Douglas Cooper

Andrew Mellon Professor of Architecture

Douglas Cooper is Andrew Mellon Professor of Architecture in the School of Architecture where he teaches drawing and occasionally architectural design. His approach to drawing emphasizes classical techniques but builds significantly on the drawing pedagogy of Kimon Nicolaїdes (The Natural Way to Draw).

Cooper is an artist and muralist whose work combines story, history, and memory into panoramic images of cities. Typically, he works with local residents and incorporates their lives into the works. He developed his first mural, now at Pittsburgh's Heinz History Center, in collaboration with Vintage, a Pittsburgh senior center in 1992. In 1994, he completed another mural with the elderly for the Philadelphia Courthouse. His 200-foot-long mural in the Carnegie Mellon University Center (1996) shows the campus and Pittsburgh during three different time periods. His mural series for Seattle's King County Courthouse (2005) depicts the geography, history, and land-use patterns of that region. On two occasions, Cooper has used mural projects as vehicles for foreign language instruction. In 1996, assisted by CMU students, a German professor, and elderly residents of Frankfurt, Cooper created a nine-meter by six-meter mural for Frankfurt's central market. He used a similar process in creating a c. 70 meter-long mural for a lecture hall at the University of Rome (2005).

Cooper's recent murals have used the constraints and opportunities of the architectural setting as a source of content. The height, sight lines, and circulation in lobbies at corporate headquarters Mascaro (1999) and Michael Baker (2003) and the University of California San Francisco were used as opportunities to depict the histories and aspirations of each institution. Recent collaborations have involved his work with photographers to create a multi-layered mural combining drawing and photography at Carnegie Mellon’s facility in Doha, Qatar (2009), and his work with fabric artist and fellow SoA faculty member Stefani Danes to create a 23 foot-high by 48 foot-wide mural for the East End Cooperative 2013), a mural for the East Liberty Presbyterian Church (2018), and a 15 foot-high by 45 foot-wide mural for a corridor in the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University (2019).

Cooper’s drawings have been shown in one-artist exhibitions at local, national, and international art centers: Concept Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA; The Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; The Westmoreland Museum, Greensburg, PA; Gallerie der Spiegel, Cologne, Germany; The Davidson Gallery, Seattle, WA; and the Rosenberg and Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, NY. He has collaborated on several videos with students at Carnegie Mellon University, notably the 2012 video Pinburgh.

Cooper has authored three books on drawing. Drawing and Perceiving (Wiley, 1997), now in its fourth edition, provides an in depth study of his drawing pedagogy. Steel Shadows (University of Pittsburgh, 2000) is a memoir of his years of drawing the city of Pittsburgh. Knowing and Seeing (University of Pittsburgh, 2019) addresses the intellectual foundation of his approach to drawing the urban landscape.

Forbes Field: A Memoir in Drawings

Forbes Field as remembered by Doug Cooper through drawings; Doug lived across the street from the players entrance from 1968-70. Features vignettes about Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell, and Bill Mazeroski.