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The Cooper Union reached a major milestone in January with completion of schematic design for the new academic building. Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis along with Gruzen Samton presented the design to the steering committee, which enthusiastically supported the plan.

On the heels of this important phase of the building plan, Cooper Union Trustee Sandra Priest Rose and her family made an extraordinary gift of $5 million to the new academic building fund. To honor the family's exceptional generosity and vision in making this gift, Cooper Union will name the building's new 200-seat auditorium in honor of the late Frederick P. Rose. This gift along with several other Peter Cooper Heritage Society contributions brings us close to the $30 million point - 25 percent of our goal. Our warmest thanks go to Sandra Rose and her family, and also to:

Richard L. Menschel and The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, who helped close out 2004 in grand fashion with a similarly significant $2.5 million grant to support the new building. In recognition of this remarkable contribution, the Foundation has asked to reserve the naming opportunity for the Board Room.

Cooper Union Trustee Jeffrey Gural, Chairman of Newmark and Company Real Estate, Inc. and his wife Paula Gural, with support from his father Aaron Gural, have committed $1 million to the new building. All of these major gifts bring us closer than ever to ensuring Cooper Union's future and enriching the lives of exceptional young people for generations to come.

We mourn the recent passing of Tom Wesselmann, a dedicated and loyal alumnus (A '59) who named The Cooper Union in his will to receive a very generous bequest. Also recently deceased is Arthur Rosenblatt (AR'52), an active alumnus who served on the Board of Trustees from 1981-84, and was President of the Alumni Association from 1977-79.

President Campbell recently launched the President's Roundtable Lunch Series intended to bring together small groups of students with distinguished leaders in various fields to discuss their experience, explore career possibilities and exchange ideas. The first President's Roundtable is scheduled for March 1st with Trustee Jeff Gural, CEO of Newmark Realty.

On January 26th in the Great Hall, Christine Todd Whitman gave a lecture "It's My Party Too: Taking Back the Republican Party." Whitman is one of the leading moderates in the Republican Party. She served in the Bush cabinet as EPA administrator from January 2001 to May 2003. Prior to that, she was the first woman elected Governor of New Jersey, serving two terms from 1993 to 2000.

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Congratulations

Awards

Publications

  • Carl Selinger (CE'67), president of the CU Alumni Association, published Stuff You Don't Learn in Engineering School: Skills for Success in the Real World (Wiley-IEEE Press 2004). Based on Selinger's leadership seminars, this easy-to-digest guide to success will help even the most inhibited engineer to comfortably deal with the difficult people, processes, and meetings of today's competitive business world.

  • Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
    - Atina Grossmann, Associate Professor of History: "The survivors were few and the dead were many: Jewish Identity and Memory in Occupied Berlin," forthcoming in Jüdische Welten: Juden in Deutschland vom 18 Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart.
    - John Short, Assistant Professor, Adjunct: "Novelty and Repetition: Photographs of Southwest Africa in German Visual Culture, 1890-1914" as a chapter in the book Hues Between Black and White: Historical Photography from Colonial Namibia, 1860s-1915.
    - Michelle Hobart, Instructor, Adjunct, of Art History: two essays in Cosa V. An Intermittent Town, Excavations 1991 - 1997 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). She also has a recent article on "The Peruzzi and their Urban Enclaves" Archeologia Medievale.
    - Lisa Hollibaugh, Instructor, Adjunct, of English: forthcoming article in Mississippi Quarterly titled: "The Civilized Uses of Irony: Darwinism, Calvinism and Motherhood in Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground."

  • Faculty of Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture
    - Lebbeus Woods, Architecture Professor: catalog for the recent exhibition in the Heinz Architectural Center, Carnegie Museum of Art: "Lebbeus Woods: Experimental Architecture."

  • Faculty of The School of Art
    - Margaret Morton    , Professor in The School of Art: "Glass House," a chronicle of photographs and oral histories depicting the resilience of thirty-five squatters, many still in their teens, who defied the law to occupy a derelict glass factory in the East Village of New York City.

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Welcome

Visiting Artists

  • The School of Art is pleased to welcome the visiting artists for the 2005 semester: Daniel Bozhkov, Ellen Brooks, Tom Burr, Paul Chan, Nancy Davenport, Carin Goldberg, Wayne Gonzales, Rachel Harrison, Sharon Hayes, Jutta Koether, Peter Krashes, Marlene McCarty, Sina Najafi, Amit Pitaru, Julia Scher, Pieter Schoolwerth, Maxim Zhukov, and Kevin Zucker.

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Special Events Raise Funds

  • Cooper Union's third annual Urban Visionaries benefit and silent auction offered a great evening of entertainment by Bill Cosby, fine dining and lively bidding, successfully raising $570,000 to support the College's full-tuition scholarships.

  • Artworks by Cooper Union students were auctioned off during the second Annual Art Sale and Silent Auction. The show grossed about $10,000, with one-half earmarked for the School of Art.

  • Nearly 30 Cooper Union alumni attended a Wall Street Alumni Breakfast on Wednesday, January 12, hosted by alumni Larry Ng EE'78 and Ray Falci ME'86. This was the first gathering of this affinity group of alumni, who were encouraged to help support Cooper Union. For more information, please contact Janet Rossbach, Director of Alumni Relations at 212-353-4164 or rossbach@cooper.edu.

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Don't Miss

General Interest

  • Attention Senior Class: Measurements for caps and gowns for Commencement will be taken in the Hewitt Lounge from 12-2pm on Tuesday, February 1st.

  • Applications for Resident Assistants are due February 18th. For more information contact Natasha Cornell Poku at 212-353-4099 or natasha@cooper.edu.

  • Cheer on the undefeated Cooper Union Varsity Basketball Team (sporting a record of 13-0) at their home games this month:
    February 5 - vs. R.I.S.D. at 3pm
    February 12 - vs. Pratt at 3pm
    February 25 - vs. alumni at 6:30pm
    Home games are at Simon Baruch JHS 104, 330 East 21st Street. For more information, contact Dean Baker at 212-353-4131 or baker@cooper.edu.

  • CU@Lunch with Cooper Union Alumnus Evan Douglis, Architecture '83; Tuesday, February 8th, 12:00 Noon at Alumni Space, Residence Hall, 3rd Floor. Lunch will be provided. Contact: Robert Thill, 212-353-4384 or thill@cooper.edu.

  • Wreath Laying Ceremony - Tuesday, February 15th, from 12-2 pm, in Peter Cooper Park. Celebrate Peter Cooper's 214th birthday. Performance by the Cooper Union Step Team, refreshments following the ceremony. Contact: 212-353-4164 or alumni@cooper.edu.

  • Volunteer for the Phonathon - Contact Stacy Taniguchi at smt@cooper.edu or 212-353-4173.

  • The Founder's Day Dinner Dance - the biggest alumni gathering of the year - will take place on Friday, April 8th, from 7pm-midnight, at Tribeca Rooftop - Please save the date.

Exhibitions

  • Coming to Light, an exhibition of The Louis I. Kahn Monument to Franklin D. Roosevelt for New York City in the Houghton Gallery ends on February 5th. A very successful symposium was held on January 25 in the Great Hall entitled Modernity and Monumentality, co-sponsored by the Chanin School with the Architectural League of New York. Dean Anthony Vidler moderated the symposium with panelists Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Lecturer in Architectural History, Harvard Design School, Michael J. Lewis, Professor of Art, Williams College, Robert Twombly, Professor of Architectural History, the City College of New York, and Carles Vallhonrat, Lecturer, Princeton University School of Architecture.

  • Come to the School of Art Student Shows. Opening Receptions are on Tuesday evenings from 6-8 pm unless announced otherwise. Please contact artschool@cooper.edu for more information.

Lectures and Public Programs

  • February 3 - First Annual Eleanore Pettersen Lecture - "MATERIAL EVIDENCE" a lecture by Toshiko Mori, 6:30pm in The Great Hall.

  • February 8 - Menschel Lecture - "Happiness: Lessons from a New Science" a lecture by Richard Layard with Paul Krugman, 6:30 pm in The Great Hall.

  • February 11 - Art School Student Lecture Series presents Janine Antoni, from 7:00-10:00 pm, in the Hewitt Building, Room 207. Please contact artschool@cooper.edu for more information.

  • February 17 - Architect Eyal Weizman will speak at 6:30pm in The Great Hall

  • March 3 - Rudin Lecture - "The Effects of Technology on Sports Medicine" a lecture by former New York Jets physician Dr. Stephen J. Nicholas, an orthopedic surgeon from Lenox Hill Hospital, 6:30 pm, Wollman Auditorium.

  • Upcoming School of Art lectures for Professor Doug Ashford's Intra-Disciplinary Seminar.  All lectures are open to the public.
    January 31 - Condine Chayova, Assistant Professor at Williams College
    February 7 - Michelle Maccarone, Founder and Director of maccarone, inc.
    February 14 - Nato Thompson, Assistant Curator at MASS MoCA
    February 28 - Carolyn F. Strauss, Founder and Director of slowLab
    Please contact artschool@cooper.edu for more information.

  • Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography, A Project by Walid Raad, Assistant Professor of Art at Cooper Union, and Akram Zaatari will be on view from January 11th to April 2nd, at NYU's Grey Art Gallery. www.nyu.edu/greyart.

  • Keep up to date with the latest Public Programs, Exhibitions and Events at This Month At Cooper.

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Did You Know?

  • New Cooper Union products, including t-shirts, tote bags and baby rompers, as well as new sterling silver Peter Cooper jewelry designed by Marilyn Hoffner A'48 are available at www.cualumni.com.

  • Some new interdisciplinary courses offered for the first time this spring are open to all students: Biomechanics (EID125); Tissue Engineering (EID 327); Design, Illusion & Reality (Topic: "Water in the City") (EID 111); Acoustics, Noise & Vibration Control (EID 160)

  • Engineering Professor Jameel Ahmad and his students have been working on several research projects; testing new type of traffic light which would use LED's instead of incandescent lights - saving power by flashing on and off, investigating a way for poor countries to boil water without using electricity using a Folding Reflective Screen and sunshine, and the "Flutter Project" in which fans could be placed underneath structures such as barges and floated on a river to generate electricity thus eliminating the need for underwater facilities.

  • Although the Engineering school's Immigrant Retraining Program is not new to The Cooper Union, there are important pedagogical changes taking place as new industry and market trends emerge. The program, which began in 1987, primarily emphasized coursework on highways and bridges. Today, coursework focuses on cost estimation for high-rise buildings. Here's one man's story of how Cooper's program helped to give him a new life. [Continue reading]

  • The Commission on Independent Colleges & Universities (cIcu) has consolidated the purchasing power of the 100+ independent colleges and universities in New York State, enabling you to buy select IBM hardware at a significant discount. There is no minimum purchase required, and the discount is available to Cooper Union students, faculty, staff and alumni for individual purchases. Visit www.cicu.org/resources.php for more information.

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