THE IRWIN S. CHANIN
SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE 
The Cooper 
Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

News & Events 

 

Next Week: 2012 Pritzker Prize Laureate Wang Shu
This Week: Lectures and Events
Around School: CU @ Lunch
Student Opportunities: Menschel | Fulbright Information Session
Open Calls and Opportunities: New and Approaching Deadlines
Faculty & Alumni News

NEXT WEEK

CURRENT WORK: WANG SHU
2012 Pritzker Prize Laureate
APR 2 at 7PM
The Great Hall
7 E. 7 Street     

Wang Shu and his wife, Lu Wenyu, founded Amateur Architecture Studio in 1997 in Hangzhou, China. The name of the office refers to the approach of an amateur builder-one based on spontaneity, craft skills, and cultural traditions. In order to learn traditional skills, Wang Shu spent the early part of his career working on building sites. Rather than looking toward the West for inspiration, Wang's work is rooted firmly in the context of Chinese history and culture. Some of his most important built works include the Library of Wenzheng College, Suzhou University; Ningbo Contemporary Art Museum; the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Art; and the Ningbo History Museum.

Wang Shu is the 2012 Pritzker Prize laureate, the first Chinese citizen to receive that honor. He is Professor and Head of the Architecture School at China Academy of Art, Hangzhou. In 2011, he became the first Chinese Kenzo Tange Visiting Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

FREE FOR CURRENT COOPER UNION STUDENTS/FACULTY/STAFF
 

Amateur Architecture Studio-Ningbo History Museum | photo: Lu Hengzhong

EVENTS THIS WEEK

POSTCARDS OF OUR CITY
New York - Dublin
MAR 27 and 28 12PM - 6PM
1st Floor Lobby
Foundation Bldg      
 
THE COOPER UNION COMMUNITY IS INVITED TO SHARE THEIR THOUGHTS ABOUT NEW YORK CITY ON A POSTCARD TO THE RESIDENTS OF DUBLIN.

Postcards of our City is part research and part exhibition organized by Motti Ruimy (Tel Aviv) and Paul Kearns (Dublin). The traditional postcard is, if nothing else quintessentially about the storytelling of place. The postcard is both "an icon" of place and "an act" of communication, a brief written message that momentarily travels physically through space for some days often weeks and occasionally years. The postcard is a privately written message yet one that is "open" for others to read. It is simultaneously a private act, and an act of public display. 
 
Hosted by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture

  

 

 

FORMLESS FINDER
Garrett Ricciardi and Juilian Rose
MAR 28 at 2PM
RM 714
Foundation Bldg      

SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE | COOPER THESIS LECTURE SERIES

The formless was articulated as a philosophical construct by Georges Bataille, a man with a famous antipathy for architecture. But Bataille's hostility was due more to his myopic view of architecture than any fundamental incompatibility between his ideas and architectural practice. Bataille could only see architecture as form -- it was always a metaphor or a symbol: a stand-in for the body, the state, or an institution. But in his Critical Dictionary, the same document that included his notoriously hostile "definition" of architecture, Bataille praised the formless qualities of space. And his notion of the formless was deeply physical, grounded in a discourse of base materiality. Ironically then, there may be no better place for Bataille's ideas to take root than architecture, provided it is no longer conflated with form.
 

STUDENT LECTURE SERIES
ALEX KITNICK: Light and Interface
MAR 28, 6:30PM 
RM 315
Foundation Bldg     

Alex Kitnick received his Ph.D. from the Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University, in 2010 and has taught at Vassar College, the School of Visual Art, Otis College of Art and Design, and UCLA. In 2011-2012 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He recently edited an October File on Dan Graham, October 136 on New Brutalism, and The Expendable Reader: Articles on Art, Architecture, Design, and Media, 1951-1979, which collects key writings by the artist John McHale. In addition to his work as a historian, Kitnick has also published criticism in magazines and journals including Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, and May.

Image Caption: Doug Wheeler, SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 (2012) at David Zwirner Gallery

AROUND SCHOOL
CU @ LUNCH 
Nyeema Morgan Art '00
APR 2 at 12PM
AlumniSpace
3rd Floor   
Student Residence

Nyeema Morgan is a New York-based visual artist. Through her interdisciplinary practice, Morgan explores personal and cultural economies of knowledge through familiar artifacts. Her works, whether project-based or singular, are inspired by philosophical conflicts presented in everyday encounters with images, objects and information. Her works, which have included large-scale drawings, installations, clay work, sculpture and printed matter, call to question information's conceptual and hierarchical value, challenge the boundaries of authoritative reasoning as well as make evident her own implications within a larger socio-political drama. 


LUNCH WILL BE PROVIDED

Sponsored by the Career Center and Alumni Affairs

 
Nyeema Morgan, picture prophylactic, prophylactic picture (from the installation I, Rhinoceros), 2013. Mixed paper media. Courtesy of the artist.

STUDENT OPPORTUNITIES
THE BENJAMIN MENSCHEL FELLOWSHIP
Fourth Year Architecture Students
DEADLINE
April 1, 2013  
 
The Benjamin Menschel Fellowship Program encourages juniors (and fourth year architect students) to submit project proposals (deadline April 1st 2013). Winning projects are completed over the summer 2013. In the fall winners prepare an exhibition of their projects for the yearly and prestigious "Menschel Exhibition" (November 2013). The exhibition is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue.

Download the application form here 
 


FULBRIGHT GRANT
Information Session
APR 9 at 12PM
RM 106
41 Cooper Sq 
 
Curious about applying for a Fulbright Grant? 
Want to learn more about pursuing project-based work abroad? 
 
Kerry Carnahan will talk about her experience as a Fulbright Fellow in Barcelona, Spain, where she studied at the Universitat Polit�cnica de Catalunya and the Cercle Art�stic de Sant Lluc. At the Polit�cnica, she supported ongoing laboratory investigations into composite concrete. 
 
Ms. Carnahan also participated in the initial phases of the reopening of a Spanish Civil War-era anti-aerial bomb shelter, built using traditional Catalan masonry techniques and located under the Pla�a del Diamant. Ms. Carnahan will discuss how the Fulbright Grant afforded her an opportunity to engage with questions of history, mass culture and biopower as they relate to public spaces and to experiment with visual and literary interpretive framework. She will also describe how the Fulbright experience informed her decade of service within New York City government as an advocate for ecological and social concerns in the built environment. Ms. Carnahan will present pictures of her work and her time in Barcelona. 
 
Peter Buckley, Associate Professor of the Faculty of the Humanities and Social Sciences and The Cooper Union's Fulbright Program Advisor, will join Ms. Carnahan to provide information and field questions about applying for a Fulbright Grant. 
 
 
 


OPEN CALLS & OPPORTUNITIES 
NEW!! 

 

OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS | Storefront for Art and Architecture is accepting submissions for On Somethingness/On Nothingness as part of Ideas City Festival 2013: Untapped Capital. Either by remixing existing conditions in new forms or by unveiling invisible forces, On Somethingness/On Nothingness will bring to the public a new catalog of Untapped Capital for the future of cities and citizens. DEADLINE: April 10, 2013  learn more ...  

 

CALL FOR PAPERS | Constructing Urban Intelligence workshop is part of the 9th International Conference on Intelligence Environments, and will take place in Athens, Greece, July 16-17, 2013. Recognizing that there are multiple ways of organizing tasks, technologies, and strategies to close the loop, this workshop will explore the role of technology, policy, and design in constructing urban intelligence through agency. Designers, researchers, and practitioners across multiple disciplinary domains are invited to submit papers. DEADLINE: April 24, 2013  learn more ... 
 
MIT CALL FOR PAPERS | Thresholds is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal that aims to publish only original material. The Call for Papers for Issue 42 is HUMAN. thresholds 42: Human prompts us to consider the past and present changing notion of 'the human' with regards to its physical, virtual, and psychological habitat. Scholarly papers that address this topic through a historical, sociological, or an anthropological lens as well as art and architectural projects that explore these issues will be considered. DEADLINE: April 30, 2013  learn more ...  
DUE THIS WEEK 
 
CALL FOR ENTRIES: PERMANENT NEW YORK CITY MEMORIAL | The Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition seeks entries for an international design competition to honor the victims of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and its legacy. Designers have the chance to cover almost the entire fa�ade of the New York City building where the blaze occurred. Anyone with an idea is encouraged to submit. REGISTRATION DEADLINE: March 29, 2013.  learn more ...

 

BERKELEY PRIZE TEACHING FELLOWSHIP | Starting in 2013, the Berkeley Prize Committee broadens the scope of the activities of the prize by offering faculty who teach undergraduate architectural design an academic-year Teaching Fellowship. The primary goal for the Berkeley Prize Teaching Fellowship is to focus students' attention on the social and physical characteristics of the proposed users of the buildings and spaces they design.  DEADLINE: April 1, 2013  learn more ...
 
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS | With relatively few outlets devoted to architectural criticism today and a professional tendency to declare a new architectural movement every ten years or so, a staggering amount of built work goes unexamined. CLOG : UNPUBLISHED will critically examine completed buildings that have thus far flown under the radar and/or have been forgotten.  DEADLINE: April 1, 2013  learn more ... 
ONGOING 
 
MELLON FELLOWSHIP | The grant will support a major new initiative within LSE Cities exploring the intersection of architecture, urbanism and the humanities.  learn more ... 
 
CALL FOR PAPERS | On the Spatial Epistemology of Politics, or How We Know Politics Through Space: Essays for Design Studies is a forthcoming edited book that explores how spaces are political and how politics is spatial. Deadline: April 8, 2013 learn more ... 
 
FELLOWSHIP | The Vera List Center for Art and Politics is pleased to invite applications for the 2013-2015 Vera List Center Fellowships. The curatorial focus theme for 2013-2015 is AlignmentDeadline: April 8, 2013   learn more ...
 
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: LOG | Architects age 59 and younger are invited to submit ONE building project completed or started between 2003 and 2013 for publication in this celebratory issue. Deadline: April 15, 2013  learn more ... 
 
CCA YOUNG CURATOR PROGRAM | For the third year the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) offers two curatorial opportunities with the generous support of the Power Corporation of Canada: the Young Curator Program and the Curatorial Internships Program. Deadline: April 15, 2013 learn more ... 
 
TRAVEL AND STUDY GRANT | The Deborah J. Norden Fund awards up to $5,000 annually in travel and study grants to students and recent graduates in the fields of architecture, architectural history, and urban studies. Deadline: April 17, 2013.  learn more ...  


FACULTY & STAFF NEWS 
PENN STATE LECTURE | Michael Webb will present the lecture "Drawing as a De-Constructive Medium," as part of the WWW Drawing Lecture Series in the Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Penn State University on March 27, 2013.  learn more ...
MoMA SYMPOSIUM | Anthony Vidler and Stephen Rustow will participate in the upcoming symposium Revising Labrouste in the Digital Age. Vidler will moderate the panel discussion "Reading Alone in Public: The Library and the Spaces of Information from the 19th to the 21st centuries." Rustow will introduce and moderate the panel discussion "Learning with and from Labrouste." The event, which is held in conjunction with the exhibition Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light, will take place March 28, 2013 at MoMA. learn more ...
LECTURES AT PRINCETON AND COLUMBIA | Anthony Vidler will participant as a speaker for the event, Looking Down on Modernity: Aerial Photography and the Science of Social Space, as part of The Disciplines Series of The Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia Univeristy on April 9, 2013. He is also a participant in the international symposium What is Cosmopolitical Design?, at Princeton University on April 12, 2013.
PRINCETON LECTURE SERIES | Lydia Kallipoliti will be speaking at Princeton University as part of the lecture series What I Did Next: Princeton's Alternative Architectural Practices - Thinking Technology on April 17, 2013. learn more ...


ALUMNI NEWS 
Diller Scofidio + Renfro (Elizabeth Diller, AR '79; Ricardo Scofidio, AR '55) | book launch | Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture After Images, Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Columbia University, April 19, 2013

Anthony Titus (Ar '98) | conference | "Visibility of Research," School of Architecture, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, March 27-30, 2013

Michael Scaduto (AR '03) | speaker | "Winter 2013 ARE Boot Camp: Structural Systems (Ssone)," Center for Architecture, New York, NY, March 23, 2013

                                                                                         

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