The Cooper Union approached Method Design to redesign a ground floor retail space fronting 3rd Avenue, folding it back into the operation and fabric of the school as an interdisciplinary studio shared by Cooper Union’s Art, Architecture, and Engineering programs. The space is built around radical transparency: a two-way dialogue where the outside world can see students make, work, and present projects as they evolve over the course of a semester, with rotating display boards doubling as pinup space and street-facing projection.
LSTN provided acoustics consulting for the project. The studio’s defining architectural feature—an overhead environmental surface of fiberglass fins and LED lighting that washes the open ground floor in continuous, even illumination, echoing the Foundation Building’s historic skylights—creates a single, largely hard-surfaced volume shared by fabrication, critique, and presentation activities happening simultaneously. Our work focused on integrating acoustic treatment into that overhead plane and the surrounding studio fit-out, controlling reverberation and managing noise transfer between work modes without compromising the openness and storefront transparency central to the design concept.
