perspectivebooks
A Dangerous Beauty
The forTunes of Peter
Cooper, patron and founder
of Cooper Union for the
Advancement of Science and
Art, were based on the
production of glue and
household cements from
byproducts of the slaughter
house—cows’ and calves’ feet.
It was a messy but profitable
business, assuring Cooper a
legacy as a “pioneer polluter”
of New York’s pond water.
Interestingly, Architecture of
Nature/Nature of Architecture,
which showcases work being
done by architecture students in the institute
built by Cooper’s industrial ingenuity, is a
vivid catalogue of material and physical
processes that are as alluring and troubling
as the oily rainbow sheen on a contaminated
puddle. The speculative schemes—products of
a nearly decadelong series of design studios
taught by the book’s lead author, architect
and educator Diana Agrest, at Cooper Union’s
School of Architecture to “deal with environ
mental issues”—present a dangerous kind of
beauty. As historian and essayist D. Graham
Burnett says in a dialogue with Agrest, “Let
us hope that this book of yours, so apparently
peopleless, returns those who read it to the
central problem of ‘us.’ Of us ‘now.’ ”
Agrest describes in moving terms her early
and farranging travels, from her native
Argentina to the underground homes of
Matmata on the edge of the Sahara. She looked
at the passing landscape in protoarchitectural
terms—from the “plan” of the Argentine
Pampas, with its “uninterrupted horizontal”
expanse, to the “section” of the geological
record written in stratigraphic lines of the
country’s Serranías de Hornocal mountains in
the Argentine province of Jujuy. Traveling on
foot, train, and in a beatup old station wagon,
the young student found the longsought
conduit between the sciences and humanities.
As Agrest notes, the “central role of representa
tion” in architecture is to create “a common
ground between architecture and science in
the understanding of nature.” These repre
sentations might take the form of standard
architectural drawings and models adapted to
nonstandard objects—such as seismic faults—
as well as nature prints, scientific atlases, andeven scans of electron
microscopic imagery. The
significance of Agrest’s claim
is apparent in “Representation
as Production,” a farranging
dialogue between the author
and scholars Peter Galison and
Caroline A. Jones. Like the
Burnett dialogue, it is one of
the book’s clarifying inter
ludes between examples of the
studio’s work. Another wel
come voice is that of John
McPhee, whose reprinted essay
of 1980, “Basin and Range:
Geological Time,” does not
show signs of age.
Who, then, is the “us” of this book, and
where and when are we “now?” In the ac
knowledgments (like a signpost at the end of
this long journey), Agrest elaborates on how
the visually dynamic bulk of student work
from the Cooper Union design studios came
together. Collectively, and as a group portrait
of the generation that produced it, this com
pilation records changing weather patterns
in a prevailing climate of warranted geo
ecological pessimism.
By comparison, the material illustrated in
New York’s Museum of Modern Art 1971 exhi
bition about Cooper Union, the Education of an
Architect: A Point of View (and accompanying
book), with its iterations of the vaunted Nine
Square problem, seems to have come from
another epoch. The past “elements” of archi
tecture—grid, frame, post, beam, etc.—have
been replaced with invisible force fields,
topographical vessels, cloud formations, and
sinkholes. The overall impression is the un
raveling of a singular point of view. The
question is no longer that of composition but
of “dealing with” a turbulent state of nature
in a perpetual process of becoming and/or
coming undone. One future possibility is that
“us” (architects) will be cropped out of the
picture and nature, by whatever definition,
will return to reassert itself over our now
longestranged better selves. As an atlas of us
now, this handsomely produced and lavishly
illustrated book covers some intriguingly
uncommon ground. nEdward Eigen is the author of On Accident:
Episodes in Architecture and Landscape.Architecture of Nature/Nature of Architecture, by Diana Agrest, with Yael Agmon. Applied
Research and Design Publishing, 280 pages, $49.95.
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