The Cooper Union was founded by Peter Cooper, industrialist and philanthropist, in 1859 as one of the nation’s most selective institutions of higher education. It provides outstanding academic programs in architecture, art and engineering for a diverse body of students. The Great Hall, where the ACADIA main conference will take place, has stood for more than a century as a bastion of free speech and as a witness to the flow of American history and ideas, and most recently the Cooper Union has unveiled a new academic building, an already recognizable landmark in the city, designed by Morphosis.
The school of architecture is known for its international renowned faculty, and some of its facilities that combine interesting conventional and non-conventional manual crafts, techniques and the latest technology. Multiple computer labs provide different perspectives that serve architecture design. There has been an interesting challenge at the School of Architecture at Cooper Union concerning the introduction of the digital. Cooper Union’s recognizable legacy for attentive craft and innovative creative drawing techniques framed by the deep understanding of architecture representation were integrated within the introduction of digital strategies. The analog and the digital are integrated and challenged through multiple media-based interfaces alternating crossings between the hand, the eye, and the mind, by crafting and modeling architectures with tools, machines, and the intermediation of the virtual digital. All of these intermediations help to create unique architectural solutions that engage an intuitive personal creative approach, to the otherwise standardized digital parameterization of information.