The Most Well Connected Poorman in America: State of the Cooper Union Article The new Cooper Union building. New York

By ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

[cooperunion1] Iwan Baan

The new Cooper Union building.

New York

New Yorkers take good things for granted. We accept the city's virtues as entitlements and are vocal about its imperfections—we complain, or kvetch, in the native parlance, with passionate expertise. When a good thing has been around for a while it takes something surprising and preferably controversial to bring it back to center stage.

That is clearly the case for the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and its dramatic new building, a stunning—some would say startling—addition to the 150-year-old institution that has occupied its landmark Foundation Building on Cooper Square since 1859. Designed by Thom Mayne of Morphosis, a West Coast firm based in Santa Monica, Calif., in association with Gruzen Samton of New York, the bold new arrival has been widely praised by the architectural community and sharply criticized by those who see it as a contextual affront to the neighborhood. This is a disagreement that won't go away any time soon. A little background may help.

Cooper Union was conceived and founded by the 19th-century inventor, entrepreneur, philanthropist and legendary New Yorker Peter Cooper, who specified that it "should be entirely devoted with all its rents and revenues of every name and nature to the advancement of science and art." His generous gift of building and land has provided a superior, tuition-free education for generations of distinguished architects, artists and engineers. The school's unorthodox agenda brought the fine arts and structural arts together, pioneered the admission of women, and featured a library free and open to the public before the New York Public Library was established.

Additional income from ownership of the land under the Chrysler Building and other strategic real-estate investments, combined with periodic fund raising, has allowed the school to maintain its tradition as a progressive, tuition-free, egalitarian institution that draws talented students from a wide range of economic and social backgrounds.

[cooperunion2] Iwan Baan

The interior staircase at 41 Cooper Square.

It would seem obvious that a new building should offer something more challenging than a polite bow to a distinguished past. Mr. Mayne is a gifted, experimental, unconventional architect who designs attention-getting structures such as the San Francisco Federal Building and the Caltrans headquarters in Los Angeles. His love of industrial materials and dedication to complexity and abstraction produces work of dynamic vitality with a distinctive, hard-edged aesthetic. This is architecture that takes no prisoners. The evidence suggests that you do not look to him for cuddly or uncontroversial buildings.

The 175,000-square-foot, $111.6 million addition, known simply by its street address, 41 Cooper Square, covers the full block on Third Avenue from East 6th to East 7th Streets, bordering the East Village. Although it is roughly the same size as the Foundation Building diagonally across Cooper Square, its futuristic façade is strikingly different in style and unlike anything else around it. The East Village is an area in transition, best known for its disappearing Bowery flophouses and restaurant supply stores. The wave of development moving along the Bowery in the wake of Sanaa's New Museum with its offhand infusion of sophisticated Japanese design already contains the marks of Meatpacking-District gentrification. With its uneven mix of scales and textures and juxtapositions that have more to do with unpredictable change than reliable constants, this is a place that upends any conventional or stable idea of "contextual" harmony.

The new building's immediate neighbors are mansarded Second Empire survivals, a domed Ukrainian Orthodox church, and brash contemporary commercial interlopers—a motley architectural crew. Critics of the design, put off by its sharply folded and angled forms and irregular, slashed openings, find it an alien invader. Accepted ideas of "suitability" assume a certain uniformity of period or style and favor respectful references to existing cornice lines and the replication of material and scale for a largely illusory connection between old and new. This formula becomes meaningless as the buildings that served as models inevitably disappear. It begs the difficult questions of creativity, continuity and contrast implicit in an intricately layered social, cultural and aesthetic reality.

Mr. Mayne does not deal in dubious recall or venture into questionable aesthetic quagmires. More important, he understood how radical the Foundation Building was in its own time. Rather than looking at it as a historic monument, he sought to emulate its advances in the spirit and character of contemporary New York.

The Foundation Building's arcaded Italianate design by Frederick Petersen was the last word in 19th-century high style. But behind the fashionable façade of what was then the city's tallest structure were important technological innovations. The structure contained the first rolled iron beams, developed and manufactured by Peter Cooper in anticipation of the metal-framed skyscraper. It had a circular elevator shaft for the round elevators that he believed would be the vertical transportation of the future, although it did not receive one that fit until a 1970s renovation. The beams spanned the barrel-vaulted brick ceiling of the Great Hall where Abraham Lincoln would give his famous New York address. The full, fascinating story of the building is told in a richly detailed exhibition, "Architecture at Cooper, 1859-2009," drawn from the institution's extensive archives and on view in the Foundation Building through Dec. 11.

It is not surprising that the school would commission an equally advanced design for its new construction, not only for the latest in technology and sustainability, but also as an appropriate learning environment for those engaged in creative disciplines. Applying a tough sensibility to a tough assignment revitalized an amorphous status quo. To this native New Yorker who has watched the city evolve over decades and treasures its unrelenting diversity, Mr. Mayne has got it just right.

Published photographs make the contoured and perforated stainless-steel screen that wraps the structure like a second skin look as if it has been hit by an asteroid. Approached in person, the building is more inviting than alarming. It has a visual and physical power that pulls you across the street to see more.

The screen stops well above the sidewalk, revealing V-shaped concrete supports and a glass-walled ground floor with views of a double-height sunken gallery inside. Operable windows in the perforated mesh and the slashes in the façade open public areas to panoramic city views. At night, lights turn the screen into an illuminated theatrical scrim. Mr. Mayne has used similar screens as energy-saving devices before; this one promises a 50% reduction in heat load. A full range of such features, from the operable building skin and a planted "green" roof to radiant heating panels and a cogeneration plant, is expected to earn a platinum LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating from the Green Buildings Council.

Behind the complex veil is a surprisingly simple reinforced-concrete box with a standard window wall and a conventional plan. Engineering laboratories, studios and classrooms line up along the east side and offices and studios occupy the west side of the rectangular container. Carved out of the space in the center is an atrium with a spectacular stair.

The stair commands one's immediate and total attention. Twenty feet wide, it is the building's organizing element and circulation spine, connecting the first four floors and continuing upward with bridges across the space and a narrower stair above as it ascends to the structure's full nine-story height. Like some wildly updated, indoor version of Rome's Spanish steps or a more rational and cheerful Piranesian invention, it is a knockout, an überstair for the 21st century.

It rises in a void, wide open to every floor—there is no conventional stairwell. An intricate, soaring, free-form, white tube lattice, like a huge abstract sculpture, fills the space around the stair and defines the edges of the void, fencing in the open floors at each level. (Hidden fire doors can close it all in an emergency.)

The stair is meant to be the interactive heart of the building and it appears to be working, although reality doesn't always follow architects' plans. Students move between classes, sit on the steps with their computers or lunches, and peel off to adjacent study lounges. Daylight pours down from a skylight at the top. This is high architectural drama, a luminous and exhilarating invitation into the structure's life and use. It is not building as bling. It is how architecture turns program and purpose into art. And it perfectly expresses the creative energy of New York.

—Ms. Huxtable is the Journal's architecture critic.

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