The Cooper Union Continuing Education Courses: A Lifelong Learning Opportunity

Since its inception in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art has stood as a beacon of accessible, high-quality education. Founded by the visionary industrialist Peter Cooper, who famously declared, "My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world," the institution pioneered the concept of continuing education in the United States. Cooper's unwavering commitment to providing first-class educational opportunities to adults in New York City led him to dedicate his entire fortune to this noble endeavor. Today, The Cooper Union remains true to its founding mission, offering a diverse range of continuing education courses designed to empower individuals to create, innovate, and disrupt.

A Legacy of Accessible Education

The American system of continuing education was born at The Cooper Union, reflecting Peter Cooper's belief in the transformative power of knowledge for all. This historic institution has consistently adapted to the evolving needs of its community, providing accessible and enriching educational experiences. The Cooper Union continues to uphold its commitment to lifelong learning, inviting individuals to explore new passions, expand their skill sets, and contribute to a more vibrant and informed society.

Diverse Course Offerings

The Cooper Union's continuing education program encompasses a wide array of subjects, catering to diverse interests and professional goals. Courses span the realms of fine arts, graphic arts, illustration, typography, creative coding, and information design, providing a rich tapestry of learning opportunities. Whether you're an aspiring artist, a seasoned designer, or a curious individual seeking intellectual enrichment, The Cooper Union offers a course to ignite your passion.

Course Structure and Duration

Most continuing education courses at The Cooper Union are designed to fit into the busy schedules of working professionals and other adults. Classes typically meet once a week, with durations ranging from eight to twelve weeks. This flexible structure allows students to delve into their chosen subjects without disrupting their existing commitments.

Flexible Learning Environment

Recognizing the evolving landscape of education, The Cooper Union offers a blend of online and on-campus courses. This hybrid approach provides students with the flexibility to choose the learning environment that best suits their needs and preferences. Online classes are conducted synchronously, fostering real-time interaction and collaboration among students and instructors. The location of each class is clearly indicated in the course listing, ensuring transparency and ease of planning.

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Course Highlights

Art and Design

Drawing: This course delves into the core principles of drawing, focusing on key concepts such as shape, shading, and color. Students acquire various drawing skills, from contour lines to understanding perspective and size relationships, shading techniques, and color theory.
Graphic Design: This course guides students through the fundamental steps of the graphic design process, including preliminary research, essential tools, selecting appropriate styles, crafting personal branding, and constructing an online portfolio.
Media Production: Introducing both the technical and creative facets of media production, students receive training in various production techniques across photography, film, audio, and video.
Painting: Participants discover various techniques, including using color contrast to establish focal points, employing patterns to guide the viewer's eye, creating rhythm to lead across the canvas, achieving balance through mass, and using line to initiate visual journeys anew.
Sculpture: This course offers an initiation into representing the three-dimensional world through sculpture, exploring various materials and techniques, from clay and plaster to mold making and upcycling.

Architecture and Sustainable Design

Introduction to Architecture: Focusing on its fundamental aspects, this course emphasizes the artistic and technical aspects of designing and building structures.
Environmental Systems: Covering environmental and life safety systems as they affect program and building form, including mechanical (heating, cooling, ventilating), water supply and disposal, electrical, lighting, acoustics, vertical transportation, communication, security and fire protection.
Principles of Sustainability: Students learn about principles of sustainability.
Sustainable Design: Focusing on the design of a prototype structure using sun, light, air, renewable materials, geological systems, hydrological systems and green roofing, this course prepares students for LEED certification.
Sustainable Engineering: This course examines sustainable engineering, starting with an analysis of resources, (materials, energy, water) upon which manufacturing is based.

Specialized Programs

OSHA 30: This program is open to mechanical, electrical, civil or architecture professionals with at least 3 years of construction project management experience.
Portfolio Preparation: High school juniors and seniors may take a specialized Portfolio Preparation course and produce a competitive portfolio for the college admission process to art, design and architecture schools.

Unique Course Descriptions

Synthesis/Distinction: An investigation in design technology and creative agency through prototyping. Throughout the course students traverse, in series, emerging methods in digital fabrication and computation, from foundational details to more complex assemblies. The exercises follow a research format, focused on the social and ecological implications of creative production. Throughout the process, the course mediates between the distinctions of digital logic, and the synthesis of analog practices within the larger design field. Class exercises pair distinctions and synthesis, tools and integrations, challenging students to extend, play, and continuously negotiate the poetic potential of digital craft within a social and ecological milieu. The course provides a foundation to a wide array of technical and theoretical approaches to design through digital fabrication and creative computation, meant to supplement and expand existing coursework. Sessions are split between lectures and dedicated workshop / build time, reflecting a reciprocal approach of thinking through making.
Ecoredux: The main product of this course will be the assemblage of an archive for ecological material experiments that architects and designers explored during the twentieth century. We will collaborate in small groups in order to bring together a major database of ecological design strategies and to seek tentative connections with the remarkable contemporary resurgence of ecological strategies in architectural imagination. The starting point for this course will be the existing online archive www.ecoredux.com. Ecoredux currently maps visually and verbally the trajectory of habitation experiments that underground architectural groups conducted during the 1960s and 1970s. Such experiments include garbage housing, recycling housing components, snow molding, vacuumatics, foam houses, pneumatics from used parachutes, hand-crafted domes et-al.
Food: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the question of ‘where our food comes from’ became eminently important. The fragility of our production processes and the mobility networks that transport commodities and food, have urged new forms of localization and design of circular economies. “Food” in this course will be approached both literally and metaphorically. On the one hand, food explores architectural strategies of local production and self sufficiency (e.g. urban agriculture, renewable energy); on the other, it integrates in the built environment operations that use by-products of urban life (e.g. livestock, agriculture, forest residues) as resources. The objective is to replace traditional linear systems of “make, use and dispose” with circular systems that limit material and resource loss or explore alternative pathways. With buildings being responsible for approximately 40% of energy consumption, 36% of CO2 emissions, and the building industry being one of the heaviest waste generators globally, it is indispensable for architecture to respond, pushing for alternative design and construction models, moving away from the current prevailing models-both intensely resources-consuming and contaminating.
Svalbard: Svalbard is a revealing sensor within the complex matrix of global political, informational, and economic systems. With less than 2,700 inhabitants, this unincorporated area foreshadows an emerging post sovereign state. Feigned interest in natural resources has enabled (46) nation states to innocuously manifest a strategic presence on the archipelago while advancing non-linear interests. Coal, technology, research, and environmental tourism all overlap in various forms and with a multitude of benefactors, many of whom blur or overextend the boundaries of neutrality encoded in the original Svalbard Treaty. The accumulation of interests, contradictions, and conflicts, amid a massive consolidation of technology are the foundations of this new structure, or rather new state. Svalbard’s strategic position as a logistical juncture within future global shipping routes, optic cable paths, and geopolitical systems is quietly creating an enormous amount of speculation. The melting ice opens new definitions of boundaries for oil drilling rights and fishing zones. Strategic positioning by Russian and China keeps coalmining running while triggering a new market for land acquisition. NASA-funded satellite parks spearhead scientific research on the environmental effects of climate change. Meanwhile, new exotic forms of tourism are emerging: Arctic, polar sports, ghost towns, and science tourism. Through Svalbard the studio will investigate climate research where climate change is most visible, tourism where the environment is most fragile, food production in polar conditions, clean energy to replace nonrenewable resources, alternative forms of housing, polar technology and space research where conditions are most suitable.
Ecological Design: This course will document the intersection of architecture and design with ecology, environmental history, governance and law. We will examine conflicting definitions and concepts of architects and designers and the parallel histories of their intellectual positions toward environmental thought from the 19th century to today. However, ecological design harks as far back as Ernst Haeckel’s definition of the field of ecology and Henry David Thoreau’s manual for self-reliance. Since World War II, contrary to the position of ecological design as a call to fit harmoniously within the natural world, there has been a growing interest in a form of synthetic naturalism, where the laws of nature and metabolism are displaced from the domain of wilderness to the domain of cities, buildings, and objects. Unlike van der Ryn and Cowan’s argumentation, which focused on a deep appreciation for nature’s equilibrium, ecological design might commence with the synthetic replication of natural systems. Ecological design arguably starts with the reconceptualization of the world as a complex system of flows rather than a discrete compilation of objects, which visual artist and theorist György Kepes has described as one of the fundamental reorientations of the 20th century.
Borderlands and Exterritories: Part of the Borderlands and Exterritories seminar series, this class will focus on islands. The seminar offers students the tools to critically consider notions of territoriality, sovereignty, and bordering, particularly as they relate to architecture. We take as a starting point, and problematize our understanding of territoriality as it is still heavily rooted in our imagination of the world as divided into compartmentalized, distinct, and mutually exclusive political formations. We understand movements across borders (recognized or unrecognized, regular or irregular) not only in their relationship to movements for social justice and liberation, but also as the central elements that define contemporary territories, and defy the static status-quo of the nation-state. Through an interdisciplinary selection of readings, students will be introduced to key concepts including cosmopolitanism, citizenship, and rights. We’ll critically study and analyze processes of bordering as they exist both in nationalism and humanitarianism, as well as their material manifestations. We will thoroughly and comparatively study a wide range of island conditions: from geographically separated terrains, to enclaves and encampments, all the way to autonomous regions and sanctuary spaces. This seminar is interested not only in the technologies and architectures of violent enclosure and segregation, but also the actions that refuse them, or traverse them. Leaning on the study of key conceptual and theoretical frameworks and reading discussions, students develop illustrated research essays around an Island condition (in the scale, geography, and format of their choice), considering Arjun Appadurai’s proposal to shift the emphasis from ‘trait geographies’ to ‘process geographies’: “in other words, on the forms of movement, encounter, and exchange that confound the idea of bounded world-regions with immutable traits” (Appadurai, 2001).
Paper Making: This studio course explores making paper from traditional to contemporary approaches. The course incorporates specified instruction and experimentation driven by student independent projects. The exploration of the structural and historical uses of Western and Eastern methods including contemporary issues of recycled and alternative fibers will frame an understanding of the potential uses and appearances of handmade paper. From a basis in sheet forming, pigmenting, sizing, and the use of additives, the class will move into an emphasis on paper as a visual and sculptural object, covering paper casting and other three-dimensional approaches.
Sculpture: Process and Intention: This course helps students explore and develop their personal process of making art, with an emphasis on sculpture. Formal and material choices will be discussed in relation to intention, meaning, context, and contemporary culture. Research and development are given equal weight to finished work. Students will discuss their process individually with the instructor, and present work for review to the entire class. This course is based on the development of an in-depth practice that connects to the multiple properties of sculpture. Thematic subjects will be open, based on individual body of work; at the same time, subject positioning, viewer/author relationship, and clarity of reading will be studied. Classes will be guided by the theoretical and affective connections the students have in their engagement with materials and the practice of sculpture as idea and as concrete daily activity. Ideas and mediums will be discussed and analyzed in relation to context and historical grounding. Texts of different kinds will be used as complementary to the work being produced and as tools for each student.
Photography: This course will concentrate on subject matter, methodology, size, scale, genre, style, theory and history of photography. The orientation will be the development of projects, from the inception of ideas to professional presentation and execution of artistic work with an emphasis on making large negatives and/or producing large prints. Students are encouraged to take advantage of the full range of image-making resources available to aid in the creation of works that challenge perceptions.
Sustainability Assessment: The first part of this course discusses in detail a methodology for defining and assessing the sustainability of an entity. The course then proceeds with more traditional topics in pollution prevention for chemical processes, outlining concepts on the macroscale (life-cycle assessment) and mesoscale (pollution prevention for unit operations). Qualitative and quantitative treatment of water and wastewater systems as related to domestic and industrial needs and their effect on the environment. Introduction to air pollution sources and control and solid/hazardous waste engineering. Design of water and wastewater treatment plants. Field and laboratory techniques for measurement of water quality parameters. Problems in conservation and utilization of water. Hydrologic techniques. Surface water and groundwater supplies. Water transmission and distribution. Flood control, navigation and irrigation. Introduction to open channel flow and pipe networks. Design of hydraulic structures. Experimental aspects of hydraulic phenomena.
Solid Waste Engineering: Engineering aspects of solid waste collection, transport and disposal, including sanitary landfill design, incineration, composting, recovery and re-utilization of resources. Topics include types of environmental pollution and their effects; water quality standards and introduction to laboratory analyses of water quality parameters; sources and estimates of water and wastewater flows; physicochemical unit treatment processes.
Climate Change and Sustainability: Sustainability and sustainable development and how they relate to culture, politics, and design of our built environment. Review of the technological history of fossil fuel use and how it has affected Earth's climate. Global warming potential, radiative forcing, carbon cycle, and carbon budget. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and its application to sustainability / minimizing environmental impact. Alternatives to fossil fuel energy (including nuclear, geothermal, solar, hydropower, and bioenergy sources) and potential consequences of these technologies. The course has no prerequisites; all material needed to understand the various topics will be covered in class.
Environmental Impact Assessment: Forty years ago, when the world did not know the word sustainability, smart engineers were conducting environmental impact assessments of alternative designs and projects in order to select the post option for implementation. This course evaluates the methodologies and problems encountered and approaches to using environmental impacts (which include socio-economic impacts and beneficial impacts) in order to achieve smarter, more sustainable designs and development. Methodologies for technical and economic assessment of short and long term energy-related issues are developed. Both supply-side (power generation) and demand-side (use and efficiency) technology issues are investigated in the context of the modern social, economic, political and meteorological climate. On the supply side, quantitative comparisons of the carbon intensity, levelized cost and other metrics…

Real Estate Licensing Courses

For those interested in a career in real estate, RELNY (Real Estate Licensing New York) provides online programs focused on real estate licensing, education, and training. RELNY's courses are tailored to meet the needs of both aspiring real estate professionals and seasoned agents, brokers, and realtors.

Real Estate Salesperson Pre-Licensing Course: This course offers a well-structured program that covers everything you need to know to pass the New York State Real Estate Salesperson Licensing Exam.
Continuing Education for Real Estate Professionals: These courses are designed to help you stay ahead in the ever-evolving real estate market.

RELNY is accredited by the New York State Department of State (NYS DOS) and ARELLO, ensuring that the education provided meets rigorous state standards.

Important Information for Prospective Students

Active Participation: Students are expected to actively participate in class, especially those enrolled in certificate programs.
Online Platforms: Some classes utilize online platforms such as Slack for communication and collaboration.
Evaluation: Each term will end with a pass/fail evaluation.
Visa Assistance: Cooper Union is not able to assist applicants or participants in getting a travel visa of any kind.
Previous Experience: Students with previous experience are encouraged to apply to the Certificate Program.
Retraining Program: The Retraining program is made possible through generous donations from the Robin Hood Foundation and Con Edison.

Key Dates

Registration for the fall 2025 term will open on September 3rd.

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