Word: unionism
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...building into those streets and get it to speak to so many different contexts. The ideal combination of grit and elegance, muscle and intellect is hard to arrive at, and over the last four or five years some local projects by name architects have gotten it wrong. But Cooper Union's new academic building, which opened this fall, is a genuine triumph, a canny exercise in architectural multilingualism. (See pictures of Thom Mayne's 41 Cooper Square...
...represents Mayne's first move into New York or for that matter the East Coast. He makes buildings like no one else's, with complex orchestrations of space and form and a tough luster that's unmistakably his. The folded and perforated metal skin of his project for Cooper Union stands out strongly in its neighborhood of mostly brick and masonry buildings, but it also speaks to the local heritage of loft industry - and of thinking outside the box. "As a design and engineering school, Cooper Union is a place that's about creative capital," says Mayne. "So we wanted...
...Mayne's Cooper Union building is his first completed project on the East Coast. From the outside its signature feature is a perforated steel scrim that acts as both a sunscreen and an instant attention-grabber. By its folds and slashes it provides a dynamic surface to what might otherwise be a standard stack of offices, classrooms and laboratories. Mayne has played with similar screens in a few recent projects, most spectacularly in a federal office building in San Francisco, where the screen cascades down 18 stories and then spills in long folds across an adjoining plaza, like a metallic...
...Transparency has been a buzzword among architects for some time now. One thing it refers to is the attempt to open a building to its surroundings. So the leaping gash that cuts through the Cooper Union façade - part dancer, part dueling scar, part Chinese character that never was - could be called a gesture towards transparency. It corresponds to the public areas of the building and discloses them to the outside. It could also be called a gesture of pure architectural theater. Especially at night, when the building is lit from within, it's a completely smashing addition...
...Francisco federal office, Mayne has also provided his Cooper Union building with elevators that don't stop on every floor. His hope is that this will encourage people to take the stairs for at least a floor to increase their chances of bumping into each other. (For the handicapped a conventional elevator hits every floor.) And anyway, compared to a standard elevator, the stairs are a joyride...