For over five decades, the School of Architecture’s exhibitions have enriched The Cooper Union’s curriculum and New York City’s design communities, bridging pedagogy and public service. This diverse, influential program encompasses over 250 exhibitions and attendant publications featuring the work of celebrated architects, artists, and designers, as well as Cooper’s faculty and students. 
 
Exhibitions Collection: 2000–2020 is the final of three hallway shows presenting original and reproduced records documenting the school’s exhibitions. Drawn from material held by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive, it highlights two decades of work, from Water-Works: The Architecture and Engineering of the New York City Water Supply (2001)—an exhibition and subsequent publication led by former faculty member Kevin Bone—to Nivola in New York: Figure in Field (2020), which examined the work of Costantino Nivola (1911–1988), a Sardinian artist known for his large-scale bas-reliefs, murals, and sculptures created in collaboration with architects.
 
The first show in the Exhibitions Collection series, presented in the spring of 2023, surveyed the program via posters from the 1970s to the present; the second, held in the fall of 2023, focused on records from 1971–1999, beginning with Education of an Architect: A Point of View—a pivotal exhibition and publication of student projects shown at MoMA in 1971–72 that initiated the School’s archive and current exhibitions program; the final installment shown here coincides with the public launch of the Exhibitions Collection Digital Access Project, an ongoing effort undertaken in 2021 to catalog, digitize, and expand public access to the collection’s records. 

These records document a broad range of subjects and disciplines, including exhibitions that originated at Cooper, shows that traveled to the school from other institutions, work installed off-site, and site-specific projects. Several exhibitions address the school’s curriculum, drawing extensively from the archive’s collection of student work. The collection also documents three decades of the school’s annual End of Year Show, a public exhibition curated by faculty and students from the Architecture and Art schools that occupies much of the Foundation Building for three weeks each May and June. End of Year Shows highlight exemplary student work across undergraduate and graduate design studios, drawing hundreds of students and faculty each year from architecture programs across the city. Student participation in the production and installation of exhibitions—from shows in the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery to End of Year Shows—is an important component of the archive’s mission and emblematic of the school’s design studio culture and its commitment to “learning by doing.”
 
The impact of the school’s exhibitions also extends well beyond The Cooper Union. Coming to Light (2005), for example, examined Louis Kahn’s unbuilt design from 1974 for the Four Freedoms Park memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt; favorable exhibition press prompted a major gift that revived longstanding efforts to construct the park, which was completed on Roosevelt Island in 2012. More recently, Nivola in New York renewed interest in and preservation of Nivola’s work, including a subsequent show at Magazzino Italian Art and acquisitions by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA. 

Over the past four years, Caitlin Biggers—the project’s manager and archivist—has worked with Archive staff and students to arrange and describe the collection; create and publish a collection finding aid; customize the project’s CollectiveAccess (CA) platform with its software developer; populate the platform with ~4,700 permissioned records and metadata; and preserve the collection’s analog and born-digital records. This work—the results of which are available on a terminal in the exhibition—would not have been possible without a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), an independent federal agency and the largest source of federal funding for U.S. libraries. The IMLS, which is being eliminated by the Trump administration, has provided over $370,000 in vital support to the Architecture Archive’s digitization initiatives for its two core collections of student work and exhibitions records.

By balancing the needs of these two collections through an integrated CA platform, the Archive has built on its existing digital collections capacity, allowing staff to manage the collections as they grow while paving the way for future digitization projects. Improved access via discovery tools and a public, web-based platform promises to enhance the collection’s educational value and the impact of the exhibitions program—a program that remains central to the school’s evolving pedagogy, its benefit to New York City’s intellectual and cultural life, and its contribution to the region’s broader architecture and design community.
 
Special thanks to Meztli Castro Asmussen, Nora McNulty, Jasper Meikle, Natalia Naugle, Ninel Shahnazarian, Salina Shih, Kevin Yang, and Zara Zulfiqar, who provided essential production and installation support for the exhibition.

Held in the Foundation Building's Third Floor Hallway Gallery. 

Open to the general public:
Tuesday–Friday, 12 pm – 7 pm
Saturday & Sunday, 12 pm – 6 pm

This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services grant MA-249588-OMS-21. 

The Architecture Archive's programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.