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Dean’s Book Club Tours the Cooper Hewitt Museum

POSTED ON: December 12, 2019

Students and faculty tour the Cooper Hewitt Museum. Trustee, Kevin Slavin, served as a guide on the tour.

Students and faculty tour the Cooper Hewitt Museum. Trustee, Kevin Slavin, served as a guide on the tour.

For Academic Year 2019-2020, Engineering Dean Barry Shoop instituted a Dean’s Book Club to build community amongst our Cooper Union faculty and students. The book club serves as an interdisciplinary element in the School of Engineering’s Strategic Plan and the book chosen was Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo Da Vinci. 

Twenty students and eight faculty members committed to participate in this year’s book club and at the first meeting held in November, Dean Shoop provided a short overview of Leonardo Da Vinci through the lens of innovation - and the importance of diversity and working at the intersection of disciplines. 

Today, students and faculty from the School of Engineering - accompanied by faculty and staff from the school of Architecture, Art, Humanities and Social Science, and Student Services - tour the Cooper Hewitt Museum. Cooper Union Trustee, Kevin Slavin, served as a guide on the tour.

The exhibit they viewed was “Nature—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial.” It features over sixty projects that demonstrate how designers collaborate with scientists, engineers, environmentalists, academics and other stakeholders to find inventive and promising solutions to the environmental and social challenges confronting humanity today – which is a very reminiscent of exhibits on Leonardo Da Vinci who was a painter, architect, inventor, engineer and was considered one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived.

View more photos of the tour on our Engineering Facebook here.

More News from The Cooper Union

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.