On Tuesday, October 23 2018, The Cooper Union opened a new exhibition entitled Archive and Artifact: The Virtual and the Physical, presenting 50 years of undergraduate architectural thesis projects by students of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture. Immediately before the opening, Donna Sink and I spoke with Dean Nader Tehrani about his perspective on the tradition of thesis, and how the new show reflects Cooper Union's 50-year history of undergraduate thesis under the direction of Hejduk, Vidler, and himself.
This story was originally published last year. We're re-featuring it today in light of Cooper Union's recent unveiling of The Student Work Collection.
Paul: I'd like to start out with you sharing a little bit of your own personal perspective on the value of the thesis and the role of thesis in architectural education.
Nader: The value of thesis, in my mind, emerges from the moment when students realize that the programs professors make up in the beginning of the semester, the agendas they produce, and the prompts they create are both motivated and fictional. I have a distinct recollection of coming to this realization in my own undergraduate years, and the marginal, yet productive, relationship these fictions had to the world out there. It is also the moment when you realize how potentially the most potent moment of the design process may be in the development of a program, or an agenda. One of the most creative moments is when you realize you might be asking a unique question for the first time, or a question never posed in a certain way, much like a professor may have to do in the development of a studio prompt, as a precondition for the development of a dozen projects that rehearse its possibilities in the design process. That is, in essence, what happens in a studio, as one establishes a thesis through a conjecture, a series of questions, or problematics, and how students’ project manifest their implications in radically different ways. And I guess one of the things I loved about the discovery of thesis is the sheer independence to conceive of a problem, and the power of being able to construct a pedagogy out of it.
Donna: Do you think that the students understand that earlier in their careers? Or is it really only until they are asked at thesis time to do some defining themselves that they really start to take that on? And I am especially curious how you think that translates them then into their first job in the real world when they have a client, you know. Do you think that they are prepared for being able to ask those same questions that they want to ask themselves in addition to the questions and the problems that the clients are bringing to them?
Let’s postpone the second part of the question for a moment and talk about it in the context of academia. I think that the riddles that are posed to students--whether at RISD, Harvard, MIT, or Cooper Union, the very places I have taught over the past 25 years— are all slightly different. Academic freedom offers faculty the space to develop varied narratives from semester to semester, and from school to school. Consequently, students have an intuitive understanding that there's something slightly different at stake in each professor's agenda and that they are each defining a territory through their pedagogy.
So no, students are not completely innocent going into thesis, but they may not have internalized the sheer responsibility that comes with the terrain of defining a set of questions, finding the right analytical tools to research the questions, and how to translate all that into a project of consequence. Somehow, during this process, the cultural, urbanistic and programmatic context of the projects also take shape, forcing a generic set of questions to take on the peculiarities of a specific context. So yes, I think that students have an intuitive understanding throughout their years of study, but the weight of responsibility that comes with the independence of thesis feels entirely new.
In reaction to the second part of your question, I would say, first and foremost, I don't think we should confuse what we do in school with what happens in the world of practice. If we succeed in creating the right academic environment to demonstrate the agency of the architectural discipline, then beyond preparing students for practice (as we know it to be today), we may yet prepare them to reinvent it, to imagine novel ways in translating thinking into other forms of architectural practice, and to broaden architectural research in the context of an expanded intellectual terrain: consider the ways in which certain architects have adopted their skill sets to become politicians, contractors, developers, or even clients. With many models of practice outmoded, and with so many practices, technological or otherwise on the brink of obsolescence, what students need is the space to learn, to think critically and develop analytical skills that they may need to apply to completely different circumstances afterwards.
What clients bring to the equation can be demanding of course, and yet not always compelling on their own terms. Thus, the architect’s ability to bring a conceptual project to the client —or to extract it from a seemingly benign prompt— might be one of the most important aspects of what the academic context might help develop, in effect, not so much by solving a prosaic problem inasmuch as inviting a new way of looking at the challenge altogether. In this sense, the real world out there is not so real, as it is a fertile space within which speculations might yield alternative ways of inhabiting the world.
Donna: So I totally agree with you that yes, the discipline is changing so quickly that we can't teach our students to solve very pragmatic things now because they will have to branch out in ways that we can't even predict yet in the profession. I'm curious how important the role of the thesis advisor is in sort of honing or deciding which students to work with or pushing the students to find those abilities within themselves. Can you tell us a little bit about your thesis advisors and what their role is within Cooper?
As a gentle reminder, this exhibit has work spanning over many decades with varied structural relationships with advisors. When I arrived to Cooper Union three years ago, thesis was taught though team teaching, much like what is done in the foundation years. The first and second semester were separated conceptually with a thesis prep period that would come to closure with the design of a book, while the second semester was a time to focus on a project --often producing a significant conceptual gap between the two.
I made some modifications to its structure: I discontinued the strict line that is traditionally drawn between thesis prep and thesis, and I brought the two into confluence by making it a longer year. By doing that, I essentially had them designing from the first day, while still defining their analytical process, but in turn, I also had them extend their research process all the way to the end, to the last days of the final presentation. With less focus on the final presentation, the iterative process of making, writing, drawings and thinking gains traction, without the necessity of drawing strict barriers between their analytical and projective project. This has resulted in less of a divorce between their conceptual thinking on the one hand, and their project, on the other…..and by extension, less confusion and guilt about the loss of scholarship, or the lack of creativity.
We have also now reduced the amount of professors to two, blending their intellectual agendas into a conversation, while introducing a third professor of each student’s choice into the equation part way through the year, to supplement the process from a more allied position.
In other words, the student is now more free to associate him or herself with other professors, whether inside or outside of Cooper Union, drawing from varied positions and expertise to help inform projects that may require a more specialized attention or a particular research. This has also resulted in a level of autonomy for the students to build their own discourse, while also bringing them into conversation with a larger audience of critics and collaborators.
Paul: Do you think it's important to address contemporary issues in architecture and culture in a thesis project? If so, do you feel like thesis projects today are approached differently than they have been in the past?
The answer is yes and no to different parts of the question. Let me initially try to frame how I have outlined the thesis process for the students - even if it is slightly different from the very methodology of the professors in charge: I tend to ask for a framework that is as relevant for today and has the ability to converse with architectural discourse over time, across histories. I ask the students to consider a problematic, a challenge, or an urgency that has a societal dimension to it: in some way exemplary of what we are all going through in the world. Naturally, I ask them what question emerges from this urgency.
Second, I ask the student to define what is architectural about the nature of the urgency they have elected to address. While asking them to define the formal, spatial and material terms of the equation, I also ask them to reflect on the dynamic nature of the discipline’s boundaries, and how that might be challenged through the very work they are undertaking. But also, how it impacts the city, or landscape. And in what way does it pose a question about a building type, a convention, or a known architectural trope. Through this, I hope to get the students deep into the question of what makes architecture embedded in a certain type of question that no other discipline might be able to pose.
Third, I ask students to consider how they might be producing a new form of knowledge through their work, whether in research or design. How is it that formal, spatial and material questions might take on a critical stance in relation to the discipline, its history of conventions, and the very canons that define its institution?
Fourth, as they engage the design process, I ask them to revisit their preoccupation in both historical and contemporary terms: that is, how this same question may have been articulated centuries ago (and through what texts)? and in what way are other architects addressing similar questions in our day and age? I ask the students in what way they might be building a conversation with others in history, whether contemporaries or ancients. I would like to imagine that students gain an appreciation of time as part of their equation: how this project speaks to our time, and another time altogether. Some describe the importance of anachronism in what architects do, precisely to evade the stagnation of what seems to be relevant today (and invariably out of touch with tomorrow) to address an issue that might evade the reductivism of our temporal constraints today, whether by fashion or by the limitations of our technologies.
Paul: Let's talk about this new show, “The Archive and The Artefact, The Virtual and The Physical”. This is an exhibition of thesis work from the last 50 years at Cooper Union. During that time there's been a number of leadership changes and shifts in administration. Has there been a consistent theme or a consistent thread throughout the years in Cooper Union's approach to thesis?
It is interesting that for everybody that tries to characterize Cooper Union as a monolith, I have come to learn that the character of Cooper Union has been as diverse, debated and friction-filled an environment as any environment can be. In other words, it has been anything but monolithic and it has consistently changed throughout the years. And yet, in all the heterogeneity of voices, eras, and aesthetic procedures in evidence in this room, I come to realize that it is also defined by a certain sensibility that brings the work into conversation. This sensibility defies the specifications of the pedagogies, as much as it is divorced from the power of the faculty members. Perchance, it is something that happens after hours, amongst the students themselves, extending certain sensibilities through osmosis, while underlining the presence of the individual voice as a guarantor of their agency. I like not think of it as the ability of an academic environment to learn from its mortar rather than its bricks.
Certainly, this sensibility is informed by an ethic: to draw with discipline, to build with craft, and to consistently redefine the limits of the discipline.
At the same time, lodged within the pedagogy were questions being posed that were not always obvious, nor always evident in their relevance. But somehow, in their provocations and in their anticipation of being dismantled, there was always a sense that the most arcane of challenges would be researches, forensically dismantled and meticulously rebuilt with a sense of projective risk. And these are the results of people coming from very different orientations. Legend has it that there was powerful dialogue between John Hejduk, Raimund Abraham, Peter Eisenman, Ricardo Scofidio among others, and mong them, many in discord and dissonance. But underlying that a shared ethic that may not have needed to be articulated through consent.
Paul: The exhibition features student work by notable architects such as Elizabeth Diller, Laurie Hawkinson, Daniel Libeskind... What do their thesis projects show us in terms of the work that they have become known for? Are there any interesting observations that you made looking at the work of some of these acclaimed architects, the work that they were doing in school compared to what they're doing today?
It’s a difficult question because while there are certain red threads connecting their work over time, it is also insufficient evidence to gauge what they have become today. It’s hard to look at Elizabeth Diller’s thesis, Twin Houses for a Single Resident, and not be in awe of her mastery of certain detailed specifications; in turn, it is infinitely clear how those very details become the substance of numerous projects, exhibitions and built installations. And yet, nothing in that thesis can be translated into the kind of viral success that she’s seen since her student days, because those drawings alone cannot fully capture the rhetorical strength of her voice as an intellect. Even today, while a certain ethic persists in the detailed specification of the work, her activism as a spokesperson for architecture and its programmatic strength is possibly her strongest asset, and it may be that this is one of the strongest aspects of this exhibit: the salient connection between words and images in their ability to create discourse. Diller’s work exemplifies this quality.
It is important to recognize that with all the strength of what is on whose walls, that a different eventuality awaited each student: some with commercial success, others with academic respect, and yet others with the ability to refine the discipline in significant ways. Of them all, maybe Diller is the only one who has been able to operate in all categories with a level of sophistication like no other.
Paul: I'm not sure how involved you are in this project, but are you able to tell us anything about the Architecture Archive’s Emerging Database of Student Work Collection that's going live next year?
Oh, this is an infinitely important project. We've invested a lot of time and a lot of attention to it. It’s led by Steven Hillyer, director of the Architectural Archive at The Cooper Union. This entire exhibit is dedicated to the emergence of the digital archive, and in this sense, the exhibit is just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath every drawing is at least a dozen or more drawings in the web and behind every student, there is a community of other students. So, what we're doing is giving presence to a digital database of people that are an embodiment of a pedagogy, a school of thought and its vicissitudes over a long period of time. The exhibit is just one small part of this larger project and yet its pedagogical motivations lie at the core of our commitments.
Paul Petrunia is the founder and director of Archinect, a (mostly) online publication/resource founded in 1997 to establish a more connected community of architects, students, designers and fans of the designed environment. Outside of managing his growing team of writers, editors, designers and ...
2021-present: Senior Owners Representative at IFF. We are a Midwest CDFI nonprofit that offers real estate and facilities services to non-profit organizations. I work in the Indianapolis office. 2017-2021: Architect at Rowland Design in Indianapolis. 2012-2017: Campus Architect at the ...
1 Comment
There's one tensions to this interview that i found interesting. Should the thesis process be about reinventing "practice" or the knowledge discipline of architecture. I'm not sure the process achieves either but i do think there is a fundamental distinction - between the aims of a professional or artistic = endeavor encapsulated by a "practice" versus some message, lesson, or finding relevant to the knowledge discipline of architecture. By knowledge discipline I mean that architecture is taught and institutionalized similar to other disciplines like biology or history. Ultimately, the thesis process asks some hard questions about architecture and the boundaries of its disciplinary practice and knowledge areas.
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