Archive and Artifact: The Virtual and the Physical, an exhibition opening at the Cooper Union in New York City later this month, will showcase work from undergraduate architecture theses from the school’s past 50 years. Visitors to the show will have the chance to check out the professional beginnings of bold-face names like Elizabeth Diller, Stanley Allen, and Daniel Libeskind.
“The thesis year is a pivotal point in Cooper Union’s five-year architectural program, as it showcases the imagination and maturity of our students,” said Nader Tehrani, dean of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture in a statement. “Thesis is a culmination of an emerging architect’s learning and the launchpad between life as a student and their future as a professional. It allows students to become self-driven and often serves as a touchstone for long-term research throughout their career.”
The show is going up in anticipation of the school’s launching of a digital archive of past student work in October 2019.
The Cooper Union has been one of the New York City’s top architecture schools for decades and was particularly important in the 1980s and ’90s as a center of activity for architects like Peter Eisenman and John Hejduk.
A symposium, Thesis Now: Pedagogies, Research, and Agency of the Architectural Thesis, will accompany the exhibition on December 1, and the show is being presented in tandem with this year’s Archtober festival.
Archive and Artifact
Wednesday, October 24–Saturday, December 1, 2018
Tuesday–Friday 2 p.m.–7 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 12 p.m.–7 p.m.
The Cooper Union, Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery, 2nd Floor
7 East 7th Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues
New York, New York 10003
