The number of crises we face today is overwhelming by any measure. Part of the exhaustion comes from the need to determine which ones to attend to. Related to this, however, is another pressing question: the crisis of attention itself. Contemporary media has disrupted our engagement with reality and rewired our abilities to attend to it. This is not simply an issue of technology; it is conceptual and aesthetic, biological and social, material and energetic. To counter this, we need to constantly renew our commitments to exploring the mediations of architecture. We need to not only understand how built architecture modifies attention, but also how design media alter how we attend as architects: how we draw, model, image, scan, read, and write, effects how we think and design. These are not secondary concerns—they are cultural techniques; they are mediations that stabilize and destabilize relations with the real.
 
And as I’ve said before, we need to keep them weird.
 
The etymological history of the word “weird” is developed from Old English wyrd which meant “fate, chance, fortune.” This is an interesting allusion, because architecture is constantly proposing designs for the near future. Even further back, the Old High German wert – “to turn, to wind, to bend” has other implications regarding how architecture can turn or bend the familiar, allowing us to experience the world in alternate manners.
 
The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union has a legacy of experimental design pedagogy. This semester, the courses, studios, lectures, events, and exhibitions extend this legacy by asking how architecture, and the mediations of design, alter attention to the world.

We’re excited to welcome several new faculty to the School of Architecture: Nicola Cortese is teaching a seminar on the representation of reuse, Sonia Flamberg is joining the Design II studio team, Connor Gravelle is joining the Thesis studio team, James Hamilton AR’10 and Malin Heyman AR’12 are teaching a Design IV option studio, as is Sean Lally.

We are pleased to announce that Behnaz Assadi has been selected as the inaugural award recipient of the John Q. Hejduk Endowment for Architectural Research. This fund establishes an annual honorarium supporting exemplary work by faculty of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture over two years. It is awarded to support design practice, scholarship, teaching, or research that reflects diverse voices, ethnicities, trajectories, or communities.

Assistant Professor Nora Akawi is returning from sabbatical as the inaugural John and Mary Manuck Distinguished Professor. Generously endowed by John and Mary Manuck, this professorship was created to foster collaboration across disciplines by raising the visibility of design as a unifying element of art, architecture, and engineering and the humanities and social sciences. 

We’re thrilled to announce that Assistant Professor Mersiha Veledar is now officially Associate Dean; Assistant Professor James Lowder is now Coordinator of Graduate Studies; and Assistant Professor Adjunct Owen Nichols is now Assistant Professor Proportional Time.

There will be several exciting lectures, events, and exhibitions beginning with the Third-Floor Hallway exhibition of What Else Could it Mean? Drawings and Writings by James Wines & SITE curated by Phillip Denny and Suzan Wines and produced by the Architecture Archive. Bernard Tschumi will give the YC Foundation lecture “Circular” on September 22nd. Atelier Heyman-Hamilton will present their lecture “Cutting together Apart: Approaches to Building” on October 8th. The History/Theory faculty will host the discussion “Fascism/Anti-Fascism” with Maria Gonzalez Pendas, Sarah Lopez, and Dan Roche on October 20th. The Representation faculty have invited Mark West, AR’80 to present “Seeing Things: Pareidolia and the Discovery of Form” on November 12th, and Visiting Professor Sean Lally will share his lecture “Snags, Glitches, and Unintended Consequences” on November 17th. The Third-Floor Hallway will also present Handmade Utopia in partnership with Distributed Art Publishers (D.A.P.), opening on Tuesday October 13th.

There will be two film screenings this semester followed by discussions: Maintenance Artist followed by a discussion with Toby Perl Freilich, Tom Finkelpearl, and Diana Agrest on Tuesday, October 6th; and American Masters: Diller Scofidio + Renfro, a documentary from the PBS series followed by a discussion with Elizabeth Diller, AR’79 and Jeff Bieber on Tuesday, November 10th

I’m looking forward to an amazing semester of thought, creativity, research, discussion, and design from the faculty and students!
 
— Michael Young, Dean
     The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture