Update on School of Architecture Leadership

Dear Cooper Union,

We write today with news regarding The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture. Hayley Eber has shared with us that upon completing her term as Acting Dean of the School of Architecture at the end of this academic year, she will be moving on from The Cooper Union. This change will be effective as of May 31, 2025.  After that, Hayley will be taking on the role of Executive Director of the Van Alen Institute, which has long been a driving force behind community-led urban design here in New York and beyond.

Hayley was appointed as Acting Dean as of the 2022-2023 academic year after serving as Associate Dean since 2019. She is a faculty member and also an alumnus, having graduated from the School of Architecture in 2001. She leaves the School of Architecture in a position of strength. During her leadership as both Acting Dean and Associate Dean, administrators and faculty worked together to advance curricular innovations which included strengthening and expanding the school’s long-established commitment to the relationships between history, theory, design, and methods of architectural representation. To that end, faculty restructured the required curriculum in the first and second years to include photography, animation, computation, and other digital tools as ways to analyze architecture; and broadened history and theory courses beyond Western canons. The school widened the scope of learning opportunities beyond Cooper as well, with workshops, projects, and studio courses that incorporate immersive travel experiences and collaborative engagements. In recent years, Cooper architecture students have exhibited at prestigious international exhibitions and biennials, notably the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, the Venice Biennale, and the Tallinn Architecture Biennale.

We recognize that this news comes at a time of other leadership change here at Cooper. We will be working closely together on a transition plan for the School of Architecture.

Our thanks to Hayley for all of her contributions to The Cooper Union over these many years. We wish her the best at Van Alen.

Should you have any questions for us, please reach us at malcolm.king@cooper.edu and demetrius.eudell@cooper.edu.

Malcolm King                                 Demetrius Eudell
 

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