Preston Scott Cohen

Preston Scott Cohen is a Boston based designer and the Gerald M. McCue Professor in Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is also the Director of the Architecture degree program at the GSD.

He is the winner of the Herta and Paul Amir Competition (awarded January, 2004) to design a new building for the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (estimated $45 million budget to build flexible gallery spaces, concessions, as well as the restoration of labs and offices).

He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Architecture degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1982 and 1983 (respectively). In 1985, he received his Master of Architecture degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Geometry in architecture

In the "Wu House" paper for the ArchiLab conference, Cohen gives a vision of his geometric transformations which are used to define the movement in space of the building occupant. The transformation is only accessible on paper but the images show all the same that these forms are the apothesis of his research at a given moment. To quote from Goethe:' Architecture is crystallized music'.

His approach is based on the descriptive geometry of the 17th century, but he shows a novel application by using oblique projections. This approach is supported by computer modelling. The calculations are rapid, sometimes preprogrammed, and the transformation from two dimensions to three is a simplified by the software. Geometry is returned to its independent status after having served primarily the needs of technology during the industrialization of the West. It is no longer a tool for the production of machinery.

In the case of the Wu House, the curves are the intersections of cylindrical volumes. The spaces are three-dimensional images of geometrical operations. The vitality of the lines reflects an idea of design which is far from the preconceived rules of esthetics.

Publications

* Several publications, including the 1997 monograph "Preston Scott Cohen"
* "Wu House" paper for the ArchiLab conference 2001
* Forthcoming book "Permutations of Descriptive Geometry"

External references

* [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/824569.html Hyperboloids among the rectangle] - Construction of the new Tel Aviv Museum building