Archinect - News

Editor's Picks #314

2013-05-07T13:14:00-04:00

Over at the LA Times, Christopher Hawthorne reported on LACMA Director Michael Govan’s plan’s for $650-million new building by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor...Eric Chavkin commented "New construction has always been fundraising tail that wags the museum dog. Big names to draw bigger money...Now that AMPAS is leveraging it's Oscar prestige to be a part of LACMA, a new name to entice donor dollars is Zumthor, a name that means absolutely nothing to most.

News
Michael Z Wise reviewed the newest edition of Albert Speer, Architecture by Léon Krier for the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Wise concluded his review "Though he is again bemoaning a contemporary inability to regard classicism in a detached manner, it is Léon Krier who is in a delirious thrall to a malevolent aesthetic".

Will Galloway was surprised "wow, i didn't need another reason to dislike krier, but this one certainly seems more than enough to set aside any other complaint about the guy and never revisit them. its amazing that someone could hate modernism so much that even hitler's vision for the world seems palatable to him. nasty". For his part Steven Ward
argued "I'd rather see the swastika redeemed for its original associations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika) than see any redemption of Speer's work. It's not that the style(s) from which he borrowed were bad so much as his intentional bombastic over-scaling of everything. These buildings were meant to communicat...

Cooper Union Students React

2013-04-30T15:23:00-04:00

Students in the School Architecture, with support of Art and Engineering students respond to Cooper Union Board of Trustees failure to uphold the mission of their school through a collaborative intervention upon the School of Architecture Lobby, a white space famously designed by John Hejduk. The students pinned two written statements upon the walls after completion(below). Until the recently announced decision Copper Union was the only school of Art, Architecture, and Engineering in the country to offer full tuition scholarships to all admitted students, admittance based solely on merit.

Statement #1

This space, the third floor lobby of Cooper Union's Foundation Building, is a sacred space, the heart of the School of Architecture. This is our citadel, our platform to address the world. This lobby is a place where we engage in a dialogue of critique, debate, and the free exchange of ideas. The spirit of this space, a work forged from the toil of many great individuals, has...

Cooper Union to charge UG tuition beginning next year

2013-04-23T20:23:00-04:00

Officials at New York City's Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art announced today that the school, famously free to students, will begin charging undergraduate tuition next year.

Via thinkgreen in the forum.

Cooper Union’s Free Tuition Tradition May Be Near Its End

2013-02-16T12:18:00-05:00

The new academic building was glamorous...a statement about just how far the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art had come, from its 19th-century origins as a charity for the poor to one of the most selective colleges in the nation. But that was before market convulsions shook the school’s finances, and before the truth about its dire budgetary situation came to light

Students Seize Cooper Union Room to Protest Possible Tuition

2012-12-03T20:08:00-05:00

Twelve students barricaded themselves inside an eighth-floor room at the top of the Cooper Union Foundation Building at noon on Monday to urge the school not to begin charging tuition to undergraduates. The school has not made a decision on charging tuition for undergraduates. But in April, it decided to begin charging tuition to graduate students for the first time in its 110-year history.

Cooper Union Will Charge Tuition for Graduate Students

2012-04-25T01:57:00-04:00

After months of agonized debate about its 110-year-old tradition of free education, Cooper Union will begin charging graduate students next year while maintaining, at least for now, its no-tuition policy for undergraduates, the college’s president said Tuesday.

Why Cooper Union Matters

2011-12-13T13:29:00-05:00

The philosophy that courses through the institution is that education is a higher good, one that enriches the individual and, in so doing, enriches the human community. In this framework, education has its own value—and this is what makes Cooper Union radical and worth saving, perhaps even worth imitating: It is operating on a fundamentally different idea of what education is, and what it can be.

No more free tution?

2011-11-01T23:56:44-04:00

“Altering our scholarship policy will be only as a last resort, but in order to create a sustainable model, it has to be one of the options on the table,” Jamshed Bharucha, who took over as president in July, said in an interview.

Facing serious financial trouble in a weak economy, Cooper Union, the New York City college founded in 1859 to provide free education for the working class, may begin charging undergraduate tuition for the first time in more than a century, its president said Monday. More via Bezoar on the possible role played by architecture in Cooper's financial mess.