Thom Mayne and Jean Oei
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Two times: 3:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m.
Cooper Square
This program was part of the 2008-09 program calendar. Click here for information about our current season.
Thom Mayne, founder and design director of Morphosis, and Jean Oei, project designer and job captain in New York, will lead a tour of Morphosis’s new Cooper Union Academic Building.
The Cooper Union New Academic Building is conceived as a stacked vertical piazza, contained within a semitransparent envelope that articulates classroom and laboratory spaces. The vertical campus is organized around a central atrium that rises to the full height of the building.
The interior space configuration encourages interconnection among the engineering, art, and architecture departments. The skip-stop elevator system makes trips exclusively to the fourth- and seventh-story sky lobbies that surround the atrium, drawing occupants to congregate on the grand stair. These key social spaces become the places where education informally takes place.
The building’s physical and visual permeability helps integrate the college into its neighborhood. A steel-and-glass skin improves the building’s performance through control of daylight, energy use, and selective natural ventilation. The facility is slated to receive at minimum a Gold LEED Rating.
Please note this is an active construction site with no elevator access. No documentation, written or photographic, of the visit will be permitted.
Photograph: Courtesy of Morphosis
