance in a series of call and response duets, listening and speaking to the paintings within the RISD Museum’s Grand Gallery, the work created a conversation with the room, drawing out the paintings into the sounds of ‘In C’ using spoken word, sound installations, performative gestures, and projections.
Circling Towards a Disciplinary Chora, 2014
Today, education in the broadest sense holds the capacity of developing new pathways of interaction and forms of knowledge that address the challenges of our increasingly complex world. Like many complex systems such as language or molecular structures, disciplines are polymorphic, they transform relationally, taking on different structures, forms and organizations depending on their disciplinary environment. Knowledge evolves; creating situations of proximity and interaction among a great diversity of forms of knowledge gives rise to mutual transformation, builds new linkages, new thought processes, new questions and new works. ‘Circling Towards a Disciplinary Chora’ Captures the live performance of the same title.
Aarhus Arc, 2012
The 'Aarhus Arc' was built by 200 master students at the Aarhus School of Architecture. Performing as a wall, a drawing board/film screen, it divided the space, inviting people to whisper through it, draw through it, cut through it. Through these acts of empathy for those on the other side, the arc transformed into an architecture, a theater, a film, a drawing, a conversation, an action, a school, and a contribution to a city culminating in a series of performances of magical moments, smoke and fire. ‘Aarhus Arc’ captures the live performance of the same title.
Arts Letters and Numbers
Arts Letters and Numbers
Arts Letters & Numbers, is a 501(c) 3 non-profit: theater, film, education and publishing organization dedicated to creating new structures and spaces for creative exchange across a wide range of disciplines including: Architecture, Visual Arts, Theater Arts, Film, Music, Humanities, Sciences and Social Sciences. Working toward a new model of cultural creates new works in theater, music, film, performance, visual and literary arts.
Performances
Galapagos In C, 2015
‘Galapagos In C’: is an interactive, multimedia performance combining architecture, performance, and music in the RISD Museum. Terry Riley’s canonical 1964 piece “In C” was accompanied by Community Music-Works alumni with composer and music scholar Stuart Isacoff of the Wall Street Journal, playing piano. The performance was the culminating gesture of a collaboration between architect/director David Gersten and composer / musician Michael Harrison.
In a series of call and response duets, listening and speaking to the paintings within the RISD Museum’s Grand Gallery, the work created a conversation with the room, drawing out the paintings into the sounds of ‘In C’ using spoken word, sound installations, performative gestures, and projections.
Quotes from the Wall Street Journal Article
"Pulling it off was a serious challenge requiring discipline, a willingness to take risks, and real grit. The result was simply exhilarating.” "Interdisciplinarity is a popular buzzword on many campuses, but in most cases it remains a mere slogan. Here was a shining model for other schools—“
Galapagos Now, 2015
Inspired by the Galapagos Archipelago and the knowledge transformations that emerged from Darwin’s five-week experience within their dense bio-diversity, the Galapagos Now invokes the first principle of the theory of evolution. When individual agents are brought into proximity, they interact, building new linkages. Under the right circumstances, these symbioses create transformations, catalyzing new forms. The proximity and interactions within diverse agents is fundamental to the emergence of new logos, new species, new modes of being, the events of variety and variation; knowledge evolves, comprehension evolves, new forms emerge. The structure of this performance was situated between the collective embodied process of construction and the dynamic interactions of a wide range of disciplines understood as a living system.
Oppenheimer's Table, 2015
In spring 2015 a group of people from all over the world, and representing a wide spectrum of disciplines, convened to take part in “Oppenheimer’s Table” - the first in a series of Arts Letters & Numbers performance workshops examining and expanding upon the nature of 132 doodles generated from the secret joint committee meetings held in 1947 and chaired by Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer.
The doodles, attributed variously to Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, I.I. Rabi, and other notable actors within the burgeoning cold war became the conceptual and formal foundation for the exploring of the complex history, culture, and possibilities that lay ahead in our contemporary nuclear age.
Circling Towards a Disciplinary Chora, 2014
Today, education in the broadest sense holds the capacity of developing new pathways of interaction and forms of knowledge that address the challenges of our increasingly complex world. Arts Letters & Numbers is a space to understand, withstand and ultimately create transformation that embodies our best hopes and aspirations. Like many complex systems such as language or molecular structures, disciplines are polymorphic, they transform relationally, taking on different structures, forms and organizations depending on their disciplinary environment. Knowledge evolves; creating situations of proximity and interaction among a great diversity of forms of knowledge gives rise to mutual transformation, builds new linkages, new thought processes, new questions and new works.
Exquisite Broken Circle; Suddenly a Chora, 2013
‘Exquisite Broken Circle; Suddenly a Chora’ was structured through six disciplines; construction, drawing, film/photography, writing, theater and music and was conceived of as a disciplinary exquisite corpse. We sought to build a bridge; a bridge that is a stage, a drawing board, a film screen, a story, a place to act—a bridge between many disciplines. This bridge was co-constructed, as each step in its construction developed as a series of shared questions across all of the disciplines. As we excavate the site, we ask: What is excavation in drawing? in film, in writing, in theater, in music. As we pour the foundations we ask what are foundations in drawing, in film, in writing, in theater, in music. As we raise the structure, we ask what is structure in drawing, in film, in writing, in theater, in music. As raise a new horizon, we ask; what is horizon in drawing, in film, in writing, in theater, in music?
Exquisite Broken Circle, 2012
"Exquisite Broken Circle" an Arts, Letters & Numbers workshop was held at Brown University. Conceived of as an embodied "exquisite corpse," participants from multidisciplinary backgrounds engage in action, reaction and reenactment within the construction of two half-circle arcs set back to back. Within each arc space of performance, a set of livefeed cameras and projections loop the image(s) and the performer(s) in an infinite mirror of responsive and repetitive movement that creates a dialogue between the performers and each set of actions.
Circles: Drawing on Friendship, 2012
“Circles: Drawing on Friendship" was the first of the Art, Letters & Numbers workshops to be held in our Mill in Upstate New York. Through a deep intellectual, emotional, and creative questioning, we drew up a series of works and created new structures, new spaces, new stories which culminated in a celebratory performance. The collective creative urgency was a crucible of emotive precision from which we pour the foundation for our future workshops.
Aarhus Arc, 2012
The 'Aarhus Arc' was built by 200 master students at the Aarhus School of Architecture. Performing as a wall, a drawing board/film screen, it divided the space, inviting people to whisper through it, draw through it, cut through it. Through these acts of empathy for those on the other side, the arc transformed into an architecture, a theater, a film, a drawing, a conversation, an action, a school, and a contribution to a city culminating in a series of performances of magical moments, smoke and fire.
Open Book, 2011
The 'Open Book' was an initial step towards what has become Arts Letters & Numbers. Directed by David Gersten. The performance explored the interrelations between gravity, bodies, drawing, time through inhabiting plans on floors, sections on walls, and the space in between.
