A Design IV studio section led by Stella Betts traveled to Albany this past week to visit the Empire State Plaza, the subject of her studio’s brief. 

Titled Re-Imagining Empire State Plaza, the studio is both an urban and architectural investigation. Conceived and designed by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and the architect Wallace Harrison, Empire Plaza was built in New York’s capital city of Albany in the late 1960s and early 70s, and is a paradigm of modernist urban planning. Through a series of choreographed operations, Betts is prompting students to deeply re-adapt the plaza by transforming its relationship to its larger urban context and infrastructural systems, rethinking its program and use, adapting its existing buildings to become carbon neutral, and imaging a new kind of public plaza for the people of Albany and the citizens of New York. 

The field trip featured visits to the plaza’s buildings, including a performing arts venue known as The Egg, Corning Tower and its observation deck overlooking the city, the New York State Museum and Library, the Justice Building, and the concourse below the plaza. In addition, the studio visited two H.H. Richardson buildings—the State Capital, with its famous “million dollar stair” completed in 1899, and Albany City Hall, completed in 1883.

2016 School of Architecture graduate Diego Salazar recently completed New York Titans, a multimedia project honoring New York City’s built environment. Initiated in response to his 2016 encounter with the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan, the work began with his vision for a large drawing to commemorate, twenty years later, those who lost their lives on 9/11. As Salazar developed a visual language that transposes human and architectural form, he began a parallel effort to create a series of drawings featuring iconic New York City buildings. He would create fourteen drawings, all at 36 x 60 inches.

Over the next five years, Salazar expanded New York Titans to include several collaborators, some of them former Cooper Union classmates. He had started a company, Studio Rombo, which represents and collaborates with artists and designers, and began traveling to Oaxaca, Mexico to meet local artists and artisans. Diego quickly realized that he could combine his two endeavors and commissioned Oaxacan artists to create, along with him, work for New York Titans. He also reconnected with his childhood friend Rafael Quijano, a practicing artist, in late 2020. Salazar invited in Quijano to develop artworks based on the Titans concept and in return Quijano agreed to find an exhibition venue for the project as a whole.

Salazar expanded his collaborative effort to include additional artists, reaching out to Vanessa Tai AR’16 and Akash Godbole AR’17, who created digital artwork—available as NFTs—for the Titans theme. The group soon grew to include five fellow Cooper Union Architecture graduates: Connor Holjes, Hui Rong Liu, Jieun (Hannah) Kim, Kelsey Lee, and Joey Parrella, all 2017 alumni. Each of them made work for the Titans project using their own techniques and perspectives.

In the summer of 2021 Diego turned to his former classmate Janine Wang AR’16 commissioning her to fabricate a large frame to house his tribute to 9/11. On September 11th, 2021 Salazar presented his drawing via Instagram, and on November 2nd, the Day of the Dead—inspired by his days in Oaxaca—he installed the drawing inside Janine’s frame, creating an altar and placing it, along with marigold flowers and candles, in Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick to honor those who perished on 9/11.

An exhibition of Diego’s New York Titans drawings, as well as the work of his collaborators, was held at Luxuny Atelier in December 2021. Jorge Islas Lopez, the Consul General of Mexico in New York, attended the opening reception. 

In reflecting on his five-year journey, Diego stated “I feel gratified, but with an ever-stronger desire to continue creating and collaborating with other artists. I hope this is the first of many future projects and exhibitions.”

Assistant Professor Michael Young’s new book—Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image (Routledge Publishing)—is the subject of an in-depth review by Davis Richardson in The Architect’s Newspaper. 

Published in the fall of 2021, Reality Modeled After Images shows, according to Young, “how design is impacted and changed by shifts in image culture, representational conventions and technologies.” In his introduction, Young remarks that typical discussions of architecture and politics frequently overlook “what it is that architects labor over in the day-to-day negotiations that define and redefine the discipline.” Namely, conventions:

“The values that define a discipline are maintained through its conventions. Conventions are what is taught, what is handed down, what links generations. They consist of tools and techniques, norms and models for the production and interpretation of what qualifies as significant work. Conventions specify acceptable modes of appearance, verify expertise, and narrate lineage. They defend the boundaries of what constitutes a discipline.”

Young interrogates these boundaries through, as Richardson notes, “a broad range of topics—including politics, labor, machine vision and surveillance capitalism, lidar and photogrammetry, and ornament, among many others—without feeling disjointed…” 

“Reality Modeled After Images is organized around three central themes that come out of the École des Beaux-Arts: pochė, entourage, and mosaȉque. The pochė, or the spaces hidden from view by architectural representation; the entourage, or all the extra, ‘non-architectural’ elements that populate architectural plans and drawings such as plantings or scale figures, and the mosaȉque. All involve the rendering of surfaces, all had less to do with any one particular design solution or strategy, historically, and more to do with the classical, disciplinary methods of representing those designs, much of which has persisted to today, as Young lays out.”

Richardson further observes that “While these themes serve as an effective structural and thematic device that binds the book together, it reads like a series of longer, separate essays that could stand on their own, if they wanted, but still manage to mesh well within a larger whole. It is closer to a highly curated journal with a consistent voice than a traditional book, with only six chapters—two for each theme—yet never feels too brief nor stretched thin.”

In addition to his writing, research, and teaching at The Cooper Union, Young is a co-founder of YOUNG & AYATA, an award-winning, Brooklyn-based design practice. 

The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture is pleased to announce that Sanjana Lahiri and Kevin Chow, both AR’22, have received the 2021 Robert L. Wesley Award from the SOM Foundation. Named in honor of the first Black partner at SOM, the award supports BIPOC undergraduate students enrolled in architecture, landscape architecture, interior architecture, urban design, or engineering programs in the United States. 

Dean Tehrani notes “It gives me great pleasure to see that Sanjana and Kevin’s hard work has been recognized by the SOM Foundation. The Robert S. Wesley award goes to young designers and scholars of significant ambition, and both of these students have successfully brought their design interests and scholarship into meaningful confluence. With a sophistication of thought and eloquence of communication, both have led critical discussions within this school for some time. I trust that this award might serve both as a great launching pad for further research, perchance for graduate studies and far beyond.”

Lahiri, an Indian architecture student from Singapore, is the co-founder of Cooper Union’s Architecture Lobby Chapter and a member of the Cooper Climate Coalition, a student-led group advocating for climate action across the institution. She has also curated Cooper’s Student Lecture Series. 

“Architecture’s position in the world remains, for me, a source of discomfort, and my biggest challenge over the past four and a half years has been to negotiate my proximity to the discipline,” notes Lahiri. “I hope to use funding from the Robert L. Wesley award to continue along the vein of curation, project facilitation, and counter-curricula that I have begun during my time at Cooper, and to facilitate initiatives around climate action in spaces of higher education.” Lahiri’s Thesis project, currently in progress, engages New York City’s community gardens as simultaneous sites of resistance and tools of the real estate economy.

Chow is a corecipient of the 2021 Benjamin Menschel Fellowship for research supporting his exhibition Pastoral Silicon Valley: A Landscape of Quiet Crisis, which examines his hometown and will open in February 2022. Of his plans for the SOM award, Chow states "I think I will be staying within academia for a while, not because it is the perfect model, but because I have a respect for schools as institutions of advancement and generosity. What this means is not only that I will pursue higher degrees, but also that I am thinking about what a more perfect, more nimble institution might look like. To that end, this grant will help me develop such a thing, through education, research, and other projects. The Robert L. Wesley Award from the SOM Foundation serves as the strongest possible ward on the long journey ahead."

Chow’s research is primarily focused on technocracy; his Thesis project is framed as an illustrated screenplay inhabiting scenes from an endgame society of post-leisure, one which has fulfilled the promises of technology as progress. Accordingly, he is an amateur writer and artist, disguised as a preprofessional architect.

The 2021 Robert L. Wesley Award
Alexander Htet Aung Kyaw (Cornell University), Sanjana Lahiri (The Cooper Union), and Xiluva Mbungela (Syracuse University) will each receive a $10,000 award in addition to a yearlong mentorship program that connects the students with leading BIPOC practitioners and educators. In 2021 the jury decided to expand the number of fellows to include two additional $5,000 awards, given to Kevin Chow (The Cooper Union) and Viridiana Hernandez Sevilla (University of Oklahoma).

This 2021 jury was led by Robert L. Wesley and included Danei Cesario, Chris Cornelius, Joyce Hwang, and María Villalobos Hernandez. 

About the SOM Foundation
Founded in 1979, the SOM Foundation’s goal is to advance the design profession’s ability to address the key topics of our time by bringing together and supporting groups and individuals, each with the highest possible design aspirations. The Foundation’s award programming was established in 1981 and currently offers five annual awards across the United States, Europe, and China. The awards support students and faculty of architecture, landscape architecture, interior architecture, urban design, and engineering to undertake rigorous interdisciplinary research that can help shape our future.