Kevin Chow
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art School of Architecture
“Manhattan Reservoir.” In this project, New York City Water Tunnel No. 1 (completed in 1917) is allowed to fail and become an aboveground reservoir, whose form is determined by the intensity of water consumption in the buildings of Manhattan. © Kevin Chow.
Jury
Danei Cesario
Chris Cornelius
Joyce Hwang
María Villalobos Hernandez
Robert L. Wesley (Chair)
The path ahead of me—toward graduate school and then a research practice—is one paved with financial moonshots and haunted by the reactionary ghosts of the past. The Robert L. Wesley Award from the SOM Foundation serves as the strongest possible ward on the long journey ahead.
“Bathhouse.” The water tower is like the pointer of a sundial, which travels across the pristine ceiling of the bathhouse. A hemisphere acts as a point of gravity that ruptures the surface and radiates heat. © Kevin Chow.
Though an engaged and involved designer, I would say that Kevin benefits from a strong humanities background, allowing him to write, and think through writing, in a way that is uncommon in design schools.
Nader Tehrani, Professor and Dean, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, School of Architecture
“Housing.” A housing project on a Brooklyn site has four different unit types for four predicted user groups: young single professionals, college students, new parents, and young families. © Kevin Chow.
Kevin Chow
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
School of Architecture
Kevin Chow
is a thesis student at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He is a corecipient of the 2021 Benjamin Menschel Fellowship for research toward an exhibition titled “Pastoral Silicon Valley: A Landscape of Quiet Crisis,” a critical revisiting of his hometown, set to open in February 2022. His research is primarily focused on technocracy; his thesis project is framed as an illustrated screenplay inhabiting scenes from an endgame society of postleisure, one which has fulfilled the promises of technology as progress. Accordingly, he is an amateur writer and artist, disguised as a preprofessional architect.