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Gia Wolff

Assistant Professor

Gia Wolff is a designer whose work investigates performative architecture, temporary spaces, and speculative artworks. She is interested in architecture that has a reciprocal relationship between the user and the built environment and questions the performative aspects of the discipline - from how spaces function to how people function in spaces.

Wolff has worked at the architecture practices of Acconci Studio, Adjaye Associates, and LOT-EK. She is a co-founder of +FARM, a design and build program founded on a principle of direct learning through hands-on experience and is also an architectural collaborator with the Phantom Limb Company on marionette set designs including the upcoming 69° South, which is part of the 2011 BAM Next Wave Festival, NY. Recently, Wolff’s project proposal, Portaali, was chosen by Superfront’s Public Summer program and was installed August 2011 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

Wolff received a Masters degree in Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2008 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design in 2001. Wolff is an Assistant Professor Adjunct of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union where she teaches the first year architectural drawing class with Professor Michael Webb. She is also a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute where she teaches first year undergraduate design studios.

 

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.