Gideon Fink Shapiro
The new academic building at Cooper Union is both transparent and veiled. It provides efficient laboratory, office, and studio space while devoting vast areas to nothing in particular. It is made up of standardized components, yet it pops with surprises. In short, it has a dual personality. Maybe that’s just part of its tough charm. Or maybe these paradoxes are side effects of an intense effort to emphasize and ennoble the building’s public spaces. With this 16,500-sqm commission in downtown Manhattan, Thom Mayne and Morphosis had to rethink the layering of public social space and private work space in contemporary education – and in the contemporary city. The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art is unique in the history of American education. Founded by the industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, who lacked the means to pursue higher education, the institution provides full tuition scholarships for all of its 1000 students in engineering, art, and architecture. If the school performs a kind of public service, then its historic foundation building and auditorium is a venerable public landmark six blocks below Union Square. The neo-Renaissance brownstone structure was completed in an era when learning took place in the classroom or studio. Today, as Mayne points out, students extend their learning environments to the coffee shop, home, or wherever they carry their laptop. So when Los Angeles-based Morphosis won this project in 2004, the job was not only to compensate for the loss of 3700 sqm occurred as a consequence of the school’s move from three buildings to two. The design had to respond to the challenge that all contemporary architects face: how to make places that are worth going to. Or in this case, worth hanging around after class. Mayne’s answer was to carve a towering, daylight-filled atrium out of the heart of the building. He hopes this “vertical piazza” of stairs, lounges, conference rooms, and terrace foster the kind of spontaneous encounters and interactions that can’t be had via mobile phone or Facebook.
The mission is accomplished with a bit of physical coercion – the elevators stop only at the fourth and seventh levels. Therefore most students and faculty will have to walk up or down a flight to reach their destinations, mixing with their colleagues along the way. Choreographing spectacle and interaction within a grand circulation space is a time-honored practice in museums and performing arts facilities. Mayne has become a proponent of free-flowing social mixing spaces in his corporate projects as well, from the Caltrans Headquarters (2004) to the forthcoming Giant Group Campus in Shanghai. To examine the Cooper Union building up close and explore inside is to understand that its public spaces are its lifeblood, and material legibility its never-ending delight. In an age of blurred boundaries between physical and digital space, machine- and human-made objects, and collective and personal communication, this building proposes a new hierarchy of public/private space to bring the academy up to speed with the informal social networking of modern students. In terms of public response, the most controversial aspect of the project is the wrapper of stainless-steel mesh panels. Initially it makes the building appear as abstract as a Hugh Ferriss massing study, and as scaleless as a glacier. About 25% of the panels open automatically to admit daylight. Yet in addition to saving energy, the seemingly monolithic armor “allows us to be specific about what we want to communicate,” says the 2005 Pritzker laureate. While laboratories and offices remain undifferentiated from the outside (except at night when the glow of their windows can be seen through the mesh), vast cut-outs on the west elevation trace the contours of the nine-storey public atrium, indicating its importance. At the street level, the gauzy chain-mail skirt is lifted all the way around to reveal the lobby, the below-grade public galleries and event spaces, and retail storefronts. “A lot of people just see it as different,” says Mayne of the building’s exterior, “but I see it as highly connected to the particular nature of the site.” He explains the slashing and flexing of the west elevation as inspired by the force of the city and trees pushing in from Cooper Square.
In addition, the building approximates the height (41 m) of the foundation building, and is oriented toward its entrance across the street. Inside, the floors are simple ground concrete. Ceilings are modular panel systems – reminiscent of the exterior – but fit with radiant heat and cooling, and flexible to allow maintenance and new configurations. In general, the labs and studios exemplify functional simplicity. By contrast, the public areas throw function – or at least the functional organization of basic components – gleefully to the winds. A variety of naked materials and idiosyncratic geometries overlap and intersect seemingly of their own volition. This is the result of what Mayne calls “the relaxation of authorship, working with process as well as fixed result,” as in a Jackson Pollack painting. The atrium lobby plays host to a non-Euclidean convergence of raw concrete slabs, hovering scaffolding, perforated composite ceiling panels, soaring drywall planes, tilting glass panels, and undulating handrails. The influx of daylight from the landings, lobby, and skylights keeps you oriented. Overhead, a torqued grid whirls up and around the atrium like a giant exoskeleton. Composed of steel tubes encased in molded GFRG shells, the computer-modeled “mega-mesh” was installed by hand over the course of a year. It embodies the blending of high-tech and hand-tech that helps drive the firm’s work. The flashy moves are gratuitous yet fun. In the context of the building’s utilitarian leanness, these whimsical excesses may provoke students to debate form and function anew. In addition, they succeed – at least while they’re still fresh – in infusing the public spaces with the desired theatrical gusto.
