Browsing Cooper Union

The project, a massive undertaking, is being launched in two phases. This month 20,000 "analog records" dating from the 1930s to 2000 went online at archswc.cooper.edu. Another 30,000 "born-digital images, text, and audio-visual records" from after 2000 will go online in 2022. After that, the "living archive of the school’s pedagogy" will grow annually as student work is documented and added to the collection.

Projects can be browsed by the names of courses (12 of them), the projects themselves (1,179 as of this writing), authors or faculty (1,078 people in all), and locations (358 projects located on an embedded Google Map). No matter how one browses, searches, or filters results to find particular projects, the Student Work Collection is a commendable feat — and lots of fun.

A few ways to launch into the collection:

• The before-they-were-famous-architects route: Stan Allen, Elizabeth Diller, Laurie Hawkinson, Daniel Libeskind, Dean Maltz
• The famous-professors route: Raimund Abraham, Diana Agrest, Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, Diane Lewis, Ricardo Scofidio, Michael Webb, Tod Williams, Lebbeus Woods
• The that's-very-Cooper-Union route: Cartesian House, Cube Project, Nine-Square Grid, Palladio/Corbusier Analysis, Still Life Thesis