On June 5, AIANY President David Piscuskas released a statement strongly condemning the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. This latest dispatch stands in stark contrast with a much-criticized statement released after the last election, in which AIA President Robert Ivy seemed to offer an olive branch of sorts to the incoming Trump Administration.

Piscuskas articulates an oppositional stance to that of the current Administration with regard to environmental regulations; “AIANY has long been devoted to fostering a more sustainable and resilient built environment and we hereby reaffirm our ongoing commitment to the mitigation of climate change. We will continue to help architects and other design and construction professionals gain the skills and knowledge to design better, more energy-efficient buildings; advocate for policies that promote sustainability in both the built and natural environments; and raise public awareness about the role of buildings in combating climate change.”

In addition to his role as Dean of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, Nader Tehrani is the principal of NADAAA, a practice he founded in 2011 with Katherine Faulkner and Daniel Gallagher. The firm grew out of Office dA, a practice he formed in 1986 with Rodolphe El Khoury, which later expanded to include Monica Ponce de Leon in 1991. With offices in New York and Boston, NADAAA is dedicated to “the advancement of design innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and an intensive dialogue with the construction industry.”

He organizes his lecture around three projects for schools of design: the Hinman Research Building at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne, and the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto. These projects explore the relationship of these buildings to spaces of scholarship, making, and the accidents that happen in between these moments and, “some kind of reciprocity between the institutions we [as architects] try to cultivate, and the spaces they foster.”

The lecture is followed by a discussion with Florian Idenburg, a founding partner of SO–IL and Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

This lecture took place in the Great Hall of The Cooper Union on April 5, 2017.

The 2017 winners of Figment’s City of Dreams Pavilion include Cooper Union’s own Powell Draper and Max Dowd (AR ’15) as part of Team Aesop. A competition that focuses on sustainable design, City of Dreams is based on Governors Island and seeks to elevate projects that consider the environmental impact of architectural construction. Inspired by Max Dowd’s 2015 Thesis work at Cooper Union School of Architecture, Team Aesop’s project, titled Cast and Place, rethinks the role of waste as an aesthetic and material inspiration. Created from 300,000 melted discarded aluminum cans sourced from local non-profit Sure We Can, the project uses the same clay that Governors Island was constructed with as a mold to create a lattice-like pavilion for outside leisure activities. The project is slated to open to the public this summer on the island.

This past November, the Cooper Architecture community welcomed architect, teacher, and Cooper Arch alum, Mark West, for a Tuesday afternoon lecture. Mark discussed his current and past projects, process and concepts.

Mark West has taught architecture for over thirty years at universities in the US, Canada, and Europe, while working as an artist, inventor, builder, and researcher. He is the inventor of fabric-formed concrete techniques for architecture and engineering structures, and was the Founding Director of C.A.S.T., the Centre for Architectural Structures and Technology at the University of Manitoba where he held appointments in both Architecture and Civil Engineering. He currently holds appointments as a Visiting Professor of Architecture at MIT, and Visiting Lecturer in Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering at Bath University, UK.

You may watch a recording of the lecture on The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Channel.