Cooper Union's new academic building "is a genuine triumph,a canny exercise in architectural multilingualism"

At Time magazine, Richard Lacayo weighs in on the the still-pretty-new Cooper Union academic building...and here we go:

The East Village is a New York City neighborhood with a complicated vibe. It's a place where restaurant equipment wholesalers and ancient brick walk-ups rub shoulders with spanking new condo towers and hip hotels with signature martinis. Almost everywhere there are also traces of the hippie-Boho culture that settled in before the 1960s and does what it can to keep its flag flying.

Yes, yes...

It's difficult to insert a new building into those streets and get it to speak to so many different contexts. The ideal combination of grit and elegance, muscle and intellect is hard to arrive at, and over the last four or five years some local projects by name architects have gotten it wrong. But Cooper Union's new academic building, which opened this fall, is a genuine triumph, a canny exercise in architectural multilingualism.

Cooper Union retail space back on the market

The retail space at the new Cooper Union is back on the market.



It served as the information center for Performa 09, which ran through Nov. 22.



And what happened to all that wood?



And I wonder if anyone ever claimed the free couch...

Cooper Union giving away a couch

Getting more neighborly by the day! What's next? When will they get their own community garden?

And the couch is leftover from Performa 09.

Previously on EV Grieve:
New Cooper Union building gets its first (temporary) storefront tenant

Skid marks at the Coop

By now, it seems pretty commonplace to see someone using the new Cooper Union academic building as a makeshift skateboard park... Was pretty funny the first, oh, 10 times....





So how's the old Coop holding up so far? Sure, there's some wear and tear from the skateboarders, roller-bladers, BMX bikers, ass-sliders, etc., but the old gal should be able to stay afloat another 150 years or so.

Is the Coop settling into the neighborhood?

Well, six months after the new Cooper Union academic building opened, the space continues to be welcomed to the neighborhood... Will we ever be friends?

Anyway, students have used the front window to advertise keggers...



It has been tagged...



...and used as a shelter from the elements...



...a skateboard park...



...a meeting place for teen gamers...



...a place to take photos...

Ada Louise Huxtable on the new Cooper Union: "It perfectly expresses the creative energy of New York"

Legendary critic Ada Louise Huxtable weighs in on the new Cooper Union building in The Wall Street Journal. And she likes what Thom Mayne has done... Take it away, Ada!

[I]ts futuristic façade is strikingly different in style and unlike anything else around it. The East Village is an area in transition, best known for its disappearing Bowery flophouses and restaurant supply stores. The wave of development moving along the Bowery in the wake of Sanaa's New Museum with its offhand infusion of sophisticated Japanese design already contains the marks of Meatpacking-District gentrification. With its uneven mix of scales and textures and juxtapositions that have more to do with unpredictable change than reliable constants, this is a place that upends any conventional or stable idea of "contextual" harmony.

And!

It is not surprising that the school would commission an equally advanced design for its new construction, not only for the latest in technology and sustainability, but also as an appropriate learning environment for those engaged in creative disciplines. Applying a tough sensibility to a tough assignment revitalized an amorphous status quo. To this native New Yorker who has watched the city evolve over decades and treasures its unrelenting diversity, Mr. Mayne has got it just right.

And she likes the staircase!

The stair is meant to be the interactive heart of the building and it appears to be working, although reality doesn't always follow architects' plans. Students move between classes, sit on the steps with their computers or lunches, and peel off to adjacent study lounges. Daylight pours down from a skylight at the top. This is high architectural drama, a luminous and exhilarating invitation into the structure's life and use. It is not building as bling. It is how architecture turns program and purpose into art. And it perfectly expresses the creative energy of New York.

Window at Cooper Union's new academic building being used to advertise McKibbin Street keggers

Ah, at the McKibbin Street dorms in Bushwick.



Hey, and visit the 248 McKibbin St. MySpace page.

A little something for all you font lovers in the house

The Society for Environmental Graphic Design published a blog post on Cooper Union alum Abbott Miller, who was tapped to design the signage on the school's new academic building. He chose something from the Foundry Gridnik type family (you know, the thinking man's Courier).

Miller used dimensional type to engage and activate multiple planes and architectural surfaces. The building identity, for example, is optically extruded letterforms that appear "correct" when seen in strict elevation, but distort as the profile of the letter is dragged backwards in space. The top half of the letters, appearing on one plane of the canopy, are dimensional, while the bottom half are cut out of another plane, echoing the transparency of the building's skin of perforated stainless steel.

Exactly what I was thinking.

The Mayne event: What went into designing the new Cooper Union building

Time magazine has an interview online with Thom Mayne, the bigshot architect who designed the new Cooper Union building. To an excerpt!

TIME: So Cooper Union comes to you and says "Okay, here's the program. We need laboratories, offices, classrooms." They told you what they wanted. What did you want to bring to this project?

MAYNE: I don't bring anything a priori to a project in a conscious way. I don't come with an agenda. Clearly I come with interests that I've pursued over 35 years. Who I am as an architect and the history of my work — that's clear to anybody who hires me. But I come in literally with nothing in my brain about what the building will look like.

And I really couldn't with this one because it had a very complicated program. There was nothing to design until I knew how big it was and how many pieces there were. The envelope was given us — the basic shape — because it's a zoning diagram. And we needed every ounce of it because we didn't have enough. And then we looked at the program. On one side are laboratories and they go straight up and they're very efficient and straightforward. And in the front where the offices are, ditto. There's not a lot of room there for architecture.

[Photo via Time]

Fence going up around the old Cooper Union Engineering Building: Demoliton to follow?

Haven't addressed the Cooper Union Engineering Building demo rumor since at least May.

Previously.

New Cooper Union building gets its first (temporary) storefront tenant

That retail space for rent in the new Cooper Union building is now occupied...





It's serving as the information center for Performa 09, which runs through Nov. 22

Is a simple "wash me" too much to ask for?

In my haste to post the first tag spotted at the new Cooper Union academic building the other day, I forgot to note the other artwork that has arrived this fall....

OK, so we can make out that first word, but even up-close, that second word is a mystery ... seems like some variation of yuppies.

Looking at the "Mayne Death Star"

Alexandra Lange discusses Cooper Union's new academic building in The New Design Observer.

I never thought I would say this about a work by Thom Mayne of Morphosis, but I think 41 Cooper Square is too small. Cooper Union’s new, sustainable academic building on Third Avenue is nine stories, 175,000 square feet, takes up an entire city block, and yet, with all the other wonderful and terrible architecture happening on the Bowery and its side streets (the Cooper Square Hotel’s tower version of Frank Gehry’s IAC Building, Herzog and de Meuron’s disco-visionary 40 Bond, Foster + Partners’ Sperone Westwater Gallery) it blends right in. All the photographs I had seen, most taken from the air, made it look like another Mayne Death Star, a chunk of some intergalactic space ship deposited here for repairs (there is that nasty cut across the front).

Another observation: "At the sidewalk 41 Cooper Square might as well be set in the middle of a parking lot in Mayne’s native L.A."

And in the end...she said the building leaves her "just curiously bored."

Gleaming the Coop

Curbed has noted some of the shenanigans occurring on the ramp outside Cooper Union's new academic building... got a chance to see some tomfoolery myself Friday night... About five or six teen skateboarders were enjoying the new makeshift park...






This went on for a good five minutes. Right when someone watching remarked, "I can't believe security hasn't said anything," a lone security guard brandishing a walkie talkie appeared... one of the skateboarders yelled "go, go, go" to his friends, who took off and hung a left on Sixth Street.

What's doing in Texas?: Dallas getting a Cooper Square academic building lookalike

Thom Mayne, head of the renowned Morphosis architectural office in Santa Monica, Calif., is designing the new the Perot Museum of Nature and Science north of downtown Dallas. And it may look familiar to those of us hereabouts. As Metropolis notes:

[I]t’s safe to say that the Perot Museum bears resemblance to another recently completed Morphosis project: 41 Cooper Square, located in New York’s East Village. That structure, also a distorted cube, also featuring a large central atrium, was praised by critics when it opened earlier this year, and has generally received a warm welcome by New Yorkers. Moreover, the Cooper Union building, as an academic facility that engages with its architectural neighbors and encourages street-level interaction, has been heralded as a civic achievement in a neighborhood that has been the site of particular contentiousness in its recent history.

Related:
Cooper Union Building is East Village's Newest Thrill Ride! (Curbed)

Does the new Cooper Union building have a renter? (Plus, food cart!)

The "store for rent" signs are gone from in front of the new Cooper Union buidling...and the windows along Cooper Square have been papered over...so, has a retail client been secured for this spot? What could it be?



The first "for rent" ads stipulated "non cooking food." Which leaves open the possibility of FroYo. You don't cook that, right? Just pour it out of a bag?

Speaking of food!

The (Penn Station) eagle has landed

Nice preservation piece in the City Room on one of the old Penn Station eagles. Its new perch: The eighth floor at the new Cooper Union building.


[Photo by Claire Michie]

Flashback: When the Christodora House became a Greek house

Jill's post yesterday on the 12th Street NYU frathouse reminded me of a post I did almost one year ago to date...Here it is again...from Sept. 9, 2008...

[Photos by Charlie Kerman]

In 1983, when the Christodora House on Avenue B was still abandoned, members of the Tau Delta Phi, Delta Eta Chapter at Cooper Union, placed their Greek letters on the west side atop the 17-floor building. Don't have a lot of details, such as how long the letters remained there. Long enough for a photo opp, of course. Photos of the letters crew are below. (Note the condition of the Christodora...)

Collecting butts at the Cooper Union Building

We never thought much about this. However! You spend, say, $950 trillion on a new building. How will you go about collecting the butts from smoker's out front? Given the 23rd-century space-aged look of the new building, no regular old ashtray contraption will work... These seem a little pedestrian, but serviceable...




Previously.

Walking alongside the new Cooper Union building

Hey now. The sidewalks are open alongside the new Cooper Union building.




And I hope the security guard working at the CU is feeling better today.