Archive and Artifact: The Virtual and the Physical is “both an exhibition and a glimpse of what’s to come,” says its curator Steven Hillyer, who heads the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive at The Cooper Union. The show, which opened to a packed crowd last Tuesday night at the school’s Arthur A. Houghton Jr. gallery, displays a selection of noteworthy undergraduate thesis projects dating from 1969 until 2018, including those of Liz Diller, Stan Allen, and Karen Bausman. It also offers visitors an exclusive preview to the archive’s forthcoming digital database, which will provide public access to a comprehensive photographic collection of student work.
The projects on view represent those that have been selected over the years by professors—including the School of Architecture’s founding dean John Hejduk, Anthony Vidler, Peggy Deamer, Lebbeus Woods, and Eva Franch i Gilabert—to document the school’s commitment to pedagogy. They also provide insight, says Hillyer, into how the ethos of renowned alumni, such as Diller, Daniel Libeskind, and Laurie Hawkinson, were shaped (some famous graduates, such as Shigeru Ban and Toshiko Mori, are not on display). “Students tend to not value their early academic work in a creative way,” says Hillyer, “they don’t realize how important these formative works are.”
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