This exhibition, located in the Third Floor Hallway Gallery, features two of Associate Professor Joshua Ramus’ works currently under construction: The Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York, and The Brown University Performing Arts Center in Rhode Island.

You are invited to a private screening for Cooper Hewitt staff and current Cooper Union students, faculty, and staff of Mud Frontier: Architecture at the Borderlands. The 60-minute documentary directed and produced by Cooper Hewitt with the Smithsonian Latino Center traces Studio Rael San Fratello's work connecting contemporary technology with the legacy of pottery making and adobe architecture in the southwest's San Luis Valley region.

This event is open to current Cooper Union students, faculty, and staff only. All attendees must register in advance here. 

Yasmeen Lari is the cofounder and CEO of the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, an organization working to conserve the nation’s historic art and architecture while providing large-scale humanitarian aid to local communities. Since the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, she has refocused her career on traditional materials, technologies, and architectures in a process she describes as “unlearning.” Positing a sustainable, grassroots model for the development of Pakistan’s built environment, she advocates for “barefoot social architecture,” a women-centered, carbon-neutral approach to housing that emphasizes co-creation and the use of sustainable materials like bamboo, lime, and mud. Under Lari’s leadership, the Heritage Foundation has helped build over 40,000 carbon-neutral structures across Pakistan.

The program will be moderated by urbanist, filmmaker, and writer Cassim Shepard. Shepard teaches in the urban design program at Columbia GSAPP and consults for mission-driven organizations on editorial and media strategy, public engagement, and urban planning projects. He was the founding editor of Urban Omnibus.

This event will be conducted through Zoom.  Zoom account registration is required, please register in advance here. 

Guy Nordenson is a structural engineer and professor of architecture at Princeton. He was the engineer for the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC (with Silman), the International African American Museum, and Emmanuel Nine Memorial, in Charleston SC and oversaw the design of David Hammons’ Day’s End sculpture in the Hudson River.


Nat Oppenheimer is an Executive Vice President and Senior Principal at Silman. Nat joined the firm in 1988 and has extensive experience in the areas of new construction, renovation, sustainable engineering, and historic preservation as Principal in Charge of much of the firm’s institutional, private residential, and educational work.

Nader Tehrani is the Dean of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union in New York. He was previously a professor of architecture at MIT, where he served as the Head of the Department from 2010-2014. He is also Principal of NADAAA, a practice dedicated to the advancement of design innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and an intensive dialogue with the construction industry. 

This presentation will be conducted in-person and through Zoom. Public attendance is limited to Zoom, please register in advance here.

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.

If you recently missed a lecture or event you wanted to see, make sure to check out the Fall 2021 and the Spring 2021 Lecture and Events Lists. Links to earlier semester event lists are found at the bottom of their respective event pages.

For campus-wide COVID-19 updates and resources, please visit The Cooper Union's website.