Cooper Union Builds

Here's a few shots I snapped today walking past Cooper Union's New Academic Building by Morphosis under construction.



The building is located between 6th and 7th Streets, catty-corner from the school's main building. The above and below shots are looking northeast across Third Avenue, the street between the old and new buildings.



The below shot is the 7th Street corner, looking southeast. This is obviously the less-reserved of the building's two main corners.



And finally here's a detail of the screen facade, what appears to be a perforated metal with an applique of apparently random, painted rectangles. The renderings indicate that this last is as intended, though I'm not sure if it's helping or hindering the design.



One can see from the first two photos that this metal screen will continue across the Third Avenue facade (minus the scaffolded area), mounted to the cantilevered horizontal frame in the spandrel area. So basically the screen is a sculptural veil of a dumb (and I'm guessing cheap) glass and metal box. The corner detail (third photo) illustrates this disjunction nicely.