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EXHIBITION LECTURE
Beyond the Frame
Thursday, October 27
315F | 6:30 PM
Never have the facts been more elusive. It is not necessarily that they are harder to determine, but rather, harder to agree upon. What do we consider to be a reliable source? How can we think about justice in the context of a fractured landscape of information?
This talk will examine the pursuit of facts through a series of case studies exploring war crimes in Ukraine, gender-based violence in Mali, and the suppression of dissent by police forces in the United States. All of this will be contextualized within the increasingly critical role the designer plays at the nexus of design, technology, and human rights. The presentation will focus on emerging forms of fact-finding, coupled with an examination of the changing nature of evidence–from the deluge of citizen-generated video to the muli-perspectival capture and event reconstruction of contested events.
Fact-finding is often described as searching for the signal within the noise. What does the sheer amount of noise portend for the future of democracy and dissent, and how does the education of an architect prepare us to take on this question?
The lecture will be followed by a discussion moderated by Mersiha Veledar.
Brad Samuels is a founding partner at SITU, an unconventional architecture practice based in New York City that uses design, research and fabrication for creative and social impact. He is responsible for strategic oversight and directs SITU’s research division which focuses on the intersection of design, human rights and technology.
Gauri Bahuguna is a computational designer and researcher based in New York. In her current role at SITU Research, Gauri makes complex human rights cases accessible to wider audiences by wrangling large and diverse datasets into visually compelling interactive web platforms or videos. Gauri holds a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Columbia University, New York (2017) and a Master of Architecture from Columbia University’s GSAPP (2020).
This event is open to current Cooper Union students, faculty, and staff.
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EXHIBITION
Beyond the Frame — SITU Research
Thursday, October 27 through Sunday, November 13
Third Floor Hallway Gallery
Beyond the Frame is an exhibition presenting a selection of recent projects by SITU Research, a visual investigations practice based in Brooklyn, New York. The exhibition is organized by their approach to human rights and environmental justice through spatial studies and analysis across multiple scales—from the effects of a 6oz (40mm) tear gas canister on protesters to the impact of centuries-long mining in the Peruvian Andes of Cerro de Pasco.
In conjunction with the exhibition's opening, Brad Samuels AR'05, a founding partner of SITU, and Gauri Bahuguna, a computational designer and research at SITU, will speak about their work on October 27th.
SITU Research develops new forms of fact-finding to cut through digital noise and amplify truth. Working together as a group of designers, urbanists, computer scientists, and analysts, the team synthesizes disparate forms of digital evidence to provide exhaustive, factual accounts of contested events.
SITU Research is comprised of Gauri Bahuguna, Researcher; Matt Cortright, Analyst; Bora Erden, Senior Research/Technical Lead; Helmuth Rosales, Researcher; Brad Samuels, Director and Founding Partner; Candice Strongwater, Project Coordinator.
This exhibition is open to current Cooper Union students, faculty, and staff.
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VISITING LECTURE
Sameep Padora
Friday, October 28
315F and Zoom | 5:00 PM
Born in Chamba, Northern India, Sameep Padora established his Mumbai based practice in 2007 after graduating from the GSD, Harvard University.
In response to India’s socio-cultural diversity the studio has over the years operated through multiple modes of practice. The studio searches for methods to articulate value beyond addressing just program, materials and skills while looking at context as a repository and not just as a stylistic benchmark.
The practice has in the past received the Wallpaper Design Award for Best Public Building, Beazley Architecture Prize, Wienerberger Brick Award, Archdaily Building of The Year 2019, Wallpaper Design Award for House of the Year, as well as the Architectural Review’s Emerging Architecture and the AR Library Commendation Awards.
For Zoom attendance, please register in advance here.
In-person attendance to the lecture is open to Cooper Union students, faculty, and staff. Members of the public may attend through Zoom only.
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IN-CLASS LECTURE
Valerie Olson: Into the Extreme
Friday, October 28
Zoom | 5:00 PM
The lecture is part of Prof. Lydia Kallipoliti’s ARCH 225-54/ARCH-485-58 Course: Advanced Topics in History, Theory and Criticism — Architecture and Astropolitics.
Based on seven years of fieldwork within U.S. space agency institutions and fieldsites, Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth (University of Minnesota Press 2018) follows how U.S. government sponsored human spaceflight works with outer space as environmental space. It examines places on Earth where engineers, industrial designers, life scientists, and astronauts turn the solar system into an ecosystem, where “eco” encompasses ecology and economy. These projects create “systemic” processes and technologies – including biomedical research, resource prospecting, and asteroid impact prevention – that relate space and Earth in new ways. These connections extend modes of systemic thinking and environmental imagination as well as forms of spatial and political control. As spaceflight programs produce “extreme environment” operations that extend from outlying Earthly sites into space, extraterrestrial outer spaces become increasingly governable and exploitable.
For Zoom attendance, please register in advance here.
Zoom attendance to the lecture is open to Cooper Union students, faculty, and staff.
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ARCHITECTURES OF TRANSITION
Eve Blau: Modernizing Baku — The Difference That Oil Makes
Tuesday, November 1
315F and Zoom | 6:30 PM
Baku is the original oil city. Since its first oil boom in the 1870s, Baku has been an urban landscape in which the extraction and production of oil and urbanism have been inextricably intertwined in the economy, politics, and fabric of the city. The long history of those entanglements provides access not only to the foundations of the oil industry and the global urbanization processes it set in motion, but also to the manifold temporalities, spatialities, scales, displacements, and contradictions entailed in the processes of carbon modernization and concept of carbon form. Baku complicates that narrative. Unlike any other site, it also gives access to those processes in the context of the Soviet command economy and the post-Socialist restructuring that followed it, shedding new light on the dynamics of surplus driving post-oil urbanization today.
The presentation will be followed by a conversation moderated by Elisa Iturbe.
For Zoom attendance, please register in advance here.
For In-Person attendance, please register in advance here.
This event is free and open to the public in-person and through Zoom. Registration is required.
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STUDENT LECTURE SERIES
Michael Abel and Nile Greenberg, ANY: FLIPPER
Thursday, November 3
315F and Zoom | 6:30 PM
ANY (ABEL NILE NEW YORK) (EST. 2020) is a partnership in architecture. As a part of our shift from acting merely as architects to more open-ended actors, we often operate within other mediums producing cultural, design and research work. By working directly in other mediums rather than blending them together with architecture, we aim to multiply performances rather than intensifying a single one. We are able to think through the potentials of architecture by performing acts of non-architecture.
The lecture will be followed by a discussion moderated by Dov Diamond.
For in-person attendance, please register in advance here.
For Zoom attendance, please register in advance here.
This event is free and accessible to the public in person and through Zoom. Registration is required.
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CURRENT WORK
Lacol: Community Infrastructure
Tuesday, November 8
Zoom | 12:00 PM
Lacol is an architectural cooperative established in 2009 in the Barcelona neighborhood of Sants. The group works to generate community infrastructures through architecture, cooperativism, and user participation. Focused on improving the quality of urban life, Lacol encourages debate on the management of urban spaces and the recovery of local heritage.
In the words of the RIBA Journal, Lacol’s work “is proof that another way is possible; where disempowered communities can be galvanized, that land deemed out of reach can be secured, and that cooperation by all at the most fundamental levels can—when guided by architects—realize great design.”
This lecture will be presented by two of Lacol’s 14 cofounders, Cristina Gamboa Masdevall and Eliseu Arrufat Grau.
This event is free and open to the public through Zoom. Please register here in advance.
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EXHIBITION LECTURE
Kiel Moe: The Broken World Model of Design
Tuesday, November 8
The Great Hall and Zoom | 6:30 PM
Freed of the provisional stabilities that alternately enabled and constrained modernity, our models of what architecture is, does, and could be in this century radically shifts in a Broken World model of design in which, as Steve Jackson notes, 'we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points in thinking.' The Broken World model shift is equally epistemic in scope, practical in application, and hopeful in disposition: a model of architecture beyond growth, beyond comfort, and beyond the doldrums of normalizing pedagogy and practices.
A discussion following the lecture will be moderated by Sanford Kwinter. This event is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Model Behavior.
Kiel Moe is a practicing architect and author of several books on the material and energetic basis of architecture.
For Zoom attendance, please register in advance here.
For In-Person attendance, please register in advance here.
This event is free and open to the public in-person and through Zoom.
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ARCHITECTURES OF TRANSITION
Maria Shéhérazade Giudici: Carefree, Not Careless
Thursday, November 10
Rose Auditorium | 6:30 PM
Care is one of the most powerful keywords in contemporary discourse, as it becomes increasingly clearer that the ecological crisis we face is entangled with forms of social and political violence. However, the way Western culture understands care is problematic: constructed as a dyadic, unidirectional effort geared to foster growth, the 'care' capitalism promotes might well be one of the hallmarks of environmental exploitation, rather than a solution to it. In this talk we will retrace the way such a culture of care was first articulated through the development of domestic space, analyzing the way in which the heteronormative family has been constructed as the hegemonic model of care. Through a series of case studies of residential architecture, we will discuss how the emergence and naturalization of specific architectural types has been both the cause and the effect of the effort to construct the very subjectivity of motherhood as the ultimate locus of caring. Modern housing educated its inhabitants to an idea of care that is inadequate, perhaps even dangerous when scaled up to the planet. Studying and challenging its domestic roots might help reimagine the spatial and political possibility for other forms of care to emerge: socialized rather than individualized, based on solidarity rather than on the protection of one's possessions.
The lecture will be followed by a discussion moderated by Elisa Iturbe.
Maria Shéhérazade Giudici leads the History and Theory course at the School of Architecture of the Royal College of Art and coordinates the PhD Programme of the Architectural Association. Maria is the founder of research platform Black Square and the editor of AA Files; her work focuses on the relationship between space and the construction of subjectivity.
For Zoom attendance, please register in advance here.
For In-Person attendance, please register in advance here.
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.
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EXHIBITION LECTURE
Typography at VKhutemas, the Soviet Union's Revolutionary Art School
Monday, November 14
Rose Auditorium | 6:30 PM
VKhuTeMas, or Higher Art and Technical Studios, is a revolutionary Soviet art school that opened its doors just a year after the founding of Bauhaus in Germany. Today, the school is usually remembered for a slew of avant-garde artists who worked there — Kandinsky and Malevich, Rodchenko and Stepanova, Lissitzky, and Tatlin, among many others. However, the school’s innovative pedagogy and its democratic admission structure geared towards working class students deserves attention as well. Following some of the formal, theoretical, and political debates that happened in and around VKhuTeMas allows us to better understand the ground-breaking use of typography that developed there and became a staple of constructivist art and design. This lecture will shed light on the origins and trajectory of VKhuTeMas, paying especially close attention to how ideas on typography fed into the school’s artistic output and how they evolved over time.
The lecture is co-sponsored by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union.
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required. Please register here in advance.
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EXHIBITION
Model Behavior
Tuesday, October 4 through Friday, November 18
First Floor Colonnade and Lobby | Hours: Tuesday – Friday 2-7 PM, Saturday and Sunday 12-7 PM
The term “model behavior” is commonly used to describe good social skills. This exhibition, curated by the Anyone Corporation, turns that concept on its head to investigate how models themselves behave. Conceptual models, study models, section models, and presentation models are givens in the practice and production of architecture, but the role of the architectural model in projecting or eliciting social behavior is seldom considered. At a moment when models in other disciplines – such as climate change and COVID models – are clearly affecting social behavior, how do architectural models reflect those changes or contribute to changing behaviors? This exhibition provides an opportunity for individuals to rethink the potentials of the architectural model, both within the discipline and in its relationships to the myriad models that shape contemporary culture.
Exhibited in the colonnade and first floor of Cooper Union’s historic Foundation Building, Model Behavior features more than 70 works and objects by 45 artists and architects including artists Olafur Eliasson, Isamu Noguchi, Ekow Nimako, and Thomas Demand, and architects Peter Eisenman, Darell Wayne Fields, Greg Lynn, Forensic Architecture (Eyal Weizman), First Office (Anna Neimark and Andrew Atwood), MALL (Jennifer Bonner), Ensamble (Débora Mesa and Antón García-Abril), and Höweler and Yoon (Eric Höweler and Meejin Yoon), as well as School of Architecture graduates Stan Allen AR’81, David Gersten AR’91, Jürgen Mayer AR’91, Jesse Reiser AR’81, and Nanako Umemoto AR’83, and faculty member Michael Young.
Free and open to the public.
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VIDEO ARCHIVE
Watch Our Public Lectures and Events Anytime
Vimeo | On Demand
The School of Architecture records, archives and publishes videos of public programs to open access and accommodate asynchronous learning and research for audiences in different time zones. You may visit our Vimeo channel for access to all our video content.
You may also use Cooper website's search bar to look for a particular lecture title or a lecturer's name to find embedded videos of their events with us, if any are available, along with other pertinent event and bio information.
If you recently missed a lecture or event you wanted to see, make sure to check out the Fall 2021 and the Spring 2022 Lecture and Events Lists. Links to earlier semester event lists are found at the bottom of their respective event pages.
Our public programs are free and recorded for access anytime.
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ANNOUNCEMENT
Coronavirus Response
For campus-wide COVID-19 updates and resources, please visit The Cooper Union's website.
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Nader Tehrani, Arch fac | Lecture | Nader Tehrani: My House is Better than Your House, California College of Arts Architecture Division, October 20, 2022, San Francisco, CA
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Mauricio Higuera A’13, Arch fac/staff | Participant | “Estallido Cultural Por La Paz y la Vida,” Ministerio de Cultura de Colombia, Queens Theater, Sunday, October 30, Queens, NY
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Carmi Bee, AR’67 | Article | “Green, affordable housing for seniors, designed by RKTB, opens doors on former site of iconic church,” REAL ESTATE WEEKLY, August 9, 2022
Toshiko Mori AR’76 | Featured | Six New Projects to be Honored with MASterworks Awards, Municipal Art Society, October 17, 2022
Maurice Cox AR’83 | Featured | “Chicago plans to speed up vacant lot sales in bid to curb crime,” THE PHILADELPHIA TRIBUNE, October 18, 2022
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Catherine Seavitt Nordenson AR’94 | Lecture | "Roberto Burle Marx and Forest Politics," LAEP Speaker Series, WiLA Lecture, Utah State University Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, September 23, 2022, Logan, UT
Elizabeth Graziolo AR’95 | Featured | “Inside a modern Art Deco-inspired home at New York’s One Wall Street, YAHOO!FINANCE, October 13, 2022
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Open Calls & Opportunities |
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NEW
CALL FOR APPLICANTS
CALL FOR APPLICANTS
DEADLINES APPROACHING
CALL FOR ENTRIES
2023 Rome Prize Competition from the American Academy in Rome, awards the Rome Prize to support innovative and cross-disciplinary work in the arts and humanities. Deadline: November 1
CALL FOR ENTRIES
CALL FOR FELLOWS
ONGOING
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
HERITAGES: Past and Present — Built and Social will consider shifts in how we define heritage — as both material objects and social traditions — from the perspectives of art, architecture, cultural theorists and social historians. Deadline: November 25
CALL FOR PAPERS
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Future Anterior Journal is a peer-reviewed journal that approaches the field of historic preservation from a position of critical inquiry. Deadline: January 31
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CALL FOR APPLICATIONS
CALL FOR WRITING
Write for Urban Omnibus! Shaped by a wide range of contributors In an effort to advance the collective work of city making, Urban Omnibus calls for students and professionals to submit article proposals. Deadline: Ongoing
CALL FOR APPLICANTS
CALL FOR APPLICANTS
ACSA seeks a Staff Editor to join their team and sheperd journals and books through peer review, production, and publication stages. Deadline: Ongoing
FREE GROCERIES
The College Student Pantry welcomes all college students in need of groceries. Open first and third Wednesdays from 3-5pm. Stop by 602 E 9th St in the East Village (corner of Ave B) for a free bag of groceries. Ongoing: 1st and 3rd Wednesdays at 3PM.
SUBSCRIPTION PROMOTION
Azure Magazine is offering a 58% discount for students and faculty for their 2022 magazine subscription.
CALL FOR ALLIES
CALL FOR SUPPORT
Mophradat: Support the Arts in Beirut Prioritizing those already disadvantaged, and those who influence the community around them in a thoughtful manner, Mophradat offers resources to artists, visual thinkers and architects. Deadline: Rolling
CALL FOR APPLICANTS
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