10.30.18 Lunchtime Lecture | Karen Bausman: City Assembled and Other Acts of Imagination

Recipient of the Rome Prize, architect Karen Bausman, AR ’82 is the founding principal of Karen Bausman + Associates, where she is committed to design excellence and the creation of architecture, cities and landscapes of enduring quality and ecological soundness. Under her design leadership, her office has been awarded multiple multiyear Design Excellence contracts as part of New York City's ambitious effort to bring new ideas, technology, and environmental soundness to the design of city-financed buildings and other structures in New York. Her expertise is currently being applied to numerous large-scale coastal building projects at sites across New York City. Ms. Bausman first garnered international recognition with her Performance Theater for Los Angeles, which won the Progressive Architecture Award. This breakthrough commission and other works that push the boundaries of structural and visual poetry formed the basis of Karen Bausman: Supermodels, a solo exhibition of her building designs and working methods at Harvard University. Among her most notable private commissions are ultra-elegant headquarters for clients Warner Bros. Records (Interior of the Year) and Elektra Entertainment. Her applied research into biological and natural structures underlies her dynamic building designs and is featured in INDEX Architecture, published by MIT Press.

Karen Bausman, AR '82 has held the Eliot Noyes Chair at Harvard University and the Eero Saarinen Chair at Yale University, the only American woman to hold both distinguished design chairs. She received her professional degree in architecture from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1982. She received the President’s Citation for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Architecture from her Alma Mater in 1994.

[JackSprat]

I literally cannot believe this video has been watched so few times and with no comments. I was fortunate to have known Karen when she was at Cooper Union. Then she always struck me as being especially persistent, but she survived being a very young freshman from Macungie, PA with a lot of insecurity, to creating that beautiful thesis project and continuing to grow and grow and grow until this video. Yes I agree completely with her advice. Always think by drawing. Until you do, what you know and don't know are figments of your imagination. The drawing will show you, always; you may not recognize it at first, but you cannot rise out of the mud until you understand where your foot is. And persist. I did not; I decayed, she has flourished. Thank you for showing this video. Unfortunately--I can tell by the people coming and leaving--the real architects even at Cooper are in the minority. I was privileged to attend only elite schools my entire life. And so I can say, big deal--half or more (much) of my classmates everywhere were dimwits and often pompous on top of it. This video should be shown not only to a Cooper Union audience. Draw, draw and draw and never give up. Karen has learned so much about architecture, but about educating, about the practice of architecture, about working in the public sector--I only ever got to be a lap dog architect or perhaps decorator for the almost-wealthy people who might hire me. She has truly done honor to Cooper Union. Brava