Class 33: Visit to the Cooper Archives with Katie Blumenkrantz & the Architecture Archive with Steven Hillyer, Chris Dierks, and Caitlin Biggers

From Projects: The Cooper Union
Jump to: navigation, search

For our thirty-third class on September 25, 2017 we met at 2pm in 414 Fdn., before meeting up with Katie Blumenkrantz to tour the Cooper Archives where she explained the state and make up of the collection, how it currently functions and her hopes for expanding its availability to the community and to researchers via campus initiatives and continued upkeep of the card catalog system. The Library maintains an active twitter and facebook page.

We met back up to map out people's studio and work spaces over the years, when we have a chance we'll walk together to see where we've been and where we're going. We then met up with Steven Hillyer, Chris Dierks, and Caitlin Biggers to hear more about John Hedjuk, the renovation of the Foundation building, relocation of the archive, its function over the years and its current effort to roll out a massive digitization & research tool for a subset of curated student work, an initiative independently funded by outside grants as part of the School of Architecture's Strategic Planning. The accompanying show for this initiative will be @ Cooper in October 2018.

Photos

📸 More photos (Dropbox 🔒)

Emails

Hi Projects class✨,

Apologies for the last minute email, we'll be meeting today at 2pm in room 414 for foundation. Come caffeinated, we're bringing some cookies. We'll be doing a bit of walking to the archives and then through people's work spaces!

- - -

This week:

Following our weekly round up of observations/updates/questions/developments/etc we'll all head downstairs to meet up withKatie Blumenkrantz for a guided look at The Cooper Archives, we'll look at some material's Katie's pulled as well as talk about the history/present function of the archive and it's contents, what types of materials can be entered and who can have access.

We'll take a quick break and meet back in the lobby @3:40 to head upto meet with Steven Hillyer, alum of the Architecture school, instructor & director of the Architecture Archive. He will show us their collection, and talk about their new digital archive of student work funded by a federal grant.

See also, this video conversation between three of the school's archivists.

We'll wrap up with a walk through the Foundation & NAB to take a peek at where you've all had studio and work spaces over the years.

- - -

Recap from the last class (9/18/17):

We spoke with Interim Director of Finance and Administration Keith Stokeld and heard from Walid a bit about the entanglement of financial/investment & real-estate dealings as they relate to Cooper on the individual to corporate and domestic to global scale.

Interim Director of Finance and Administration Keith Stokeld presents to Projects class.jpg
Interim Director of Finance and Administration Keith Stokeld walks Projects class through reading a balance sheet.jpg
Walid presents on real estate and financial entanglement of Chrysler Building.jpg

Please continue to review the documents assigned last week as they'll be coming up frequently and we should all be logging our questions! For comparisons sake here are two relevant class meetings from last year with Bill Mea (former interim President and CFO) and a follow up with Chris Cloud (then VP of Development)- those who were there can offer insights as to how the numbers and narratives have shifted or stayed the same.

- - -

Next week:

We'll be visited by Peter Buckley, Associate Professor and Acting Dean of Humanities who has also played an integral roll in maintaining Cooper's historical documents and context. He's participated in many committees and most recently was on the committee convened to revise the mission under the umbrella of "strategic planning" and has previously chaired the school wide accreditation process (see his involvement in these documents)

Please begin preparing for our presentation cycle on October 9th, we're asking that everyone prepare roughly 5 minutes to share with the class as well as a typed page of notes and writing about your interests, observations, etc as an exercise in getting it down on the page.

- - -

Reminders & Notes:

We'll try to have Mauricio in soon along with other Projects class alums to talk about some of what they are working on these days. I'm including a link to his collective New Santuary NYC  which held and will continue to hold Vigils for those affected by old and new immigration reforms. Below are a few pictures from the first half of the vigil. 

Text from Sanctuary Vigil.jpg
Sanctuary Vigil.jpg

If you’re around on Tuesday, September 26th at 6pm, there will be a memorial service in the Great Hall for Adrian Jovanovic, who passed away earlier this year.

Adrian was a graduate of the class of 1989, an Alumni Trustee, and a founder of the Committee to Save Cooper Union. He fought for the preservation of free tuition at Cooper Union and was one of our community’s greatest advocates for “getting back to free.” We collaborated with David Gersten and the students who built the model of the Foundation Building to bring the model back down to Cooper from upstate- it was partially set up at the Block Party and we'll be setting it up @ 4:30pm tomorrow Tues 26th for the memorial if anyone wants to lend a hand.

David Gersten with the Foundation Model .jpg

ps We're collating some Block Party documentation, if you missed it you can see some pix from the alumni here!

Jake with the Peter Cooper pillow.jpg
Kiersten and Ariana at the Peter Cooper Block Party.jpg