Work from Cooper Union Architecture students will be presented at the annual Menschel Fellowship Exhibition, which opens January 31^st in the 5^th and 6^th floor lobbies of the Foundation Building. Five students from the School of Architecture will be exhibiting work: Jenny Hsiao and Hui Rong Liu, will present their project, A Bowl of Ocean Soup. Students Yu Kiu Chan, Kelsey Lee, and Piao Liu will present their project, Tracing the Forgotten: Tibetan Vernacular Architecture. The Menschel Fellowship is a program designed to provide 4^th year students the opportunity to travel and research specific areas of personal interest.

The proposed elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities has sent shockwaves through creative communities throughout the nation. Although the NEA, the NEH, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting occupy less than 1% of the overall annual budget, the organizations have come under threat of extinction. The Hill reports that in addition to the privatization of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the NEA and NEH would be completely eliminated with the proposed Trump Administration plan. Petitions are currently being circulated to stop these cuts from taking place. Concerned individuals are also encouraged to call their Congressional senators and representatives.

Karan Vafadari, (Cooper Engineering Alum ‘87), has been detained by Iranian authorities, according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. He and his wife, Afarin Niasari, were arrested by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, and have been held without access to counsel or formal charges since late July in connection with an art gallery they had been directing in Tehran. After months of silence, Afarin’s sister, Kateh has written a letter to Supreme Leader Ali Khameni which calls for the couple’s immediate release and asserts that they have been subjected to "extortion, property seizure and national security threats" since their arrest earlier this year.     

The online community Archinect recently posed questions to the heads of some of the leading Architecture schools across the country. Dean Nader Tehrani was one of the six respondents who cemented Cooper Union as the vanguard of free expression. Archinect’s questions focused on how the pedagogical community plans on responding to the views of President-elect Trump and nature of the implications of his presidency on the practice of Architecture. Dean Tehrani describes the “call to intellectual arms” as an ethos that must be maintained both in the present moment and sustained moving forward:

 “Our responsibilities are to expose intellectual projects, to reveal positions and to enable the space of disagreement.”