Cooper Union maintains a critically important role in the life of the City. Perceptual access to higher education is unusual, but access clearly increases the likelihood that our urban centers can sustain their leadership in cultural/artistic production. It is important that this building be perceptually open in order to claim a pedagogical role in civic life because schools, unlike museums that are increasingly centers for cultural consumption, have the sole mission of training and nurturing creative minds.

The zoning envelope proscribes the kind of exuberant challenge to the grid that the institutional personality of Cooper Union would seem to demand. We focused instead on expressing the sensibility of the place through an interior circulation system that at once carves into the envelope in a subtractive process while working to exploit the interrelationships of engineering, art and architecture through an interweaving vertical piazza to create an interior space that encourages interconnection and contact while reducing the probability of departmental balkanization. The incision made to the body of the building creates an opening that allows those within to orient and connect to Foundation Building and the greater cityscape while also creating an invitation to the neighborhood to observe and take part in the intensity of activity inside. We are looking to design within a subset where subjective and objective spaces intersect, where the relationship of inside and outside is obfuscated, and where the articulation of the exterior is minimized as a gesture to the neighborhood and as a contrast to the complexity within.

This new academic building at the Cooper Union is essentially a vertical piazza contained within a semi-transparent, rectangular enclosure that articulates the classroom and laboratory spaces inside. The eight-story block is comprised of three intensified plazas, one above the other, that are connected by the 120’ atrium space that contains the circulation stairways. The stairways function dually as circulation and as oversized lanterns, each being clad on the exterior with illuminated translucent material. Serviced by a skip-stop elevator system that has only two stops for eight floors, this building operates on a rhythm of spatial expansion and compression that will draw users to climb through it. The social legs of the building are in the grand stairs, but the heart is on the fourth and seventh-story sky lobbies that surround the staircase atrium. It is in these aerial piazzas that all typical institutional amenities are located: meeting rooms, social space, seminar rooms, wireless hubs, restrooms, phones. These are the key social spaces for students, faculty and visitors – the places, in fact, where much of contemporary education actually takes place. Technology has allowed education to come out of the classroom and into the coffee bar – it may be that the most vibrant and memorable place to learn is where students and faculty rub shoulders, share meals and feel like they’re home.

The building occupies an unusually unencumbered site whose four free facades rise from a glass-framed lobby. Entered from the northwest corner, the lobby extends the exterior surface to the inside to become a mezzanine overlooking the gallery on the floor below. Access at this point to the gallery and the main lecture hall is shared to make a linkage with the community. From the entry lobby the ground plane moves on to the middle of the space and begins to warp up into the grand stair or vertical city street whose use will resemble that of the stairs in the front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the inclined piazza in front of the Pompidou Center. Nearly half of the people using the building will be able to navigate between destinations solely by use of the grand stair. Skip-stop elevators will be available for floors four and seven for those with destinations at the top of the building or to one of the sky lobbies. In every case, stairways in the atrium are oriented toward the outside of the building. From the lobbies at floors four and seven the view is directly onto the Foundation Building, while from the lobby to the third floor, the view is of the park on Third Avenue and the city beyond. The four-sided transparency on the first floor creates another important opportunity to maintain a visual connection to such significant architectural neighbors as the Ukrainian Church.

To further dissolve the boundaries between inside and outside, the exterior material of the building above the lobby level is porous: it is clad in semitransparent, openable perforated stainless-steel panels that will be operated by the building manager. The operable panels will create a continually moving pattern, providing surface variety on the facade, shielding the interior from the sun, providing cooling during the summer months and acting as an insulating layer during the winter. The use of this innovative skin is in keeping with the mission of the Cooper Union to find environmentally sensitive design solutions that will allow the building to achieve a minimum Silver LEEDTM rating from the U.S. Green Building Council.