Over the holidays I received an e-mail from a friend, pointing me to this article saying I was the third most popular blog in the year 2010. I thought to myself, did I even post anything in the year 2010? I logged on to Archinect and checked for myself, and I was close to being correct.. I only posted once, about our beloved Raimund Abraham's death, and then never touched it again.

During that year Mark jumped on board and wrote about Cooper from the perspective of a guinea pig in the new Master's program. He became the sixth most popular blog. But now I think he has put the blog to rest, and in his wake has left me to once again feel guilty about not representing my school.

So, without dwelling on why I never updated, or the reasoning I may have given to my absence, I will just pretend like there hasn't been almost a year and a half between posts about my studies.. and continue from where we last left off:







Last year, we opened the semester with an exhibition tracing the history of architecture at Cooper from 1959, when Abraham Lincoln gave his famous speech on slavery in the Great Hall, to 2009, when 41 Cooper Sq. opened, the new academic building designed by Thom Mayne. Among original drawings, artifacts, and models, we were responsible for putting together an animation which documented the entire history of the historic Foundation Building, highlighting structural and programatic renovations, restorations, and additions to the building. In the end we created a document through Rhino which can trace each and every change in the building to make a living document able to show an architectural history of the building that no one has seen before.














I was a student in the third year "comprehensive design" studio. We designed apartment buildings, museums, did analysis, built full size details, drew wall sections, learned about HVAC, designed a structural system and tested loads, kept the water out. And somehow we managed to keep a level of discussion about the ideas in our projects.










I watched and documented some more reviews throughout the school during finals.








Over the summer, I took a month off of work to ride my bike 1800 miles from Ohio to New Orleans, in what was maybe the most amazing experience of my life. It was intense.








I worked at both Lyn Rice Architects and again at the Architecture Archive of the Cooper Union. At Rice's I built models, worked on presentation drawings, had happy hour one too many times.. at the Archive I (painstakingly) worked on building a model for the Paul Rudolph Lower Manhattan Expressway exhibition that documented the project in its entirety.








I helped a friend install a sukkah in the middle of Union Square...








Last semester we studied autonomies, through programs, structural components, and other components like entry and light through picking random elements out of a hat. Then we built 30'x30'x30' cubes which were eventually inserted into the urban fabric, with sites that we also chose from a hat. It sounds simple in description, but was one of the wildest semesters I've experienced.








And finally (though I'm probably missing much more), I started this semester off in Advanced Descriptive Geometry with studying the curves of Unknown Pleasures. I tried to think of a witty title for the project, but all I could come up with was Unknown Measures.


Until next time,
Danny