Nov. 19, 2015
"To the Miracle of Mersiha - YOU're deeply in this book." Diane Lewis
Lost Lines
Linee Occulte at New York’s Citygroup explores the unseen in architecture
By Aaron Smithson • July 5, 2021 • Architecture, Art, East, On View
Posted on: September 13, 2018
Studio Prize: Animate Archi-Tectonics: Structural Configurations Between Lines, Planes, and Volumes
This first-year undergraduate studio at the Cooper Union explored the principles of form and space by starting with Paul Klee's idea that "a drawing is taking a line for a walk."
Investigation | Mersiha Veledar, an assistant professor at the Cooper Union, doesn’t believe in easing her first-year students into the school’s rigorous undergraduate program—and it shows in the way she designed her studio, Animate Archi-Tectonics, which throws them headfirst into a deep exploration of how lines, planes, and volumes come together to create architectural forms.
The studio is split into three phases, beginning with an examination of the ways lines intersect. From those drawings, students investigate how the forms created by those intersections function at different scales and dimensions; they then build models, which they test in terms of scale and habitation—inserting doors and stairs, for example.
“In my book the most exciting thing about this studio is showing students how abstractions can be made real,” Veledar says.
RIBA President’s Medals: Silver
Cycles of Toolmaking: An Optic, Tactile, Haptic, Material, Scalar and Pedagogic Study
Cooper Union, New York
Student: Daniel Hall
Tutors: Lauren Kogod and Mersiha Veledar
‘Patterns emerge, as cycles of tool marks are used and misused. Embedded in the character of these patterns are indicators of time, scale, movements of the human body, and a genealogy of tool evolution.’