VISITING LECTURE

Anthony Titus AR'98: Anatomical Apparitions

Tuesday, September 12

315F and Zoom | 6:30PM

The lecture will focus upon the structure of Anthony Titus' transdisciplinary practice of art and architecture. Spanning a selection of exhibitions, projects, and teaching pedagogy from the past decade, the lecture will emphasize the processes and procedures involved in making the work as well as the works themselves. The lecture will also focus on the exploration and discovery of new possibilities between the spaces of architecture, sculpture and painting. The conversation and exchange between these disciplines serves as a rich space of opportunity to enhance and expand our current understanding of space, form, color, and structure as participants in a larger cultural landscape. 

Anthony Titus Studio is an interdisciplinary practice that focuses on the relationships between contemporary art and architecture. Since its inception in 2005, the studio has produced numerous installations, objects as well as solo and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad. The practice has consistently explored the uniquely constructed spaces between architecture, painting and sculpture. He received his undergraduate degree in architecture from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and a graduate degree in fine art from the University of Chicago. 

For Zoom attendance, please register in advance here.

The in-person event is open to current Cooper Union Students, Faculty, and Staff only. The Public may attend this event through Zoom. 

GALLERY REMARKS

Michael Young: The Turned Room

Tuesday, September 19

Third Floor Hallway Gallery | 6:30PM

Michael Young will speak about The Turned Room, his exhibition of photogrammetry work currently on view in the Foundation Building. 

Digital sensing and imaging can be defined as the translation of detected environmental energy into numeric information—which is to say, sensing and imaging become interchangeable. The differences between a two-dimensional image and a three-dimensional model, or a still photograph and animate cinema, also tend to blur. The moved image—two images of an object from two different locations—can be sequenced to create a sensation of camera motion, but these displaced images can also be used to triangulate the location of a point in space, as with humans’ binocular vision or when birds bob their heads. This moved, or doubled, image of the world is also the basis of photogrammetry. Used in surveying for centuries, the doubled image—“a point in space known through two interrelated projections”—is the fundamental principle of Gaspard Monge’s Descriptive Geometry (1798), which was the foundational course of the École Polytechnique; it is also the technical basis of interrelated plans and sections in architectural drawing.

The Turned Room also relates to Young’s recent book Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image (Routledge, 2021). The book explores architecture’s entanglement with contemporary image culture, looking closely at how changes produced through technologies of mediation alter disciplinary concepts and produce political effects. Using both historical and contemporary examples, it focuses on how conventions of representation are established, maintained, challenged, and transformed. Young’s investigations are conjoined with inquiries into aesthetics and technology in the hope that the tensions between them can help reveal how architectural images are produced, disseminated, and valued, and how images alter assumptions regarding the appearances of architecture and the environment.

Open to Cooper Union students, alumni, faculty, and staff.

ARCHLOG

Bridging the Megacity: Cooper at the Seoul Biennial

Posted on September 8

The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture is thrilled to announce its participation in the 4th Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism in Seoul, South Korea. Work by twelve current thesis students from their spring 2023 Design IV studio section with Associate Professor Adjunct Nima Javidi is now on view from September 1 – October 31 in the Biennale’s Global Studios exhibition.

Using Seoul and its unique geological condition as a starting point, the studio considered multilayered mat structures that can accommodate, through their thickness and crust, the passage and continuity of waterways, windways, and human inhabitation. This reading of infrastructure, because it operates at both human and ecological scales, informed design approaches that afford ecological continuities while allowing human settlement as an overlay. The resulting mat generated from different rhythms of structure, access, and ecological flow required reworking and montage with the edges of the bridge to create a seamless and meaningful connection with urbanity on each side of the river. 

EXHIBITION

The Turned Room

On View Wednesday, September 6 through Sunday, September 24

Third Floor Hallway Gallery | 12:00PM

As a recipient of the Arnold W. Brunner/Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize, Associate Professor Michael Young occupied the Philip Guston Studio at the American Academy in Rome from May 13th to June 16th, 2023. Over the course of four weeks, he undertook an experiment in representation specifically constrained by this time and place. Everything that he worked on was already in the room; nothing could be brought in or removed. Working in the studio every afternoon from 2:00 until 8:00, he created three-dimensional photogrammetry models from data points gathered through digital images captured with an iPhone. The captures were a sequence of 15–40 images taken as a series of still frames moving around an object. Each week, he took a different object—a chair, a phone, a desk, a series of drawers—and positioned it on the floor in the space as an object of focus. These objects allowed him to capture the background of the room with relative gradations, from highly detailed to loosely defined, shifting in resolution from realism to abstraction. The weeklong setup also allowed him to capture the room at different times of day, with different qualities of light from different directions, and with different spectrums of color hue. The models consisted of points and only points, averaging around 25 million per model. Selected views of the point-cloud models were extracted at three different resolutions and overlayed as color field studies to develop a specific mood and palate. The proportions of the prints resulting from this process are the proportions of the room. Each object was also turned in relation to gravity, creating—when modeled three dimensionally and viewed from multiple angles—an ambiguity around what was turned: the object, the model, or the room.

On Tuesday, September 19 at 6:30 pm Young will hold a gallery talk for the exhibition in the Third Floor Hallway.

Open to Cooper Union students, faculty, and staff.

MESSAGE FROM THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT AND VPAA

Update on Dean Search for The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture

Posted: Tuesday, August 15

Dear Cooper Community,

As a unified community, our collective efforts are guided by and remain steadfastly aligned with The Cooper Union’s Institutional Goals and Strategic Priorities, adopted by the Board of Trustees in 2018. We are advancing Cooper Union as an institution of excellence – one where students are prepared to question and lead in a complex world, and where they learn through leading-edge models for higher education that consider the ethical, cultural, and environmental contexts and consequences of technical and creative disciplines. In short, we continue to reinforce and build on Cooper Union’s legacy and strengthen our position as a place where students build their capacity and abilities to change the world for good. We have made important progress across the board – in our academic programs, in student experiences, in our civic initiatives, in the spaces and places at Cooper and beyond where scholarly and creative exploration flourish.

Strategically aligning people – academic leaders and faculty, in particular – with this mission is central to our ability to continually deliver on it for students and the world at large. Equally vital is our capacity to infuse novel ideas, creative solutions, and unconventional approaches into our academic work in order to maximize our positive impact.

For The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, more than ever, that work is rooted in the convergence of the discipline and practice of architecture with the urgent need for the built environment to foster an equitable, accessible, healthy society and sustainable planet. It is work that is further contextualized by human experience over the course of history, including all of our histories.