1.23.2013

December 22, 2012

Cooper Union Aims For Athletic Success By Ron Schachter

The Cooper Union men’s basketball team (in white) features a starting five that each have a GPA of at least 3.9. (Photo courtesy Joanna Cruz/Cooper Union)

So, you’re a talented college student who wants a top-notch academic experience and to play basketball. Stanford, Princeton and Harvard leap to mind as good landing spots. But there’s a tiny college in New York City that’s recently elbowed its way into that select company.

The members of the men’s and women’s basketball teams at Cooper Union, nestled in Greenwich Village, are all there on full scholarships. That’s not because of any athletic prowess. For the past 150 years, the school has offered free tuition to its entire

student body, which consists solely of art, architecture, and engineering students.

Graduates include a Nobel Laureate, a bevy of MacArthur “genius” award winners, and Thomas Alva Edison. Cooper Union President *Jamshed Bharucha points out that his college is one of the most selective in the country.

“It’s unique in that the students are, without exception, committed to their work and interested in a rigorous academic experience that’s very advanced,” Bharucha said, “where you’re in a community of like-minded students who aren’t interested in the frills and the other distractions, if you like, of the typical college experience.”

But over the past two decades, Cooper Union has also fielded successful men’s and women’s teams in tennis, volleyball, and basketball, as well as coed squads in soccer and cross-country. Last year, the men’s volleyball and basketball squads won league championships against the likes of New York-area schools Sarah Lawrence and Yeshiva, and a host of fellow art, architecture, and engineering schools throughout New England.

They think about the physics, they think about the angles. They think about the shifting of weights and the technique in such an advanced, crisp way that there is no question that it gives them that little edge.

–Jamshed Bharucha, Copper Union President

Those achievements are all the more notable because this urban campus has no athletic facilities. The athletics department has barely a $60,000 budget. Basketball coach *Stephen Baker adds the men’s team has managed 16-4 records in the two seasons before this one, even though most of the members haven’t played high school ball.

“They do well at everything that they do, so if they try a sport they just think naturally that they’re going to get it,” Baker said. “They have a tremendous work ethic so they’ll work harder than anybody else, and they’re great at learning. They enjoy learning. And they’re used to succeeding.” *President *Dean of Athletics

Baker, who’s been the Associate Dean of Students for 37 years, reintroduced the intercollegiate sports program in 1992 after it had been in mothballs for decades. Nowadays he also holds the unique title of Dean of Athletics. About 80 of Cooper Union’s 1,000 undergraduates participate.

On a Friday night in late November, the men’s and women’s teams ran through their weekly practice in a rented junior high school gym nearly 20 blocks from campus. Practice time is limited for a good reason. Most players, including women’s captain and architecture major Yoon Shin, take seven courses a term.

“I have class until 10 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday,” Shin said. “On Tuesday, I have nine hours of class and I work as an R.A. in the dorm, so that takes up almost all 24 hours of the day.”

Shin says that Baker’s basketball program has made it worth finding the extra hours to compete in a sport she hadn’t played before.

“He’s giving an opportunity for us small college kids to get a full university experience, so it’s great,” Shin said. “We’re not missing out on anything.”

The starting five on the men’s team all sport grade point averages of 3.9 or higher. That includes co-captain and civil engineering major Dominik Goj, who was recruited in high school by Division I colleges. Goj said his less experienced teammates at Cooper

Union are quick studies.

“You don’t have to repeat things over and over from week to week,” Goj said. “Guys will come up to me in the hallway in school and ask me some things. I’ll give them some tips. Then they’ll come back to me and say they’re working on it, and everybody picks up things really quickly. It’s amazing. I was really surprised when we kept winning games, but I think it’s expected now.”

Cooper Union President Bharucha theorized that the uncanny ability of the players to visualize and problem solve gives them a unique advantage on the court.

“They think about the physics, they think about the angles,” Bharucha said. “They think about the shifting of weights and the technique in such an advanced, crisp way that there is no question that it gives them that little edge.”

The practice and aptitude paid off on the following Saturday when the women and men played a home doubleheader against lower Manhattan neighbor The King’s College. About 75 fans half-filled the bleachers on one side of the gym.

After a close first half, the women — led by Shin’s rebounding and a flurry of fast breaks — pulled away to win 37-25. The men’s team, meanwhile, kept up their winning ways with a 77-68 victory.

Despite its size, Cooper Union also has its share of fierce athletic rivalries, in this case with the other art, architecture, and engineering institutions on the schedule. Chief among them, Baker says, is Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

“That’s a rivalry that goes back over a hundred years,” Baker said. “It’s something that they prepare a little bit differently than against any other team, because they take so much pride in the fact that they’re playing someone that has to focus on the things that they’re doing. That they have the recognition that I might be up after the game, I might be up all night long because I have to come up with a conception about my next project in the studio, or in architecture, or in engineering.”

Baker couldn’t resist the dig that Pratt’s players have an extra motivation — because they may have been rejected by Cooper Union.

Althea Chang, Contributor

Cars, Tech, Toys, Luxury

1/12/2013

Video Game Teaches Teens Driver Safety Comment Now Follow Comments

Engineers, programmers and designers working in a Manhattan basement are refining a video game meant to teach driver safety. They’re hoping to partner with insurance companies willing to invest in safer roads and help put their hardware in high schools. I visited the experimental automotive lab at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City and produced this video. LINK TO VIDEO: http://www.forbes.com/sites/altheachang/2013/01/12/video-game-teaches-teens-driver-safety/

January 17, 2013

George Maciunas: ‘Anything Can Substitute Art: Maciunas in SoHo’ By HOLLAND COTTER

41 Cooper Union Gallery 41 Cooper Square, East Village Through Feb. 2 Decades before there was Occupy, there was the artist *George Maciunas (1931-1978). Born in Lithuania, Maciunas (pronounced ma-CHEW-nas) came to New York City in the late 1940s and graduated from Cooper Union in 1952 with a multitasking degree in art, graphic design and architecture, later supplemented with work in art history and musicology.

All of these disciplines came together in the giant nebula of international collective activity known as Fluxus, which Maciunas both named and oversaw. And on the movement’s 50th anniversary, Cooper Union, in collaboration with the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center in Vilnius, Lithuania, is paying homage to Maciunas, its illustrious alumnus, with this engrossing archival show.

Bryan Zimmerman/The Cooper Union, NY, and the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center, Vilnius

“V Tre,” (1963), from the exhibition “Anything Can Substitute Art: Maciunas in SoHo,” at Cooper Union.

With roots in Dada and Zen Buddhism, Fluxus was anti-capitalist, anti-elitist, pro-community and pro-play. On the one hand, its goal was to propose a new kind of art in which anyone could participate, and to create an avant-garde so integrated into life as to become the new, enlightened normal. At the same time, Fluxus preserved and cherished its distanced, critical status, as exemplified in its sly, funny sendup of corporate culture and its socialistic innovations.

A practical-minded utopian, Maciunas bought several crumbling industrial buildings in 1966 in SoHo, a neighborhood slated for demolition in the name of urban renewal. He began converting them into live-and-work spaces to be owned and managed by artists, who, particularly if their output was unmarketably experimental, were otherwise hard-pressed to find quarters in the city. One of these Fluxhouses also held early showcases for underground films, run by Maciunas’s fellow Lithuanian, Jonas Mekas.

The Cooper Union exhibition, organized by Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, follows Maciunas from school, through his personality-crowded Fluxus years, to his death from cancer at 46. It requires a fair amount of close reading and decoding, but anyone who wants to get a sense of how art can be both activist and existentialist will find bracing information here.

And anyone who wants to get a sense of Maciunas himself, and the Fluxus universe in which he lived, will want to watch Mr. Mekas’s swiftly flowing 1992 film, “Zefiro Torna, or Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas.” It plays continuously in the gallery, and it’s exhilarating and heartbreaking.

*A’52

Kevin Bone / Photo by Raye

Published on Artinfo (http://www.artinfo.com) http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/855328/le-corbusiers-ecology-what-modern-architecture-teaches-us

Le Corbusier's Ecology: What Modern Architecture Teaches Us About Green Design

Courtesy the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive of The Cooper Union Cocoon House, Paul Rudolph with Ralph Twitchell, 1951, from "Lessons From Modernism: Environmental Design Considerations in 20th Century Architecture, 1925-70”

by Kelly Chan Published: January 14, 2013

Sustainability has become something of a buzzword in contemporary architecture. The future of design seems inextricably entwined with the future of our planet. Knowing this, we gamble our fate on technological advances, on innovations such as green roofs, photovoltaic cells, and new, more complex schemes for recycling water, energy, and other natural resources. But according to *Kevin Bone, architect, professor, and pioneering researcher on urban waterfronts and water supply systems, the past has more to offer the future than one might be inclined to believe.

Bone is the curator behind “Lessons From Modernism: Environmental Design Considerations in 20th Century Architecture,” an upcoming exhibition at The Cooper Union that will analyze the ecologically

conscious features of 25 architectural projects dating from 1925 to 1970. Displaying works ranging from Alvar Aalto’s Finnish row houses to Oscar Niemeyer’s experiments in tropical modernism, the show attempts to dispel the stigmatized conception of modern architecture as a blithely out-of-context and even

*Director of the Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design, Architecture Faculty

environmentally disruptive style of building. Though some of its outcomes were less salubrious toward the environment, as Bone suggests, this oft-misunderstood movement championed a surprisingly relevant agenda to find harmony with the natural world.

ARTINFO recently spoke with Bone about the solar cycle, Le Corbusier, and what “green” architecture really means.

How did you become interested in the topic of sustainable design in modernism?

I’ve been interested in a broader field of environmental design for over 30 years, and I brought some of that with me to the Cooper Union. I’ve long believed that we’ve been making a mistake by regarding the discussion of the environment as secondary to the primary design mission. That was what motivated this show: to demonstrate that at the core of the modern movement, the great architects we all regard as the heroes of the discipline were in fact very attuned to the cycles of nature. I wanted to make that evident to the students, so that they were not going forth thinking that sustainability or green architecture or environmental design — whatever term you want to use — is simply something that you call a consultant for. Rather, it’s something that needs to be initiated at the very beginning of the architectural idea.

What do you think it is about modern architecture that makes it seem antithetical to environmentally responsible design?

I think we have to be careful to distinguish between modern architecture and modern corporate buildings, which often get identified as being modern architecture. The standard hotel or office tower from around 1970 on has been a sealed glass building, and a lot of people find these to be uncomfortable environments because they lack fresh air, or they are heavily air-conditioned. I think the public sees any simple glass box as a work of modern architecture, and that’s probably part of the problem.

There could also be some misinterpretation of Le Corbusier’s statement that “the house is a machine for living in.” Of course, if one reads the text of that book [“Vers une architecture”], he goes on to very explicitly discuss the relationship between the garden and the house, the sun and the house, natural ventilation and the house. In a way, that quote has somehow been taken out of context to mean that architecture should be “mechanized.” I don’t think that was necessarily the direction he was heading towards.

Given that the notion of sustainability as we know it today did not exist during this era of modernism, what do you think motivated architects like Le Corbusier to come up with what can be considered sustainable design solutions?

There was a resource crisis in Europe. Fuel was precious; wealth was precious. The modernists were attempting to make architecture for a class of people who were not necessarily privileged to the architectural product. I think that’s very relevant for our times, because once again architecture has drifted to the fringe of being a product for the elite. I think when the early modernists imagined that we could build light, airy, and dignified architectural environments for working-class people, they recognized that there was a limitation on the resources and capital that society had available to make the work. That’s very similar to what we have today, even though the resources and the capital were perhaps limited for different reasons.

This might be why — when we travel to Europe — we’re amazed at how utterly well built some of their buildings are. A routine building in Denmark from the 1950s is often far more energy-efficient than what

we’re doing nowadays in the United States. And that’s because they had very little fuel. They were trying to do more with less.

So, do you believe there is some underpinning of the modern movement that inspires concern for the environment?

Yes, I don’t think the language of “protecting global eco-systems” was being spoken in those times, but nonetheless, the result of what modernist architects were doing had less negative impact on the environment. The motivations were slightly different, but not so different. They were still rooted in resource conservation and the idea that one can make an economical building — a good economical building — that would also be enveloped in the spirit of architecture. Economy didn’t have to mean rock-bottom social housing with no redeeming spatial and spiritual qualities or a sense of place.

What do you hope that contemporary architects and architecture students can learn from revisiting modernism through the lens of sustainability?

They’re going to see that all of these architects were in contact with nature, and that nature was often a very big influence on how they saw the world. I think that’s fairly important because a lot of us are growing up nowadays in a kind of urban-digital bubble where there’s not a lot of contact with the visceral cycles of the planet. If you don’t understand the most fundamental aspect of the site — the relationship of the sun to the planet at the given place where you want to make the architecture — then you’re at a disadvantage. You see through the sketches — those of Oscar Niemeyer, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Marcel Breuer — that the movement of the sun through the sky is critically important.

What are some of the most resonant examples of design in the exhibition?

The Frank Lloyd Wright Solar Hemicycle — one of his Usonian Houses that he built up in Wisconsin — is really a textbook example of a passive solar heating structure. But that’s reasonably well known. There are others, such as Antonin Raymond, who went over to Tokyo to work on the Imperial Hotel [with Frank Lloyd Wright] and built a very beautiful work of modern architecture using traditional Japanese methods. Here was someone who used locally sourced — in the jargon of today — building materials and local craftsman and demonstrated that he could make a work of modern architecture. Modern architecture didn’t have to be either poured-in-place concrete or a white stucco box. Many materials could be worked with. There was clearly a sense of the local that came through in a lot of these projects.

“Lessons From Modernism,” will be on show at The Cooper Union's Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery, located at 7 East 7th Street, 2nd Floor, from January 29 to March 16.

To see more images from "Lessons From Modernism," click the slideshow here.

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VISUAL ARTS

INTERNATIONAL EDITION

January 11, 2013 LAST UPDATED: 1:15:PM EST

Slideshow: “Lessons From Modernism: Environmental Design Considerations in 20th Century Architecture” at The Cooper Union

Pat McElnea, courtesy The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive of the Cooper Union

Building for the Emprezaz Graficas O Cruzeiro, Oscar Niemeyer 1949

Pat McElnea, courtesy The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive of the Cooper Union

Open Air School, Johannes Duiker, 1928-30

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Pat McElnea, courtesy The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive of the Cooper Union

Housing at Sunila Pulp Mill, Alvar Aalto, 1936

Pat McElnea, courtesy The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive of the Cooper Union

Cocoon House, Paul Rudolph with Ralph Twitchell, 1951

Pat McElnea, courtesy The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive of the Cooper Union

House II in Kavouri, Constantinos Decavallas, 1970

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Courtesy The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive of the Cooper Union

Green roof and courtyard study for the Siedlung Halen Housing (Atelier 5 Architects, 1961)

Courtesy The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive of the Cooper Union

Solar path diagram for the Walker Beach House (Paul Rudolph with Ralph Twitchell, 1951)

CRITICS’ PICKS

George Maciunas 41 COOPER GALLERY AT COOPER UNION 41 Cooper Square, Lower Level 1 December 11–February 2

In Fluxmanifesto on Fluxamusement, 1965, *George

Maciunas writes, “To establish [the] artist[’]s

nonprofessional, nonparasitic, nonelite status in society, he

must demonstrate [his] own dispensability . . . he must

demonstrate that anything can substitute art and anyone can

do it.” To rephrase, the role of the artist is, paradoxically

enough, to eliminate the role of the artist. Maciunas’s

ambivalence, if not outright hostility, toward art as a

profession accounts for his reluctance to identify as an artist;

he preferred to introduce himself as an architect, a graphic

designer, or as the chairman of Fluxus, the neo-avant-garde

movement he named and instigated in 1962. In “Anything

Can Substitute Art: Maciunas in SoHo,” curator Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt surveys Maciunas’s remarkably

varied output. In addition to scores, multiples, and publications, this includes floor plans, historical charts,

advertisements for both Fluxus and freelance clients, papers from his graduate studies at the Institute of

Fine Arts, newsletters for the Fluxhouse Cooperatives he managed in SoHo, day-planners, passport photos,

postcards, even his 1952 diploma from the Cooper Union. In short, Schmidt-Burkhardt puts Maciunas’s

proposition that “anything can substitute art” to the test by presenting material more readily associated with

architecture, scholarship, publicity, real estate, and bureaucracy than artistic practice.

Given his collaborative working methods, it’s impossible to consider Maciunas in isolation. The show in

particular underscores the connection between Maciunas and his fellow Lithuanian, the filmmaker Jonas

Mekas. Most of the material on view comes from the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center in Vilnius, and

Mekas’s beautiful 16-mm Zefiro Torna, or Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas, 1992, screens

continuously. Mekas’s personal footage of Maciunas stretches back to 1952, and it’s striking to see that

these two indefatigable organizers—between them the founders of Fluxus, the Fluxhouse Cooperatives, the

Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and Anthology Film Archives—first met through a suburban Long Island

community of émigrés from a country that was, as Mekas memorably puts it, “sacrificed on the altar of

Yalta.” Anything can substitute art, but art can also be a substitute, a home for those in perpetual flux.

— Colby Chamberlain

*A’52

View of “Anything Can Substitute Art:

Maciunas in SoHo,” 2012–13.

dwell » events

exhibition

'LESSONS FROM MODERNISM' AT THE COOPER UNION

January 29 – March 16, 3 am Cooper Union 7 East 7 E. 7th St. New York, New York 10003 United States

Lessons From Modernism examines selected works of architecture completed between 1925-70 through the lens of sustainability. This analysis of the use of environmental strategies — long before they were commonly used in 21st century buildings — opens at The Cooper Union’s Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery on January 29th.

Through an analysis of the influence of nature and the environment in architectural design, Lessons From Modernism provides new insights into works achieved by a diverse selection of architects, including Le Corbusier, Paul Rudolph, Jean Prouvé and Oscar Niemeyer. The exhibition demonstrates how these architects integrated environmental concerns into their designs and explores the extent to which these practices have produced environmentally performative and distinctive architecture.

An opening reception takes place January 29 at 6:30 p.m.

MOMS OFFER MORE December 2012

College Admissions Corner

I am a junior in high school and plan to visit colleges in the spring. What should I be looking for? -MG, Cortlandt Manor

Great question. First make sure to call the colleges you expect to visit and confirm they have tours and allow visits during the time you'd like to arrive on campus. Once you've set foot on the campus, use the time wisely. Try to sit in on a class if permitted. Speak to students that attend the college to get a feel of what they like and what they don't. Be sure to find students randomly and not just those selected by the admissions office. It helps to bring a list of questions with you before arriving on campus. Some ideas to think about. Are faculty available outside of class? Who teaches the courses, graduate students, faculty or a combination? What is the typical size of a first year class? Is tutoring available if needed? What is the social life like ? Do most students stay around on the weekends or go back home? What is the food like? What are the on and off campus housing options? How many students get jobs and internships during their studies and after graduation? How many attend graduate school and what types? Can I study abroad? How easy is it to change majors? What is the demographic make up of the school? How many students return after their first year? How many graduate on time and within one or two years of expectation? Are there support services if needed? Health? Academic? In closing make sure you get a good feel of what the school is like and be sure to think about if the college meets your academic and personal needs. If you leave unsure about the college follow up with the admissions office to have your concerns addressed. See if you can contact a student that graduated from your high school and now attends the college you are interested in. If you ask your guidance office or the college admissions office you should be able to get a name or two. Though the internet is a good way to explore colleges nothing substitutes for an in person visit. I encourage students to write me at lipton@cooper.edu with questions about college admissions.

*Mitchell Lipton serves as Dean of Admissions and Records and Registrar at Cooper Union. Mitchell actively presents at local and national conferences and consults on a number of educational endeavors. He holds an elected position with the College Board and serves on the Advisory Board of Private Colleges and Universities. Mitchell served as Vice President of the New York State Association for College Admissions Counseling, Steering Committee member for The New York State Legislative Forum, and member of the National Association for College Admissions Counseling New York City College Fair Committee. He lives in Cortlandt Manor with his wife and two children. Mitchell may be reached at lipton@cooper.edu *Dean of Admissions

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ARCHITECTURE January 8, 2013 Her Critical Judgments Were Built to Last

Editors' note: Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture critic of The Wall Street Journal, died Monday

at age 91. The dean of architecture critics, she was so widely read and influential that her

name was known even to those who did not keep up with the field on a regular basis.

Born and educated in New York City, Huxtable was hired as architecture critic of the New

York Times in 1963, the first such critic on the staff of an American newspaper. Her work

there earned her, in 1970, the first Pulitzer Prize awarded for criticism and, in 1981, a

MacArthur Fellowship. She joined the Journal in 1997.

Though a self-described "unrepentant modernist"—a passionate advocate

of the steel-and-glass aesthetic—Huxtable was no ideologue. She was also

"a closet Beaux Arts fancier" who could enthusiastically praise the newest of

the new in architecture, Thom Mayne's "stunning—some would say

startling" 2008 addition to the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science

and Art in Manhattan.

Ken Fallin

As a critic, Huxtable combined the forensic skill of a Clarence Darrow with the righteous

passion of an Old Testament prophet. Her prose was clarion-clear and uncompromising, yet

leavened by wit and verve.

Architecture is experienced in three dimensions and on multiple sensory levels

simultaneously, making it difficult to do justice to it in words. Yet Huxtable's prose brought

buildings vividly to life for professional and layman alike. Below are some excerpts from her

work for the Journal.

*excerpt from original article