It is with great sadness that The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture announces the passing of former faculty member Sean West Sculley, who died on March 23, 2021. During his forty-seven-year tenure as a faculty member at The Cooper Union, Sean taught all five undergraduate design studios, most notably Design II and Thesis, and several Theory of Landscape Architecture seminars. He was a fixture in the third-floor studios and ever passionate about the disciplines of architecture and landscape architecture.

In addition to his teaching, Sean made numerous contributions to The Cooper Union. In the spring of 1977 he helped organize the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation visiting professorships, inviting the poet John Ashbery, literary critic Jay Fellows, filmmaker Robert Freeman, author and playwright John Hawkes, architect Aldo Rossi, and historian Joseph Rykwert to teach the fifth-year design studio. Sean later edited and wrote the introduction to Solitary Travelers, a publication celebrating the creative work of each of these six esteemed visiting professors. He also participated in the Trenton Industrial Corridor Study (1979)—a publication of student proposals from the 1978-79 Design IV studio he co-taught with Diana Agrest, John P. Clarke, Richard Stein, Fred Travisano, and Michael Wurmfeld.

In 1999 Sean’s design for the George Hecht Viewing Gardens was realized. Located at the intersection of 9th Street, Stuyvesant Street, and Third Avenue, the $2.1 million dollar project received funding from the City of New York, Con Edison, and George Hecht, a 1930 graduate of The Cooper Union. The design features a decorative wrought-iron fence, a compass rose and a variety of trees, shrubs, and flowering plants. In his remarks about the garden, Sean explained “The park has to do with a notion of maintaining the vitality and longevity of a historic neighborhood that is now experiencing a renaissance of activity. The effort, in terms of the design, was to acknowledge and respect the historical character of much of the architecture in the neighborhood. Not only that, one element in the garden—the compass rose—refers to the fact that Stuyvesant Street runs true east and west. It’s the only street in Manhattan that does so.” 

Sean was deeply committed to the School of Architecture’s pedagogy and his relationship with John Hejduk. In a letter to Hejduk accepting his reappointment as a faculty member for the 1987-88 academic year, Sean wrote “The honor and delight of being associated with you and your colleagues at Cooper continues to be an event in my life of the first consequence. I am nurtured, proud and above all always thankful to be part of the school.”

Several of Sean’s colleagues in the School of Architecture remember him fondly:

When I arrived as Dean, Sean came to my office, congratulated me, and asked what would I like him to teach. I replied by asking what he would wish to teach. We discussed a number of options and settled on his real passion—the art and architecture of landscape gardening. It would be a seminar that he taught regularly, with site visits where possible, during his time at Cooper. Every year he dropped into my office to check in, and every year he offered to help in any way he could. A perfect gentleman offering wise advice from his long experience with Cooper, he was a beloved teacher and a valued colleague.

— Anthony Vidler

I was unfortunately never Sean’s student nor taught with him, nevertheless hearing him talk to students and at crits, I always found him the most respectful teacher. He would observe the work quietly, for a long time, and he always—with a smile—encouraged students, having the ability to connect even whimsical work with time-honored traditions. His kindness and wit will be sorely missed.

— Tamar Zinguer

Sean Sculley and I joined the teaching faculty of The Cooper Union in the academic year 1970-1971. In those days it was The School of Art and Architecture, under one dean, George Sadek. I came to know Sean a few years later. He expressed admiration of my students’ drawings and for several years was part of a small group that met in my studio to draw from the figure. He was also a great defender of the inch (as opposed to the metric system) and belonged to a society that supported this. Apart from his favored attire of Bermuda shorts, he was given to wearing a kilt on occasion. He is remembered by many alumni as an enthusiastic and supportive critic.

— Sue Ferguson Gussow

I had only one chance, an excellent one though, to teach alongside Sean Sculley. It was some time ago, together with a group of wonderful teachers: Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, and Mike Webb, and it was a very formative experience for me. Over three decades I had many opportunities to converse with Sean, sitting in the faculty lounge, sipping a coffee, and listening to his considerations on art, the school and, of course, landscaping. I most enjoyed listening to his pondering on political history. Sean was an elegant person, in the way in which he dressed, in his manner and—quite significantly—in his thinking. And when he wore his shorts it meant that a warmer season was at the door.

— Guido Zuliani

Sean West Sculley graduated from Kent School in Kent, Connecticut in 1957. He received a BA from Harvard College and a BA from the Columbia University School of Architecture. Before joining The Cooper Union he was on faculty at Columbia University’s School of Architecture and was a visiting faculty member at the Graduate School of Regional Planning and Landscape Architecture of the University of Pennsylvania. He was honored by the New York City Municipal Arts Society, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, the Westchester Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and Suffolk County in New York State. Prior to establishing his private practice, he was a partner of Sculley, Thoreson and Linard, and a former associate at James Stewart Polshek, FAIA. His academic research focused on the history of landscape architecture and public policy pertaining to the use and protection of open space in the public realm, and on developing affordable housing in emerging economies. 

If any former colleagues or students would like to share their memories of Sean with his daughter Samantha West, she can be reached at samantha@samanthawest.net. Donations in Sean’s honor can be made to The New York Landmarks Conservancy. 

Inset photograph of Sean West Sculley by Samantha West.

 

Citygroup is far from a white cube gallery. Studio Ames’ curatorial approach to the exhibition “Linee Occulte: Drawing Architecture,” highlights this fact while marking its own territory in such a way as to make visible the undercurrents for which the exhibition space formed as a response.  As presented on their website, Citygroup was “formed to challenge the structural and cultural forces that shape the normative practices of architecture. […] We are unwilling to defer to the status quo of capitalist political economy and believe we must interrogate the conditions that subjugate, alienate, and appropriate architects, architecture, and inhabitants of architecture.” Not to bank on the intention of the gallery’s name as a phonetic riff, but the play on words is helpful in understanding the meaning spaces can inflect to encompassing structures and forces - such as finance, or a pandemic. Studio Ames' exhibition design and curation deploys Trompe l’oeil throughout the space as such an inflection that demarcates a space within a space and continues this logic so as to involve each drawing in a dialogue of hidden, yet visible, lines. 

As explained in the curatorial statement by Studio Ames: 

“In Book II on perspective, Sebastiano Serlio referred to an “unthought known” in architectural production. He referred to certain lines as: “linee occulte,” hidden lines. These hidden lines are akin to construction lines in architectural drafting, the lines necessary to conceive of the final form. Serlio describes the process of drawing forms in perspective. Unlike Alberti, he accompanies his text with drawing examples, and from one drawing to the next, certain lines appear and disappear. The ones that disappear are presumably not necessary in communicating the next step and they become a kind of lost history to drawing making. In a time when we are contending with many shared and lost histories, what importance do the lines of the past, hidden out of view, have on our process? This is the question that Linee Occulte: Drawing Architecture asks participants and viewers to consider.” 

Presenting drawings within the context formed by their common theme and exhibition design, "Linee Occulte: Drawing Architecture" gives us the opportunity to see the work of Daisy Ames, Iman Fayyad, Lindsay Harkema, Kevin Hirth, Alfie Koetter, Stephanie Lin, Melissa Shin, Lindsey Wikstrom, and Mersiha Veledar as a collaborative construction. 

When asked about her take on the exhibition, Stephanie Lin observed that “Linee Occulte asks us to refocus our attention to the elements, processes, forms, and structures that are underperceived, as an architectural and social agenda that are one in the same. In its exhibition design by Studio Ames, uncovering these relationships between the visible and the suppressed is meaningfully rendered through overlaid perspectives that are both continuous and multiple across the gallery space.”  One may notice in Lin’s response a hint of creative tension between the “visible and the suppressed” or, likewise with Mersiha Veledar, as she  adds in agreement that “[t]he unique concepts (and methods of representation) by each participant emerge within the limits of individual square tablets and amidst the matrix of precise lines Daisy carefully maps out on the surface of the walls, revealing once again the hidden in-situ context of the space beyond.” These emergent creative tensions perform a conceptual and perceptual push-and-pull between say, formal elements such as lines and proprioception —think social distancing— or between what one sees and knows. That this effect is part and parcel of the construction of a drawing, or the atmosphere and meaning of a social space is one of the many joys, along with the unique creative accomplishments by each participant, that this exhibition offers. 

On April 13, at 12 pm EDT (6 pm CET) the Oris House of Architecture will broadcast an online opening event for its current exhibition Lebbeus Woods: Zagreb Free Zone Revisited. This exhibition recreates Zagreb Free Zone—a show originally held at the Zagreb Museum of Arts and Crafts (MUO) in 1991 by former School of Architecture faculty member Lebbeus Woods (1940 – 2012).

Woods taught at The Cooper Union for 25 years, and his commitment to educating architects is extensively documented in the School of Architecture’s Student Work Collection database. The School is also working closely with the Estate of Lebbeus Woods to finalize a donation of his pedagogical records to the Architecture Archive. These records, which document his design studios and seminars at The Cooper Union, will be available for educational and research use. 



Lebbeus Woods: Zagreb Free Zone Revisited presents the same set of large prints shown 30 years ago at MUO. As a companion to the exhibition, an extensive monograph traces Woods’ subsequent work on the project, including original drawings, notebooks, models, and documents related to the planned construction of a Freespace structure in Zagreb.

Event participants are Joseph Becker and Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art); Maristella Casciato (The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles); Steven Holl (Steven Holl Architects, New York); Peter Noever (Noever Design, Vienna); Leo Modrčin, Lovorka Prpić and Fedja Vukić (Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb); Andrija Rusan (Oris House of Architecture); Sven Sorić (graphic designer, Zagreb), and Aleksandra Wagner (Executor of the Estate of Lebbeus Woods).



The exhibition is co-organized by the University of Zagreb Faculty of Architecture, Oris House of Architecture, and the Estate of Lebbeus Woods, New York, with the Zagreb Museum of Arts and Crafts as the exhibition partner. The project also received support from the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia. 



The exhibition’s catalogue Lebbeus Woods: Zagreb Free Zone Revisited—edited by Leo Modrčin, Lovorka Prpić, and Aleksandra Wagner—can be purchased through the Oris House of Architecture. 

The exhibition is on view through April 24, 2021 at the Oris House of Architecture (Kralja Držislava 3) in Zagreb, Croatia. 



Inset drawings by Lebbeus Woods, © Estate of Lebbeus Woods.

Ja Architecture Studio, a Toronto-based practice established by Visiting Professor Nima Javidi and Behnaz Assadi, has received a Progressive Architecture Award for Wardell, a recently completed residential addition on Wardell street in Toronto.



The project began as a side-yard extension to an existing two-story house on a triangular lot. Wardell “finds its identity through accentuating an anomalous urban condition,” according to the Studio. “Tucked into the wedge shaped lot, the two-storey side addition mediates between the string of two-storey mansard roof row houses, and the rear yard of the house on the corner…The curved wall creates a cleave between the existing house and the new addition and adds a visual cue that leads from the front walkout, through a passage under the recessed bridge that connects the two volumes to the sunken rear yard terrace and garden.”

P/A jurors embraced this approach, noting that the project’s “steel-and-wood-framed addition allows the architects maximum flexibility in their willful form-making. At the same time, their decision to clad every exterior surface in brick allows the bold shape to play well with its more prosaic neighbors. The simple, straightforward design on a tricky site is both evocative and poetic, transforming an ordinary material typical of the neighborhood into something memorable both inside and out."







In December 2020, Wardell also received an Award of Excellence from Canadian Architect. A juror there described the project as “a little jewel in the middle of the city,” noting that “the designers could have just added to the existing house, but they created a separate object with a versatile space between…The sculptural shape is complemented by a very interesting tectonic approach that does something different with brick.”