Architecture professor to open exhibition in Stuckeman’s Rouse Gallery

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — James Cooper, associate professor of architecture in the Penn State College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School, will open an exhibition featuring his own work titled “Drawing and Analyzing Architecture: Works of Jamie Cooper” at 6 p.m. on Nov. 14 in the Willard G. Rouse Gallery, located in the Stuckeman Family Building at University Park.

The exhibition features nearly 30 drawings and paintings of various sizes ranging in materials from graphite on paper to pen and ink on illustration board to watercolors and more. The exhibition is free and open to the public from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays in the Rouse Gallery through mid-January 2026.

Cooper, who has been a Department of Architecture faculty member since 2008, said his love of hand drawing started at a young age under the influence of his mother, Barbara Cooper, who introduced him to pencils, crayons, and paintbrushes before he started school. After studying architecture at Ryerson University in Toronto (now Toronto Metropolitan University), Cooper joined the design department at NORR Partnership as part of a small design team. He would spend his evenings creating large-scale analytical renderings and paintings of historic architecture — especially the Pantheon in Rome — which, he said, allowed him to “study architectural history through drawing, free from the constraints of clients, budgets and deadlines.”

Cooper pursued his interests at the University of Michigan and completed an “Analytique of Michelangelo’s Campidoglio in Rome,” as well as watercolors of Otto Wagner’s Steinhof Church, Postal Savings Bank and Schützenhaus while studying in Vienna. He also spent a summer in Florence where he said his interest in Renaissance architecture deepened while studying under Graham Smith.

Cooper returned to Florence to study Michelangelo’s buildings firsthand in 1993 before entering the doctoral program at the University of Virginia. His dissertation, titled “The Genesis of Michelangelo’s Campidoglio,” used computer modeling and measured analysis to reconstruct Michelangelo’s unbuilt design.

While at the University of Virginia, Cooper was hired as a teaching assistant in the Vicenza summer program, where he spent two weeks each summer in Pompeii working on the Pompeii Forum Project and then six weeks teaching in Vicenza alongside Mario di Valmarana, whose family owns Palladio’s Villa Rotunda.

“That experience deepened my appreciation for Palladio’s architecture, and I produced many watercolors, drawings and sketches both for my own study and as teaching examples for students,” Cooper said.

While writing his dissertation in 1999, he completed two large graphite drawings — one of the Chrysler Building and one of the Empire State Building — each requiring roughly 100 hours of work.

“Because the building owners refused access to original drawings, I reconstructed them from historical publications and photographs,” Cooper said.

Cooper joined Syracuse University’s School of Architecture in 2001 after completing his dissertation, where he taught design studios emphasizing design and analysis through drawing and a field trip course that involved on-site drawing, sketching and diagramming instruction in cities throughout Italy.

When Cooper arrived at Penn State, he continued with a similar approach, teaching in the University’s Rome program for several summers and leading students on field trips where, he said, they learned to analyze and understand architecture through drawing directly in their sketchbooks. He has taught studio design courses, the first-year “Visual Communications” course, advanced drawing seminars and architectural history/precedent analysis courses.