The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union in New York City has unveiled The Student Work Collection, a new online resource that highlights nearly 80 years' worth of architectural output with the aim of recording the "School of Architecture's pedagogy by documenting student work." 

The comprehensive archival project includes over 4,000 student projects that are catalogued by student and and instructor names, as well as by course number, semester, decade, and design problem, among other topics. The collection provides a deep view into the early pen-on-vellum work of now-famous architects like Daniel Libeskind (class of 1970), Liz Diller (class of 1979), and others. The archive also offers a more complex perspective of the educational efforts of prominent architectural educators and theorists, including John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, Toshiko Mori, Lebbeus Woods, and others. 

According to the site's About section, archival processing of student work began in 1970 under Hejduk's leadership as he and student Roger Canon began the production of Education of An Architect: A Point of View, a book and exhibition that was on display at the Museum of Modern Art. The archive was officially established in 1983 and was formalized as a department within the School of Architecture in 1991 under the leadership of Kim Shkapich. The current director is Steven Hillyer.

According to the university, the archive "will become one of the first comprehensive, public, digital resources for historical and contemporary architectural pedagogy and student work."

In our conversation with Cooper Union's Dean Nader Tehrani last year, he commented, "... 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... 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."