The Eleanore Pettersen Lecture Series

The Eleanore Pettersen Lecture, established through a generous gift to The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, is dedicated to the voices of women in architecture as a lasting tribute to Ms. Pettersen's significant impact in the world of architecture and her love of The Cooper Union. Pettersen, who had worked as an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright and would later design the post-White House home of Richard M. Nixon, was one of the first women to be licensed as an architect in New Jersey, and developed a successful practice there that spanned over fifty years.

Lectures in this series have been given by Toshiko Mori (2005), Phyllis Lambert (2006), Elizabeth Wright Ingraham (2008), Billie Tsien (2009), Francine Houben (2011), Sarah Wigglesworth (2013), and Farshid Moussavi (2014), Mabel Wilson (2020), Lesley Lokko + Sumayya Vally (2021), Samia Henni (2022). 

The Fariba Tehrani Lecture 

The Fariba Tehrani Lecture was initiated in honor of Biba Tehrani, whose decades-long commitment to education has served as a radical alternative to the very models of conventional pedagogies of which she is both beneficiary and victim. Her commitment to discursive interaction, speech, and oratory makes this endowment an apt tribute for her contributions to generations of students.

The YC Foundation Lecture

The YC Foundation, Inc., New York, makes grants for lectures in Architecture that inspire young architects to leadership through the experiences and stories of the lecturers.

The Diane Lewis Student Lecture Series 2024-25

The 2024-25 Diane Lewis Student Lecture Series focuses on storytelling within the practices of art and architecture. Storytelling is a force which is capable of constructing and deconstructing the narratives of our lives, communities, and surroundings. Architecture is not a frozen concept within the space it has engineered, but a transmutable narrative – a story that is embedded within the landscape it occupies, the community it serves, and the Ever-changing reality it reflects. 

Our speakers, a diverse group of sociologists, artists, set designers, urbanists, and architects, will bring a tapestry of perspectives to an atmosphere which questions the role of design in the construction of not only physical spaces, but the cultural, socio-political, and ecological contexts which surround and inhabit them. We will explore the invisible currents that flow through our cities, the contested groups that hold stories of resilience and adaptation, and the intersections where architecture meets art, activism, and performance.

This lecture series will look at how architecture speaks – through its provocation of thought and elicitation of emotion, its ability to cultivate experience, and its manipulation as a force of control or tool of colonial repression. Architecture shapes the way we experience the world, and in one that is marked by uncertainty and the looming threat of global conflict, the spaces and narratives we uphold have never been more critical.

We invite our audience to engage with these transformative ideas, to listen closely to the stories embedded within the spaces around us – and those far from us – and to become active participants in the ongoing dialogue about the future of our built environment. 

The Diane Lewis Student Lecture Series is endowed by Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown.

Current Work

Current Work is a lecture series co-sponsored with The Architectural League of New York featuring leading figures in the worlds of architecture, urbanism, design, and art.