Agrest and Gandelsonas: Fabric Object II Diana Agrest & Mario Gandelsonas Curated by Steven Hillyer The Cooper Union New York Through May 2 “Life didn’t end in 1989, we kept doing stuff,” Diana Agrest told me one morning a few days after Fabric Object II debuted in New York City, a retrospective about her and Mario Gandelsonas curated by Steven Hillyer. That remarkable stuff is now on view at The Cooper Union, where Agrest has taught for the past 50 years.  Michael Meredith originally staged a retrospective in 2024 about Agrest and Gandelsonas, Fabric Object I, at Princeton University. The Cooper Union exhibition, Fabric Object II, is that show’s successor and features many of the same works, albeit in a larger space with a widened purview. It celebrates Agrest’s five decades of teaching at The Cooper Union right before her and Gandelsonas’s archive is shipped to the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) for perpetuity. The exhibition speaks to how the work of Agrest+Gandelsonas Architects changed over the course of five decades. (Zhiye Feng/Courtesy The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive of The Cooper Union) CCA’s acquisition was facilitated by Phyllis Lambert, Sylvia Lavin, and Jean-Louis Cohen, prior to his untimely passing. “We’ve had a relationship with the CCA for ages,” Gandelsonas said. “In 2018, Sylvia organized a show at CCA. There was a room with architectural follies by Leo Castelli, which we were also a part of. We learned Phyllis loved our works. CCA eventually called and asked if we could donate our archives, which is what we did.” Fabric Object II features drawings, models, and sketches by Agrest+Gandelsonas Architects, but also dialogues between the subjects and John Hejduk inside a display table designed by MOS. On view are canonical projects like their competition entry for Roosevelt Island (1975); Park Square (1978), a study for a public space in Boston; Urban Fragments (1978) in Buenos Aires; Les Halles (1980) in Paris; and Urban Ready-Mades (1989), a proposal for Goose Island, Chicago, to name but a few. There’s also representation of Agrest’s unbuilt Museum of the Twentieth Century (1989), and their later works in New York City and China.  Urban Ready-Made 2, Goose Island, Chicago, Illinois,1989 (Courtesy The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive of The Cooper Union) Short essays by faculty at Cooper Union and Princeton University, where Gandelsonas teaches, shed new interpretations of the duo. Texts by Monica Ponce de Leon, Nader Tehrani, Marshall Brown, Michael Meredith, Sylvia Lavin, Stan Allen, Beatriz Colomina, Mark Wigley, and others complement ephemera from Gandelsonas and Agrest’s records. Tehrani’s short essay about Goose Island and the House on Sag Pond (1989–90), for instance, drew connections between the projects the architects hadn’t considered.  “For me personally, what I love about the projects, especially the earlier ones, is that they challenge methods of representation; they upend how we represent architecture and space,” Hillyer told AN. “I think, at a time when our students are so focused on digital technology and digital tools, it’s really important for them to be reminded of hand drawing’s great importance.” “Oppositional Binaries” Fabric Object II derives its title from Agrest and Gandelsonas’s philosophy of the city, which is part Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Donna Haraway, El Lissitzky, Konstantin Melnikov, Jacques Lacan, Jorge Luis Borges, and other influences. This philosophy is constructed of “oppositional binaries,” as Meredith points out in his essay. “Architecture is the consciousness of the city,” Agrest said to me while walking through the show.  Agrest and Gandelsonas were fellows at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), the legendary New York City think tank Peter Eisenman founded. Building Institution. The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, New York 1967–1985 by Kim Förster is a recent, exhaustive history of the IAUS, which told the Institute’s multivalent history in impressive detail. “We were some of the earliest fellows at the Institute,” Agrest said. “We were there until the end.” Architecture Between Memory and Amnesia, Suburban Center on the Mississippi, Minneapolis, Minnesota (Courtesy The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive of The Cooper Union) Flash forward 50 years, the evening of April 10, Eisenman and former IAUS students like Stan Allen gathered at The Cooper Union to welcome Fabric Object II, not long after the deaths of Anthony Vidler and Kurt Forster, two IAUS figureheads. “Stanley had been a student of mine in design at the Institute,” Agrest added. “He was Mario’s student in theory class there. As an intern, he drew so many drawings for us.”  Traversing Fabric Object II, my own experiences reading post-structuralist texts by Agrest and Gandelsonas in architecture school flashed before my eyes. (It admittedly took a few years to let Semiotics and Architecture: Ideological Consumption or Theoretical Work sink in.) The exhibition deepened my love of Constructivism, and helped me draw connections between their theoretical writings and built work. “This is an exhibition about hand drawing,” Gandelsonas said, “which is something Michael [Meredith] felt is missing today in architecture schools.” Both Agrest and Gandelsonas agree that, in regard to the synergy between writing and drawing, the act of making meaning is always done retroactively. “We write about the projects after we’ve done them, which is interesting,” Agrest added. “We never go into something and say, ‘This is what I’m going to do.’ Mario’s theoretical works are very different from mine, or at least they used to be. Oftentimes, people will ask me questions about my work, like ‘Why don’t you talk about theory more?’ It’s of course embedded in the work.” Display cases were designed by MOS. (Zhiye Feng/Courtesy The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive of The Cooper Union) Public programming and pedagogy intertwine at The Cooper Union, where Steven Hillyer and Chris Dierks stage shows in response to what’s happening in studio. For Hillyer, Fabric Object II was timely, like what Gandelsonas said in relation to drawing, but also a celebration. “This was an opportunity for us to have an exhibition of Diana and Mario’s work in New York just before it heads up north,” Hillyer told AN. “That’s a pretty momentous moment, and it was, in my view, deserving of a really important exhibition. It should be seen.” “Diana has been teaching here for 50 years,” Hillyer elaborated. “To be able to mount an exhibition about her and Mario’s work is special. There are projects here that Diana worked on her own, and projects that Mario did on his own. I love the fact that they are commingled here within that chronology.”