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KIESLER & THE FORM AND MEMORY OF THE CITY: FUTURE VISIONS IN THE YOUNG KIESLER AWARD STUDY, 2013
PROFESSOR DIANE LEWIS, R.A., FAAR Principal, Diane Lewis Architect PC PETER SCHUBERT, FAIA Partner, Ennead Architects International DR. DANIEL SHERER, B.A. Yale University, Ph.D. Harvard University MERSIHA VELEDAR, B.Arch Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, The Cooper Union M.Arch II Graduate School of Architecture, Princeton University DANIEL MERIDOR, B.Arch, M.Arch II Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, The Cooper Union Studio Visits: BETTINA ZERZA, M.Arch Graz UT Principal, Bettina Zerza Architecture LLC “The Cooper Union School of Architecture, its work, and the students of fourth year urbanism studios are awarded funds for the publication and exhibition of their studio work. This is because this faculty and the mandate of the Cooper Union, is inextricably linked to Frederick Kiesler’s concepts in achieving a continuum between the most archaic and more futuristic ideas of form, structure, scale and inovative civic humanist program.”
- DIETER BOGNER & MONIKA PRESSLER, Directors Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation
LIBRARIES FROM THE ANCIENT TO THE MODERN, FALL 2013
Professors Rustow, Veledar, Allin, with Anderson and Raiji
The purpose of the Third Year Studio is to introduce problems and building typologies of a greater complexity than those treated in the first two years and to develop both analytical and design skills around a comprehensive consideration of site, program, structure, mechanical systems and building envelope. This year the Third Year Studio sequence will be divided into two separate but related semesters, both working with the same institutional building program. While both semesters will combine analysis and design exercises, the emphasis in the Fall will be slightly heavier on analysis, with somewhat more projective design work in the Spring. The building type/program for both semesters will be the Library.
Institutional Building Programs
Most of our modern institutions, and virtually all of our institutional building typologies, are products of the Enlightenment. Schools, museums, libraries, hospitals, courthouses and prisons were all fundamentally (re)defined towards the end of the 18th century and a great experimentation ensued in which new building types were gradually developed, many of which persist today. Institutional buildings are public buildings, which means that they are collective settings for individual experience. Their 'purpose' is to create the conditions in which each person's education or research, exposure to art, palliative care or justice, can be achieved alongside that of many others. We know and judge our institutions by how well they serve each of us but they work as public institutions only if they serve us all.
The challenge of responding to such programs is to find a method for moving beyond the architect's personal experience and convictions about school or reading, art or health or justice to a full engagement with the public nature of the institution and the needs and desires of an unknown group of others. Thus, for the Library, at the heart of the design problem is making an architecture that perfectly supports the needs of each reader while accommodating all of them. Size, scale and number become critical and the nature of individual experience in the collective realm is the constant frame of reference. Institutional buildings, because they are public, also have a very particular representative function: they must embody their institutional identity in a manner that is legible and meaningful, even as our expectations of what they mean and how they mean it evolve over time. These are some of the issues we will grapple with this year.
Exercises
We will start with three quick, intensive exercises of a week each, designed to examine the space of reading. In the weeks that follow through the end of October we will look at a group of historical and contemporary libraries in terms of their site, massing, materiality and formal language, working from the 'outside in' to understand how specific libraries resolve the complex questions of their place in urban and public space. We will also look at those buildings in terms of their structural and mechanical systems, analyzing the role these play in determining design and how building envelopes function in material, formal and representational terms. We'll finish the semester with a design exercise that has each of you extrapolate a set of principles from your analysis and synthesize a proposal that examines your reference critically and that begins to stake out a larger position with respect to the library as a contemporary building type.
There will be a series of lectures in which each of your professors, as well as guest speakers, will present an approach to a set of issues that touch directly on the work you're doing at that point in the semester. We'll talk about the history of the library typology; the challenges of working from a detailed program; site analysis; using structural and mechanical approaches generatively; understanding the dynamics of how building envelopes function and so on. There will also be a list of reference readings.
Drawings
By now you have all been making drawings for two years and have had a lot of direct instruction in how to make them. We will not be teaching you how to draw. Rather we will be critiquing your drawings and the choices you make in documenting your ideas for clarity, precision and elegance of expression. You will be free to use pencil, ink or, after the first three weeks, computer. All drawings however will be in one of the ANSI standard formats: 8.5” x 11”; 11” x 17”; 17” x 22”; 22” x 34”; 34” x 44”. This is intended to insure that your work can be presented in way that allows it to be compared and read critically and that it serves as a resource, both for you and for your colleagues. This is mandatory and not subject to discussion; drawings not in the prescribed formats will not be reviewed and presentations that do not include the required drawings will be considered incomplete or non-existent (with all the draconian consequences that inevitably entails). The one exception is your design notebook or your working sketches, which you will make in abundance, and which can be in whatever media and format you find congenial. These, however, no matter how exquisite they may prove to be, will not substitute for the required drawings in the formats prescribed above.
Henri Labrouste, Library of St Genevieve, Paris, France, 1850
Carriere and Hastings, NY City Library Main Branch, NY, NY, 1911 (Foster & Partners, current)
Gunnar Asplund, Stockholm Public Library, Stockholm, Sweden, 1928
Alvar Aalto, Mt. Angel Library, St. Benedict, Oregon, 1970
Louis I. Kahn, Exeter Library, New Hampshire,1972
Paul Rudolph, Library at U.Mass Dartmouth, Massachusetts, 1972Did we want to keep this one?
Mies van der Rohe, Martin Luther King Library, Washington DC, 1972
Hans Scharoun, Berlin State Library, Berlin, Germany1978
OMA, Très Grande Bibliotheque, Paris, France, 1989, Competition
Herzog & De Meuron, Eberswalde Technical School Library, Eberswalde, Germany, 1999
Toyo Ito, Sendai Mediatheque, Sendai, Japan, 2001
OMA, Seattle Central Library, Seattle, Washington, 2004
Alberto Kalach, Vasconcelos Library, Mexico City, Mexico, 2007
Sou Fujimoto, Musashino Art University Library, Tokyo, Japan, 2010