Dear Members of the Cooper Community:

We are back!

Some twenty-one months ago we went into lockdown, and we learned how difficult it would be to remain apart. At the same time, we could not begin to imagine the challenges of coming back together after all this time.

The Fall semester has been underway for three months, and the reverberations are becoming increasingly clear. We like to think of institutions as the foundations of continuity, and yet we have seen how in such a short span of time, institutional memory can wear thin very easily. Some fifty percent of our student population is entirely new to the physical place of The Cooper Union, and they are only now becoming familiarized with the spaces, programs, and events that are a central part our cultural experience. 

As our alumni know so well, beyond the presence of faculty, the lion’s share of learning happens in the liminal spaces between courses: in the after hours, and between students as peers. Maintaining and further developing our school of thought has proven to be a true challenge. The pandemic may have kept us apart, but the return to in person was marked by sufficient administrative protocols that ensured an experience that was anything but normal: weekly testing, limited access to workshops, mask mandates, and many other small details that would otherwise go unnoticed. These conditions have become the defining features of our daily experience. The mere recognition of each other behind masks is possibly the first obstacle of everyday communication, requiring our added efforts to overcome the inevitable anonymity that they enforce. Today, as I write down these thoughts, I acknowledge the delicacy of the situation, having overcome the isolation of the pandemic, only to face the Delta variant some months ago, and now the renewed uncertainties brought about by the Omicron variant. These are reminders of the new, ever-changing conditions under which we need to thrive.

Despite this, or maybe precisely because of it, there is no substitute for being back in person. It is a joy to be able to see people, and to reclaim a studio space that is so vital for speculation and experimentation. From an administrative perspective, we’ve had to take stock of what online learning has allowed, and in strategic instances take advantage of it. For one, it opened the doors of our school to professors and critics who would otherwise not have been able to join us. Mae-ling Lokko and Matthew Waxman have both taught this semester from different time zones, and they have genuinely transformed our intellectual reach. In turn, our lecture series has taken advantage of varied modalities to bring many people back into The Cooper Union in person, while advancing other voices online. In person, we had the pleasure of hosting Yung Ho Chang, Lacaton & Vassal, and our own visiting critics, Gary Bates, Susannah Drake, and Joshua Ramus within our own spaces. And we celebrated the work of Diana Agrest, The Irwin S. Chanin Distinguished Professor for the 2021-22 academic year, through her lecture The Wall and the Books. With Professor Nora Akawi as curator, we have also hosted another series of talks under the banner of “Pluriversal, Bewildered and Otherwise,” drawing in speakers such as Arturo Escobar and Mpho Matsipa, among many others. And in between, we have taken advantage of key accomplishments to celebrate faculty and friends whose books were just published, with Matthew Soules’s recent release of Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra-Thin: Architecture and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, as well as our own Michael Young’s new publication Reality Modeled after Images.

As much as we plan our semesters, friends and family have come to our support on many occasions, and this semester has been no exception. We were fortunate to take advantage of Fabio Gramazio’s sabbatical from the ETH, to host him as a Visiting Scholar at Cooper Union. This was serendipitous, but also strategically well-timed, as it aligned perfectly with the launching of the AACE Lab, designed by our own Professor Sam Anderson, a facility that expands our workshop towards new digital capabilities. After over a year online, many students yearned for the basic tactility of model making, mock-ups, and material explorations. This facility has radicalized our opportunities in the School of Architecture, and we were able to host several events to help foster a dialogue that helped to expand its discursive possibilities. We mounted an exhibition of the collaborative work of Mania Aghaei Meibodi and Wes McGee, titled Plastic Architecture, a theme that invited a roundtable moderated by Fabio Gramazio and Brandon Clifford of MIT. Beyond computation and digital protocols, the event was dedicated to questions of labor and the environmental impacts that such research could unleash, with recycled materials and 3D-printed cavity walls as the protagonists under examination. Looking forward, we are planning an exhibition curated by Anna Bokov and Steven Hillyer on the pedagogies of the Vkhutemas, the result of an extended research over a decade, and Anna’s recent book Avant-Garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space. This is a brilliant case study that sheds light on modernism at large, as well as the intellectual cultures we have inherited through the meticulous compilation of exercises, prompts, and works across disciplines.

With all that has kept us together, not being able to gather the alumni community into our spaces over the past two years has been difficult. Our students and faculty were very proactive in setting up our end of year exhibitions, and with the special initiatives of Steven Hillyer and Farzin Lotfi-Jam, our 2020 virtual exhibition was particularly poignant in its reconstruction of the Foundation Building as the site of projection. Still, what it lacked was you, and the many that populate the opening at the end of each academic year, what I sincerely hope will be possible at the end of this coming Spring. It was in these events that I came to meet the Cooper community, and I would very much like to celebrate my last year as dean with the same ritual.

School of Architecture alumni have been exceedingly generous in their engagement with the school over the years, and it would be difficult to enumerate each and every one of you. In our small circle in school, it has been an enormous pleasure to bring back as faculty, such voices as Pamela Cabrera, Christina Yessios, and Dionisio Cortes Ortega. Others, such as Brad Samuels, are teaching elective courses here and building new histories in the process. Old friends such as Francois de Menil, Jesse Reiser, and Nanako Umemoto – as well as Edward Gormley, are repeat guests for Sue Gussow and Sam Anderson respectively. I hope to be able to expand this list over the course of the spring semester and bring yet many other voices. Indeed, with the help of curator Yael Hameiri Sainsaux and her colleagues, we will be soon hosting an exhibition in honor of the late Diane Lewis, titled Conceiving the Plan: Nuance and Intimacy in the Construction of Civic Space, bringing together the contributions of an even longer list of Cooper alumni, faculty, and former faculty back into Houghton Gallery.

The last six years have been an immensely enjoyable experience for me, and I hope with the completion of the seventh I can step down as dean with the comfort of having overseen a transition that has been volatile from many perspectives. The early years had significantly different challenges than those we have all been experiencing of late. We are truly in a different place now, and with new priorities – the most important one being the search for a new dean already underway. Soon there will be a formal communication from the search committee, which is working closely with President Sparks to define the mission and engage the community at large.

With the end of year upon us, I want to thank you for your generosity of the past years, and even more so the past two years. The pandemic has defined completely new needs for both students and faculty, and your support to us has meant a great deal.

Happy Holidays to everyone! 

Nader Tehrani

The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture is pleased to announce that Toshiko Mori AR’76 will receive the prestigious 2021 Isamu Noguchi Award, conferred annually by the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum. Mori, as well as the ceramics artist Shio Kusaka, will receive the award at the Museum’s annual benefit celebration on Tuesday, October 5, 2021. 

Now in its eighth year, the Isamu Noguchi Award is conferred annually on highly accomplished individuals who share Noguchi’s spirit of innovation, global consciousness, and commitment to Eastern and Western cultural exchange. Brett Littman, the museum’s director, notes “The Isamu Noguchi Award was created to recognize exceptional individuals whose creative practice shares a thoughtfulness and boundary-transcending point of view found in Isamu Noguchi’s work and extends his ideals into our own times. We are honored to present this year’s Award to artist Shio Kusaka and architect Toshiko Mori. Their very different work shares a profound sensitivity to nature, playful and clear-minded approaches to materials and function, and quiet reflectiveness, carrying forward and extending Noguchi’s principles.” 

Born in Kobe, Japan, in 1951, Toshiko Mori, FAIA, is the founding principal of Toshiko Mori Architect PLLC, and the Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD). Through nearly four decades of influential projects her practice has emphasized a sensitivity to ecology and history, innovative and intelligent use of materials and light, and functionality in the most expansive sense.  

The Award is presented in recognition of her diverse body of work—from early work designing for clients such as Commes des Garçons and Issey Miyake, to exhibition designs for the Museum of Modern Art and Cooper Hewitt, to numerous residential, cultural, and civic projects around the globe. Her integration of the surrounding environment in her designs, her thoughtful sensitivity in selecting materials, and her advocacy and activism for sustainability in architecture reflect values that she shares with Noguchi, with whom she interned while studying architecture at The Cooper Union. 



The quintessential sculptor in an expanded field, Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) was a future-focused idealist whose timeless work blended the ancient and the modern; formalism and conceptualism; art, architecture, and design. His multidisciplinarity and ability to bridge many of the supposedly irreconcilable contradictions at the heart of contemporary life remain an inspiration for a wide range of creative people. Using everything he learned designing playgrounds, dance sets, and gardens, he remade sculpture into a discipline for understanding our place in the universe, a technology for transcending limited thinking, and a technique for integrating the best habits and effects of craft into daily life. 

Previous recipients of the Isamu Noguchi Award include: Lord Norman Foster and Hiroshi Sugimoto (2014); Jasper Morrison and Yoshio Taniguchi (2015); Tadao Ando and Elyn Zimmerman (2016); John Pawson and Hiroshi Senju (2017); Naoto Fukasawa and Edwina von Gal (2018); Rei Kawakubo (2019); and Sir David Adjaye OBE and Cai Guo-Qiang (2020). 

 2018 Cooper Union architecture graduates Gabriel Munnich and Yaoyi Fan recently founded Design with FRANK, a start-up based on the premise that good design shouldn’t be a luxury. To that end, their company has developed a digital tool that embeds architectural intelligence in a user-friendly way, allowing anyone to make well-designed homes that fit their exact needs. Munnich and Fan believe that, as architects, it is their responsibility to create the next generation of design tools that serve everyone’s needs while creating a better-built environment for all. 

Recently featured in designboom, Design with FRANK streamlines the traditional design process into a simple, intuitive, game-like experience that allows users to make a house by manipulating and connecting 3D blocks. Once satisfied with their design, users can interchange roof types and exterior materials to suit different climates. The software also provides a sophisticated map system via satellite imagery and vector world data that visualize the user's dream house in their chosen physical site. 

Homes designed with FRANK are created with sustainability at their core, as the software factors in solar gain and continuous insulation to minimize heat loss. The house blocks are compact to maximize their efficiency, and building with FRANK can reduce environmental impacts by creating homes that use less energy and fewer natural resources. A built-in cost estimator also allows users to see how their design and material choices impact their overall build budget. 

Once their design is complete, users can purchase and study a 3D printed model of the house they have generated. Design with FRANK offers two drawing packages as well—an initial set of architectural drawings and a complete construction set. 

“While at Cooper, we realized that architecture stems from the tools that create it,” said Yaoyi Fan and Gabriel Munnich. “So we spent a large portion of our time creating design tools, such as CNC and 3D printers and software scripts. Through Design with FRANK we think we can democratize design by providing access to better tools for both designers and aspiring homeowners.”







 

As part of an ongoing series of posts highlighting faculty and alumni projects featured in and associated with the Venice Biennale’s current 17th International Architecture Exhibition, the School of Architecture is pleased to feature the Veneta Porta Lignea, one of two projects by NADAAA in the Biennale. 

Located adjacent to the Giardino delle Vergini, the installation occupies a critical location in Venice as both a destination at the end of the Arsenale, and its gateway as one arrives by boat. Historically, this vaporetto stop has been seen as a back door. However, with the Arsenale serving as an important open space during COVID, more outdoor installations have been conceived as part of this year’s exhibitions, warranting a gateway that acknowledges the site as a new front door. 

NADAAA strategically conceived the project’s assembly and disassembly, focusing on proposals that could be erected in less than two days without having a substantial impact on the context, its fondamenta, and gardens. With an eye towards optimization, NADAAA adopted a panel of cross-laminated timber (CLT) as a single member into which it could carve and stencil without wasting material or labor.



The office’s first approach adopted a mass-customized strategy to optimize a cantilevered structure, giving depth to the core span while milling out material at its cantilevered edges and drawing out the herringbone pattern of the CLT to the surface. Surprisingly, this approach also increased the use of material and labor.

NADAAA’s second approach addressed the predicament of labor and materials with the idea of building the entire installation out of one CLT slab. This relegated the exposure of the CLT end-grain to the edges of the slab, where the silhouette of the CLT plank is excavated with divots affording nested joints for compressive and tensile members. The resulting design articulates a base, a shaft, and a lintel which both frames the threshold into the Giardino and recalls the symbol of Venice—the winged lion of St. Mark which holds the city’s welcoming words in an open book to the waters: Pax Tibi Marce Evangelista Meus (Peace unto you, Mark, my Evangelist). 

The base serves as a wood foundation, liberating it from penetrating the Venetian soil. The “piloti” is triangulated, a figural “V,” and an allusive registration of the open book containing Venice’s welcoming words—all while framing a view of the fortification tower beyond the lagoon. The lintel is displaced asymmetrically, cantilevering over the arrival passage and pushing the installation’s structural capacity to its limits; a Venetian stone maintains its balance on the opposing end. Set on the stones of the fondamenta, this wood construction also alludes to the wood piles that hold up this maritime city.

NADAAA also wished to develop a structure that would help to bring people together, frame the space at the Giardino, serve as an edge for the garden, frame the serene view north towards the lagoon, and provide a foreground for other Biennale installations.



The 17th Venice Architecture Biennale How Will We Live Together? is curated by Hashim Sarkis. 

Project Team: 

Principals: Nader Tehrani, Arthur Chang 

Project Coordinator: Alexandru Vilcu 

Project Team: Eric Cheung 



In Collaboration With: 

Canducci Group, Structural Engineer Consultant 

Andrea Canducci, Alessandro Canducci, Alessandra Feduzi, Giulia Leopardi, Antonio Eroi 

Donors/Sponsors: 

Means Method Mission 

Canducci Group 

Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown 

Payanini SRL